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Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a respected and respected national security reporter. You are. You’ve covered national security for a long time and you’ve covered, for lack of a better word, real espionage stuff. You are deep in it. How does this compare to this in terms of source performance based on the process? Because it really makes sense, right?
Noah Shachtman: To continue. So, look, because WIRED before, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all news organizations. And I’ve never had anything like this where people are so scared and take things so seriously that they don’t get released as a source. In spy movies, there’s a thing called a brush-off where someone pretends to hit you or pretend to hug you or whatever and stuff it into your pocket. As far as I know, this crap has never happened in real life, at least not to me. It finally happened in real life in the story.
Brian Barrett: Oh.
Noah Shachtman: When you have people that I reach out to, they’re like, “Sorry, wrong number.” And then I would hear from them on a different number two seconds later. It was freezing cold here in New York, the coldest winter in years. And now I’m outside and I’m turning off my butt and the source because the source can’t meet inside for fear of being caught. And you think, well, wow, these people must be delusional. They have only seen a lot of spy movies. Well, not exactly. The most famous, and we took this in our story, are two Knick legends who met one night in the field, one of them was Charles Oakley, who was a famous opponent of Jim Dolan. And he was told by his former teammate, Patrick Ewing, one of the all-time greats, to get down because there were listening devices everywhere. So these people acted more fearlessly than spies, but they had reasons for doing so.
Brian Barrett: Tell me more about Charles Oakley in all of this, because that was the most interesting part of the story, I thought, because there’s a guy who you might think is the icon of the Knicks’ fans. You’d think they wouldn’t be out of touch with the franchise. He is clearly not. Would you like to talk a little bit about his experience and what you got out of talking to Oak?
Noah Shachtman: If you’re watching the finals right now, you see on the broadcast that there’s all these Knicks legends there, guys like Luke Charles Brewell, Patrick Ewing, Alan House, and John Starks, what have you. The one person you don’t see there – the one person you don’t see – it’s very surprising not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was the Knicks’ hardest hitter in the ’90s, a great player. Why isn’t there? He is not there because over the years he has publicly criticized Jim Dolan’s management of the group. And in the mid-2010s, he was involved in a controversy. I mean, there’s a lot of ways around it, but he got into an argument with MSG security and was kicked out of the stadium and banned from entering. And there have been many cases. There are a lot of lawsuits going on, but yes, it’s one person who was victimized and we’ve talked to others who are part of the security team at Madison Square Garden. Suppose there were orders given to follow him to see him. So this is not automatic so that the interest rate does not match with the other player. There has been a long ugly legal battle. There have been cases of digital and physical surveillance of the person.
