The Alleged Surveillance Machine Targeting a Banished Knicks Legend

Brian Barrett: Noah, you are an acclaimed national security journalist who has spent years covering intelligence work and real espionage matters. How did this reporting compare with the way you normally handle sensitive sources and protect them? The process seemed to echo the methods you have seen in national security reporting.

Noah Shachtman: It went beyond anything I had experienced. When I was at WIRED years ago, I reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I covered the intelligence community extensively. But I had never encountered sources who were so afraid of being identified that they took such elaborate precautions. In spy fiction, there is the idea of a “brush pass,” when someone bumps into you, embraces you, or otherwise creates a moment of contact to slip information into your pocket. As far as I know, that had never happened to me in real life. During this reporting, it did.

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Noah Shachtman: I would reach out to people, and they would answer by saying, “Sorry, wrong number.” Then, seconds later, they would contact me from a different number. New York was in the grip of an exceptionally cold winter, one of the harshest in decades, and I found myself standing outside in the freezing weather with a source because that person refused to meet indoors for fear of being bugged. You might assume they were simply paranoid, that they had watched too many spy movies. But that was not quite the case. As we described in the story, two Knicks legends met one night at Madison Square Garden, and one of them, Charles Oakley, a well-known critic of Jim Dolan, was reportedly told by his former teammate Patrick Ewing to lower his voice because listening devices were everywhere. These people acted more cautiously than spies, but they had reasons to do so.

Brian Barrett: Tell me more about Charles Oakley’s role in all of this. He is a Knicks icon and a fan favorite, so it seems surprising that he would be treated as expendable. Can you walk through what happened to him and what you learned from speaking with Oak?

Noah Shachtman: If you watch the Finals broadcasts, you see numerous Knicks legends and former players shown on screen. The person who is conspicuously absent is Charles Oakley, one of the Knicks’ toughest enforcers during the 1990s and a standout player. He is not there because, for years, he was openly critical of Jim Dolan’s ownership and management of the team. Then, in the mid-2010s, Oakley got into an altercation with Madison Square Garden security and was removed from the Garden. He was subsequently banned.

Since then, there have been accusations from both sides, along with ongoing lawsuits. We spoke with sources within the Madison Square Garden security world who said orders were issued to follow and surveil him. This is not a typical dispute between a franchise and a former player. It has become a long, bitter legal battle involving allegations of digital, audio, and physical surveillance.

Source link