Pablo Torre Finds Out - PTFO Exclusive: We Followed the Money in the NFL Union Scandal. So Did the FBI.

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

As the NFL returns, Pablo and Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio are back with more secret documents, a federal investigation, new government names, billions of union dollars, an O.J. Simpson parking space, the world’s largest strip club... and one big "clusterf*ck." Does the OneTeam Partners saga connect to a Game of Thrones-style power play by the NFLPA's shadow boss? Or could the feds be on the trail of an even bigger scandal?• Part One: The NFL's Secret Collusion Case, Revealedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P42Wq3fmTYg• Part Two: We Got Another Secret Union Document — and Smoked Out Another Cover-Uphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P42Wq3fmTYg• Read our latest NFL document on Pablo's subscribers-only newsletter:https://www.pablo.show/subscribe• Pre-order "Big Shield" by Mike Floriohttps://www.amazon.com/Big-Shield-Mike-Florio-ebook/dp/B0FGH43V6D• Ex-NFLPA boss Howell's strip club expenses sent to investigator (Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler)https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45703132/nflpa-nfl-agreed-keep-collusion-findings-secret• "If he failed, their process failed": Inside the NFLPA meltdown (Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler)https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45800610/inside-nflpa-executive-director-lloyd-howell-tenure Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Journalism sucks. Right after this ad. This is an emergency episode, Mike. I don't know how else to put it. Yes, straighten up your back. I'm coming to you from home.

I have the sheaf of documents still with me. And I was worried at the outset of like, do we really do a third episode about the biggest crisis in the history of the NFL Players Association? and yes, F*** yes is the answer. Yeah, I went through the same thing. The first one went over so well. The second one, in a roundabout way,

contributed to some pretty serious action on the back end. But the more time we've spent talking about it and thinking about it, and I think to the extent we're trying to come up with through lines and have a thread that maybe explains a lot of weird things, I think we're getting closer and closer to it. But first, I do just want to catch people up because, yes, on the evening of Thursday, July 17th,

the night we published episode two in our trilogy, this happened. The NFL Players Association executive director of Lloyd Howell resigned late Thursday, ending his two-year tenure as the leader of the Players Union. Pardon me, Russian, but I'm Pablo Torre, and I am pleased to be back on PTI with you, Tony. Tony Kornheiser.

You know, just turned off the television, Lloyd Howell. Yeah, he's out. He submitted a statement. It's clear that my leadership has become a distraction to the important work the NFLPA advances every day. Then you hear about the collusion and then you hear about the loss cases about, you know, how they're telling the players they need to fake injuries

or the hold end, you go out of that, you get your money. It's just a mess right now. It's a mess. It has come out now of all the things that have been coming out about him, which caused his haste resignation. that he had been sending in expense reports for trips to the strip club. I just want to show that guaranteed contracts is a potential for the future of the NFL. Bambi.

Lower. Lower, Bambi. Lower, lower. All right. You can see right here from my graph that if we just hold out for two to three weeks, that's X amount of money that the NFL is going to incur an expense. Bambi, move your tits. I'm trying to show my graph.

What was your favorite thing, Mike, from the post-episode two reporting that ESPN and others did into Lloyd Howell? I think more than anything else, it had to be the strip club expense report angle because until you have that kind of seedy, what the hell was he thinking, it's possible to say Lloyd is in some way the victim of a smear campaign. Sure. Whoever it may be you and me or the league or some powerful block of players. And that's, by the way, Mike, we didn't even get to the fact that apparently, per the ESPN report, Lloyd Howell had also ordered the union facilities department to merge two spaces in the parking garage like Barry Bonds in the Giants Clubhouse to create a double

wide parking spot for his Porsche Cayenne Turbo in honor with the number above 30. of who? Orinthal James Simpson. You can't make it up. And so when all of this is unfolding this chaotically, this recklessly, it also is stunning to me that the executive committee, Mike,

in the reporting, fought Lloyd Howell's attempt to resign. On the call. And I just got to quote this here. Quote, the EC said, no, you're f*** not. A player with knowledge of the call told ESPN. Since elevating Howell to be a finalist for the job in 2023, the executive committee

had stood by him throughout the series of revelations about his conduct and side jobs. End quote. So just imagine this. Imagine what the EC of the union was trying to do as all of this was raining, maybe perhaps as Lloyd Howell himself was making it rain. And I know Seinfeld references are horribly outdated, but they are so perfect to summarize reality. The executive of committee for everything it's done all the way back to the super secret process that resulted in the hiring of Lloyd Howell, they are George Costanza who has bought John Voight's car. Just driving around in John Void's car. They are never going to admit that the car was once owned, not by John Voight the actor,

but by John Voight the periodontist. That is this mindset when it is obvious that the super secret Lloyd Howell hiring process, without the proper vetting, without people understanding all the various questions, directly contributed to the chaos they're now experiencing. Yes. And so in that vetting, what was missed for the record to catch people up was, ah, yes, Lloyd Howell's role as the CFO of Booz Allen in the fraud that resulted in a $377 million settlement with the U.S. government. Again, these documents, another sexual discrimination lawsuit at Booz.

It missed that he did the strip club expense. report thing in 2015 at Booz Allen. It missed that too. Yes, and so all of which is to say that three days after Lloyd Howell resigned, this is now Sunday, July 20th, Lloyd Howells number two, the chief strategy officer of the union, J.C. Treader, the guy the two of us have been reporting on from the very beginning, the guy who was otherwise flown under the national radar, I would say, and also, by the way, the guy who had predictably emerged, in our view, after Lloyd resigned, as the favorite to replace him as

executive director, according to the New York Times Athletic. That guy also resigned. And J.C. Treader, Mike, J.C. Tretter finally did the thing that the two of us had been waiting for him to do. Speak? Say anything? Comment? Come out of hiding? It's amazing to me. When you look at the lengthy the interview that he gave that emerged in print with Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports explaining himself and like he was exercising restraint when all of these false stories were being put out there about him. Like if there are false stories about you, there are ways, even if you're not doing it publicly, there are ways to get in touch with people. I know J.C. Tredder. I have his number. I'm easy to find. I invited him to come on PFT PM, PFT Live here with us and have a

conversation he never responded. But if any of the stuff that was coming out from us, the two episodes of Pablo Tori finds out where we collaborated on the 61 page, hidden collusion ruling, and then the hidden grievance regarding J.C. Treader, encouraging the faking of injuries, wink, wink, wink, nod, we're easy to find. I'm easy to find. All he had to do is pick up his phone and say, hey, we need to talk about this. You're way, way off here. And I should clarify, too, that I also hear a Pablo Tori finds out, reached out to J.C. Treader for comment, no response. And by the way, I, for my part, never received a single ounce of pushback from the NFLPA, via PR person, or J.C.

Treader, in any of this. Same. Any of this, right? But what we get now finally is J.C. Treader complaining to CBS sports about, quote-unquote, mistruths that were out there about him. And that I assume directly references the stuff that we have been reporting. And he does something that's kind of amazing. He proceeds to compare himself to a game. Game of Thrones character, which is very bold, if not very germane to the genre we're working in, because he tells CBS, Mike, that there is, quote, unquote, one specific scene from Game of Thrones that he has been thinking about over the last few weeks, end quote. Do you remember the scene that J.C. Tredder is referencing, Mike?

Actually, I don't, because I'm not a Game of Thrones aficionado, so I'll defer to your expertise. It's from when Tyrion Lannister is falsely accused in the show of killing his nephew, the young King Joffrey. Have you nothing to say in your defense? Nothing but this. I did not do it. I did not kill Joffrey, but I wish that I had. I wish I was the monster you think I am.

I wish I had enough poison for the last. whole pack of you. I would gladly give my life to watch you all swallow it. So for the record, J.C. did not quote the whole poison part. It was merely, I wish I was the monster that you claim I am, that he quoted saying, I felt a lot of that over the last six weeks. I'm being accused of being this all-controlling, all-powerful person, and I'm not. And I I fucking wish I was, because I don't think we'd be in the same place we are now, if I was, end quote. I like the argument that if I had done all this on purpose, it would have been a hell of a lot more effective

than the cluster I created. I kind of like that. I may use that. And what happens next, right? As clarity is being urged, J.C. Treader goes on the Dan Patrick show to continue to sub-tweet the two of us. Be specific on what you're talking about.

That is not true. That's being said about you. Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of narratives spun. The idea that I buried the collusion grievance, I've never seen the collusion grievance. I don't have access to the collusion grievance. I wasn't in any discussions about the collusion grievance. Just not part of my job. Chief strategy officer of the NFL Players Association was not involved in formulating the strategy

for the fact that they woke up on January 14, 2025, with the NFL by the tail with a partial victory in the collusion ruling and plenty of evidence that could have been used for a PR slash political pushback. How in the world, Pablo, it gets more inexplicable the more I see that clip. How is this guy cut out of the loop

on what we're going to do with this thing that he was involved in, testifying, and he's frozen out, How does he not storm out the door the day he finds out that he was excluded from developing the strategy from moving forward with this valuable 61-page ruling? It is laughable. It is laughable. He says, Mike, I have never seen the collusion grievance present tense. So just to even more fully explain what he's saying, right? He's saying, you know, I didn't discuss it.

I didn't bury it. And also, even though this asshole journalist published it on his substack for free, this thing that I testified in, that my phone got searched for, that I was a character in, that my claims against Russell Wilson were used as an exhibit to help the owners against the body that I love more than anything. The ruling which I was waiting for, because again, I had an intimate knowledge of it. He's saying that even after it got published finally and he could access it, because clearly he had been boxed out by Lloyd Howell in the process of suppressing it, he's saying he still had zero curiosity

in going to actually see it, even though, by the way, as a related matter, I can tell you that at least one senior vice president with the NFL has been passing this thing around and viewing it dozens upon dozens of times off of my substack. J.C. Tredder is saying,

still have never seen it. Not really sure. Especially, Mike, especially, when the NFLPA then, sides, right? To change course and appeal as we discussed in episode two after we released it. And he still says, nope, never seen it. So to paraphrase Watergate, right? An outstanding question I have. What did the chief strategy officer know and when did he know it? And it does not sound, as we continue to listen here, like he wants to tell us. I know we lost the collusion grievance in January that

that I knew that. I didn't know of any agreements or what was happening with that because it's not part of my department. Once it leaked a few weeks ago, I started learning more. I was on the board call and the EC call when it was explained what had happened over the last six months to the players. So I know more now, but at that point, I'd do nothing. It wasn't involved in the discussions. I love trying to look for tells, and he's very good. But man, there was a lot of shifty eyes. A lot of eyes starting. Anytime things got a little dicey, there was some rapid eye movement for a guy that was wide awake. Well, is this a nightmare?

And what degree of nightmare is it actually is why I wanted to continue reporting, right? If someone says, by implication, you journalists have published mistruths, frankly, I take it seriously, right? I want to continue to fact-check myself. I want to make sure I didn't get it wrong. And so this is why and how, in my would-be week-off, Mike, we both got sucked into this other, even darker rabbit hole that I didn't even understand, frankly, until today. And it turns out that the entity that is also quite curious,

just like we are, about what's actually happening here, who knew what and when, is an entity that is perhaps even scarier than the two of us combined. It's combination of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Eastern District of New York, where prosecutors are exploring the happenings related to the NFL Players Association, the MLB Players Association. And once you start putting into the universe, strip club expense reports, financed by union revenues, you are going to get the attention of the federal government,

which is charged with the responsibility for enforcing the laws against that kind of stuff. Yes. Once enough stuff is being made to rain. Documents, money at strip clubs, the government asked the question that I think we are asking still, where do we wind up if we follow all of this money? And the answer is after the break. So something that I just need to stress here is that the NFLPA is extremely different from the overwhelming majority of labor unions in America in this one crucial and generally overlooked way. It has a f***in ton of money to play with. So the job of NFLPA executive

director, for that reason alone, is an extremely enticing, extremely powerful job. And that is true for both a businessman like Lloyd Howell, as well as a proudly adversarial prosecutor like DeMor Morris Smith, who was Lloyd's predecessor and philosophical opposite. D. Smith, for instance, made more than $8 million in the last year of his 14-year run as executive director. It is hard to imagine an American union leader making more. And even then, there's a gross imbalance to the extent that his primary adversary, whether you're D. Smith or Lloyd Howell, is the commissioner. The commissioner is making many multiples.

To the extent those are the two, it's definitely David and Goliath when it relates to bank account. And that is also true. But the NFLPA's total assets, according to its most recent federal filing, amount to roughly $1.4 billion. Much of that coming from all of the dues paid by NFL players over the last quarter century now.

This amount, to be clear, is still outmatched. by the NFL to Florio's point, and it's not close, but you should also know that this billion-dollar wartchest is just the beginning of the story that we are about to tell you here. And all of this will make it even more baffling that Lloyd Howell, whose job was to oversee this entire enterprise, was both physically and mentally absentee. Dude was living in South Florida,

working as a paid consultant for the Carlisle Group on the side, which also developed a special arrangement to buy shares of NFL teams, as we discussed last time. And Lloyd Howell was also serving on the board of Moody's because Lloyd Howell loves board seats and private equity side gigs and showing up at the DC office maybe a couple times a month. And so what I did was start asking eight different NFLPA sources,

both players and officials, a pretty simple and logical question. Who in the office was actually in charge? And a consensus became clear. The shadow executive director of the NFLPA, the guy who actually lived there in the D.C. area, was J.C. Treader, who is a former, a proud former Cornell football player, but even more specifically, a graduate of Cornell School of Industrial

labor relations, which is a special college devoted to these issues, who became known around the union headquarters for taking on projects and, frankly, working his ass off. As one former union official told me, quote, no NFLPA president has ever studied the union's bylaws as closely as J.C. Trudder, end quote. And so 2022, he gets caught by the Browns in the spring. He moves his entire family, Mike, from Cleveland to Northern Virginia, takes his off. at NFLPA HQ in downtown D.C. And his first task is immediately running the search to replace the outgoing, almost $9 million man to Morris Smith.

And very quickly, he convinces the executive committee to sign NDAs for a reason that, yes, commanders running back Austin Echler continued to parrot last Friday to the athletic. You need top talent. And if you're looking for top talent, they already have a job somewhere. We have to protect their name in secrecy so we can protect them at the job they're currently at. So I love what we did as far as our process.

Now, Mike, something that's very amusing in retrospect in terms of the two finalists that they produce is that neither of them, it turns out, had a job at the time that they were interviewing for this role. why are the two finalists Lloyd Howell and also a guy named David White. And David White, Mike,

I didn't know a ton about, but his background contains the following headline from Deadline Hollywood in 2015. Quote, open secret and lies how sag after a boss, David White,

misled union board on pedophile docu. End quote. So what I did was I reached out to David White last Wednesday. He replied to my LinkedIn message and then ghosted me. So never got to hear him explain the NFLPA search or the quote unquote pedophile docu scandal. What I found out from one high-level Hollywood source, a union source, is that White had resigned from Sag After in 2021,

and was subsequently rumored to be in the running to lead the AMPTP, which is the Alliance of Motion Picture and television producers, which I didn't quite appreciate this, is is the NFL to sag after his NFLPA, meaning that David White, according to my source, Mike, is the kind to, quote unquote, play ball with management. If that happens to remind you of anybody. It's funny, too, I had this image of David White running by a friend, a colleague, an associate,

that he'd been contacted by this guy named Pablo Torre and the person saying, don't, don't, don't. Talk to him. Yeah. I'm worried about that part, too. I did. And I'm having flashbacks to 2023 when I was covering on a drip, drip, drip basis, this unusual process at the NFL Players Association. Let's make sure people understand what we're talking about. We're talking about a union with a rank and file that has a right to know.

And ultimately, they didn't know who the finalists were until they got there, and they had signed NDAs, and there was no opportunity to have any input from the people they represent from the get-go, this top-secret with awkward, clunky justification process, smelled bad to me. And we see the fruits of that very poisonous tree two years later. And so what happened was, Mike, I wound up finding an executive committee member from that time, 2023, who did not feel the same way as J.C. Treader and Austin Eckler, Richard Sherman, the superstar cornerback for the Seahawks who served on the executive committee for almost 10 years at this point in time, did more than disagree, actually.

Richard Sherman, I am told, actually pulled the parachute cord and stopped participating in J.C. Treader's search process after sitting through three rounds of candidates. And the reason Richard Sherman left, I am told, was because he was sick of how J.C. Treader was pushing candidates like Lloyd Howell. According to a source familiar with Sherman's thinking, quote, there was a rigid bias against internal union candidates, and candidates like Lloyd Howell kept getting leeway, even though they didn't seem that prepared and didn't seem to understand

how the relationship between the NFL and the NFLPA works. Lloyd Howell was treated like a project boyfriend. We can fix him. End quote. Didn't J.C. try to push the idea to Jonathan Jones of CBS Sports.com? that when it came down to the executive committee, 10 of the 11 supported David White over Lloyd Howell.

And this is where I just got to jump in here to confirm that, yes, J.C. Tredder told CBS that the EC was actually 10 to 1 in favor of David White over Lloyd Howl. And you and I have been skeptical of that from the get-go. And what you've learned on your reporting regarding Richard Sherman's position was, yeah, Lloyd was his guy. Whatever he's saying now might just be saying what he has to say to try to clumsily put lipstick on the pig. He was always a Lloyd Howell guy.

But I also want to briefly acknowledge something else here, which is that right now, today, with Lloyd Howell gone in disgrace, the executive committee members would also have an incentive to have people think that they always wanted the other guy. Because of course they always wanted David White, the pedophile docu guy who also didn't really understand the NFL. The whole problem here was the voters, the 32 players on the board representatives. Those guys who walked in totally blind.

The voters are the ones who messed this election up. And in fact, what J.C. Trudder said in that CBS interview was one step further, actually. He said that he did not tell those 32 voters what he thought about Loyal. Howe. Quote, we're not going to put our thumb on the scale. They built the scale. We're not going to push them. We're not going to go in there after doing all this work and make it look like we jammed in the person that we would have picked, end quote.

What I am told, though, is that either way, whether he liked David White or Lloyd Howell, what J.C. Treader wanted was somebody who needed J.C. Treader. someone who wasn't fluent in the relationship between the NFL and the NFLPA, someone who needed perhaps a chief strategy officer, which is literally the role that got invented for J.C. Treader that had never before existed anywhere by Lloyd Howell in October of 2024. And so now we are merging back with the known timeline of reality. And contrary to his explanation to Dan Patrick,

I am told that J.C. and Lloyd did not merely strategically box out the media. the two of the mic boxed out pretty much the rest of the NFLPA, just like in the search process. They cut out long-tenured executives at a strategy session. They offered buyouts, I am told, to union employees with more than seven years of service, about half of the 120-person staff. And I ask you, Mike, what's the effect

if you try to say to everybody who's been there long enough to have seen everything, we would like you to take the money and get out of here? Well, it's going to entice them to go because the message is if you don't choose to go with the money, you're going to be told to go without the money. But all of this paints the picture that I suspected was going to exist when they did the top secret executive director search process,

which is we're trying to engineer a world in which no one asks questions. We're trying to engineer a world in which we do what we want to do, without anyone pushing back, without anyone asking why, without anyone meddling in our affairs. And so this brings me now to maybe the most Game of Thrones thing that J.C. Treader did, which I did not know about until this past week. Because again, J.C.'s whole message when it comes to elections was, we're going to have the players decide.

We would never put our thumb on the scale. I would never tell the players what to do. But at the March 2024, NFLPA presidential elections, in Scottsdale, Arizona, there were two candidates for president of the union that year. One, of course, was the eventual winner. This is Jalen Reeves Maibin, the special teamer from the Lions, who is now a free agent, who was on the executive committee with J.C. Treter at the time. You may remember Jalen Reeves Maven from the Super Bowl presser, Mike, that we cited in episode two.

From a PA organizational standpoint, I won't steal all of Lloyd's Thunder, but, you know, there have been some changes being made. just from the structure of the PA and it's really been driven I keep using the same word, but it's really been driven to be focused towards the players. So with every decision we're making, with every, you know,

action that we're going, it's drive driven for what do the players want, what do the players need? The other candidate was Cardinals tackle Calvin Beecham. Calvin Beecham, and I didn't appreciate this until this past week, is a two-time Walter Payton Man of the Year award nominee,

a record five-time NFLPA community MVP. He's also the kind of guy with, you know, a pretty strong business profile. And I say that because I was looking through his game film, and I found his speech that he gave at the 2018 LinkedIn speaker series. I started to really gravitate to STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And if you add the arts, for those who are artsy, it's steam. And I've really spent a lot of time in that particular space over the last four years.

In that, I've really started to find my own needs. bitch, and where I can really serve the community, and where I can really serve young people. So I really spent a lot of time there and then investing started to take hold. Startups, looking at the way startups are run, looking at the holes in the pipeline that we currently have within the startup. And so what I want to impress upon you here, having just heard those two clips of two very different speakers, two very different candidates, one who had expertise in business and beyond, the other who we now know to have presided over the most disastrous NFLPA regime in

it's known history, is that here's what happened. Instead of what typically goes on at the NFLPA presidential elections, in which the speaker gets up in front of the big room, big auditorium, and speaks to the electorate altogether where everybody can ask questions, everybody can evaluate in the way that we're trying to simulate right now. J.C. Treader divides everybody into a handful of breakout rooms. And according to a player who was in one of those rooms who saw all of this unfold step-by-step, Jalen Reeves Mayben would walk into the room,

struggle to answer questions, and then Jalen would leave. Calvin Beecham would walk into the room and sound like he just did in that clip. He would blow people away. He seemed to have all of this acumen, all of these questions he wanted to ask, and then Calvin Beecham would leave.

And then something else happened. J.C. Tredder would walk into the room. And this was a move that no other NFLPA president that I've surveyed can recall ever doing or ever permitting, J.C. Tredder would walk into that same breakout room and start actively campaigning against Kelvin Beecham. According to the player I spoke to who saw all of this, quote, J.C. would start shihing on Kelvin, talking about why Jalen really cares, and how Calvin may have other motives to want the job, given his off-season activities in the world of finance.

end quote. So he was going to serve as a paid consultant with the Carlisle Group? Is that what you're saying in the off-season? I mean, that seemed to be exactly what they were trying to cultivate a business-forward, strategic,

entrepreneurial, diversified approach to Union Affairs. But seemingly in this case, Calvin Beecham was asking the wrong or too many or inappropriate questions. Or any.

Or perhaps. any questions. What the player who witnessed all of this told me, by the way, as you note that interesting paradox in philosophies, the player told me, quote, I thought the executive committee knew something about Kelvin, end quote, as in maybe his past was the one with conflicts and scandal in it. And so I was led to then be curious. So what questions was Calvin Beacham asking? And it turns out there was one big problem that Calvin Beecham kept flagging in his March 24 presidential campaign. The big problem happened to be a money problem. And if you follow that problem, Mike, if you follow the money, as we have,

you finally find yourself staring into the same rabbit hole as the FBI. So we are finally at part of the story that both of us spent way too much time talking to each other about over the weekend, trying to understand this as best we can. And this part, it turns out, really Fri-Matters. You may recall how earlier in this episode I mentioned the $1.4 billion war chest that the NFLPA has. And the war chest, Mike, by the way, for those who are not familiar,

what is a war chest for? Well, ideally it would be for providing assets and resources to the players in the event of a workstop. It's either a lockout initiated by the owners or a strike initiated by the players, even though the players have shown since 1987, no inclination or appetite to miss a game or game check, it's there just in case.

And it's there as leverage. So in the event that nuclear option is activated, the owners will understand we've got something we can dip into to help the players get through this, however long or short it may be. And you know, I should point out that in the absence of, I don't know, let's say a collusion ruling that contained the embarrassing private phone records and texts and emails and testimony of eight NFL owners, Roger Goodell, his general counsel, and various NFL executives, the Union Warchest, that enticing but outmatched $1.4 billion, would be about all the

NFLPA could have when it comes to plausible leverage. Or so I thought, because even outside of the collusion ruling stuff, there's something else you need to know about. Because under the regime of Demora Smith, Lloyd Howell's predecessor, the NFLPA quietly started developing a new financial weapon. A multi-billion-dollar company that the union co-founded in 2019 with the MLBPA and a big private equity firm, Redbird Capital, and this multi-billion dollar company is called One-Team Partners. The basic premise, admittedly, is kind of genius.

The basic premise of one team is to take the name, image, and likeness rights for as many different athletes in as many different sports as possible and craft them into one giant economic force that can do business with the likes of fanatics, which is one of its partners, and others that want access to those rights. Their strength in numbers. And unlike the collusion that can happen when independent business, has come together to affect a certain end. There's no collusion law that applies

when individuals decide they're going to lock arms and they're going to try to do the best deal for themselves collectively. And so one team partners negotiates with EA Sports for Madden checks and Nike and Adidas for apparel and the NFLPA owns the biggest piece of it by far at 44.5%, with the MLBPA owning the second biggest piece at just under 23%.

unions from women's basketball, women's soccer, men's soccer, all of them together representing thousands upon thousands upon thousands of athletes, they all locked arms with the NFLPA since. And how a union, like the NFLPA, legally oversees one team, is really crucial to understanding this. Because the NFLPA possesses four unpaid board seats. That's more than any of the other unions. and whoever sits in those four board seats is very explicitly obligated to prioritize the best interest of the union, of their union members, which is the fiduciary duty above all else. Even above one team, the company. And this is, to be clear, a unique arrangement.

You know, an NIL company that also has a fiduciary labor law obligation, it really does amount to the difference. between labor law and corporate law, kind of in a nutshell, which now brings us to the sale that quietly ignited this whole entire union scandal. And it brings us to a new character, a very important executive, who is well-liked by both D. Smith and Lloyd Howell,

whose name has not yet been mentioned in any of the reports that I've seen. Because in September 22, The private equity firm, Redbird Capital Partners, sold its 40% stake in one team for a staggering $600 million in profit, which values one team, therefore, at around $2 billion. And so, by June 2023, the same month, Lloyd Howell got elected, I am told, one team also chooses a new leader, a new CEO named Sean Sanzivari.

and Sean Sanzibari had previously served as the longtime General Counsel and head of business affairs for the NFLPA. I would describe Sean Sanzibari as a proud former Cornell football player, but even more specifically, a graduate of Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations. Again, a special college devoted to these issues you've been talking about, not unlike his friend and colleague and fellow alum J.C. Tredder, with whom Sean Sanzibari worked very closely at the NFLPA, especially during COVID. August 2023 comes, and Sean Sanzibari tells Blum. in an article about his appointment, that he has a new target, a new long-term valuation target for one-team partners. As the headline declares, quote, rights agency for professional, comma, college athletes, eyes, $10 billion valuation. Which is very intriguing indeed, right? Not least of all, it turns out, to the board members of one team, Mike. the board members who have oversight over this potentially $10 billion,

but at the very least, $2 billion in the president's joint venture. What happens is you've got four seats on the board that are appointed by the NFL Players Association. Two of them come from the union, two come from private industry and are recruited to serve, and all of those individuals had been providing services to the board of directors with no compensation. Well, in comes the number one sale of the Red Bird chunk

and the open aspiration for this to be a $10 billion company. And these board members, at a certain point, start asking a very simple question. When do we get paid? When do we get money for what we're providing to one team partners? $2 billion on its way to $10 billion company. And there's one key part also about this board, which is that the board chair, by rule, is, of course, the executive director of the NFLPA.

Which means, to check the timeline again, by the time of that $10 billion headline, the new board share happened to be a newly elected businessman with no union experience who loved sitting on corporate boards. And simultaneously, just very coincidentally, had a part-time gig with a private equity firm. You may recall this character by his government name,

which is Lloyd Howell Jr. And so what I can confirm is that the FBI right now, Mike, is actively investigating a very big question. And this is the question that the National Labor Relations Board would also be quite interested in, I am told, because the question happens to be the same question that one very qualified candidate, Calvin Beecham, kept flagging before he got beat in,

by J.C. Treterter's preferred candidate in that very conspicuous 2024 NFLPA presidential election. And this bigger question in this whole NFL union scandal is how many of the millions of dollars going to one-team partners were being siphoned from the players whose personal likenesses are responsible for the entirety of one team's potential $10 billion valuation? And how many of those millions of dollars are being diverted toward their union-employed board members, those executives, without the approval of the players. The members, they have a duty to fairly represent. And this is where we got to explain, Mike, how there was an attempt, seemingly, to get money

to those board members some way, somehow. And this relates to a program known as a SIP, S-E-I-P, It is a separate program that many organizations use to provide incentive payments to management employees. And at the outset, it allows them to have a certain piece of the action when a sale happens if various triggers are met. But it could lead to a significant payment when the private company that is investing in one-team partners, previously Red Bird Capital, now someone else. The outside investor, when they sell, that's when this SIP benefit potentially becomes cash.

Yeah, so a SIP, SEP, SEP, SEP, stands for Senior Employee Incentive Program. It's also referred to colloquially as like a phantom stake, a phantom equity that you can obtain. That could be in this case somewhere between hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, depending on where in the $2 billion to $10 billion spectrum, this very real company lands. And so this brings us to a document that has drawn the FBI's attention, which has been mentioned and rumored elsewhere, but I got to review it over the weekend with my own two eyes.

And the document is dated June 12, 2024. And I just want to place this into the larger timeline here, because J.C. Treader, as of June 24, has just overseen the election of Jalen Reeves-Mabon over Calvin Beecham. And June 24 is also the month before the secret collusion hearings. would start, Mike. That was happening in July and August. This document is a resolution that is passed in June. And this document, which is entirely specific to one-team partners, is a resolution agreed to and signed by all nine of the board members. I reviewed all the signatures. The first docu-signed e-signature at the very top belongs to Lloyd Howell, alongside the NFLPA's three other

board members, MLBPA, executive director Tony Clark, the embattled Tony Clark, whose union is also under federal investigation. For the same thing we're talking about, as well as other issues that have arisen internally over there, his signature is also right there. But as for who specifically got listed as the recipients of the SIPP units, which is better understood as union money, that part is incredibly important here also. because Sean Sanzibari, the CEO of one team and his $10 billion vision, rely upon making enormous deals that get approved by the board,

which is at this point led by its newly installed board chair, Lloyd Howell. But what Sean Sanzivari knew not to do at the same time was give NFLPA leaders union money in their names. That would be unlawful. That would be a company giving something of influence to a labor organization representative, which is flatly illegal under U.S. Code. And all of this is why Sean Sanseveri, therefore, came up with a different solution. The listed recipients on one team's signed board resolution are not the board members, it turns out, listed individually by name.

They're not NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell and NFL Players Inc president, Matt Curtin, who was a former Bank of America managing director who got hired away by his old friend Lloyd Howell in March 24. Not long before all of this. Only, by the way, for Matt Curtin to reemerge this month as J.C. Treader's preferred candidate to replace Lloyd Howell as interim executive director. No. Instead, the listed recipients are the actual unions, as in the NFLPA itself, with percentages that just happened to correlate to the exact number of board seats that each of these unions possess. And all of that, potentially, would have set Lloyd Howell up to obtain approval from his executive committee,

led by new president, Jalen Reeves Maven, and advised by Chiefs-Serv. strategy officer, J.C. Treter, in order to pay this union money to those aforementioned board members as desired. This is where it becomes potentially very complicated, but when you have spent as much time on it as you and I have, I think it can possibly be simplified. Please. The idea was, we have two board members from private industry that want to get paid under the NFLPA umbrella. We've got two who are NFLPA employees or Players Inc employees. We're going to set up something that potentially gives money to all four of them if and when this SIP becomes cash at some point down the road.

But sometime after all nine board members signed this resolution on June 12, 2024, more than a year ago now, a different decision was made. a decision to do nothing. Boyd Howell, sources say, never brought the board resolution to the NFLPA for any kind of approval. And so the SIP units, that union money,

was also never granted. All of which is extremely interesting, I would say, just on its own. And so, in other words, were these union leaders attempting to get rich with player money without player knowledge? There was no effort to secure approval from either union to proceed, but at the same time, nothing else was done. They stopped for whatever reason, and that's part of what we've been trying to figure out.

Why did they stop? They started, and then they stopped. June 12, 2024, the mechanism is in place to make this happen. at some point after June 12 of 2024, they just decided, despite the fact that multiple board members from private industry were saying, to quote Goodfellas,

fuck you pay me, they stopped. And if I'm the federal government, I want to know how it got put in motion and why it was abandoned. In the timeline to bring us all in the same single cinematic universe once again, that was happening, that board resolution was happening. that board resolution was happening in June 2024.

Again, that summer, parallel track, everything in the collusion arbitration stuff is happening behind closed doors through November. In December 2024, right? The seal is finally broken on the one-team story when Daniel Kaplan, at Awful Announcing, publishes a story about a whistleblower at the MLBPA who has been calling out executive director Tony Clark,

one of the signatures, again, on that board resolution next to Lloyd Howell, and he's being called out for many things, but I just want to quote this one line from the article, which turned out to be explosive in ways that we have underrated until now. On conflicts of interest, the charge reads, quote, Clark improperly gave himself and other executives

equity in OTP, end quote. OTP, meaning one-team partners. So what happens from here is that the article catches the attention of a longtime associate general counsel of the NFLPA, a woman named Heather McPhee, an important character in this story, who repeatedly sounds the alarm inside the building

about whether these executives, these union executives, were in fact enriching themselves or attempting to at the expense of union members. And in December of 2024, Mike, that same month, something happens inside the NFLPA as it pertains to legal investigation. The NFLPA,

via associate general counsel, Heather McPhee, decides we need to explore whether or not our union representatives who are board members with the one team partners, we're doing the same thing. And is it permissible or is it not permissible? And so one thing in the timeline, as this board resolution is passed but is never fully implemented, right? There's a Zoom call. And what takes place at the top of that meeting? Lloyd Howell shows up on the Zoom call with a gentleman named Richard Smith, who has been brought in to explore the NFLPA's involvement with this SIP plan cluster f***. And the point is, Richard Smith is basically there to say, I've been hired by the NFLPA to investigate the cluster f*** as it relates to the NFLPA. One team is not a target.

They've been told by the FBI. They're not a target. Because at the end of the day, the unions decide what to do with this. You are giving the interest in the SIP plan to the unions for them to choose what to do with. This is about what the unions, one or both, were trying to finagle possibly for the benefit of the union employees whose compensation needed to be properly set up. approved, increased, et cetera, with the consent of the union members themselves. Yes, with the caveat here to further complicate but hopefully illuminate in the same breath,

that the people running one team were from the union coaching tree, had experience with all of these people, and also, furthermore, that board was controlled by the union leaders. What did you know and when did you know it? It brings us now to May of 20th. This is just two months ago now. Because what Heather McPhee, the Associate General Counsel, who sounds the alarm inside the union building about all of these allegations,

she writes the NFLPA's executive committee a letter. And the letter accuses the Lloyd Howell J.C. Treader regime of ultimately deciding to sideline the Richard Smith investigation that began on that Zoom call with Lloyd Howell. And so what Heather McPhee further says in this letter is that she has been contacted by federal investigators with regard to one-team partners, and there have been questions about this alleged self-dealing.

And so this brings us now, Mike, to the statement that one-team partners gave the Athletic in June, which I must refer to because no one involved on the one-team side wants to go on the record about this. Sean Sansevery declined our request for comment on the record because, of course, there's an ongoing federal investigation and yet more potentially to come. but this is the quote that the athletic received from one-team partners back in June.

Quote, this exploratory effort was part of a broader initiative to assess strategies for attracting high-calibre independent talent. Following the legal advice of a labor law expert, it was determined that the best practice, if implemented, was to make grants to the respective players' associations. In so doing, any future payments would be governed by each union's player-approved bylaws, policy, and governance frameworks.

end quote. And here's where I point out that in both cases, in the case of the executive director's search of the union, as well as the one-team board resolution, the high-caliber talent in question would be who, Mike? It would be Lloyd Howell Jr. If it can be shown through further reporting or FBI investigation that he was the prime mover of all of this. Because in a vacuum, as you read that statement, it's perfectly reasonable. because that meshes with the idea that you've got people from private industry who are like, hey, you know, I like hanging out with everybody, but this is a $2 billion company on its way to $10 billion. So I kind of like to get a little something for the guidance I'm providing to this organization. So that's why it is such a critical piece. And this is a living, breathing, eating, shi-ing story.

But if I'm the FBI, I got to know how did this all start. start. And again, why did they say once they had this gobbledygook resolution that was the key to the door, why didn't they push the door open? So Mike, once again, we present for the world, for our fellow journalists, for the union, for the people considering who to elect in this vacant power vacuum role of executive director, which is still yet to be filled. We present a roadmap for what questions we find interesting that the federal government also, in parallel, we can report. is also asking, which means that there's so much more behind the door, man. And one of the potential answers to the question of what happened after the board resolution

that was never acted upon. It's possible that a decision was made. The heat's a little too hot. To use my original metaphor as tweaked by you, they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, but they let go of the cookie. Yes. That's entirely possible. We don't. don't know. That's what the FBI needs to find out. And I keep coming back, Pablo, to the extent we're looking for themes and through lines. I come back to the secrecy that J.C. Treader engineered in June of 2023 in the hiring process that culminated in Lloyd Howe getting the executive director job. And this aversion to people who ask questions, this desire to keep everything

insulated, us against them. We don't want anyone to know. We don't want anyone to weigh in. We don't want anyone to push back against that thing it is we want to do. Spin it forward. If they had acted on the resolution and the players would have approved or been in a position to disapprove, what happens? You have a tight group of people who you control, starting with the president who isn't the guy who was asking a bunch of, you know, probing and meddling questions, you present it in a very reasonable way. You rely upon the power of the personalities of the people involved, whether it's Lloyd Howell, J.C. Treadder, or someone else as to why this is a fair and appropriate thing to do. And all you need to do is sign this document. And it's only fair to compensate

Lloyd Howell and Matt Curtin. And so it gets done. It gets rubber stamped. I mean, this was all set up to an eventual rubber stamping by a group that had limited information, and was basically shoved in a direction like they were with Lloyd Howell, like they were with Jaylen Rees-Maven. That's the whole idea. We want to herd these cats, which they did very, very well,

and get them where they want them to go. And they found, I think, the most compliant group of cats. And that's the challenge moving forward. For anyone in the NFLPA who has made it this far, are you going to allow yourself to be hurted by others who are trying to get to some point

that is better for them than it might be for you. Is the roadmap a plan? Is the roadmap a series of cosmically coincidental accidents that happen to result in what would have been, if not for their resignations, if not for those meddling kids, those meddling journalists, a plan that would have worked

to your hypothetical description. That's exactly how it might have gone, given the power structure in place, given the people incentivized to keep the train on the tracks, and by the way, to keep the business booming, right? This is the whole story of all of this. Businessmen replace adversarial lawyers. That was D. Smith to Lloyd Howell and J.C. Treader.

That is why this collusion ruling was suppressed. This ruling, by the way, that J.C. Tretter says he has still never seen. And so we reevaluate our grand timeline now, Mike, from episode one to two to three. Because everything actually fits together quite neatly as much as there is arcane stuff to all of this. In January of this year, the suppressed collusion ruling, the confidentiality agreement that is entered into by the NFL and the NFLPA between Lloyd Howell and Roger Goodell. February, J.C. Treaders, fake injuries, arbitration ruling that the NFLPA loses that no one ever hears about. the alleged curtailing of the one-team internal investigation as claimed by Heather McPhee, that would happen in March the month after that.

And that brings us to, at the very least, a federal investigation which the union learns about in May, bringing us the two of us to spend way too much time together in June and now July. And it really is amazing, Pablo, because all of this really does have, the earmarks of a Cohen Brothers film. It would be a very shoddy Coen Brothers film. I wouldn't suggest that they greenlight this. But there is so much of this just weird, clumsy, clunky, Fargo. The cover-up is worse than the crime, as you've said.

Cover-ups. It's all cover-ups, man. And for this one, how do you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was some sort of conspiracy to put in place a mechanism that would have, unfairly and improperly provided extra compensation to Lloyd Howell and Matt Curtin in a way that violated the fiduciary duties that they both owed to the union members. But that gets back to the two key questions.

If they can resolve the two key questions, how did this all get started, and why did they abandon ship, and what text messages and emails might people have stupidly exchanged when they weren't thinking where this is all going to go? That's the stuff the FBI needs before they can come to any conclusions. and before we can come to any conclusions as to whether or not somebody was breaking the law. We are talking once again about the attempt

to allegedly do something without the proof of implementation. And we are brought back to what we are hoping for, which is an extensive document, Mike. Let's say a 61-page PDF in which people's phones have been searched and people have been forced to testify in front of an arbitrator.

And you get all of the information we got from the collusion ruling. but for this part of the story too. We return to the cookie jar and what it means when you're holding the cookie but haven't eaten the cookie. And so, as we contemplate, is this crime, is this pre-crime,

is this minority report, is this the Coen brothers? I feel most comfortable using the language of one of the protagonists of our story, Jay C. Trudder. Because the former player I spoke to at the end here, Mike, the player who saw the election of Jalen Reeves

Mabon after the campaigning of J.C. Treader from inside of that small group session in 2024. What he told me, upon reading the CBS sports interview that he gave, as his exit interview, when he finally spoke, was that, yes, actually, this is Game of Thrones. But there's a distinction in this player scouting report. J.C. Tredder is not Tyrion Lannister, who was accused of something but didn't do it in the plot of Game of Thrones, and therefore wishes now he was the monster you thought he was, what this player told me is that J.C. Tredder is a different Game of Thrones character. Quote, I thought of him as Littlefinger. And Mike, for those who are not super familiar with Game of Thrones,

this is Littlefinger's most famous quote. A story we agreed to tell each other over and over till we forget that it's a lot. But what do we have left once we abandon the lie? Chaos. A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all. Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. And let me just say this.

And use this in the final cut if you see fit. Add it to the DVD director's edition if you choose. But as I said to you last night, journalism sucks journalism is hard journalism takes effort Pablo you said earlier you talk to not one person

not two people eight people yes eight and I know how much time you put in because I know how much time I spend talking to you about this and I'm hardly the only person you're talking to and I've got other people I'm talking to and so look

folks in This day and age where life moves at the speed of 280 characters, there isn't always a financial incentive to engage in journalism. There is no one giving Pablo interest in a SIP plan for engaging in real journalism. So support what he's doing. I'm glad it's just an every once in a while thing for me. Because it is exhausting. And he does this all the time.

and I don't know how you find the energy to do it because there are many ladders out there. There is plenty of chaos, and you've been doing a hell of a job answering things. We still have more work to do. I hate to say that because it portends another episode. Oh, it does. And as Rocky said to Apollo at the end of the first film,

there ain't going to be no rematch. Here we are on the brink of even Drago making his appearance the next time we do this. Yes. Mike Florio, as always, it could not do. this without you. And so while journalism, as you have now been inducted into my guild,

yes, it sucks, but for that reason, it also f*** rules. And to quote, Rocky, one more time, absolutely. Absolutely. This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.