Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are. You have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. You’ve been deep in it. How does that compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the process here? Because it really rhymes, right?
Noah Shachtman: Beyond. So look, for WIRED back in the day, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all the intelligence agencies. And I’ve never had a situation like this where people were so scared and took such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source. In spy movies, there’s this thing called a brush pass where someone pretends to bump into you or pretends to give you a hug or whatever and slip some information in your pocket. As far as I know, that shit has never happened in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in real life during the story.
Brian Barrett: Wow.
Noah Shachtman: You would have people that I’d reach out to, they’d be like, “Sorry, wrong number.” And then I’d hear back from them on a different number two seconds later. We had an incredibly cold winter here in New York, the coldest in decades. And yet here I am outside freezing my ass off with a source because the source will not meet inside for fear of being bugged. And you think, well, wow, these people must be just paranoid. They’ve seen too many spy movies themselves. Well, not exactly. Famously, and we kind of captured this in our story, is two Knicks legends met up one night in the garden, one of whom was Charles Oakley, who was a famous critic of Jim Dolan. And he was told by his former teammate, Patrick Ewing, one of the greatest Knicks of all time, to pipe down because there were listening devices everywhere. So these people acted more paranoid than spies, but they had some reason to act this way.
Brian Barrett: Tell me more about the Charles Oakley of it all, because that was a really fascinating part of this story, I thought, because here’s a guy you would think he’s a Knicks icon of fan favorite. You would think he would be untouchable just because of his association with the franchise. He’s not apparently. Do you mind talking through his experience a little bit more and what you got from talking to Oak?
Noah Shachtman: If you’re looking at the finals right now, you see during the broadcast that there are all these Knicks legends there, guys like Luke Charles Brewell, Patrick Ewing, Alan House, and John Starks, what have you. Who you don’t see there—the one person you don’t see—it’s really shocking not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was kind of the Knicks brawniest enforcer during the ’90s, a great player. Why is he not there? He’s not there because for years he was openly critical of Jim Dolan’s management of stewardship of the team. And then in the mid 2010s, he got into an altercation. I mean, there’s lots of different ways to spin it, but he got into an altercation with MSG security and was thrown out of the garden and he was banned from there on in. And there’s been a series of accusations back and forth. There’s still all sorts of lawsuits going on, but yeah, he’s sort of the one guy that’s been ostracized and we’ve talked to some sources within the Madison Square Garden security community. Let’s say there was orders put out to follow him to surveil him. So this is not just a typical situation of a franchise not getting along with a particular player. There’s been a long ugly legal battle. There’s been accusations of surveillance both digitally audio and physical tailing with the guy.