Donald Trump and Madison Square Garden
Dirty money party
Soccer has long had jersey patches, little ads on the uniforms. For 70 years, the NBA kept jerseys chaste and clean.
But in 2016, two years into Adam Silver’s tenure as NBA commissioner, the Board of Governors voted to allow a two-and-a-half-inch square of branding opposite the Nike logo, on every player’s left shoulder. The patches arrived in 2017, and reportedly bring in about five million dollars a year for the Utah Jazz, and well over $30 million a year for the Knicks.
Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke based on the idea that who plays for any one team changes all the time. “I want my team’s clothes to beat the clothes from the other city. It’s laundry! We’re screaming about laundry here! People will love a guy, do you know what I mean? And then the guy’ll get traded, he’ll come back on another team, they hate him now! This is the same human being in a different shirt! Boo! We hate him now! Different shirt!”
Rooting for laundry!
Only in practice, in the NBA since the jersey patch the new game has become rooting for laundering—of money and reputations.
We haven’t even had those patches for a decade and already:
In 2017, Sun Life became the Raptors jersey sponsor. The same year, authorities in Bermuda dropped the hammer on Sun Life, “pursuant to the provisions of section 20 of the Proceeds of Crime (Anti-Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing Supervision & Enforcement) Act 2008, and restricted the Company’s Investment Business licence pursuant to section 20 of the Investment Business Act 2003. … The authority views these breaches as serious because of their extent and duration, and because they demonstrated systemic weaknesses in the company’s internal controls.”
RobinHood is the jersey sponsor for the Wizards, Heat, and Grizzlies. In 2022, the state of New York announced that “Robinhood Crypto, LLC will pay a $30 million penalty to New York State for significant failures in the areas of bank secrecy act/anti-money laundering obligations and cybersecurity.” And in 2025, they got in trouble with FINRA, which said, among other things, “Robinhood Financial and Robinhood Securities failed to establish and implement reasonable anti-money laundering programs.”
Webull was the Nets’ Jersey sponsor from 2021-2024. In 2024, an SEC press release noted “Federal law requires broker-dealers to file [Suspicious Activity Reports] to report transactions that the broker-dealer has reason to suspect involve, among other things, funds derived from illegal activity or activity that has no apparent lawful purpose.” Webull was fined for filing deficient SARs over four years.
In 2025, two members of Congress wrote a letter to PayPal concerned about a collaboration with a Chinese firm called Weixin Pay. In a letter to PayPal, they noted that “U.S. authorities have repeatedly identified Weixin Pay as a central hub for [Chinese Money Laundering Organizations] including those tied to fentanyl trafficking.” PayPal is on the Suns’ jersey.
And then there are Steve Ballmer’s Clippers, whose jerseys say “Visit Rwanda.” A Cambridge University Press report from Itamar Dubinsky explains “Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. … Despite the NBA’s declared commitment to democracy, transparency, and a just penal system, none of these are to be found in Rwanda. According to Freedom House’s democracy index, Rwanda is classified as Not Free, referring to the RPF’s suppression of political dissent ‘through pervasive surveillance, intimidation, arbitrary detention, torture, and renditions or suspected assassinations of exiled dissidents.’ Despite this abysmal record, NBA officials praise Kagame as a basketball enthusiast without mentioning his human rights violations.”
Tonight Donald Trump will become the first sitting president to attend an NBA game, at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, which the Knicks lead 2-0. “President Trump is very much a New Yorker,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the other day. “And I’m thrilled that yet another New Yorker wants to participate in the enthusiasm and the joy around this Knick team.”
The President has said he was invited to the Knicks game by “Jim.” He has crossed paths with Knicks honcho James Dolan many times.
Dolan’s 2002 wedding to Kristin Reynolds was held at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago.
Dolan sparked controversy by promising the Rockettes, employed by one of his firms, would perform at Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
Trump held a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in 2024 and thanked Dolan from the stage.
Dolan is a documented Trump donor.
As Trump takes his seat—reportedly Trump will be in a suite—Trump will have something in common with Adam Silver, the NBA, the Knicks, James Dolan, Apollo Global, Leon Black, and Jeffrey Epstein. All those people are in some manner sponsored by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates.
Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the brother of the UAE’s leader Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (also known as MBZ). Tahnoun wears sunglasses all the time and is said to manage more than a trillion dollars on behalf of the royal family.
The Emirates’ connection to Trump
The Wikipedia version of his Trump connections are confirmed by many published reports:
On 18 March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Sheikh Tahnoun for a banquet dinner at the White House and he met with the head of the CIA, the treasury secretary, the commerce secretary, and CEOs like Jeff Bezos.[15] Leaked reports revealed that during closed-door meetings, Tahnoun sought Trump’s support on several fronts: shielding the UAE from potential international sanctions and an ICJ investigation into its alleged support for the RSF militia in Sudan; backing Israel’s airstrikes in Syria aimed at regional destabilization; facilitating plans to transform Gaza into an Emirati-controlled economic zone under the guise of reconstruction.[28][29] and acquiring AI chips.[15]
Sheikh Tahnoun became a business partner with Steve Witkoff and the Donald Trump family at the same time that Witkoff was a key diplomatic envoy for the Trump administration to the Middle East.[1] In May 2025, Zach Witkoff announced that Tahnoon committed to putting $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.[30] Shortly thereafter, the Trump administration agreed to transfer the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips to the UAE, with many expected to go to Group 42. Multiple National Security Council officials, including David Feith, raised national security concerns that the chips would end up in China. In April 2025, Trump fired 6 security council officials, paving way for David Sacks to take over the chip negotiations. By mid-May, Sacks, Witkoff, and Sheikh Tahnoon had successfully negotiated the increased chip exports to the UAE, despite opposition from top American officials.[1]
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, says:
The jaw-dropping Wall Street Journal report reveals that through a complicated, secret deal, a United Arab Emirates-linked company effectively deposited $187 million directly into the bank accounts of the president and his family, and is now primary business partner with the president’s family. There’s no precedent for this in American history.
Tahnoun has many investments in and around Trump.
He’s the key investor in the UFC, which just held an event on the White House lawn.
He has run the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which was an early investor in David Sacks’ firm Craft Ventures—and Sacks has been named Trump’s White House AI and crypto czar.
In addition, Trump and Epstein have both been close to former Drexel trader Tom Barrack, who was influential in Trump’s first presidency. Barrack was indicted (but found not guilty) in 2021 as an agent working at the direction of the United Arab Emirates, obstructing justice, and making false statements to law enforcement.
The United Arab Emirates’ agenda is tricky to know—a lot of the money that flows through the Emirates is reportedly disguised, and offshored from other places. The UAE shows up near the top of every assessment of global money laundering hot spots. There are dozens of stories of massive fortunes from Moscow being laundered through the Emirates, for example. (Here’s a report about Russians holding a trillion rubles in the UAE.) And so it’s possible some Emirati investments are actually being spent with other people calling the shots.
But as a nation, the Emirates’ vulnerability is that it’s a country run by Sunni elites with a huge Shia population, which is frighteningly close to nuclear-capable, Shia-led Iran. Containing Iran is paramount to the UAE. This has long made the Emirates one of the world’s biggest consumers of American defense products.
A former Drexel trader, Steven Feinberg, went on to make a fortune in private equity, and is now President Trump’s under secretary of defense, overseeing massive defense spending.
In the first Trump administration, a plan emerged to build 30 nuclear facilities, based on American technology, in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. However, there are strict laws against selling nuclear technology to overseas firms, so the deal was set up to run through the private equity firms Blackstone and Apollo.
The 76ers have two equal lead investors. David Blitzer of Blackstone and Josh Harris of Apollo. At Apollo, the point person for that nuclear program was reportedly Josh Harris himself. Around that time, Harris began making regular visits to the White House.
In the second Trump administration, the U.S. began a war against Iran.
The Emirates’ connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s network
Abu Dhabi is one of seven Emirates, city states which were not united into one nation until 1971. In a TrueHoop post from a few years ago, we explore much more thoroughly, but on the speed tour:
A Pakistani banker named Agha Hasan Abedi, according to congressional testimony, ingratiated himself to the royal family of Abu Dhabi by supplying them with dozens of young girls to use as sexual playthings, and then used his influence in interesting ways. Abdur Sakhia, a longtime Abedi colleague, explained it to the committee this way:
Abedi created the UAE. He planted the idea of the UAE as a federation to Sheikh Zayed. These people had no standing anywhere in the world. They were smugglers and tribesmen. When Sheik Zayed would come for months in Pakistan, not even a policeman would give him any attention.
First Abedi ingratiated himself with the family with the use of children as sex items. Then he made them royalty, with help from Abedi’s home country of Pakistan. Sakhia continues:
Yet two months after meeting Abedi, Sheikh Zayed finally gets a state visit to Islamabad and meets the President of Pakistan which then became the first country to give him any status. The first embassy of UAE was opened in Pakistan and the second in London, and both were staffed by Abedi’s appointments.
Then Abedi got the royal family to use its oil money to back a bank called BCCI, which Abedi ran. BCCI appeared to be bankrolled by oil money, but reportedly quickly became a hotbed of dark money from all over, including:
The arms industry
Money purloined by officials of various governments around the world.
In The Outlaw Bank, Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne quote a source saying “the fellow who founded the bank [Abedi] was working directly with William Casey.” Casey, who would later run the CIA, was a protege of Wild Bill Donovan, who essentially invented American intelligence, and whose law clients included many of the biggest American banks and businesses that collaborated with Hitler’s regime. In World War II, Casey was a leader in the OSS (a project with a thread to Epstein).
BCCI did many fascinating things. One of them was to funnel money, secretly, into businesses that appeared to be unrelated to BCCI. One of them was the Miami-based bank Centrust, and another was Capcom. Those businesses invested in the U.S. with Drexel Burnham Lambert.
A 1992 congressional report quotes Ziauddin Akbar, the head of Capcom, boasting to a federal agent “we have contracted 165,000 contracts totaling $53 billion with Drexel Burnham,” and later, “we have done over $90 billion total in 1988.”
Two key figures at Drexel Burnham at that time were Michael Milken and Leon Black. They invested, aggressively, in many industries. Their specialty was taking control of massive businesses, sometimes whole industries.
One of their biggest wins came in the cable business, where Drexel officials reportedly bragged that, thanks to backing a short list of entrepreneurs, they controlled more than 90 percent of the U.S. cable television market. Milken’s bio says he financed “TCI (Liberty Media), Viacom, Time Warner, Cablevision, Telemundo and Metromedia.”
The Dolans’ Cablevision empire was financed by Milken, who was Black’s mentor at Drexel. Their Drexel liaison was on the Cablevision board.
Epstein swam in these waters.
The Epstein files document Epstein attended the Milken Global Conference at least in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2017, and that Epstein brokered introductions using Milken’s name.
Epstein worked at Bear Stearns, which reportedly succeeded Drexel as Cablevision’s investment bank.
James Dolan was reportedly once briefly part of a group, with Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, that attempted to purchase New York magazine.
Eventually, Milken went to prison, Black went on to found Apollo Global … and to fund Epstein.
The last CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, is on Madison Square Garden’s board right now–along with Nelson Peltz (one of Milken’s star investors), and former Bear boardmember Vincent Tese.
The Emirates connection to Apollo Global
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority made a massive investment nearly twenty years ago to become the biggest outside investor in Apollo Global. In the aftermath, it’s almost impossible to track the billions as they flow back and forth between the Emirates and Apollo.
Apollo founder Leon Black stepped down from the firm after it was revealed he had paid Epstein at least $158 million, allegedly for tax advice.
Leon Black’s son Ben Black appears in the Epstein files, especially as an unnamed woman emails Epstein to report on her dates with him. In early 2025, Trump nominated Ben Black CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a $60+ billion development finance agency. Some have questioned the timing of the appointment, just days after Apollo Global agreed to snap up a chunk of Elon Musk’s Twitter debt.
The Emirates’ connection to James Dolan
Eben Novony-Williams reports for Sportico:
The Knicks’ patch deal with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT Abu Dhabi) is part of a wider relationship announced in October 2024. Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. and Sphere Entertainment Co., sister companies to the Knicks’ parent, also have multiyear marketing partnerships with DCT Abu Dhabi, which include advertising on the outside of the eponymous New York City arena and Las Vegas theater. Earlier this year, the two groups announced that Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island would be home to another Sphere project, with DCT Abu Dhabi investing $1.7 billion toward construction.
The Emirates’ connection to the NBA
Here’s where the Spurs might feel a little left out, with their jersey patch for a French cryptocurrency hardware company called Ledger.
The Knicks take the court with an Abu Dhabi jersey patch. Abu Dhabi is the capital of the Emirates. Meanwhile, the referees themselves have an Emirates sponsor patch. From Abu Dhabi, it might look like the Knicks and the referees are on the same team, along with the President, and–if he attends as he so often does–Epstein’s key funder Leon Black.
The NBA has a significant relationship with DCT Abu Dhabi, which is why the league has preseason games in the Emirates, a midseason tournament called the Emirates Cup, and a basketball academy in the UAE.
Adam Silver is also tied to the Emirates through his college roommate James Zelter, who is the co-president of Apollo Global, with its pervasive Emirati ties. The NBA has also done a lot of work with Joseph Ravitch of the Raine Group, who is reportedly a key connector between Emirati money and U.S. investments.
All together now
On a night when people who love sports are excited to watch Karl-Anthony Towns battle against Victor Wembanyama, many other agendas have entered the building. The stands will be packed with people, including the President, who knew Jeffrey Epstein and his schemes.
It’s a strange feeling, that sports are secondary, even in the NBA Finals.
There probably is no consolation, other than this: As WIRED revealed at the beginning of the playoffs, Madison Square Garden is wired up like a surveillance state. Anyone in the building can be tracked, facially recognized, and recorded.
Adam Silver and Donald Trump fostered this world, where billionaires follow their whims and regular people feel the consequences. As Silver and Trump sit in that reality, enjoying the largesse of Emirati money, I suspect they will both feel a little constrained, knowing Dolan can almost certainly hear them.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Great article. And one that begs the question of sports gambling in all this. Guys like Black, the UAE mob, and owners like miriam adelson don't care in the least about hoop. They care about money, but more, about control.
It should be noted that at last night's Game 3 Trump was not just jeered with booing, he was jeered with thunderous booing by his own people, RICH NEW YORKERS.