Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Jumbotron Emails, the Courtside Cabana and Ballmer's "Highest Integrity": Kawhi-Gate, Part XIV

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

As Kawhi Leonard resurfaces, Pablo shakes loose written proof of the Clippers trying to help make their star do something — anything — for a scoreboard company. David Samson beams in with meditations on an emergency: how the governor of Rhode Island paid hundreds for an NBA ticket, how to hide millions in a stadium construction site... and how much a billionaire owner really knows about the cost of doing business.• More from WPRI on the governor and the Clippers game• Subscribe to Huntebrook Media's newsletter for more investigations• Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube for breaking news, greatest hits and live premieres with PabloPreviously on PTFO:• Part I: The Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree• Part II: An Argument with Mark Cuban• Part III: The Mystery Investor, the No-Show Payday and the "Smoking Gun"• Part IV: Steve Ballmer, the Other Cuban and the $118 Million Infusion• Part V: Steve Ballmer's "Inconceivable" Donation, the $20 Million Guarantee and a Head on a Spike• Part VI: An IRL Showdown with Mark Cuban• Part VII: The Briefcase, Ballmer's Social Network and Aspiration's House of Cards• Part VIII: Uncle Dennis, Ballmer's $50 Million Sprint and the Side Deal That Wouldn't Die• Part IX: Ballmer's Tree Money, the Whistle-Blowers and the Document You've Been Waiting For• Part X: Steve Ballmer's Victim Impact, the Man Who Prosecuted Aspiration and the Abacus of Incarceration• Part XI: Ballmer's Secret I.O.U., Aspiration's "Web of Lies" and the Zenith of Fraud• Part XII: RIFC, the Impossible Deal and Life After Aspiration• Part XIII: The Halo, Ballmer's Bowl and a New Crisis in the Super-System 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. And then they were off to the races 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 sold for $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 other shit to get to before we get, I guess, the end of your vacation. I look forward to speaking about it with you, but 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 Sicily, 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 Dachonics episode we just did with Amin al-Hasson 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? Kauai Leonard. He's going on his Asia tour, and he's going to Wuhan, China, which you may know for viral content of a different kind. David? It's a far way from the Roxbury. Well, you look like you just had a night at the Roxbury, by the way,

given the shirt for those who are not watching. And this is the same dude, David, and Kauai Leonard, who used to keep the lowest profile in the NBA. But 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 a way when the NBA rules on aspiration in 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 Dactronics, the team's South Dakota-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 you missed this part of the episode, the crisis PR firm that Dichtronic had hired, which had denied ever representing the Clippers or Steve Bomber, the owner, before disclosing upon further questioning that they had, in fact, worked for an LLC that Steve Balmer had created to, quote-unquote,

obfuscate his identity. My reaction to the episode is that, Electronics does not require a crisis PR firm on an 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 the serious franchise altering allegations that they broke the league's cardinal salary cap rule through not only the fraudulent tree-planting startup aspiration, but also Kauai's alleged multi-million dollar endorsement agreement with diktronics that, of course, uncovered.

Because here, David, is what the Clipper said back on September 3, 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 Homer's lawyers 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 Kauai's 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 Ballmer then proceeded to say on ESPN

about what the Clippers did not do when it comes to the eight-figure endorsement deal broker by Kauai 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. We were done with Kauai. We were done with aspiration. The deals were all locked and loaded. Then they did request to be introduced to Kauai under the rules. We can introduce 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 could any of this circumvention have happened? It didn't.

It couldn't have. The introduction got made. And then they were off to the races 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 Ballmer is aware of,

beyond which they ought not cross. Yeah, what surprises me is that he took a position. It's 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't 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. It's the reason why Wachtel is in business and why they've billed millions of dollars to Bomber who actually pays for the NBA investigation side note

is that Wachtel Lippton 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 wanted to talk to 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 Dachron.

You were. You hired them. Yes, very much so. It is out of the question that Dactronics 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 Dactronics 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,

Daktronics submitted a bid for our Jumbotron 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 other episode of how you can manipulate budgets that are publicly stated as what your stadium budget is. But all of that happens. And in all of the dealings with Dactronics, 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 Balmer's 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 $100 million for your video setup, a bit of a different product there. Yes. remember what the contracts was worth, I'm going to say between $15 and $20 million was our contract with Dachronics. And I'll go even further. Any sponsor of our team going forward at any point,

whether it was at 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 them. Well, Dactronics, their alleged multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal with Kauai Leonard, is shocking for all of these reasons, including that it was never announced, that Kauai and Dactronics, in fact, never appear to have even acknowledged each other in public, but also, because, as you allude to,

Daktronics 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 Dactronics that I'm going to get all the deliverables for $15 million.

but I want to somehow make the contract worth $20 million. I can have Daktronics change what they're charging me for the ribbon boards, and I can then save that money elsewhere or get Dactronics to spend that money on something else, and it's totally legal, totally above board, but it's all a negotiation. So the point is, we can manipulate everything, but you do it in concert with your partner. So for Daktronics 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 Dactronics would have done with the clippers to build into a dome. It's not even a question in my mind, and you can flag it if you want. Yes, I will throw it, 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 Pablo Torre and Kawhi? I'm tired of him, bro. Why do he f***ing with Kawhi? Bro, they get to the bottom of it, bro. He had to deal with the scoreboard. They're going to do with Kawhi. Bro, they go avoid players' contracts, bro.

Pablo Tori is doing the lowest work for sure, man. They said, if he would have put in 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, part in when you were building Marlins Park. Others have pointed out that we did not actually show proof that Kauai himself personally planted the tree. It was more like he watched as the tree got placed on the autographed steel beam

that flew up to the roof of the Intuit Dome. We are always trying to fact-check ourselves around did he actually plant the thing? And yeah, a boardman, the claw, gets paid, but he did not dig an actual tree into soil with his, you know, claws. You know, we're sticklers. And so just want to 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 and Tewitome project for years, and they both described, their understanding of how the Clippers funneled the millions through Daktronics to Kauai

to circumvent the salary cap. People at Daktronics, people within the Clippers organization themselves, had told me about this multi-million dollar deal with Kauai and Daktronics. They're not a company that you would see a celebrity endorser 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. Do Daktronics back to Kauai? But people, I guess this is more than fair, actually.

They've demanded written proof that Daktronics 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 Daktronics and Kauai

because maybe Kauai Leonard just independently loves a Jumbotron. So the way that would be negotiated is that Clippers would approach Daktronics and say the Jumbotron 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 $5 million. We would like to make sure that the contract says $6 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 Clipper's relationship with Dactronics. 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 Dachronix executive, though, this is where it gets Steve more interesting. They first started talking about the HALO,

the same year that Kauai 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 on site. There was conversations, you know, with the architect and the Clippers team on what they wanted, and there was, you know, this idea of the halo.

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 Clipper 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 Kauai Leonard's uncle, Dennis Robertson. And as we've established, Kauai 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 Kauai to do something, to do anything, no matter how low the lift, to make an extremely lucrative job with a jumbo-chot 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. 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 Kauai and Daktronics. 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 Kauai and Uncle Dennis not necessarily cooperating.

This now evidenced by some new documents that we've exclusively obtained. And so, David, we will begin with, this first email from inside the Clippers marketing department. From Redacted at Clippers.com sent Tuesday, March 16, 2021, to Redacted at Clippers.com, redacted at Dactronics.com. Cccredacted at Dachronics.com. Redacted at Clippers.com. 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. This is eight months, David, before Kauai 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 Dactronics would even, even 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 redacted at clippers.com sent April 15th, 2021, subject Ray Clippers Ideas dash Dactronics. 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 slash K. to secure a date. Please 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 market. 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, does you reach the player? Which 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 redacted at Clippers.com,

sent May 11th, 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. Playoffs are 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 a parent 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 Dactronics 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, a response, David, that I'd like you to read.

From redacted at Dactronics.com, May 11, 2021, to redacted at clippers.com, redacted at Dachronics.com, redacted at clippers.com, ccredacted at clippers.com. Redacted, comma. I'll follow up and get back to you, exclamation point. Thanks for the reminder. Hold on, let me read that without laughing. I'll follow up and get back to you. Thanks for the reminder, exclamation point. Go Clippers, redacted. I can't. 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 Balmer said when he talks about they're often. the race is 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 we're 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. And yet the Clippers, yeah, they appear. you're way more interested than Daktronics's in getting them the stuff.

Yeah, I'm not sure what Daktronics would be doing with the stuff when you're B2B. I'm not sure. It would not be interesting to me negotiating with Daktronics. They said, by the way, we'll throw in a signed, you know, Mickey Mantleball. Let's talk about what it might cost, right? You're a team executive 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 uh 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 uh 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, Pablo, but I've negotiated deals for player appearances often. For the record here, we did send detailed questions about these documents to Daktronics and the Clippers and Kauai's new agent

and Uncle Dennis. And they didn't immediately respond, but we're happy to put a statement or disclosure to the SEC perhaps in any of the show notes and future episodes. that we have. We also called everyone on this email chain in partnership with Hunterbrook 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 Kauai ever schedule the autograph stuff? Because we don't have that evidence at this point. But what we do know is that Kauai did sign something else just a couple months after the Klipper's marketing people were repeatedly emailing those very friendly reminders.

And this agreement from Kauai was even friendlier to the Clippers than it had to be. This is from the ringer. Kauai 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 Intuit Dome Construction site where the Dactronic 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. 2015, this is the year after he bought the Clippers, the league office fine, Balmer $250,000 after he and Gillian Zucker presented DeAndre Jordan, their center with an endorsement deal from Lexus, which happens to be a major Clippers team sponsor, not unlike aspiration and Dactronics were, which led Steve Balmer to write an internal memo, this first obtained by Dan Wojke, then of the O.C. 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 signed piece of paper behind, breaking the league's sacred 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 NBA's investigation. There was no evidence found, as you may recall.

Although, it was discussed, David, at the NBA owner's meetings, apparently, as former Mavericks 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 Bomber? Oh, 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 Dactronics, again, according to one key Dactronics 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 Kauai 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 Daktronics in writing with those very friendly reminders to connect with Kauai and Uncle Dennis, noted badass negotiator, months before ground would 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 Kauai

actually doing stuff to earn the money that he's allegedly getting from Daktronics. 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, as happened in 2015 and 2019. But,

this is what our reporting is crystallizing here for us, David. I would not want my marketing department annoying Daktronics 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 Daktronics to make sure that they have a plausible reason for giving Kauai money. And so I await any explanation as to why that trail exists.

I continued to just acknowledge that all of this with Kauai 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 Dactronics broaching the idea of the Halo Board in 2019. And so, look, the mechanism here, it's right there if they wanted to utilize it.

And I just got to 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 designed. 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. Hello. Hi, I'm live recording something. I'll call you right back. Is this an emergency? Is this an emergency? No.

Okay. Grazie. Thank you. 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 volcanoes just out the window. I just want to make sure, like, the entire hotel wasn't empty. We're doing like a last check. We're making some prano's 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 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 Intuit Dome, 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 Dectronics, by the way.

But I digress. Well, this is why, according to our reporting, the Clippers funneled millions of dollars through aspirations. 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 Intuit Dome's Halo board was under construction, Daktronics 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-tier football club owned by Los Angeles financier Brett Johnson that Kauai Leonard and Uncle Dennis and Kauai'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 piles of 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 Potucket. 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, Daktronic system. What, David, according to this line item? $2,117,486. And 76 cents. Right.

But Pablo, hold on a second. I don't know if this is the only payment to Dactronics, but I would assume it's not. Well, what we did hear, David, because your question is an excellent question, is 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 Jumbotron package,

we top out at $2.5 million. 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 Daktronics, $2.5 million max is a couple million cheaper than what they would expect such a buildout to actually cost. One estimate pegged it at a $5 million build, for instance.

What one source called this Daktronics price tag for Kauai 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 had budgeted, what the street, meaning what Wall Street expected your revenues to be. but if Rhode Island Football Club is only paying you $2 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 Daktronics 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, Daktronics 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 RIFC owner Brett 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 if it's a congressman. If it's someone on the fucking 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 wound up focusing on was this guy. And this old white guy in the blue sweater

hanging out courtside, 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 greenlight 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 realize something kind of insane. Because if you look at this photo again, David, right, right there, and you ignore the old white guy sitting courtside with the blue sweater, but you look up and you look over to the left. Do 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 allowed the clippers then to capitalize all for. 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. Enhance, Enhance, is the actual Governor of Rhode Island, Dan McKee at the Glipper's 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 McKin. keys torso. I can't. The same jersey of the second-tier pro-socer team in which Kauai Leonard was a hidden part owner starting two LLC's, KL2 RIFC LLC, and KL2 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 Ballmer'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 clip Burrers' home opener, this a month after we began publishing the series, which is that they're some of the nicest seats in the whole NBA. They appear to be located in a section of Intuit Dome, known as the Courtside Cabanas. Cost on those? $2 million for the full season, for the whole suite, and it's apparently quite delicious. This is what the brand new $2 million court side cabana suite is like at the Intuit dough.

You start off with entrance through the players-only garage and are escorted beneath the court directly to the NBA's first ever private court side cabana. Your suite comes with multiple insane chef's. like an omacasse counter, torched A5 Wagyu steak, a custom dessert station, and your suite is fully stocked with everything from charcutory 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 Quartzon Club with even more chef curated food options. The kind of sweet, 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 state laws about like what you got to reimburse, right? Right? Because you can't just take gifts of a certain value.

Yeah, well, 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 walked by. Like players? Yeah. I got into a room where they walked by or they didn't get any introductions. So you didn't get to talk to Kauai Leonard? No.

Okay. When our partners at WPRI asked him whether he had paid for these luxurious seats himself, the access to all of this, his parents. 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, probably, 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, as a courtside cabana. Those are sold and 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 U.S. at the time, which seems like a pretty fantastic deal, given how expensive that whole suite is. We've got the governor's foreign wire transfer for nearly 700 bucks, including transfer fees to Madrid, where 380MK 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 Ballmer'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 will read the role

of someone named Shesha. The governor of Rhode Island also asked for an invoice. We had him come to a Dome for Clippers game a few weeks back. So it seems like there is no big rush. Yes, I remember. Shaysha, did you have any luck on how we want to handle the invoicing for the tickets for L.A. mayor and Rhode Island Governor? Price. And if we do through Wawanda 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 Shaysia is. And why the marketing rep asked, David, as you had read, if they should handle the invoicing, quote-unquote, through Rwanda. Well, Shesha, it turns out, is this guy? The LA Clippers, we're going to have, like, the exclusivity on the jersey. So we're going to have the Visit Wanda patch in the jersey. So this visit Wanda will appear for all the game, home game, away game for the Clippers.

We're going to also have, like, 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. Cheja Valier, David, is the chief strategy and communications officer for the Rwanda Development Board, whose CEO is pictured here holding a Clippers jersey right next to Gillian Zucker in a photo shoot for a 2025 press release about how Visit Rwanda 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 slash RIFC majority owners' courtside command, that whole special evening at the Intuit Dome

and its connection to visit 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 voided, the hidden part owner of RIFC that we've been talking about. And RIFC, 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 fortuitous partners, and the NBA investigation. The attempt to draw such a connection by linking entirely separate commercial relationships

is baseless. End quote. I'll bet you a dollar that is part of the deal for Visit 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 Cheja 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 an arrangement of some kind as he did with aspiration with visit 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, published the first part of our series, is this. L.A. Clippers announced that Visit Rwanda's New Jersey Patch sponsor for Clippers,

part of a round of sponsorship agreements for Visit Rwanda that also includes Los Angeles Rams. Open parence not related to Kauai Leonard's visit to Rwanda. Close parence. You may not be wondering, what was this visit you're talking about that Kauai Leonard took to Rwanda that a 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 redesigned court. There were many happy children, which looked awesome. I'm going to try to be here for the whole camp next time. Like I said, I caught it on the tail end. 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 pile of dirt with a tree. And just in case there is any ambiguity at the end here for any of our critics out there, Boardman was also standing right next to this. NBA All-Star champion, Kauai Leonard. That's good marketing.

Ridden on a literal. Bairal Bourd, sticking out of the soil. Goodbye. Love you. Love you, too. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick, Digital Strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song as always by John Bravo.

I'll talk to you next time.