Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is And then they were off to the races on on their own right after this You're on vacation. I'm at home from my home studio Sports is calling for us The Lakers just got so over $12 billion to a guy that you know Josh Kushner and I can't even begin to talk about How much I want to talk about that with you. But we have others to get to before we get uh I guess the end of your vacation. I look forward to speaking about it with you But uh, I'll just tell you that walking the Camino for two weeks from Portugal to Spain was one of It was the most spiritual and enlightening and powerful and emotional things. I've ever done I'm now in Sisley where I'm stuck on an island with an erupting volcano Unable to travel. Oh god. I explained to the concierge in Italian or maybe it was English That Pablo Torre needed me to have Wi-Fi This is not a joke. There is a metaphorical and literal volcano erupting somewhere on your horizon It's why you missed the Deconyx episode. We just did what the meal has in last week But you are now willing to create content for public consumption As is the person that I brought you here in part to discuss I meet you August 22nd at the Wuhan, right? August 22nd. I'm booking my ticket right now. I'm about to lock all y'all up Yep, August 22nd. What's the Wuhan? Coilinered he is going out his agent tour and he's going to Wuhan, China, which you may know for viral content of a different guide David It's a far away from the Roxbury Well, you look like you just had a night at the Roxbury by the way given the shirt. Thank you for those who are not watching And this is the same dude David and coilinered who used to keep the lowest profile in the NBA I should warn you here. We got documents David for you to read for the first time new documents Well, I should warn you though Pablo just before you show me documents is that when I told you and I was going to go away Your first concern was wait wait will you be away when the NBA rules on aspiration the clippers? That's not that was like your number one and we did not see a scenario by which that wouldn't have happened Here we are still hasn't happened You have found spiritual enlightenment sooner than the NBA has ruled on this case I do need to clarify that since our last episode there has been zero comment zero denial zero correction on anything From the clippers from dectronics the team selt the code of based video board manufacturer Which the NBA has also been investigating Nor any responses to our questions from the LA based crisis PR firm David and I was bummed he missed this part of the episode The crisis PR firm that dichronics had hired Which I denied ever representing the clippers or Steve Palmer the owner before disclosing upon further questioning that they had in fact Worked for an LLC that Steve Palmer had created to quote unquote obfuscate his identity My reaction to the episode is that dectronics does not require a crisis PR firm On a ongoing basis. I would assume they go crisis by crisis and they realized very quickly upon your inquiries That they needed one I do want to cite one way for the clippers to plausibly defend themselves here to the NBA from these serious franchise altering allegations that they broke the leads cardinal salary cap rule Through not only the fraudulent tree planting startup aspiration, but also coise alleged multi-million dollar endorsement agreement with dichronics that of course uncovered Because here David is what the clipper said back on September 3rd 2025 This is the day that part one as you well know of this now 14 part series first dropped And the NBA commenced its investigation and owners largest presumably had some extra time to refine the statement You'll find in front of you Neither Steve nor the clippers organization had any oversight of coise Independent endorsement agreement with aspiration To say otherwise is flat out wrong They had no oversight of such a sponsorship deal which was they say independent Here for good measure David now is what Steve Balmer then proceeded to say on ESPN about what the clippers did not do When it comes to the eight-figure endorsement deal broker by Coise and aspiration both of whom had previously signed their own respective deals with the clippers in 2021 But not yet with each other We were done they were done all the we were done with coise we were done with aspiration the deals were all locked and loaded Then they did request to be introduced to coise under the rules we can introduce Our our sponsors to our athletes we just can't be involved and we even found the Email that makes the first introduction it was early November. I won't remember the exact date So where where could any of this circumvention have happened it didn't it couldn't have How did the introduction got made and then they were off to the races on on their own we weren't involved involved they were not involved they cannot be involved David There seems to be a line that Steve Balmer is aware of beyond which they ought not cross Yeah, what surprises me is that he took a position is one thing the crisis PR firm will tell you And we talk about this often is the multiple statements can really hurt you And he took a very strong position right after our first episode of September 3rd And he's been walking it back slowly ever since and it's sort of going up and down like a mountainous range of false statements Now he's got to figure out what position to take but he's also dealing with lawsuits Against other investors in aspiration. He's also dealing with the NBA So he's answering to a lot of different gods right now which also makes crisis PR that much more difficult But the idea here that they know they shouldn't be involved they can have oversight This is all independent to say otherwise is flat out wrong That does represent seemingly a threading of the needle in their mind as long as they don't do that This can happen The reason why Wattel is in business and why they've built millions of dollars to Balmer who actually pays for the NBA investigation side note Is that Wattel lipped and has to figure out whether or not that needle was threaded because they're looking at the actual facts They're interviewing witnesses Well, the other reason we want to talk to you here David is not just your expertise about league investigations Which you know personally it's also the fact that you yourself were involved with that products You were you hired. Yes very much so it is out of the question that Dectronics would have come to us and said hey, we'd love to talk to Jean Carlo Stanton about Possibly being a sponsor we started with Dectronics when the ballpark was being built Because that's how you build the ballpark is you go to all the subcontractors and you talk about who's going to do the seats Who's going to do the toilets and when it comes to scoreboards you go out for bid Dectronics submitted a bid for our jumbo tron and the ribbon boards You negotiate what that deal will be How it will be paid What's inside the budget what's outside the budget of the stadium? Which is a whole another episode of how you can manipulate budgets that are publicly stated as what your stadium budget is But all that happens and in all of the dealings with Dectronics the number of times a player came up Was zero I want you to hold a couple of the thoughts you just expressed there because the title you had Of course president of the marlins you were building marlins park your own new stadium So you were doing pretty much what Steve bombers right hand woman gillian zucker went on to do for the clippers and into a dome with the halo board except I don't think david that you paid a hundred million dollars for your video setup a bit of a different product there Yes, I remember what the contracts was worth. I'm gonna say Between 15 and 20 million dollars was our contract with Dectronics And I'll go even further any sponsor of our team Going forward at any point whether it was a dolphin stadium or marlins park There is no deal that was ever done with one of our players that I didn't know about not one And to what extent was the owner therefore aware of what you were aware of I wouldn't bother our owner with a guy who was getting a car To do a quick car deal But if it were a high six low seven figure deal the owner would know that because I would tell him Well Dectronics their alleged multi-million dollar sponsorship deal with kawaii Leonard is shocking for all of these reasons including that it was never announced That
that Kawaii and Dectronics, in fact, never appear to have even acknowledged each other in public, but also because as you allude to, Dectronics didn't do stuff like this with individual athletes. In fact, they prided themselves on not having such sponsorships according to their own SEC filings and former Dectronics employees who could not name a single such celebrity endorsement before. - Yeah, and I can go even further with you, Pablo. The way you negotiate these deals is you have a budget for scoreboard, let's say. And you can play within that budget. So if I negotiate with Dectronics, that I'm gonna get all the deliverables for $15 million. But I want to somehow make the contract worth $20 million. I can have Dectronics change what they're charging me for the ribbon boards. And I can then save that money elsewhere or get Dectronics to spend that money on something else. And it's totally legal, totally above board, but it's all negotiation. So the point is, we can manipulate everything, but you do it in concert with your partner. So for Dectronics to do a deal with Kauai, I'm not saying it's $95, Pablo. It's 100% guaranteed that the Clippers had to know about it. And it was 100% baked in to the contract that Dectronics would have done with the Clippers to build into it, though. It's not even a question in my mind and you can flag it if you want. Yes, I will throw the allegedly on there, but we remain exceedingly confident in our reporting, except I do want to acknowledge this. There have been a couple of critiques that I think are worth airing out. I see you, Pablo, Torrey, Kauai. I'm tired of him. Not a bro. Why'd he (bleep) Kauai, bro? And bro, they get to the bottle, bro. He had a deal with the school board. They gonna do a Kauai. But they gonna avoid players contracts, bro. It's Pablo, Torrey is doing the lowest work for sure, man. They say, "Oh, Jimmy would have played at one tree." This goes on the table. And look, we did actually in that episode, David, show Kauai with a tree in the topping off roofing ceremony, which you also took, of course, pardon when you were building Marlon's Park. Others have pointed out that we did not actually show proof that Kauai himself personally planted the tree. He was more like he watched as the tree got placed on the autographed steel beam that flew up to the roof of the Intuit Thome. We are always trying to fact check ourselves around did he actually plant the thing? And yeah, a bored man, the clog gets paid, but he did not dig an actual tree into the soil with his claws. You know, we're sticklers. And so just wanna acknowledge that. The more fervent criticism, though, has been about documents. Because in our last episode, we relied on one former high level Clippers official and one high level source who was under contract with the Clippers Intuit Thome project for years. And they both described their understanding of how the Clippers funneled the millions through Dectronics to Kauai to circumvent the salary cap. - People at Dectronics, people within the Clippers organization themselves had told me about this multi-million dollar view with Kauai and Dectronics. They're not a company that you would see a celebrity endorse your for. You know, and then it wasn't coming out of their end that the Clippers were technically kind of funding it. You know, and that it was funneling money from the Clippers to Dectronics back to Kauai. - But people, I guess this is more than fair, actually, they've demanded written proof that Dectronics had anything to do with this superstar player who reportedly didn't want to do anything. And they've demanded written proof that the Clippers were involved in or had any oversight of such a relationship between Dectronics and Kauai because maybe Kauai Leonard just independently loves a jumbo-tron. - So the way that would be negotiated is that Clippers would approach Dectronics and say the jumbo-tron is worth 80. We'll give you 100 and we want 20 to go in a sponsorship deal. Again, something we did, we didn't have companies do it with players. We did something different, which is the value that we're buying is five million. We would like to make sure that the contract says six million even though you're only delivering us five million worth of items. Take that extra million and buy a suite. So we can show that a suite has been sold and buy season tickets. Incredibly common, might I add. - I love that you're going full sopranos on this already. The budgeting here, this is the story. What are we calling this cost? And why are we calling it something else? Is speaking to other incentives that you might have as an organization building out a stadium? There is clearly something very interesting about the Clippers relationship with Dectronics. And it was actually announced publicly, David. You're talking about timeline. In June of '22, these are big press releases that come out into a dome officially opening in 2024, right? So they announced the thing before they actually get to constructing the thing. And according to one key Dectronics executive, though, this is where it gets even more interesting. They first started talking about the Halo board the same year that Kawaii Leonard happened to become a free agent. This was way back in 2019. - So I got involved with our sales team at the beginning and I think the initial conversation started early as 2019. And then we got on board as a partner with the Clippers in 2020, almost three years before we started onsite. There was conversations with the architect and the Clippers team on what they wanted. And there was this idea of the Halo. And if it were-- - That is absolutely normal. You have the conversations. If you're smart, so you can try to control budget and make sure that the design is exactly what you envision. - Well, speaking of controlling budget, according to our new round of reporting here, there was a crucial aspect of the Clippers scoreboard partnership that proved difficult when it came to execution, which is that the Clippers, they had apparently agreed to do business by way of Kawaii Leonard's uncle, Dennis Robertson. And as you've established, Kawaii himself apparently did not want to do anything for these unannounced multi-million dollar quote unquote sponsorship deals. He was getting allegedly to circumvent the NBA salary cap. But the Clippers, David, meanwhile, in order to not break the NBA's cardinal rule, really would have needed Kawaii to do something, to do anything, no matter how low the lift, to make an extremely lucrative job with a jumbo-chomp manufacturer seem even vaguely real. We're talking about a selfie promo video. We're talking about an autograph signing. We're talking about something, anything, really. - Those deals would have appearances in them. They would have come meet and greet with the executives, with the sales team, go on a sales call, maybe certainly signed items that can be used by the company. - But this is where it gets kind of funny because the Clippers within this framework, right? On the one hand, they would know that they'd have to create at least the impression of independence, right? No oversight. This is just a deal with Kawaii and electronics. They definitely would not want to be involved. This is echoing the language of Balmer that we heard before. - And then they were off to the races on their own. We weren't involved. - But on the other hand, the tension emerges according to our reporting because you have Kawaii and Uncle Dennis, not necessarily cooperating. This now evidenced by some new documents that we have exclusively obtained. And so, David, we will begin with this first email from inside the Clippers Marketing Department. - From
[email protected], sent Tuesday, March 16, 2021, to
[email protected],
[email protected], CC,
[email protected],
[email protected], subject, Ray Clippers Ideas. Hi, redacted. I hope you're having a great week so far. We wanted to check in to see if your team has already met with the player and his rep or if you have the meeting on the books. We look forward to beginning the activations and if you have any questions about anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. - So, first of all, we are in March of 2021, eight months, David, before Kawaii starts, KL2 Aspire LLC for his no-show job with the Clippers Jersey Patch Sponsor, Aspiration, and more than a year before the Halo Scoreboard Project by DarkTronics would even be announced. So, that's where we are in time. I do also like though that the Clippers employee is referring to the player and his rep with anonymity, in fairness. It could be anybody. The player could be, I don't know, Paul George, right? We don't know that. But what sticks out to you about that email just based on the face of it? When we're dealing with players and we are trying to get them to do things, the only time we involve their agent is if the player's not being cooperative by fulfilling what they're contractually obligated to do. But in advance, we would not bring the agent in unless it were an epic situation of discomfort between us and the player. And that was extraordinarily rare, if ever. - Well, on that note, here's another email sent from the Clippers Marketing Department from later in the chain. This one month later, following up. On another email, the same person had sent one week before the email you're about to read now. As a theme does,
begin to emerge. >> From
[email protected], sent April 15, 2021, subject, Ray Clippers' ideas, Dash Dectronics. Hi, redacted. Hope you're having a great week. Wanted to check in to see if you've been able to connect with Uncle Dennis/KL to secure a date. Let me know if you have any questions, exclamation mark. Can I just react to that? Of course. Let me start with, a Clippers employee is emailing a sponsor, trying to facilitate making sure that that player is satisfying his obligations to that sponsor in a deal that has nothing to do with the team. The number of times that I or my marketing department would have gotten involved in this would be zero unless we were involved in this. >> I have noticed in these two emails that the Clippers seem very interested in making sure that the buyer of the services get the thing that they are supposedly interested in buying from the seller, whereas the seller, by the way, happens to not be super responsive if these emails are any indication. We would never email the sponsor to wake the sleeping dog. You generally would speak to your partners if they've contacted you first and said, dude, we paid and we can't get our signed stuff, we can't get in touch with the player. The emails would go the other way, those I've received plenty of. I never would have an outgoing email, hey, did you reach the player? He brings us, by the way, to yet another email in the email chain this coming one month after that last one, as the Clippers now in this timeline are in Toronto, rocking up the regular season, which had been delayed due to COVID. >> From redactedoclippers.com, sent May 11, 2021, hi redacted, hope you're having a great week so far, wanted to reach out to see if Uncle D has given you any update on timing with regard to the autographs. Play officer usually an off-limit time for us to approach players, but please let us know if you are able to work something out with Uncle D. Thank you and have a great evening exclamation mark. >> It's like the Clippers are apparent trying to make these two kids play with each other. Can you guys hang out? Can you guys do something, please? Because this is now three emails months apart trying to get Uncle Dennis Robertson to finally do the thing that you would imagine absent other cap-circumvention explanations. He would be doing because Dectronics wanted him to do it, not because the Clippers wanted him to do it. >> The team would not be in the middle of that under any situation unless, of course, Pablo, they're in the middle of it. >> Well, this is where we get to the follow-up in the same email chain, our response, David, that I'd like you to read. >> From redactedadactronics.com, May 11, 2021, to redactedadclippers.com, redactedadactronics.com, redactedadclippers.com, CC, redactedadclippers.com, redacted.com, I'll follow up and get back to you exclamation point, thanks for the reminder, oh, don't let me read that with that laughing. I'll follow up and get back to you, thanks for the reminder exclamation point, go Clippers, redactedad. >> My main takeaway from reviewing this just particular handful of emails is that the Clippers do seem to be exerting a lot of oversight inside of a deal that seems very dependent on their involvement. >> Yeah, I think it's important to go back to what Palmer said when he talks about their off to the races on their own. We weren't involved. That expression does not come with all of these email chains. They are in the starting gate, it would appear. >> Well, the marketing people from the Clippers repeatedly sending these friendly reminders admittedly, lots of hope are having a great day, all that stuff, very friendly. It's encouraging Uncle Dennis and Kauai to please do something. Please do anything, like the autograph stuff. Yet the Clippers, yeah, they appear way more interested than Dectronics's in getting them the stuff. >> Yeah, I'm not sure what Dectronics would be doing with the stuff when you're B2B, it would not be interesting to me negotiating with Dectronics. They said, by the way, we'll throw in a signed, you know, Mickey Mantleball. >> Let's talk about what it might cost, right? 13 executives who signed such deals, generally speaking, how many autographs would you expect to get from a superstar even in a multi-million dollar sponsorship deal if that was the primary deliverable? >> You would get annually, sometimes you can do it twice a year, there'd be a signing, and you could get five dozen baseballs, two dozen bats, and two appearances, not to last longer than 15 to 25 minutes, and if it's a seven-figure deal, you may get a private meet and greet with executives, again, not to be more than 10 people at a time. You could get a player to agree to a step and repeat if it's a mid-six-figure deal where you stand and you take pictures with someone and they come in the picture and they leave and the next group comes in. I mean, this is a different story, Palo. I've negotiated deals for player appearances often. >> For the record here, we did send detailed questions about these documents to Dectronics and the Clippers and Kawaii's new agent and Uncle Dennis, and they didn't immediately respond, but we're happy to put a statement or a disclosure to the SEC, perhaps, in any other show notes and future episodes that we have. We also called everyone on the CML chain in partnership with Hunter Brook Media, our reporting colleagues on this project and nothing. But what we're doing, David, as we look for yet more documentation here, is wonder, did Kawaii ever schedule the autograph stuff because we don't have that evidence at this point? But what we do know is that Kawaii did sign something else just a couple months after the Clippers marketing people. We're repeatedly emailing those very friendly reminders, and this agreement from Kawaii was even friendlier to the Clippers that it had to be. >> This is from the ranger, Kawaii Leonard's contract extension sets the Clippers title window. Quote, Leonard could have taken a two-year deal or waited to bank in on a larger five-year extension. Instead, his new four-year agreement splits the difference and gives him and Los Angeles a more clear timeline for a championship push, end quote. >> And the very next month, you may not be shocked to hear that Steve Balmer breaks ground on the Intuitum construction site where the Dectronic scoreboards will be the biggest ticket item in the entire building. >> So Steve Balmer, David, of course, we should remind people of this. He's already been punished for salary caps or convention by the NBA before. In 2015, this is the year after he bought the Clippers. The league office fined Balmer $250,000 after he and Gillian Zucker presented Deandre Jordan. There's a center with an endorsement deal from Lexus, which happens to be a major Clippers team sponsor, not unlike aspiration and Dectronics were, which led Steve Balmer to write an internal memo. This first obtained by Dan Wikey, then of the OC register. And that memo claimed in part, David. >> As I shared with everyone on day one of purchasing the team, being part of the Clippers family means operating with the highest integrity. We believed we were doing this the right way, and any circumvention was inadvertent. In our efforts to support our players in every way possible, we as an organization must be diligent in complying with the CBA. >> All of which is to say that by the time Steve Balmer pitched Kauai Leonard in person, winning his hand in free agency in 2019, the Clippers, you might presume, knew the rules. They were quite diligent at the very least in knowing what they are. And you might presume that they then knew better than to leave a sign piece of paper behind breaking the league's sick red collective bargaining agreement. And in fact, after the Lakers and the Raptors both reportedly complained to the league office, that summer about how Kauai and Uncle Dennis were demanding tens of millions of dollars in alleged cap circumvention benefits, including no-show jobs and equity stakes in sports franchises. Team Balmer got cleared by the MBA's investigation. There was no evidence found as you may recall. Although it was discussed, David, at the MBA owner's meetings, apparently, as former Maverick's majority owner and noted frenemy of ours, Mark Cuban, once said on this very show. >> Yeah, because we talked about it in the Board of Governors, yeah. >> Right. So Uncle Dennis went to owners. >> Is a badass negotiator, yeah. >> So you're saying that he didn't go to Steve Balmer? >> Well, maybe he did, right? But if Balmer had any brains whatsoever, he just laughed at him. And that doesn't mean Uncle Dennis stopped.
there. Yeah, I mean, listen, they're agents who will only deal with owners. Scott Boris is famous for that, but we ignore that. But yeah, when you want a deal for your player and you're the agent, you're going to go and try to get as much money as you can. And the fact that the Lakers and Raptors said no, and then he ended up with the Clippers, I guess people can draw their own conclusions. It raises questions that become very interesting, by the way, because Dectronics, again, according to one key Dectronics executive, first started talking about the Halo Board back in 2019. I think the initial conversation started early as 2019, and then we got on board as a partner with the Clippers in 2020. When the free agency of Kawaii Leonard was taking place. Also, even more interesting, when you remember that in 2021, the Clippers, per the emails that you read for us, were annoying Dectronics in writing with those very friendly reminders to connect with Kawaii and Uncle Dennis, noted badass negotiator months before ground will be broken. It's so important to note that if you're trying to make sure that you're not circumventing the cap, allegedly, you need to make sure there's a trail of Kawaii actually doing stuff to earn the money that he's allegedly getting from Dectronics. Yes, there are two levels to which this story for us in our point of view, have become glaring. One is, wow, that's a lot of money for autographs, or for in the case of aspiration, nothing we can discern. But the other level of it is, if you just give us something, anything, we can kind of make this work. But if you don't, it becomes that much harder to spin at some point in the future in the event of, let's say an NBA investigation has happened in 2015 and 2019. But this is what our report is crystallizing here for us, David. I would not want my marketing department annoying Dectronics, the way the Clippers marketing department was, because the trail is too easy to be found in an investigation. There are many other ways to do it without leaving a trail when you want Dectronics to make sure that they have a plausible reason for giving Kawaii money. And so, I await any explanation as to why that trail exists. I continued to just acknowledge that all of this with Kawaii and Dennis still alleged, but I will just remind people that aspiration as a company, the Clippers, we found ties between the organization visits from team executives. In 2018, we had Dectronics broaching the idea of the Halo board in 2019. And so, look, the mechanism here, it's right there if they want it to utilize it. And I just got a stress here again that not many people in podcasting at least know what it's like to build a new stadium, but your job I can only presume was on some level. Can we control costs? Can we spend less? But then when we are spending, be creative in how we get maximum return on our dollars. Every day, every day with every bid package, with every subcontractor, with anybody who you're working with, and there are hundreds and thousands of pages of documents, of negotiations that happen. But anyone who says it's easy to get a ballpark done and built, it's just not try renovating your bathroom at your house. You're going to be over budget and you're not going to be on time. You're talking about the problem familiar to anybody dealing with subcontractors of inflated invoices of vague valuations. And I've been doing some extra research this week to understand this topic even better. And by that, I mean, I've been rewatching the sopranos and you do learn that this is in part why the mob loves the construction business. For the record, I had my guy go over the books. We can do maybe two carpenter jobs, one no show, one no work. The episode there is titled no show. But this is what we're talking about construction sites. Yeah, but again, we're not mafia. We were not involved in the mafia. The concept here is that you have a budget that you are designing to and you have to have wiggle room. I use the word fungible. Dollars are fungible. And so you can absolutely manipulate contracts in order and it's totally legal. Excuse me. One second. I hope that's not Uncle Polly. Hello. Hi, I'm live recording something. I'll call you right back. Is this an emergency? Okay. Scotty. Right. I just want to make sure they're not evacuating the building. You have your priorities in order though. I'm podcasting. Hold up. Did the volcano erupt? That's what I was. I answered the phone just in case because the shades are drawn in the volcano. It's just out the window. I just want to make sure like the entire hotel was an empty. And they're doing like flashing some granos jokes. I never would have interrupted the show. But for that, but for the possibility that there might be lava flowing into your hotel room. But like the point is that when you build a stadium, you're building a house. And when the money goes up to billions of dollars in the case of Intuitum, you're talking about a higher potential for obfuscation. Let's just call it that. That is a very true statement and it would not just be with the electronics, by the way. But I digress. Well, this is why according to our reporting, the Clippers funneled millions of dollars through aspiration through a hidden side deal for the founding Jersey patch sponsor of the dome, which the team of course continues to vehemently deny. The other interesting thing about all of this, David, is that while the Intuitum's Halo Board was under construction, Dectronics had another partner of note. Another new stadium also being constructed in the same exact time frame that we have covered with you in studio before. Do you recall which partner that would be? Could it be the Rhode Island football club? The second to your football club owned by Los Angeles Financier, Brett Johnson, that Kawaii Leonard and Uncle Dennis and Kawaii's proper agent at the time, Mitch Frankel would wind up hidden part owners of despite zero identifiable or rationally explicable connections to Rhode Island to speak of? Well, you may recall the puzzle paperwork that we had when you were last on the show, including thousands of pages that we filed via public records requests from the state of Rhode Island and the city of Pawtucket. And after going over these books, what we found are a bunch of line items inside of the Rhode Island football club's centerville bank stadium budget. And what we've determined here, along with our guy Eli Sherman at WPRI-TV, is that while the clippers were reportedly paying $100 million for the Intuit Dome's unprecedented Halo board, the Rhode Island football club was paying for their very normal relatively speaking electronic system. What, David, according to this line item? Two million one hundred and seventeen thousand four hundred and eighty six dollars and seventy six cents. Right. But Pablo, hold on a second, I don't know if this is the only payment to that electronics, but I would assume it's not. Well, what we did here, David, because your question is an excellent question, as we looked at all the regular reports, we've looked at every other record we could find. And in total, the price tag for our IFC's total jumbo tron package, we top out at two point five million dollars. And look, in fairness, right? Like, it's not the Halo board, but according to estimates we've received from multiple sources who do business directly with the electronics, two and a half million dollars max is a couple million cheaper than what they would expect such a build out to actually cost. One estimate pegged at a five million dollar build, for instance, what one source called this electronics price tag for Kawaii soccer team is, quote, a fantastic deal deals are fungible. If you are being overpaid in one side, you can get underpaid on another side because what you have to do is make sure that overall what you're being paid for that year's work is what you had planned to be paid, what you were budgeted, what the street, meaning what wall street expected your revenues to be. But if Rhode Island Football Club is only paying you two million and you're losing margin on that deal, you'd make that up somewhere else. So that would not shock me, Pablo. And so in fairness, we did reach out to Rhode Island FC for comment here asking to confirm their electronics bill and whether it was cheaper than what you might call fair market value. And the franchise told us in a statement in part, quote, "Dictronics was engaged in the ordinary course of business as the technology and scoreboard provider for the stadium in line with multiple other similar partnerships and other sports entities. There was nothing unusual or improper about the relationship," end quote. But an additional question people have is how any of this, how exactly our IFC owner, Brad Johnson, this whole saga, leads us back to Steve Balmer's Clippers. And this raises the other question, David, that I believe you are especially equipped to answer in our industry, which is when you were president of the Marlins doing the job that Gillian Zucker is still doing for the Clippers, would you know if the sitting governor of Rhode Island was attending your home opener? Would the team have oversight in any way when it came to welcoming a VIP politician like that?
There is zero chance that I would not know and that our owner would not know. Zero. It's beyond ridiculous that a governor, a sitting governor is in your ballpark and you're not aware of it. There's security issues you want your owner to make sure that you're seeing them. You may want to get the governor to sign some balls. I mean, there's no way a governor or a senator. By the way, we would get a list to fix a congressman. If it's someone on the school board, I'm getting the name of that person who's in our ballpark. Who's visiting your house is the responsibility of the, yeah, you to know. We know every scout who's in the ballpark, every VIP, every scout, everybody from the other team and their party. I mean, it's might have a facial recognition system that the team in Los Angeles at the dome currently has. Yeah. We didn't have that. But listen, I want to point out that the team did not reply to our questions about this, but it would be very funny if the Clippers did not know that Rhode Island governor, Dan McKee, was attending this game on October 24, 2025 against the Phoenix Suns because we knew. And I don't mean that in retrospect, David, I mean to reveal to you here that even though this game had been marked private on Governor McKee's personal schedule, as we showed you earlier in the series. A source had told us in real time that the governor was going to be in attendance. And so what we did here at PTFO is we sent a reporter to the game to scan the entire 18,000 person crowd to try and photograph him, to try and find out where exactly Dan McKee, Governor of Rhode Island might be sitting. And this turned out to be, I can now admit, incredibly embarrassing at the time because the guy we want to focusing on was this guy. And this old white guy in the blue sweater hanging out court side, yep, put your glasses on. We're showing him right now to everybody on our YouTube channel. This guy is not Dan McKee, the governor who would green light the construction of our IFC Centerville Bank Stadium at Brett Johnson's urging diverting public funds that had been earmarked for affordable housing, zero units of which have actually been built as we've previously reported. That's not the governor. Keep those glasses on, though, because just last week after we published that awkward interview with the real Dan McKee in collaboration with our local news friends at WPRI, we realized something kind of insane because if you look at this photo again, David, right there, and you ignore the old white guy sitting court side with the blue sweater. But you look up and you look over to the left. You see that old white guy, please tell me that's an RIFC jersey. You can see this guy drinking from a silver can. And to reveal what he's wearing with full clarity, I do think that we should point out that the white men are with this deal, allowed the clippers then to capitalize offer. That yes, in fact, as you can even more clearly see now on the NBA league pass broadcast of the game behind that's the outstretched elbow of Nicholas Batum, yes, and Hans is the actual governor of Rhode Island, Dan McKee at the clippers home opener, sitting right there alongside RIFC owner Brett Johnson staring at Kauai Leonard down on the court while wearing a f***ing RIFC kit. That is in fact what you spotted on Dan McKee's torso. I can't. James Jersey of the second tier pro soccer team with Kauai Leonard was a hidden part owner starting two LLCs, KEL2, RIFC LLC and KEL2, RIFC real estate LLC. The week before he signed a Submax extension with the clippers owner of this building in January of 2024. He was there in these photos, we've been sitting on, distraught for 11 months, just hiding in plain sight in Steve Balmer's house, the entire goddamn time. So David, there is something else now that you should know about Governor McKee's choice seats to last season's Clippers home opener this month after we began publishing the series, which is that there are some of the nicest seats in the whole NBA. They appear to be located in the section of Intuito known as the Courtside Cabanas, cost on those two million bucks for the full season, for the whole suite. And it's apparently quite delicious. This is what the brand new $2 million Courtside Cabana suite is like at the Intuito. You start off with entrance through the player's only garage and are escorted beneath the court directly to the NBA's first ever private Courtside Cabana. Your suite comes with multiple insane chef stations like an Omakase counter, torched A5 Wagyu Stake, a custom dessert station, and your suite is fully stocked with everything from Charcuterie to these massive Texas style beef ribs and even your own personal bartender. And if that's not enough, you also have full access to the Lexus Courtside Club with even more chef curated food options. And a kind of suite, in other words, David, where you'd really love it if someone out there would pay $2 million a year to you to have for a full season. It's part of a bigger deal with companies. I'll say that. Number one, number two, when politicians are coming to your ballpark, you have to be very careful where they are sitting, what the value is of the ticket that they are in. It's very complicated when a governor comes to your ballpark, actually. Well, there are these laws, state laws about like what you got to reimburse, right? Because you can't just take gifts of a certain amount. Yeah, but you have to declare what you're allowed to get, what you have to pay for on your own. There's law. Yeah. Well, look, what the governor says, by the way, about that evening is that he got into a room where the players walk by like a player's. Yeah. I got into a room where they walk by or they can get any introductions. So you didn't get to talk to Kauai Leonard? No. Okay. I asked him whether he had paid for these luxurious seats himself, the access to all of this. His press office explained that he had indeed reimbursed a marketing group, 380 AMK for the tickets, quote. On his own time, the governor was interested in attending a basketball game and reached out to Brett Johnson who lives in Los Angeles and connected the group with 380 AMK, a sports marketing agency that hosts visitors at the arena. Yeah, Pablo, that's not a complete quote or it shouldn't be because of course you don't have access to just buy a ticket on StubHub in that club and as a courtside cabana, those are sold and those you have to go to the owner of that courtside cabana. There is a ticket value. Certainly, you can take the 2 million divided by the 41 games and then divide it by the number of seats. Well, this is where I should say that after WPRI repeatedly asked, the governor's office did finally send us last week via email attachment. The Spain-based 380 AMK's invoice for reimbursing his ticket from back in February 540 euros is the price tag, or about 625 bucks US, at the time it seems like a pretty fantastic deal given how expensive that whole suite is. We've got the governor's foreign wire transfer from nearly 700 bucks, including transfer fees to Madrid where 380 AMK is based and 380 AMK did not respond to our request for comment. But the governor's office also attached something that I did not initially understand, which is even more documentation from this interconnected super system of businesses we continue to outline here, under the roof of Steve Balmer's house, because what we got was screenshots of the text exchange between, according to the governor's office, 380 AMK's representative and the representative for the seat owner in question. So David, could you please read the role of 380 AMK marketing agency rep in this text exchange? And I'll read the role of someone named Shazia. The governor of Rhode Island also asked for an invoice. We had him come to into a dome for Clippers game a few weeks back, so it seems like there is no big rush. Yes, I remember. Shazia, did you have any luck on how we want to handle the invoicing for the tickets for LA mayor and Rhode Island governor price and if we do through Wakanda or through 380 AMK? Very polite in all of these documents we're reading today, which I appreciate. But you may now be wondering who Shazia is and why the marketing rep asked David, as you had read, if they should handle the invoicing, quote unquote, through Wakanda. Well, Shazia, it turns out, is this guy?
The LA creepers, we're going to have the exclusivity on the jersey, so we're going to have the Visitor Panda patch in the jersey. So these Visitor Panda will appear for all the game, home game, away game for the creepers. We're going to also have the LEDs, of course. The LEDs, of course, referring to the signage they're going to have, visit Rwanda all over the Halo board as well. Tasia Valier, David, is the chief strategy and communications officer for the Rwanda development board, who CEO is pictured here holding a clipper as jersey right next to Gillian Zucker in a photo shoot for a 2025 press release about how Visitor Panda is team Balmer's chosen jersey patch sponsor as you may recall now. Replacing aspiration, post bankruptcy and post federal prosecution. You may not be wondering, by the way, if this governor/RFC majority owners, courtside cabana, that whole special evening at the Intuit Thome and its connection to Visitor Rwanda, had anything to do with, you know, the clippers, the team that happens to employ, at least until they're able to finally trade them away or as contract gets foided, the hidden part owner of RFC that we've been talking about. And RFC for its part said, quote, "For the avoidance of doubt, there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between Rhode Island FC, Brett Johnson, benevolent capital, or for two of his partners and the NBA investigation. The attempt to draw such a connection by linking entirely separate commercial relationships is baseless." And quote, "I'll bet you a dollar that is part of the deal for Visitor Rwanda to be on the jersey that there was a court side cabana included. I'm just going to throw it out there, do it that as you wish to your audience, but I'll bet you a dollar." Well, we reached out to Shazia Valier and the Rwanda development board for comment and they did not respond by our deadline. But one more logical question for our purposes, this on top of all of the human rights concerns surrounding the authoritarian government of Rwanda, incidentally, might be this, David. Did Kauai Leonard also have some sort of individualized deal and arrangement of some kind as he did with aspiration with Visitor Rwanda? And at least part of the answer, according to this post by athletic beat writer, Law Murray, in late September of 2025, after we published the first part of our series, is this? LA Clippers announced that Visitor Rwanda's new jersey patch sponsor for Clippers, part of a round of sponsorship agreements for Visitor Rwanda that also includes Los Angeles Rams. Open friends not related to Kauai Leonard's visit to Rwanda, close friends. You may not be wondering, what was this visit you're talking about that Kauai Leonard took to Rwanda that is separate from the visit Rwanda sponsorship for the team that employs him. And it took place in August of 2025. This is before we published part one of our series, but months after aspiration went bankrupt and his co-founder Joe Sandberg got arrested. And Uncle Dennis, yes, was in Rwanda with his nephew as were some of the same folks from the Rwanda development board. But this visit to Rwanda happened under the auspices of the Giants of Africa program. "This is my first time in Africa, I won't make it my last." There was a redesign court, there were many happy children, there's looked awesome. "I'm gonna try to be here for the whole camp next time, like I said, I caught it on the tail end, but. " This visit also featured very importantly here, Kauai Leonard finally doing something, David, with his own two hands, he's planting a tree in Rwanda, well done, Kauai. "Actually holding a shovel with two hands in front of a pilot dirt with a tree, and just in case there is any ambiguity at the end here for any of our critics out there. Lord Man was also standing right next to this. NBA All-Star Champion Kauai Leonard, that's good marketing." Ritted on a literal board sticking out of the soil. "Goodbye, love you, love you too." "Poblatory Finds Out" is produced by Walter Ravaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Nilly Lomon, Rob Cray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello. "Studio Engineering" by RG Systems, sound designed by Andrew Bersich, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.
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