The Dolans' surveillance state
Creepier than it appears
Friday we learned from Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman of WIRED and Pablo Torre Finds Out that Madison Square Garden is an antsy little surveillance state controlled by the never-likable little dictator James Dolan and, unfortunately, his highly competent and aggressive security team led by a guy named John Eversole, who reportedly posted the photo above.
They documented an 18-page report on the movements of an innocuous fan around the building. They documented the private texts of security freaking the hell out as some fans started chanting anti-Dolan phrases. They documented security tracking children, Charles Oakley, and many others. And they documented that, despite Dolan’s saying it was all to stop terrorism, in fact the Garden is not coordinating with law enforcement on anything like that.
As explained by those great journalists, it’s creepy as hell.
As I heard it, the better part of a decade looking into dirty billionaires, intelligence, Jeffrey Epstein and the like–it’s perhaps even creepier.
Schactman told Torre: “I had one tech exec say to me that [Eversole] was a quote unquote badass who could quote tell the NBA and the NHL what to do, not the other way around.”
Yup. When John Eversole worked for Symantec, part of Broadcom, they published a brochure that said this:
An Army reservist and former Marine, John ran security for the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; he was the personal bodyguard for a U.S. secretary of defense; and in the corporate sector he directed personal security for one of the richest CEOs on the planet.
One online bio of Eversole suggests that CEO must have been Larry Ellison, head of Oracle.
That’s an interesting name. In an earlier TrueHoop post, I declared that the most important thing in the Epstein files happened in the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank. And here’s a 2013 email to from that group’s executive Chip Daulton saying that Lawrence J. Ellison is an “active client under Russ Daulton.” Daulton is in all kinds of public records as a Deutsche banker. So it certainly appears that Ellison banked in a small niche of the banking world with Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black
Ellison has become the controlling owner of TikTok, a major federal contractor, and a vocal champion of a surveillance state who reportedly told investors:
We’re going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.
Summarizing: Madison Square Garden is a surveillance state, where anyone perceived as an enemy of James Dolan’s can be tracked, banned, or dealt with by an elite security veteran who thought it was cute to post a picture of a cat and a gun on a bed.
And that’s before you get to the bad stuff.
James Dolan is rich because of his dad, Charles Dolan, who built a cable television empire. But the way he built it was tricky. He kinda built it twice. The first time, he got deep into debt and lost everything but a small outfit on Long Island. Then he got creative about the financing, and eventually roared back to dominance thanks to billions in junk bond financing from Michael Milken and the disgraced Drexel Burnham Lambert.
That might carry implications. If you’ve been reading this Epstein series on TrueHoop, then you know that a lot of NBA and Epstein-affiliated people emanated from Drexel, whose annual meeting was staffed with young women and called the Predator’s Ball. There are credible ties to intelligence, to the arms trade, and to Apollo Global, the NBA’s most important source of cash.
In Dolan’s case, their personal Drexel banker, named Dick Hochman, joined the Cablevision board and remained there for decades (as Cablevision got in trouble for how it handled stock options). Milken and Drexel financed a huge swath of the cable industry, including CNN, MCI, McCaw Cellular, TCI, Viacom, and Time Warner. With a capital structure drawn up by Milken, the Dolan’s empire came to include Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Knicks, the Rangers, and Sphere.
And Cablevision was always weird. A 2001 New York Observer profile by Landon Thomas (who is all over the Epstein files would later lose his job at the New York Times for being so close to Jeffrey Epstein) wrote that Cablevision’s Long Island headquarters has “about as many security guards — meaty guys with blank expressions, all dressed uniformly in red polo shirts — as employees” and a security office called “intelligence services.”
It’s the cable company! Why would it need all that? And why has the Dolans’ next business followed suit with its own intelligence services?
Over the end of the 1980s, Drexel collapsed and Milken went to prison in 1990. Drexel’s alumni spread all over the finance world. Among them: Leon Black, Marc Rowan, 76ers billionaire Josh Harris, and Hawks billionaire Tony Ressler went to Apollo; Steve Feinberg went to Cerberus; and Richard Handler went to Jefferies where he became essential to the fortunes of Tilman Fertitta, Trump’s ambassador to Italy and the billionaire who runs the Houston Rockets. The Cablevision/Dolan relationship survived; Dick Hochman stayed on the board, and Cablevision’s next bank became Bear Stearns, where Jeffrey Epstein once worked and maintained strong connections.
In 2003, James Dolan and Jeffrey Epstein were part of a small group, along with several investors with Drexel ties, who failed in their attempt to purchase New York magazine.
Less than a decade later, Bear Stearns collapsed which caused problems for Epstein and his network. Leon Black’s foundation funds were kept in Bear Stearns accounts. Deutsche Bank, which had financed Steven Feinberg’s Cerberus and maintained Epstein as a client, became popular with a laundry list of billionaires, many of whom are tied to Epstein’s network.
Deutsche Bank included a unit that had once been called Alex. Brown. In internal documents it’s referred to as DBAB, for Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown. Alex. Brown had been run by A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, who long had CIA ties, and where he quickly became the executive director after leaving Alex. Brown.
And then Buzzy joined the board of Apollo Global Management board. His wife Cheryl Gordon Krongard was previously CEO of Rothschild Asset Management North America, then a senior partner at Apollo. Krongard simultaneously served on the In-Q-Tel board (CIA’s venture arm) for 15 years overlapping his Apollo tenure.
Apollo is the direct descendant of Drexel Burnham Lambert, with many of the same staff and holdings.
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.
Apollo’s founder Leon Black then paid Epstein at least $158 million, which was recently confirmed under oath by his accountant.
The Drexel network always had some evidence of arms dealing, intelligence affiliation, and defense contracting. That has only become more overt over time.
Apollo has Buzzy on the board and acquired Blackwater.
Cerberus subsidiaries include DynCorp and Tier 1 Group.
People disappear far too often, especially when they have powerful enemies. It’s a byproduct of lawlessness, and some people wielding unchecked power. An incredible example of this, of course, is journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and sawed into pieces, which we know because there’s an audiotape of the exchange that you can hear if you’re so inclined. I listened to some of it, and was blown away by the idea that the head of Saudi Arabia has a team of men who clearly were not doing this for the first time.
And then it emerged that team had been trained by Tier 1.
Who else have they trained?
In 2018, Cerberus honcho Steve Feinberg was appointed to chair Donald Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which meant a private equity billionaire got classified intelligence while remaining CEO of a massive player in the defense space. Cerberus was a Deutsche Bank wealth management client. In March 2025, Feinberg became the deputy secretary of defense, overseeing huge defense expenditures.
And so it’s in that context that in 2018, MSG Entertainment began deploying facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater, and eventually Sphere. LinkedIn shows that former FBI agents, CIA officers, and NYPD detectives join the Garden security staff.
Like his dad before him, a billionaire inexplicably builds intelligence-grade surveillance infrastructure, staffs it with former CIA and FBI officers, and is sitting on a trove of surveillance material that could be used for just about anything that billionaire wants. Surveillance is powerful. And that billionaire’s empire was financed by the same machine that produced a CIA Executive Director on the Apollo board and a former Drexel trader running the Pentagon.
Is this a story about NBA fans and the personal oddities of James Dolan? Or is it a case of sports putting a friendly face on a scarier tale of a ruthless effort by a small group to use their money and leverage to become untouchable?
During the Arab Spring, the governments in Moscow, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi began to sweat. Digitally-organized mobs dragged dictators through the streets; at one point 120,000 people were amassed at the Kremlin demanding change. They reacted in many and varied ways, but especially tracking dissidents, including by placing spies within Twitter.
More than the ability to control Charles Oakley, Dolan now has a growing database of millions of people who have attended his venues. If a dictator whose cronies invest in Milken’s network needs help finding the next Khashoggi, would Dolan have his team search the database?
Another approach dictators have taken, which has been highly effective, is to invest so much in social media that they essentially own it now. (I don’t know if Elon Musk will ever make money on his Twitter investment, but I’d bet that Twitter will never work again as a tool to threaten the overthrow Putin or MBS.)
Tracking dissidents seems like a tiny thing to most of us. But it’s everything if you’re an evil dictator. And to them, James Dolan has a damn useful setup.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Henry, once again doing some essential, amazing connecting of dots!
Thought provoking stuff. There is no law if you are wealthy enough is there!