The Jeffrey Epstein guide to the playoffs
Dirty billionaires mucking up a good thing
The players are doing their part to make the NBA playoffs spectacular. I don’t want to talk about anything except V.J. Edgecombe and Scoot Henderson!
But the antics of the dang billionaires are a persistent stain on the NBA. Here’s a ranking of Epstein-affiliated teams in the NBA playoffs:
76ers
Josh Harris was an analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert and co-founded Apollo Global with Leon Black, who funded Epstein’s operations for years.
For reasons that have not been explained, Jeffrey Epstein emailed Leon Black’s assistant to say that he was arranging for Josh Harris to pay her $2.4 million.
Harris met with Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates for an “intimate” breakfast at Epstein’s house. It was scheduled to last two hours, afterward Epstein emailed to ask Harris if he had fun.
The money behind Harris comes from Apollo Global. The money behind David Blitzer, Harris’s partner in sports investments including the 76ers, comes from the Blackstone Group. Blackstone is a complex firm run by Stephen Schwarzman, whom Epstein knew, invited to dinner, and called “terrific.”
There’s a lot more in this TrueHoop story.
Nuggets
Substack has hosted breathtaking investigative journalism over the last few months, with brilliant people stitching together insight from the Epstein documents from the Department of Justice. Two stories stand out:
Kait Justice on the Deutsche Bank files that Epstein and Steve Bannon were utterly convinced would end Trump’s presidency, and
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on defense and intelligence implications of Epstein’s New Mexico property.
Both are must read; if you haven’t, please don’t delay.
And then note that Nuggets billionaire Stan Kroenke is in both.
In support of Kait Justice’s work, I researched and published a list of the biggest clients of the business unit at Deutsche Bank that attracted so many Epstein-connected people, including Donald Trump and Carl Icahn. Near the very top of the list, in terms of assets invested with Deutsche at the time, was Stanley freaking Kroenke.
And it’s even creepier when you read Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s story which traces the commingled origins of the American intelligence and defense industries, and the people connected to both who bought up ranchland in New Mexico with proximity to the two major sites of America’s nuclear weapons industry. A focus of that story is a man named Henry Singleton, a major defense contractor and massive landholder, including a ton of land adjoining Epstein’s ranch. It turns out the Singleton family recently sold most of that land to … Stanley freaking Kroenke.
How it all fits together is unclear, but Kroenke is certainly traveling in some iffy circles.
Knicks
James Dolan inexplicably built an 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. And that billionaire’s empire was financed by the same machine that produced a CIA Executive Director on the Apollo board, a former Drexel trader running the Pentagon, and the deep pockets that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation.
Hawks
Tony Ressler was a senior vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the high-yield bond department. He left when Drexel collapsed in 1990 and co-founded Apollo Global Management in 1990 alongside Leon Black, Marc Rowan, and Josh Harris—using Credit Lyonnais money to buy distressed Drexel bonds at fire-sale prices. Adam Silver’s college roommate at Duke, Jim Zelter, runs Apollo as president. Ressler left Apollo in 1997 to co-found Ares Management. Leon Black, who funded Epstein, is married to Anthony Ressler’s sister Debra. Anthony’s brother Richard was also an associate of Epstein. The word “Ressler” appears 487 times in the recent Epstein file dump. Reportedly the most successful investment in the history of private equity–Lyondell Basel–was a collaboration between Ares, Apollo, and oligarch Len Blavatnik.
Rockets
Tilman Fertitta comes from a family with well-documented historical mob ties.
Fertitta himself made his fortune from investing in hospitality properties like Landry’s restaurants and Golden Nugget casinos. Donald Trump appointed Fertitta as U.S. Ambassador to Italy.
But Fertitta’s most interesting ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s world come through his good friend Richard Handler, who runs Jefferies. Handler was a 28-year-old trader at Drexel when it collapsed in 1990, and has a career that has intertwined in interesting ways with Leon Black and Carl Icahn. The word “Handler” is in the Epstein files almost 700 times.
Handler and Fertitta have a well documented friendship: Jeffries served as lead underwriter when Fertitta financed the Rockets purchase with $1.4B in bond sales, bought his yacht in 2024, and they co-founded the SPAC Landcadia Holdings (the name is evident part Landry’s and part Handler’s Leucadia).
Thunder
A lot of TrueHoop’s investigation into the dirty money around Epstein has focused on A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, a former CIA executive who was on the board of Apollo Global when Apollo founder Leon Black funded Epstein’s operation. The thing is, Buzzy has been on a lot of boards—often in companies where Carl Icahn is a big investor. Starting in 2014, Krongard was a board member of a Chesapeake offshoot called Seventy Seven Energy. In the years to follow, McClendon got in legal trouble, and then died driving his Chevy Tahoe into a bridge embankment. I’m not sure anyone has explained to the public how it all fits together, but I do know that this guy Buzzy connects the Thunder’s ownership group, Apollo Global, and the CIA. Read more about all that here.
Lakers
The Lakers are now owned by Mark Walter, who made his name at Guggenheim Partners. Guggenheim formed in 1999 and quickly became a big player in the world of sports investing—but it always seemed to exist in the shadow of Michael Milken, whose Drexel Burnham formed the network and defined the methods that made Apollo Global successful. Indeed, the SEC investigated and fined Guggenheim $20 million for failing to disclose that Guggenheim president Todd Boehly had taken a $50 million personal loan from Milken while Milken was under a lifetime securities industry ban. The SEC found Guggenheim “breached its fiduciary duty” to clients. Mark Walter and Boehly used Guggenheim insurance company funds (at least $300 million) alongside their personal capital to buy the LA Dodgers in 2012. Government regulators investigated the insurance fund arrangement but declined to act. Guggenheim is mentioned here and therein the Epstein files.
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