NBA backroom update
Chris Paul, a Trump pardon, and Apollo at the Kremlin
CHRIS PAUL
In one of the weirder episodes of NBA history, the Clippers mysteriously sent Chris Paul home in the middle of the night. We don’t have great insight into why, but one report says he had stopped talking to Coach Ty Lue weeks earlier while another had an anecdote about a locker room confrontation with Kawhi Leonard.
Do players get cut for that kind of stuff?
The Clippers are under investigation. Big bad consequences could be coming for Steve Ballmer or Kawhi Leonard, depending on who says what to the league’s designated investigators. And Tyronn Lue is known to be a very close friend of Chauncey Billups and a devoted poker player who must be keeping an eye on the ongoing federal gambling investigation.
There will or will not be testimony that makes Steve Ballmer, Kawhi Leonard, Ty Lue or others look bad. Many in NBA circles have the blind habit of not rocking the boat. Chris Paul, though, has always been prickly, which is part of the reason he has bopped around from team to team his whole career. It wouldn’t surprise me if, on the team that investigators are circling, garden-variety insubordination might smell more like dangerous disloyalty. In heist movies, that’s the first guy you ditch.
PARDON
Austin’s Moody Center is the University of Texas stadium that opened in 2022 and has hosted all kinds of top acts: NBA preseason games between the Spurs and Blazers, Dave Matthews Band, Harry Styles, Willie Nelson, UFC. (I don’t even know what sport Wikipedia is talking about here: “The arena hosted the MF & DAZN: X Series 003 event for Deen the Great vs. Walid Sharks on November 19, 2022.” But I do know that the money behind DAZN comes from oligarch Leonard Blavatnik and I also know that name’s going to come up again in a few paragraphs.)
The building is able to book top acts because it was built and is operated by the Oak View Group, which was founded by very-close-to-the-NBA Tim Leiweke, and also-close-to-the-NBA Irving Azoff, who lives near the center of the music industry. (More on Azoff and Leiweke from a 2022 TrueHoop post, including news of a pre-Grammy gala honoring Azoff which was attended by John Legend, Christina Aguilera, Fetty Wap, Dave Grohl, Lana Del Rey, and seemingly every famous person in America. When Khloe Kardashian married Lamar Odom, the ceremony was the hottest ticket in Hollywood, and it happened at Azoff’s house.)
But in July, the Department of Justice accused Leiweke of rigging the bidding process by effectively bribing, with the promise of lucrative subcontracting work, the other bidder to drop out.
The New York Times reports that investigators found an email where “Mr. Leiweke bragged after winning the contract that ‘we were very clever to put together an agreement that scared everyone else away’ adding that ‘this allows us to dictate terms to the university.’” The building ended up costing $375 million.
Leiweke resigned and faced up to ten years in prison; Oak View paid a $15 million fine. The Department of Justice issued a press release that said things like “Unfair business practices, like those employed here, make it very difficult for the American people to pursue prosperity like our founders intended,” said U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons for the Western District of Texas.
And “Timothy Leiweke allegedly led a scheme designed to steer the contract for entertainment services at a public university’s arena to his company. Public contracts are subject to laws requiring an open and competitive bid process to ensure a level playing field,” said Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G. Raia of the FBI New York Field Office. “The FBI is determined to ensure that those who disregard fair competition principles do not benefit from a rigged bidding process targeting our communities and public institutions.”
I don’t know what kind of behind-the-scenes efforts it takes to get a pardon from President Trump. But in a week when he pardoned a politician accused of bribery, and the former president of Honduras who was prosecuted for leading a drug-trafficking conspiracy, Trump also just pardoned Tim Leiweke.
KREMLIN
It’s starting to weird me out how many stories don’t mention Jeffrey Epstein or Apollo Global where those entities have clearly earned that honor. (Epstein has deep history with Mohammed Bin Salman, the head of Saudi Arabia, but when MBS visited the White House no one mentioned that?)
It happened again at the Kremlin on Tuesday. Here’s what I see in the photo above.
On the left: Yuri Ushakov
In leaked emails, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak consulted with Jeffrey Epstein in 2013 about setting up a private meeting with Vladimir Putin. It worked, through Ushakov (with the help of many people including, interestingly, a Swiss private bank). The topic is unknown, but afterward, according to the hacked emails published on DropSite, Barak told Ushakov: “[Please] note and convey to your Boss that the two messages were conveyed yesterday night fully and accurately to the top players.”
Second from the left: Jared Kushner
Jared’s brother is a part-owner of the Memphis Grizzlies.
When Kushner Companies was desperate for cash in 2017, Jared Kushner met several times with 76ers honcho and then-Apollo executive Josh Harris, then a subsidiary of Apollo Global made the Kushner Companies a massive loan.
In 2016, Jared Kushner was photographed at the U.S. Open with Leon Black, who founded Apollo Global and financed Epstein’s operations for a decade.
“Dear Mr. Jeffrey Epstein,” reads a 2013 email recently released by the House, “Jared Kushner, New York’s youngest powerhouse publisher, is celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the New York Observer on Thursday, March 14th. Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be by his side to toast you all. …[On list of those scheduled to attend: Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein] The celebration is going to be one of those quintessential New York nights. We are looking forward to seeing you.”
Third from the left: Kirill Dimitriev
Kirill Dimitriev is a Russian man educated at Stanford, Harvard Business School, and Goldman Sachs. He was a big player in the formative years of Russian private equity.
Dimitriev founded the Russia Direct Investment Fund, an effort to bring a new level of global finance to Russia’s moribund economy. Leon Black was on the fund’s advisory board from roughly 2011 to 2014.
Dimitriev was at the secret 2017 Seychelles meeting, with Erik Prince (from the family that owns the Orlando Magic) which the Mueller investigation investigated as an attempt to establish a back channel between the Kremlin and Trump’s White House to discuss things like Ukraine.
Erik Prince is famous for starting the military contractor Blackwater, which worked for the CIA. Then everything went sideways. Blackwater changed names and was purchased by Apollo Global. The CIA executive who managed the Blackwater relationship was, for a long time, on the Apollo board.
The Seychelles meeting was reportedly organized by Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), the president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Abu Dhabi. The UAE’s very founding is alarming and deeply resonant of Epstein’s story. One of the key funds under MBZ’s control became the biggest outside investor in Apollo Global. The UAE has also become a critical source of funds for almost every pro sports league, certainly including the NBA which now has games in the Emirates every preseason, an Emirates Cup, and the word Emirates on every referee uniform.
Prince had been sent there by Steve Bannon who, we now know, was exceptionally close to Epstein.
Fourth from left: Steve Witkoff
Steve Witkoff right now has massive, valuable private investments in partnership with oligarch Leonard Blavatnik, as beautifully reported by Popular Information.
Some prior Ukraine peace talks reportedly took place in a Florida property owned by Blavatnik’s firm.
Witkoff has been maligned in the press for a leaked phone call with Ushakov in which he appears to take a very pro-Russian position.
The biggest deal in the history of private equity was a collaboration between Apollo Global and Blavatnik, who took over Lyondell Basel together and made an absolute killing, and led to several more partnerships.
Like Apollo Global, when Witkoff hit a rough patch, he was bailed out by funds from Abu Dhabi.
Blavatnik and Epstein were both members of the Council on Foreign Relations, both deeply tied to Harvard University, and both well-connected to the English royal family.
Steve Witkoff’s son currently runs the crypto startup with opaque funding that, Reuters reports, is easily the Trump family’s greatest source of income. The founding fathers had this big concern that people–especially foreign leaders–might try to bribe people in the American government. And so there are a lot of rules around, for instance, giving gifts to public officials. This firm is an infinite loophole. Dark money is a real thing, and Putin sits atop a nation that has perfected moving money quietly.
The four men reportedly met, with Putin, for five hours in the Kremlin, and made little progress on Ukraine pace.
I wonder what they talked about?
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