The Halo, Ballmer's Bowl and a New Crisis in the Super-System: Kawhi-Gate, Part XIII

How high up did Kawhi Leonard's silent deals go? Pablo ties a larger-than-life scoop to Steve Ballmer's "seemingly impossible aspirations," as Hunterbrook Media's Sam Koppelman follows the money from South Dakota to L. A. — and Amin Elhassan is left to deconstruct the Death Star. • Subscribe to Huntebrook Media's newsletter for more investigations https://newsletter.hntrbrk.com/ • Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube for Kawhi news, greatest hits and more https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/ Previously on PTFO: • Part I: The Silent Superstar and the Rotten Apple Tree https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhiN2IxMTNkNmUyY2RhYTI2MmQzNWI1 • Part II: An Argument with Mark Cuban https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhiYTg1ZTkyZDkxM2JkMzMwODFhODBi • Part III: The Mystery Investor, the No-Show Payday and the "Smoking Gun" https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhjMjVlMzJhY2EzNTIxYzc2MzhiZjNi • Part IV: Steve Ballmer, the Other Cuban and the $118 Million Infusion https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhjYjcxNzVkYzYyZjBlMWQ2NjdjMzYy • Part V: Steve Ballmer's "Inconceivable" Donation, the $20 Million Guarantee and a Head on a Spike https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhkOWU1ZmIyNTUyYjcyYzIwZWQ1NTQ1 • Part VI: An IRL Showdown with Mark Cuban https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhlZDk2ODM4ODU1MjdhNDM2ZGJjNDU2 • Part VII: The Briefcase, Ballmer's Social Network and Aspiration's House of Cards https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/Njk2MDc1MzMxMTA3M2E2MWJkOTM5Yzg1 • Part VIII: Uncle Dennis, Ballmer's $50 Million Sprint and the Side Deal That Wouldn't Die https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/Njk4YjhmZjdiYTgwY2YxZWNiMTdmZTBl • Part IX: Ballmer's Tree Money, the Whistle-Blowers and the Document You've Been Waiting For https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlhYjA0ODliNDllZWNjMGI3YjU1Mzhh • Part X: Steve Ballmer's Victim Impact, the Man Who Prosecuted Aspiration and the Abacus of Incarceration https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlmOTFjOWY5YjE1MDdmYmRkZTAxZjc4 • Part XI: Ballmer's Secret I. O. U., Aspiration's "Web of Lies" and the Zenith of Fraud https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NmEyMjI5NmFiMGYyOTYyYmU0ODEwOTAx • Part XII: RIFC, the Impossible Deal and Life After Aspiration https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NmE2YTYxMzMxN2Q3N2JmNzJhMjc3MWVm (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and Hunterbrook Media and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Scaring it in terms of what was going on with, you know, the salary cap circumvention. Right away, the light bulbs went off in my head in terms of, oh yeah, this is also going on with other parts of the Intuit Dome project as well.

• 0:23Pablo Torre?

  Right after this.

• 0:27Speaker 02

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• 0:50Speaker 03

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• 1:23Pablo Torre?

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• 2:04Pablo Torre?

  that's left is finding yours. While shopping, you'll also find great perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, premium support, and financing with flexible payment options. Shop the winners now at dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 2:31Pablo Torre?

  It's important to point out that we are underneath a roof, the same roof again, Amin.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:36Pablo Torre?

  Thanks for being here.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  I mean, no problem.

• 2:39Pablo Torre?

  Are you adjusted?

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go. Okay, I like, yeah, this is true narcissism. I like hearing the sound of my own voice.

• 2:45Pablo Torre?

  It's shocking to everybody.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, there it is. The, the deep baritone of amino acid.

• 2:50Pablo Torre?

  I do really love this part for people who are just somehow finding out about us for the first time. You're about to see, along with our audience for the very first time, what the [bleep] is going on today. Last week, you may recall that we broke the news of Kawhi Leonard's secret unannounced part ownership.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Okay, so this is Kawhi episode. Got it. All right, cool.

• 3:10Pablo Torre?

  A second-tier pro soccer team on the opposite side of the country from the Los Angeles Clippers in?

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Rhode Island!

• 3:16Pablo Torre?

  While the Kawhi trade with the Raptors remains frozen, at least for right now, as the NBA's investigation is still hanging over the head of Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. And my personal favorite piece of feedback from this last episode is in fact the first thing in your folder.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  This is from user at PDWO on Blue Sky. David Sampson basically gives up the game on getting public financing for sports stadiums, and it's maybe the C-plot in this episode.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  Our friend David Sampson, former president of the Marlins, was explaining to us how he hid things from journalists by relying on intermediaries, these third-party entities, during the construction of the stadium that he had built, Marlins Park. And you may recall that after years of this very careful secrecy, David told us that he finally got to the point, this was in 2011, where he could autograph a steel beam. A beam that got raised to the roof of his brand-new stadium in a beautiful ceremony, as we showed you in our last episode. He could remind us what you see in this photograph.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  It's our guy David Sampson. First of all, these sunglasses are the mid-otsos, I wanna say.

• 4:28Pablo Torre?

  A little Morpheus from The Matrix.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  He's got a Marlins hard hat on and a construction vest.

• 4:35Pablo Torre?

  Yes, the neon yellow, high-visibility safety vest is what that is called, apparently.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  And he's pointing at a massive beam with a massive Sharpie, and there are all sorts of names and messages written and signed on that beam, and I'm assuming that this is the one that goes to the roof.

• 4:52Pablo Torre?

  This was the C-plot. The third most important thing it felt like in the last episode because we had spent 10 months investigating the perfect storm of life after aspiration. Aspiration, that do-gooding Clipper sponsor which had specialized in?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Planting trees and giving you carbon credits for them.

• 5:12Pablo Torre?

  That's right. Aspiration was broke and under federal investigation, leaving Kawhi Leonard looking for the multiple millions of dollars he was owed on top of his guaranteed eight-figure ownership stake in said tree planting company, despite never?

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Doing a single thing.

• 5:28Pablo Torre?

  Not planting a single tree.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Not planting a single tree.

• 5:32Pablo Torre?

  All of it somehow, leading to Kawhi's sub-max extension with the Clippers in January 2024, the week after he formally registered two LLCs tied to the Rhode Island Football Club and its owner Brett Johnson's real estate development around their brand-new Centerville Bank Stadium. A nine-figure project sucking up millions and millions of taxpayer dollars that had been originally earmarked for?

• 5:55Speaker 04

  Affordable housing!

• 5:57Pablo Torre?

  Which takes us back to this headline, Amin, from The Athletic, which remains extremely useful context for this episode.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  NBA investigating second Kawhi Leonard sponsorship deal as part of aspiration probe.

• 6:13Pablo Torre?

  And here is what RIFC itself told our collaborators at local WPRI TV last Friday, the day after our episode dropped, in an updated statement.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Rhode Island FC can confirm that neither the club, Brett Johnson, nor anyone else affiliated with fortuitous partners, has been contacted by Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz as part of the investigation into the LA Clippers and Kawhi Leonard.

• 6:42Pablo Torre?

  Therefore suggesting that Kawhi's random-ass soccer team may not be the NBA's mysterious second sponsorship looming on a grassy but treeless knoll, after all. And so, another very common question we've gotten in our feedback to the RIFC episode is, how is this secret side deal connected to salary cap circumvention?

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Right. We never really connected the dots between what's happening in Rhode Island and the Clippers, which is necessary for any cap circumvention conversation. There has to be a team circumventing said cap.

• 7:19Pablo Torre?

  And lots of people around the NBA are saying exactly this. They are asking, yeah, how the [bleep] is Kawhi's private money trail after aspiration directly tied to the Clippers? And for the record, the Clippers did not respond to our request for comment about any of that. They haven't responded for months now, despite us asking the kinds of detailed questions you're gonna hear today ahead of time, giving them the opportunity, as always, to correct us. But the Clippers did recently say what, Amin, in a statement to ESPN?

• 7:52Speaker 04

  We remain confident that when the facts are evaluated fairly and thoroughly, the NBA will confirm exactly what we have said from the beginning. We have not done what we are accused of doing.

• 8:07Pablo Torre?

  And just to remind everyone, our job in this studio actually isn't to do Wachtel's job. The law firm in charge of the NBA investigation, they were hired to help Commissioner Adam Silver decide if any of Kawhi's deals can be rationally explained as anything but salary cap circumvention in an attempt, one might presume, to finally end this hellish, almost year-long news cycle for the league. Whereas our job is to broadcast the truth of what happened, as best we can understand it, to the public and to go as high up as this story might take us. And so today, Amin, before we go any further, I do wanna show you that photo of David Sampson and his autographed steel beam one more time.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yes, please.

• 8:52Pablo Torre?

  Because it turns out that this sort of beam autographing photo op is something of a time-honored tradition in the stadium construction business, the genre of which brings us to the very place we ended our last episode, which is the house that Steve Ballmer built. So can you now describe what you see in these photos from March of 2023?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  That's the mayor of Inglewood and the owner of the Clippers, side by side, both signing a beam with white Sharpies, as opposed to the black Sharpie that David Sampson had in the prior picture.

• 9:36Pablo Torre?

  That is in fact Mayor Butts, the aforementioned mayor of Inglewood. And I applaud both of us by just saying that very straight ahead.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Seymour?

• 9:47Pablo Torre?

  We're gonna see more of him, turns out. And that is in fact the richest owner in American sports. They are wearing the hard hats, the high-visibility vests, their names, yes, on the back like jerseys. And if you zoom out, you will see that Ballmer is surrounded by dozens of the Clippers' construction partners and basketball players, all of whom are in attendance. And you can see Ballmer pointing to the assembled crowd, including, of course?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Kawhi Leonard, front and center there with a durag under his hard hat. We've got, who's that, Mason Plumlee, a row behind there. You got Russell Westbrook to his right.

• 10:24Pablo Torre?

  Yep. All of them listening to Steve Ballmer tell everybody about his uniquely-designed and, to his credit, privately-funded stadium in Inglewood, which is, as of this day in March 2023, a construction site. A construction site where Steve Ballmer, big numbers guy, seems to have analyzed pretty much every single detail.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Three times the NBA average number of toilets in your

• 10:55Speaker 04

  The most passionate toilet speech ever.

• 11:00Pablo Torre?

  You were there at the Intuit Dome, right? For All-Star Weekend?

• 11:03Speaker 04

  I was, yes.

• 11:04Pablo Torre?

  Earlier this year. You've been there for games in the past?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  I have.

• 11:08Pablo Torre?

  It is a delightful place to watch basketball, is it not?

• 11:11Speaker 04

  You know, people ask me a lot of questions about this investigation. And I tell them, one of the things that makes it hard is that Steve Ballmer is a very well-liked guy. He's well-liked by his peers, the other owners. He's well-liked by the players because of things like the Intuit Dome. A 100% self-financed, modern marvel of architecture. And he's not lying. Every couple of feet, there are massive bathrooms. There's a gajillion urinals.

• 11:36Pablo Torre?

  How are the toilets?

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Amazing. Great suction, clean, spacious. He took his time, clearly, in the designing of these receptacles of human waste.

• 11:49Pablo Torre?

  By the way, you're not alone in that review. Time Magazine, named Intuit Dome no less than one of the world's greatest places, period.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's ambitious game plan, at a price tag of $2 billion, has set the bar for the nation's stadiums, starting with its sustainability initiatives. Its nearly 40,000-square-foot halo board, a double-sided, ultra-high-definition display with a quarter-billion LED lights wraps around the arena.

• 12:24Pablo Torre?

  And this arena is where today's A-plot is taking place. Because something else, Amin, that you should know is that for the last 10 months, I have not just been investigating RIFC, the Rhode Island Football Club, in parallel to our still-ongoing investigation into Aspiration.

• 12:42Pablo Torre?

  I have also spent the last 11 months on a third parallel investigation in addition to Aspiration and RIFC. And our reporting for today's investigation actually began two days after we published Part 1 of this series, way back in September 2025.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  I hate how giddy he is. You have something on your screen right now that you're like, oh, I can't wait to lay this out.

• 13:08Pablo Torre?

  Well, it's actually a call to somebody who is intimately familiar with the house that Ballmer built. Is that, who's in that?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  In my hard hat.

• 13:17Pablo Torre?

  So wait, so you're showing, I'm looking at a picture of the Intuit Dome mid-construction. You're wearing a yellow vest and a hard hat. And you're standing next to, I presume, is that a colleague?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's another colleague of mine. And you could see just in the background, there's still dirt on the ground. There's not a seat in the arena yet. We're wearing hard hats and high-visibility jackets as things are going in.

• 13:44Pablo Torre?

  This is from my video call with a high-level source who was under contract for the Clippers' Intuit Dome project for years. We modulated the voice, animated the face, so they could speak candidly about what they saw and heard without fear of retribution. And on this call, I mean, we were in the middle of discussing the exact time period that we've been investigating.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:05Pablo Torre?

  2023 into 2024, when Aspiration was collapsing and Kawhi Leonard, it turns out, was secretly getting into business with Rhode Island for some reason, before taking a shocking pay cut in order to help the Clippers' salary cap. And you should also know that I have met and interviewed this source in real life. Their story has stayed consistent over the last 11 months, which takes us back to the start. So you're listening to Part 1 of this series, and you're hearing the story of salary cap circumvention with Aspiration. And how long does it take you to realize this reminds me of something?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Hearing it in terms of what was going on with, you know, the salary cap circumvention, right away, the light bulbs went off in my head in terms of, oh yeah, this is also going on with other parts of the Intuit Dome project as well.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  This is also going on with other parts of the Intuit Dome project as well.

• 15:02Pablo Torre?

  A part in particular that has been hiding in front of your eyes, Amin, in plain sight.

• 15:28Pablo Torre?

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• 16:30Speaker 02

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• 17:00Pablo Torre?

  I mean, it is important to know that in the build-out of the house that Ballmer built, the order of operations was extremely careful. Because in order to start the construction on this arena, Steve Ballmer had to win a big legal fight involving the city of Inglewood.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:17Pablo Torre?

  And you no doubt recall the name of the mayor of Inglewood who was involved in this whole thing.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Mayor Butts?

• 17:22Pablo Torre?

  The Honorable Mayor James T. Butts. It's so good. It's the greatest name in his entire saga. Greatest name in sports, technically. You may recall, by the way, that we showed you this footage of Mayor Butts standing near Clippers co-owner and truly, rationally inexplicable Aspiration investor, Dennis Wong, at that very same ceremony in the Dennis Wong episode that we did last year. Remember that?

• 17:49Speaker 04

  Yes, there he is.

• 17:51Pablo Torre?

  But I mean, there is a more obscure name in this Inglewood story that we now need to understand. And it is a name that PBS SoCal reported on in 2018.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Documents show how Inglewood Clippers Arena deal stayed secret. Inglewood city officials were secretly negotiating an agreement to build an arena for the Clippers' basketball team for months before giving a carefully-guarded notice to the public, according to newly-released documents. The attorney negotiating for the project added that the entity he is representing, quote, "will have a generic name so it won't identify the proposed project," end quote. Inglewood residents would see only that the meeting involved Murphy's Bowl LLC, an entity formed in January 2017 in Delaware.

• 18:46Pablo Torre?

  And who, Amin, you may ask now, was hiding behind the evasively-named Murphy's Bowl LLC?

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Who?

• 18:55Pablo Torre?

  Well.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  It's on the sheet?

• 18:56Pablo Torre?

  In your folder.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Oh, my god.

• 18:58Pablo Torre?

  There is a bit of paperwork from the California Secretary of State's database. And will you please read the name of the sole manager member for Murphy's Bowl LLC that was officially revealed in writing years later?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Stephen A. Ballmer.

• 19:13Pablo Torre?

  According to a formal letter to the city council from the Public Integrity Division for the District Attorney's Office of Los Angeles County, which is now in your folder as well.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:22Pablo Torre?

  This LLC was part of concerted efforts between the city and the LLC to limit public awareness. In addition to what?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  The generic name of Murphy's Bowl LLC was used intentionally to obfuscate the identity of the proposed project and those associated with it.

• 19:45Pablo Torre?

  If any of that sounds familiar. But thanks to the statute of limitations, nobody was punished by the DA. Ballmer's lawyers got these big legal fights either dismissed or settled or else resolved, so that the Intuit Dome construction, of course, could begin apace, which finally allowed Stephen A. Ballmer,

• 20:04Pablo Torre?

  a different Stephen A.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now I want to do Ballmer quotes in Stephen A.'s voice. Toilets! You don't, you can never have too many toilets.

• 20:17Pablo Torre?

  It allowed Stephen A. Ballmer to focus on the most special and complicated detail of this whole construction project. It was the thing that he and his right-hand woman, Gillian Zucker, the very important CEO of Ballmer's Halo Sports and Entertainment, which handles the Clippers' business affairs, were so excited to reveal.

• 20:39Speaker 06

  They had very clear aspirations.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Oh, come on. Come on!

• 20:44Speaker 06

  They had very clear aspirations. They wanted this to be a house of hoops.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  What? God! Come on, guys! Get a thesaurus, someone!

• 20:55Pablo Torre?

  Look, I can only presume that this was a total coincidence and/or a Freudian slip in the way that a story like this can just sort of burrow into your brainstem. But this was in 2024.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:09Pablo Torre?

  Before the dome officially opened later that year. And this, by the way, what we're talking about, is the largest 4K-quality, full-ultra-high-definition LED board in history.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  It is glorious.

• 21:23Pablo Torre?

  A type of super scoreboard that the world had never seen.

• 21:29Speaker 07

  So we started going about accomplishing this, and we realized that in order to do that, we actually had to map every single pixel and every single seat. And in order to do that, we had to find some partners who were like-minded, people who would tolerate our somewhat unusual and often seemingly impossible aspirations.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  Come on! Gillian!

• 21:51Pablo Torre?

  Maybe you want to take a second take on that? No one in the wings is like, hey, yeah, maybe not the best.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Just, I mean, like, yeah.

• 21:59Pablo Torre?

  Anyhow, somehow, the Clippers' seemingly impossible aspirations were realized.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  Should we look at it? Yeah, introducing the halo.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  This is how Christopher Nolan wanted the Odyssey to be seen.

• 22:16Pablo Torre?

  I mean, imagine the Odyssey on a double sided wraparound scoreboard in the shape of a halo. It is remarkable. This thing has everything.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 22:29Pablo Torre?

  There's a built in T-shirt cannon. Did you know that?

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Yes, the cannons are in the scoreboard and they shoot with precision because they're trying to get to the fans who are the loudest because they have sensors in the seats Pablo.

• 22:41Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  That picks up how loud you've been and how consistently loud you've been. And so they want to reward their most passionate fans with freebies.

• 22:50Pablo Torre?

  I mean, look, as a content person, these are pretty incredible content offerings. The Halo board has a whole content portfolio. All of which is thanks to the relatively obscure partner that helped the Clippers achieve those aspirations. A company that I at least had never heard of before.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  So for the screen itself, we went to South Dakota where Daktronics sets the standard. Despite numerous challenges, many caused by that pandemic, Daktronics and its strong local employment force shipped every single piece of this board across the country on schedule. Let's hear it for him.

• 23:27Pablo Torre?

  So this is the approximately a hundred million dollar halo board, a record price. The most expensive Jumbotron ever created. It is a whole acre. An acre of 4K video, three times the length of the Hollywood sign, weighing 519,000 pounds. It is the double sided oval shaped crown jewel of Steve Ballmer's Intuit Dome.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Look, I've been to a bunch of Georgia Tech games over the last few years all over the country. And almost every stadium we've been to, I believe the Jumbotron has a Daktronics logo at the bottom because they made it.

• 24:01Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the same company that David Sampson used to build the Jumbotron at Marlins Park. They're the worldwide leader arguably in Jumbotron manufacturing. Even though lots of people like me just aren't as familiar with the name.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:17Pablo Torre?

  And look, you may now recall, I mean, how Daktronics fellow Clippers partner at the time, Aspiration, they got their name out by hiring celebrity spokespeople.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 24:28Pablo Torre?

  Such as?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Robert Downey Jr.

• 24:30Pablo Torre?

  Leo DiCaprio.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Drake.

• 24:32Pablo Torre?

  Orlando Bloom.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Kawhi Leonard. One of these things doesn't fit.

• 24:37Pablo Torre?

  Of course Kawhi Leonard, who according to our reporting, made more than four times all of those A-listers combined to do nothing in private. Daktronics, by contrast, does not use public facing celebrity spokespeople or endorsers to promote the brand at all. Apparently, in fact, we wound up connecting with a half dozen current and former Daktronics employees. And we asked, could you recall the company having a single sponsorship with a celebrity of any kind? And as one former Daktronics employee told us in a text message, I mean.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  This is a quote, LOL, definitely not. Daktronics was conservative to a fault for the 20 plus years I was there. I remember asking early on why we didn't do more traditional advertising and promotion to increase brand recognition. I was told since it's B to B and not a consumer product, it didn't make sense to advertise that way.

• 25:30Pablo Torre?

  Individuals do not order Jumbotrons. These are devices otherwise used to display other people's advertisements in giant public spaces. But this is where I do need you to know something else. And this is something that I initially heard on the phone from the first high level source I've been talking to for the last 11 months.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So when we first got connected and we first spoke, I said, Pablo, you know, the big halo board hanging from the ceiling in the Intuit Dome? That's from a company called Daktronics. And Daktronics also had a spokesperson from the Clippers named Kawhi Leonard.

• 26:10Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to part 13.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Christ, man.

• 26:12Pablo Torre?

  What questions, I mean, might you now have about this apparent sponsorship deal in which Kawhi Leonard is apparently considered a spokesperson for Daktronics?

• 26:22Speaker 04

  I'm going to play stupid and say, well, what were his responsibilities?

• 26:27Pablo Torre?

  Well, I mean, you should know, there is no public trace of Kawhi Leonard doing anything for Daktronics that we could find. And even stranger, it was never publicly announced that he was hired as a sponsored athlete and/or a spokesperson and/or an endorser and/or a partner of any kind.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  So they ran the aspiration playbook, basically.

• 26:46Pablo Torre?

  If any of that sounds familiar.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:48Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  How about that?

• 26:50Pablo Torre?

  But while Kawhi's alleged Daktronics arrangement was unknown to so many of the Daktronics employees that we talked to, perhaps because it was never announced and extremely unlike the company to have one of these things. The deal was apparently not a secret among executives who were working on the house that Steve Ballmer built in 2023 and 2024. And we are talking here about the Clippers organization and Daktronics. And this would make it the sort of deal that is hidden, but also obvious. Which once again reminded me of the Kawhi sponsor that allegedly preceded it. Aspiration.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  This was talked about just openly within the organization and from people working on the project that Kawhi was a spokesperson for Daktronics. And it was just the biggest thing. It was just openly joked about within people working on the project that knew about this as it was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  How else could it be anything else?

• 27:49Pablo Torre?

  Rationally speaking, how could it be anything else is a very good question. I should point out that all of this eventually led me to a different source with knowledge of Daktronics' relationship with the Clippers. This is a person who worked for the team itself in a high level role and who was also there in the Intuit Dome as was being constructed during 2023 and 2024. And this former high level Clippers official also requested anonymity due to fear of retribution. Because this, I mean, is what they wanted me to know.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Quote, I know Kawhi had a sponsorship with Daktronics, unquote.

• 28:31Pablo Torre?

  And over months of vetting the second high level Clippers source, a former official, they also independently confirmed something else. Which is that this Kawhi deal was not only talked about by fellow higher ups at the Clippers and Daktronics as a way to circumvent the NBA salary cap. This second source was also told that Kawhi's Daktronic sponsorship was a multi million dollar deal. As my first source separately explained on tape.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  People at Daktronics, people within the Clippers organization themselves had told me about this multi million dollar deal with Kawhi 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 fundamentally money from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Kawhi.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  First of all, I would love to hear the rationale again of, hey, why would this company that has never engaged in this sort of marketing, all of a sudden decide, we need a spokesperson to sell what? And the spokesperson has to be the dullest human being imaginable. I'm going to go back to article 13.

• 29:49Pablo Torre?

  I mean, he's bringing up the CBA on his iPad.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Section D, and it says, "A violation may be proven by direct or circumstantial evidence, including but not limited to evidence that a player contract or any term or provision thereof cannot rationally be explained." This is what we're talking about, right? With all of these things, because I, I, I talk to people in the NBA, I talk to people, you know, agents and people execs for other teams and even media people who cover a team and say, I mean, what are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with this. So there's a company and they're sponsored, they're paying them. What's the big deal? And I said, when you lay it all out, we say, can we rationally explain this? Without using a cap circumvention as the reason.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  I've yet to hear one good explanation. And that was for Aspiration, which at least had a track record.

• 30:44Pablo Torre?

  Had other celebrities.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:47Pablo Torre?

  That they were paying.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  We do this and we get big names to do it. You're telling me that however many years Daktronics is, call it 40, 50 years old.

• 30:59Pablo Torre?

  Almost 60.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Almost 60 years of being in business. They're going to change their policy and their whole approach to this. And they're going to start with Kawhi Leonard? I just told you that they're the foremost Jumbotron manufacturer in the world. You know how many teams they work with? How many stadiums? They had their pick of the litter and they went with Kawhi Leonard? Who then never does anything. They don't even put out a press release.

• 31:28Pablo Torre?

  I think the key part of Aspiration and Daktronics and their sponsorship with Kawhi, as alleged, is that they never announced them. And so, look, I just got to point out that Aspiration is a tangled web, although I think it's fairly simple to understand now that we've laid it all out over the last, you know, 11 months. This one is pretty damn simple. And so I just got to say here, once again, that we reached out for comment from the Clippers. We reached back out to Kawhi's new agent. We got no immediate response, although we'll quote them if we do in the show notes and in future episodes. So this takes us to Daktronics itself. And the way that they handled our questions, I mean, I would say, was far more interesting.

• 32:14Pablo Torre?

  And for this part of our journalistic group project, which previously called upon our local news pals at WPRI in Rhode Island, I now have to turn to somebody who specializes in the analysis of public companies. This is our friend Sam Koppelmann, the publisher of the independent investigative outlet Hunter Brook Media. The investment arm of which, by the way, holds no positions in the Jumbotron space.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in the world of stadium build outs and Jumbotrons, Daktronics is a massive player. If you walk into a minor league baseball game or a stadium all across the country, you might see a scoreboard built by Daktronics. It's a publicly traded family business. 58 years old, from South Dakota, sort of run in a very old school way.

• 33:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and my fascination has to do with this alleged sponsorship that they had with Kawhi Leonard. And so in your deep diving into the annual reports, the quarterly calls, what do they say about sponsorships?

• 33:17Speaker 04

  One really interesting line is that they say, quote, "Other."

• 33:21Pablo Torre?

  Competitors use sponsorships as a way to win business, which to me implies that they don't at least publicly advertise using sponsors at all.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like I said, 60 years of policy, it would be, it would, you know what it's like, it would be like if the United States all of a sudden said, you know what? Communism, not so bad. I'm just saying that like, hey, when, when we had a very particular worldview to change it on a dime and not, again, not for the most charismatic,

• 33:57Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  influential game changer of a person that made us throw away our prior strategy. For a guy who's not going to do anything, he won't even retweet.

• 34:11Pablo Torre?

  It is kind of like if Mahatma Gandhi was like, you know what I love? Violence.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  And, and a burger.

• 34:19Pablo Torre?

  But this is where I want to get to another way that Daktronics reminded me of aspiration, which is even more fascinating, maybe. Because by the spring of 2023, aspiration, you will recall, was on the road to bankruptcy and federal investigation. Following the whistleblower complaint, we obtained that detailed salary cap circumvention in writing under penalty of perjury. And around this same time, it turns out, things weren't going that great for Daktronics. Daktronics' balance sheet definitely wasn't the kind where you'd expect them to suddenly decide to invest in a sponsorship deal with Kawhi Leonard. You're seeing a company that once had quite a bit of cash, as much as $80 million in 2021.

• 35:02Pablo Torre?

  In 2022, Daktronics made just over $500,000 in net income, and it owed way more than that in debt. Daktronics was on the brink, not just of not bringing home big profits, but of actually going bankrupt. And even in 2023, Daktronics had just $10 million of cash on hand, and they had that cash through debt facilities, through revolvers, basically borrowing it just to fund their operations. And when you listen to Daktronics' earnings calls from this period of time, in their second quarter of 2023, it's not like a normal, boring earnings call. The company is clearly fighting for its life.

• 35:44Pablo Torre?

  You can hear the company's then CEO, who was the scion of the family business, talk about just how bad things had gotten and just how unprecedented a time it was for Daktronics.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  We previously announced recent wins of a new super system for the L.A. Clippers' new arena. Having said that, in our 54-year history, we have not been faced with the perfect storm that these last two years represent.

• 36:13Pablo Torre?

  I just love that Sam Koppelman was grinding hours of game tape of earnings calls for this episode.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Somewhere, Tom, to middle smiles.

• 36:22Pablo Torre?

  I'm the Kobe Bryant of earnings calls. I'll just watch the same play over and over and over again. And there was another moment I saw, I just kept rewinding, which is when the company's audit committee chair, a member of the board, spoke up, which isn't very common, it's like seeing Tyler Kolek at the end of a game or something. And he was speaking because the company's auditor had issued a dire warning.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  About the company's ability to continue as a going concern, we unfortunately had to conclude that substantial doubt did exist. I will now hand the call over to Reese.

• 36:55Pablo Torre?

  To be clear, a going concern warning is very bad. That meant that the company might go bankrupt within the next 12 months. Great time to sign a celebrity sponsor.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  So this is the part where I, I'm curious, right? Beyond just the ridiculousness of the situation of, hey, we're gonna do this about face. It's publicly traded, so this outgoing cash would have to be disclosed.

• 37:27Pablo Torre?

  That is a very good observation. Also, when I was listening to that, it kind of sounded like they were describing building a Death Star.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Of a new super system for the L.A. Clippers' new arena.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yes, I, I definitely thought of Director Krennic and, and Grandma Tarkin and all of them kind of in that little board meeting talking about, hey, man, what are we doing with these?

• 37:51Pablo Torre?

  The empire's fine. We have a new super system coming to protect the Daktronics empire.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:58Pablo Torre?

  And so just in terms of the influence that Steve Ballmer and the Clippers had over Daktronics and their operations in 2023, this is how my first source, the person under contract for the Clippers' Intuit Dome project, put it to me.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  If the Clippers told Daktronics to jump, they would say how high?

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Is there something about a failing business that makes it ultra amenable to cap circumvention schemes?

• 38:25Pablo Torre?

  Well, unlike aspiration in this case, Amin, because you raise a very good question, Daktronics did a lot more than just survive. They went from being severely financially distressed to, as this 2024 Sportico headline suggests, the opposite.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Scoreboard maker Daktronics hit 17-year high on Intuit Dome's success.

• 38:52Pablo Torre?

  And just to consider the stock chart now, you've raised questions about public companies and how they must report things. As Sam explains, the stock chart is pretty stunning. The stock went up six times between 2023 and today, and the Intuit Dome marked that bottom. That was the deal that really helped kickstart Daktronics and turn things around for them. Look, I don't fully understand the difference between correlation and causation, but maybe it was a really good decision to pay Kawhi Leonard some money, or at very least, a good decision to take a payment from Steve Ballmer and build the Intuit Dome, because the Intuit Dome really did help save Daktronics.

• 39:35Pablo Torre?

  As far as I'm concerned, that might have been the greatest endorsement deal of all time.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  I'm looking at the chart right here, and right around 2023, it's trading at less than $5. And by the time we're done, in current day, it is $20.28. Yeah, I, I guess you could say Halo Board Man gets paid.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

  That would have been a good ad campaign. Halo Board Man gets paid.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Ah, and that would have just cleared everything. See? He did something for them.

• 40:07Pablo Torre?

  Once again, an Instagram slide. Could have done a lot of work, perhaps.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  They could have photoshopped it. They didn't even need him to take a picture. He doesn't even need to be there.

• 40:16Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  You hire a social media manager, post it, interacts with people, like, retweet, repost, share, and all. He never had to do a thing, even within the, the context of, you don't have to do anything, Kawhi. They could have created miles of coverage of

• 40:35Pablo Torre?

  An acre.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  plausible deniability. They chose not to do a single damn thing, Pablo.

• 40:42Pablo Torre?

  Look, in fairness, maybe Daktronics would claim that there were private, secret things. You know, the things behind closed doors that Kawhi would do to fulfill this alleged multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal. And because of that possibility, late last month, Sam Koppelman of Hunter Brook Media reached out to Daktronics directly. I always start by looking for a company's number. In this case, Daktronics only had one number on its website, like the sort of sleepy, 60-year-old company that it is.

• 41:20Pablo Torre?

  I called up the number and I was on with customer service.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  For sales assistance for new display systems, press 1.

• 41:28Pablo Torre?

  And then I pressed 0, and I pressed 1, and I pressed 3, and I pressed all the buttons.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  Press 2. If you would like to speak with an operator, press 0.

• 41:38Pablo Torre?

  And I couldn't find a human being to speak to. But I did find a part of Daktronics' website that was for media inquiries, so I submitted a request for comment. And thankfully, this worked. I got an email from someone who seemed to be a PR person, a marketing person at Daktronics, who asked me to share more details on the story. I then sent him my number. This is on July 23rd. He then writes back to say, you know what? I'm not gonna call you, but let me introduce you to our VP. But that person was actually the general counsel of Daktronics.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Well, that's not suspicious at all, lawyering up. Had they even mentioned Kawhi's name at that point?

• 42:17Pablo Torre?

  This elevation of priority to the general counsel, yeah, I had the same question. Had you mentioned Kawhi Leonard yet? I had not. And then four days later, I wrote to everyone. And I said, at 4:52 PM, "Hi all, we are preparing to report on Daktronics and its sponsorship deal with Kawhi Leonard. Please let me know if you have any comment. Thanks, Sam." And the thing is, Pablo, as soon as I mentioned the name Kawhi Leonard, I didn't hear back directly from Daktronics, but within 30 minutes, I got an email from someone from the domain name GFbunting.com.

• 42:58Pablo Torre?

  And so, Amin, I want to show you the landing page of GFbunting.com.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  GFbunting.com, there's a picture, I believe a Shure mic, which is the microphones that we use here in studio.

• 43:13Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  And it says, "We help clients tell their stories."

• 43:19Pablo Torre?

  And if you click over to the team section, you'll find a bio for their founder and president, whose name is?

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Glenn F. Bunting.

• 43:29Pablo Torre?

  An award-winning journalist at the L.A. Times, turned crisis communications expert.

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  GF Bunting and Co. is a firm, it turns out, that, quote, "prides ourselves in establishing and maintaining long-term relationships with our clients."

• 43:46Speaker 04

  What does that mean? What does that mean?

• 43:48Pablo Torre?

  If there's a crisis, you want to call us. And apparently, relatedly, there is a crisis, as further evidenced by the email that Sam received from a GF Bunting and Co. executive.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Sam, the folks at Daktronics passed along your email and said you plan to write something. I've helped them on a few things media-wise and can help get you a comment or answers if it's something they can talk about. Do you have a couple of minutes to tell me about it? And a massive GF Bunting and Co. logo at the bottom.

• 44:20Pablo Torre?

  And so, Sam picked up the phone. His vibe was pretty friendly. I think he wanted to get out of me what we were gonna report, and he said very clearly that he was not a spokesperson for Daktronics, though at Later became clear that this firm had been hired by Daktronics to respond to this crisis or other crises or whatever various issues the company's faced. And I'll just say that when I brought up Kawhi Leonard and the sponsorship, it didn't sound like this was the first time this guy was hearing about it. And so this conversation, just to be very clear, this part of the conversation as you're meeting each other and you're identified as a journalist and he is talking to you and getting you to say things, is this part off the record?

• 45:04Pablo Torre?

  No. Does he ever go off the record with you in the conversation? Yes, but not before saying a couple of interesting things. One, he says, quote, "My understanding is Daktronics doesn't have a deal with Kawhi right now."

• 45:22Speaker 04

  Okay. All right, there's a temporal.

• 45:25Pablo Torre?

  Right now.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, see, it's, it's, might have had, could be in the future. Right now does not exist.

• 45:32Pablo Torre?

  Well, remember, Sam's email to Daktronics PR and its general counsel had said, "We are preparing to report on Daktronics and its sponsorship deal with Kawhi Leonard. Please let me know if you have any comment." And so for this crisis comms guy to call back and say, "Quote, my understanding is Daktronics doesn't have a deal with Kawhi right now." Is kind of like if someone asks about your girlfriend and your response is, "My understanding is that I'm single right now."

• 46:03Speaker 04

  We're not together right now.

• 46:07Pablo Torre?

  Another possible answer, by the way, might have been, "I don't know what you're talking about." But that's not the answer I got from these professional crisis comms strategists. When I followed up on it, what he said was, quote, "I don't know what the company wants to say or can say, given the Wachtel investigation and all that." And it was clear to me that that investigation wasn't something that Daktronics was loosely following, but it was something they were intimately involved in or asked about.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  You ever given a deposition, Pablo?

• 46:45Pablo Torre?

  I have not, although I like to play a deposer on TV.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  I have. And the first thing, you know, when the lawyers were prepping me for it, they were like, "Do not provide any added material. Just yes or no, yes or no, yes or no. Don't give them any extra exposition that they didn't ask for. This guy, who's, you're a crisis management PR firm."

• 47:11Pablo Torre?

  A direct, straightforward premise is presented. And, and you get a reference to the NBA's ongoing investigation, which is a strange thing to have a thought about if you're not involved in the investigation.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Do you know how locked in you have to be for the name Wachtel to come? I mean, not like the investigation.

• 47:34Pablo Torre?

  Not the NBA investigation.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Wachtel. He knew the name of the firm.

• 47:39Pablo Torre?

  Almost like you listen to podcasts about it. I mean, a time honored tradition that has followed us this whole time, from the Clippers to Aspiration to RIFC to Daktronics now, is the conspicuous evasiveness of the people who allegedly have secret deals with Kawhi Leonard when they are presented with these straightforward questions and premises about said alleged deals. And RIFC, at the very least, they came out and said they have not been contacted by Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen and Katz as part of the investigation into the LA Clippers and Kawhi Leonard. But here, we're not getting that. We're getting that the whole NBA investigation means that he's not sure what Daktronics wants to or can say.

• 48:21Pablo Torre?

  And so why would a company that's not being examined by Wachtel for an alleged secret deal with Kawhi Leonard be concerned about said investigation? Well, for his part, Sam did try to get clarity. And so I gave Daktronics the opportunity, day after day after day, to deny its sponsorship deal with Kawhi Leonard, to explain it. And then very explicitly, I asked repeatedly if there was even a single instance or example of Kawhi delivering any goods or services to Daktronics in exchange for this sponsorship deal, which we understand to be worth millions of dollars.

• 49:04Pablo Torre?

  And day after day, request after request, Daktronics didn't respond at all. If any of that sounds familiar.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Very.

• 49:16Pablo Torre?

  I mean, we've now found what multiple high level sources have identified as another multimillion dollar sponsorship deal for Kawhi Leonard that was never even announced publicly in any way by a sponsor doing business with Steve Ballmer that happened to be in financial distress during the alleged partnership, which took place while Ballmer was building the Intuit Dome. And if anyone can explain this to us outside of the salary cap, AKA the rule that makes it so that billionaires ostensibly cannot spend whatever they want to win, I welcome them to do so. Because in the meantime, I mean, I just have to keep quoting you from a previous episode, quoting the GM of the Clippers during this time period.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  How many [bleep] side deals have we made with Kawhi? I feel how Michael Winger felt when he said that.

• 50:03Pablo Torre?

  Exactly.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  How many side deals do y'all [bleep] have, man?

• 50:08Pablo Torre?

  I should say that we here at Pablo Torre finds out took a detailed list of questions, back to Daktronics proper, to that PR staffer and general counsel that Sam had been trying to deal with before we published this episode. And Daktronics did not respond before our deadline. But again, we'll quote whatever response they give us in the show notes and in future episodes.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  I'm speechless. I'm speechless. Because it's the same coin. There's two sides to the same coin. One side is incredibly creative and sophisticated, allegedly. And the other side is horrible execution. And I can't, I can't come to grips with the idea that these people are really smart. Why are they doing it in the dumbest way possible?

• 51:07Pablo Torre?

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• 51:50Pablo Torre?

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• 52:55Speaker 03

  State fair food is getting smaller and pricier. We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal? What's his deal? He went to Metro and got $450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy 837 5G for free and no activation fees. Free phone? Oh, sign me up. Get that more for your money feeling, only on Metro by T-Mobile. Bring your number and activate $40 period plan. $450 based on device discount waived.

• 53:21Pablo Torre?

  Patient fee not available at Look Match or T-Mobile in the past 180 days.

• 53:33Pablo Torre?

  But the other thing that sticks with me here is the name Glenn Bunting. And I say that because the founder of the Crisis Comms firm that Daktronics hired, it just sounded familiar to me.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  GF Bunting?

• 53:48Pablo Torre?

  It had been rattling around in my head for the last couple of weeks, like I had heard it on television or something before. And then, eventually, I found out where. Let's hear it for the fabulous Clippers and our new coach, Doc Rivers.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Shout out to Ed O'Neill.

• 54:09Pablo Torre?

  Shout out to Laurence Fishburne.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Two things about this. Number one, Ed O'Neill, for those who don't know what Donald Sterling was like, he nailed it. He nailed it. Like, it was eerie to watch it on TV. The other thing is that Laurence Fishburne, one of my favorite things is about this role, they asked him, oh, you know, how excited were you to play Doc Rivers? He said, never heard of him.

• 54:31Pablo Torre?

  Is that right?

• 54:31Speaker 04

  He'd never heard of Doc.

• 54:32Pablo Torre?

  He took off his Morpheus glasses and was like, who?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  He handed his Morpheus glasses to David Sampson and said, hold these for a second.

• 54:40Pablo Torre?

  He said, wait a minute, are you talking about the aspiration investor, Doc Rivers?

• 54:44Speaker 04

  So, okay, while I remember that show and I remember it fondly, where does Glenn Bunting fit in in that clip?

• 54:52Pablo Torre?

  On the TV show clipped, the clip of which we just saw, the trailer, which aired on FX in 2024, Glenn Bunting was admittedly overshadowed by the other Glenn, Glenn Doc Rivers, played by Laurence Fishburne, and that guy with the red hair who played Blake Griffin.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:10Pablo Torre?

  How are you not doing your Doc impression?

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I've never heard of Laurence Fishburne. So how about that?

• 55:18Pablo Torre?

  But here is the other Glenn, I mean, in real life, split screen with the actor playing him, Jason Butler-Harner. So Glenn Bunting

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:29Pablo Torre?

  is a character in real life

• 55:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:32Pablo Torre?

  and in the show because long before Glenn Bunting and co. got hired by Daktronics.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 55:37Pablo Torre?

  Glenn got hired as the crisis manager for one

• 55:40Speaker 04

  That's who it was.

• 55:41Pablo Torre?

  Shelly Sterling.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  I remember now.

• 55:44Pablo Torre?

  The then-wife of Donald Sterling, notorious former Clippers owner, who, after TMZ published a recording of his racist remarks to his mistress, was forced to sell the team by the newly-installed NBA Commissioner Adam Silver back in 2014. And Glenn Bunting is the dude who helped Shelly strategize as she eventually got control of the Clippers and ultimately decided to sell the team to none other than

• 56:06Speaker 04

  Stephen A. Ballmer.

• 56:09Pablo Torre?

  And once I started making calls about Glenn Bunting, out of Clipper-driven curiosity, I found myself talking to three people with direct knowledge of Stephen A. Ballmer's legal fight in Inglewood, the same legal fight we told you about before with the honorable Mayor James D. Butts. And what those three sources told me was something that apparently had never been publicly reported before, which is that during that controversial Inglewood legal fight, I mean, Glenn Bunting was working for none other than

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Stephen A. Ballmer.

• 56:44Pablo Torre?

  And so we asked Sam Koppelman to ask Glenn Bunting's colleague, the Crisis Comms guy working for Daktronics, if Glenn Bunting had ever worked for Steve Ballmer. He said, quote, "We have never represented the Clippers or Ballmer. We did help Shelly." Of course, referring to Shelly Sterling. Now, that is definitive language.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:04Pablo Torre?

  We have never represented the Clippers or Ballmer.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 57:08Pablo Torre?

  In this whole saga, this has been an endangered species.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Direct answers to direct questions?

• 57:13Pablo Torre?

  We are watching a snow leopard in the wild, marveling at it. Oh, my God, we got it. But then, I remembered something. I remembered that whole thing with the LADA's office and how they wrote that this LLC had this weird generic sounding name that had been part of, quote, concerted efforts, including to obfuscate the identity of the aforementioned Stephen A. Ballmer. Do you remember the name of that LLC?

• 57:41Speaker 04

  It's called Murphy's Bowl LLC.

• 57:43Pablo Torre?

  A great memory. And so then, just to be safe, we asked Sam to ask Daktronics Crisis Comms guy a deliberately specific follow-up question. If Glenn had ever worked with Murphy's Bowl LLC in connection with Inglewood litigation? He checked and 10 minutes later, he said, quote, "I'm told we did some work with Murphy's Bowl."

• 58:07Pablo Torre?

  Another use of the word never gunned down in its prime.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  But like, you know what? There's a part of me that's like, I believe them.

• 58:15Pablo Torre?

  Oh, but this is, this is what's so fascinating about crisis communication.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:19Pablo Torre?

  It's like, look, we don't want to lie to you, but we are gonna keep ourselves from telling you the truth that you're clearly asking about.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:29Pablo Torre?

  And it's tricky, right? So like, we don't have a deal with Kawhi right now is one thing. The reference to the Wachtel investigation also feels like it's not random through the same lens. And when we hear Apolitori finds out, reached out to Glenn Bunting directly, asking about the extent of his previous work with Ballmer's LLC, if he was connected to Daktronics by Steve Ballmer or the Clippers or the representatives, and how long he'd been working with Daktronics, and if he saw any conflict of interest between the two, or if he'd talked with Ballmer or his associates about aspiration or Daktronics or the NBA investigation, he did not respond in time for our deadline today.

• 59:09Pablo Torre?

  But in fairness to Glenn F. Bunting, it's hard to be asked questions that there are no good answers to.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Especially when your job is to make lemonade out of these lemons.

• 59:22Pablo Torre?

  Is to make it so that your crisis goes away. And in fairness, again, I should say that maybe all of this, as always, is merely a series of giant coincidences.

• 59:36Speaker 04

  And misunderstandings. This is a big misunderstanding.

• 59:39Pablo Torre?

  Maybe Daktronics, which is this family business based in Brookings, South Dakota, just happened to be using the same LA-based Crisis Comms firm that Steve Ballmer privately used when he was trying to get the Intuit Dome built.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  No, he didn't. He didn't use it. Murphy's Bowl used it.

• 59:55Pablo Torre?

  Excuse me. I defer to both you and the LA District Attorney's Office on these matters, I suppose. But maybe also, it's a coincidence that while Daktronics was, according to our high-level sources, helping the Clippers circumvent the cap with this unannounced sponsorship for Kawhi Leonard during the build-out of the Intuit Dome as a kind of replacement for the failure of aspiration, yeah, Daktronics happened to have another client we've discussed that was building their own new stadium during the same time period

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  Better not.

• 1:00:26Pablo Torre?

  in 2023 and 2024.

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  You better not.

• 1:00:28Pablo Torre?

  And I mean,

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  You better not.

• 1:00:30Pablo Torre?

  speaking of paying close attention to our words.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  Don't you dare.

• 1:00:33Pablo Torre?

  I happened to mention this parallel client to you last week. Because at long last, we get to opening day in Pawtucket, where Brett Johnson is finally opening Centerville Bank Stadium. There's a sellout crowd of some 10,500 fans in attendance. That's capacity. People gazing up at the brand-new Daktronics Jumbotron. Ooh, seen here? Manufactured by the same company that made the Intuit Domes. Enormous halo board.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  This is worse than Game of Thrones. Last thing I said, it's like Game of Thrones, this throwaway line. It turns out there's a whole backstory. You gotta stop doing this. You have to.

• 1:01:17Pablo Torre?

  I mean.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  You were laying it up.

• 1:01:19Pablo Torre?

  I'm just trying to be very careful on the record at every possible opportunity.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  You set me up, you son of a [BLEEP].

• 1:01:28Pablo Torre?

  Look, they're the worldwide leader in Jumbotrons. Maybe all of this, again, timeline even accounted for, is just a coincidence. And so I will simply remind you neutrally that Kawhi Leonard started two LLCs for a secret Rhode Island football club side deal in January of 2024, the week before agreeing to what was at the time, a shocking submax extension with the Clippers.

• 1:01:52Pablo Torre?

  For the 13th episode in a row, Amin, I guess I would just like somebody, anywhere, to give us a rational explanation of how our rigorously vetted sources are getting this all wrong.

• 1:02:06Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, like, the names here, I also just want to observe, like, the names Halo Board and Halo Sports and Entertainment, they do not simply echo the branding that we keep encountering in this series through Aspiration and Fortuitous Partners and Benevolent Capital, and now, in this case, with a halo literally over the heads of the Clippers.

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  Literal angels.

• 1:02:29Pablo Torre?

  Steven A. Ballmer's unprecedented Jumbotron was also so enormous, this is fascinating to me, that Techtronics needed to help the Clippers engineer the entire roof of their stadium in a very special way, as Ballmer himself went on to explain.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  The panels that make up the roof, I didn't know what they looked like, so they brought the panels and we looked at them at the daytime, the nighttime, lit from the back, unlit. Is this really a good idea? Great.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Is this really a good idea? That's the whole Kawhi Leonard saga with the Clippers. Is this really a good idea?

• 1:03:07Pablo Torre?

  That's the same presentation that he was giving with Gillian Zucker that we showed you before. And by the time Ballmer ceremonially raised his autographed steel beam to the roof of the Intuit Dome in March 2023, alongside Gillian Zucker and Kawhi Leonard and Mayor Butts and Dennis Wong and all these folks that we showed you before, that autographed steel beam became part of the architecture of the Halo Board super system itself. The super system, as described to me by the people who worked beneath it, formed this interconnected network of support that Steve Ballmer needed to keep the whole thing, like, the whole building itself, from collapsing under the sheer weight

• 1:03:51Pablo Torre?

  of the Halo Board and his own seemingly impossible aspirations.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  This oddly apt metaphor for everything that's happening.

• 1:04:04Pablo Torre?

  But there is one more thing.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  There's more.

• 1:04:07Pablo Torre?

  That I need to tell you about. Because, speaking of metaphors, we've been talking this whole time about stuff hiding in plain sight. And so I want to bring you the photo we showed you before from March 2023 inside the Intuit Dome construction site, with the missing panels Ballmer was referencing and the dirt on the ground that my source described. And oh, by the way, yeah, look, there's Steve and there's Kawhi. We're back at the roofing ceremony, the topping off ritual where we started. But I want you to look closer now and tell me if you notice anything.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  You've got the front row with the players there, other people I assume are Clippers employees, maybe some construction people were actually there. And Steve Ballmer is standing triumphantly, pointing to the heavens, hand on his hip, other hand in the sky. There's an American flag there. I feel very patriotic at this point. Pablo, what am I looking for?

• 1:05:02Pablo Torre?

  What's the other thing behind Steve Ballmer next to that American flag?

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  It's a sign, but I can't make out what it says.

• 1:05:09Pablo Torre?

  What's the other thing to the left of that?

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Oh, no! No!

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Is that a tree?

• 1:05:17Pablo Torre?

  Amin, when a steel beam like this is raised to the top of a new stadium.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Why is there a tree?

• 1:05:23Pablo Torre?

  Another time on a tradition holds that you don't just autograph the beam, you gotta put something else on top of it. And to answer the question you just asked, I will now turn to Gillian Zucker, Steven A. Ballmer's right-hand woman and his CEO of Halo Sports and Entertainment, who happened to speak at this very same ceremony in her high-visibility vest.

• 1:05:45Speaker 07

  You may notice at the end of the steel beam behind me, there is a tree. It's not just any tree. It's a five-foot-tall lemon cypress tree. It is native to California and it will grace our arena and construction today with good luck. Then it and 999 more will be planted in the soil throughout Inglewood in partnership with Intuit and Aspiration to commemorate this milestone, to absorb carbon, to beautify and bring shade to the city. It represents our commitment to sustainability at Intuit Dome.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  You cannot have picked a worse good luck charm than that damn tree.

• 1:06:28Pablo Torre?

  Bringing shade to the city, indeed. And I want you to tell us where that tree went as we watch it here at the end of part 13 of this endless [BLEEP]ing series. Ride this beam.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 1:06:45Pablo Torre?

  Where is it going, Amin?

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  They're raising it up to the roof like it's a banner? And it's actually going to the roof? No, come on, come on.

• 1:06:53Pablo Torre?

  The tree.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  Don't tell me it's on the Halo Board.

• 1:06:57Pablo Torre?

  Went on to the roof, right where the Halo Board and its super system of beams would replace it.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Unbelievable. By the way, we must correct our reporting because months and months ago, we said not a single tree was planted. Amended, capitulated.

• 1:07:18Pablo Torre?

  I'd like to offer a correction that now we have actual proof that Steve Ballmer's Clippers, with Kawhi Leonard right there, smiling right behind him, actually planted a tree. They put it right up there, hanging over the Clippers' heads.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 1:07:49Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production, with additional reporting for this episode by Michelle Sarah, Andrew Ford, Eli Sherman, and Matt Sullivan. For breaking news updates, by the way, on Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers, and more of the storylines that we continue to investigate, please do make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. And a friendly reminder that our tip line is always open at 513-85-PABLO. Till then, I'll talk to you next time.

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