Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a distinguished, well-respected national security journalist. you are. You’ve covered national security for a long time and, for lack of a better word, you’ve covered actual espionage stuff. You are deeply immersed in it. How does this compare in the context of source management in terms of process here? Because it actually rhymes, right?
Noah Shachtman: Ahead. So look, I went to Iraq a few times previously for WIRED. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all the intelligence agencies. And I’ve never come across a situation like this where people were so scared and took such extreme measures to avoid being outed as a source. In spy movies, there’s a thing called a brush pass, where someone pretends to bump into you or hug you or something and slips some information into your pocket. As far as I know, this never happened in real life, or at least not to me. This eventually happened in real life during the course of the story.
Brian Barrett: Very good.
Noah Shachtman: You’ll have people I contact who will say, “Sorry, wrong number.” And then I’ll hear back from them two seconds later on a different number. We experienced an incredibly cold winter here in New York, the coldest in decades. And yet here I am, shrugging my ass off with a source on the outside because the source won’t get inside for fear of getting screwed. And you think, well, wow, these people must be absolutely crazy. He himself has seen a lot of spy films. Well, not at all. Famously, and we captured this in our story, two Knicks legends met in the garden one night, one of whom was Charles Oakley, 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 turn off the pipes because there were listening devices everywhere. So these people behaved more crazy than spies, but they had some reason to act that way.
Brian Barrett: Tell me more about Charles Oakley, because he was a very fascinating part of this story, I thought, because here’s a guy who you would think is the fans’ favorite Knicks icon. You would think that just because of his association with the franchise he would be untouchable. He apparently isn’t. Do you mind talking in more detail about his experience and what you learned from talking to Oak?
Noah Shachtman: If you’re watching the Finals right now, you’ll see during the broadcast that there are all these Knicks legends there, guys like Luke Charles Brevell, Patrick Ewing, Allen House and John Starks, what have you. The one guy you don’t see there – the one guy you don’t see – it’s really shocking not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was the most courageous promoter of the Knicks during the ’90s, a great player. Why isn’t he there? He’s not there because for years he was openly critical of Jim Dolan’s management of the team. And then they had a fight in mid-2010. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to spin it, but he got into an altercation with MSG security and he got kicked out of the Garden and he was banned from there. And there have been a series of continuing allegations. There are still all kinds of lawsuits going on, but yes, he is a guy who has been ostracized and we’ve talked to some sources in the Madison Square Garden security community. Suppose orders were given to keep a watch on him. So this is not a normal situation of a franchise not being able to get along with a particular player. A long ugly legal battle has ensued. The person has been accused of monitoring the person digitally, audio and physically.
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