Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Exclusive: The Invisible NBA Owner and "Crimes Against Humanity" About this episode A dunking tech bro in Memphis. A drone massacre in Ukraine. How did America's backyard beams end up in Putin's network of underground buyers? And how on Earth do Ja Morant, Justin Timberlake, Kevin Hart and "The Grindfather" get us to an illegal trade war? Hunterbrook Media's Sam Koppelman breaks down how his reporters investigated from a bird's-eye view, to a high-end Moscow dealer, to undercover calls back home — and asks what the hell Adam Silver's gonna do about another billionaire scandal hiding in plain sight.
• Read the full investigation at Hunterbrook Media https://hntrbrk.com/ubiquiti
(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.)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 On this one, we actually got one of the [bleep] craziest smoking guns I've ever seen.
0:10 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
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1:54 Pablo Torre? Look, this is gonna be an episode about weapons, about the NBA, about money and the internet. And so I do feel obliged. Sam Koppelman, thank you for being here, as always.
2:02 Speaker 01 Honored.
2:02 Pablo Torre? We should start with Ja Morant. We should start with the young star of the Memphis Grizzlies, who personally might be very interested in what we're gonna talk about here today, ahead of next week's trade deadline. Because whether or not the Grizzlies find a stable alternative for his services, I do wanna catch people up on what he, in fact, has been going through.
2:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been an interesting couple of years for Ja Morant. He was recently put on the trading block for the first time.
2:28 Speaker 03 Because for the first time since drafting him, number two overall in 2019, sources tell me the Grizzlies are open and listening to offers on Ja Morant.
2:37 Speaker 01 And this comes after multiple NBA suspensions.
2:41 Speaker 04 Breaking news on Memphis star Ja Morant, who will be suspended for...
2:46 Speaker 01 Gun-related incidents.
2:48 Speaker 05 Grizzlies star Ja Morant has been suspended for a second time after once again appearing to flash a gun on social media while he's riding in a friend's car.
2:57 Pablo Torre? Yes.
2:58 Speaker 01 Which also led to him being fined for his signature celebration.
3:01 Speaker 03 Fined $75,000 by the league for mimicking a shooting gun with his finger.
3:06 Speaker 01 Pantomiming shooting guns.
3:08 Pablo Torre? Which then led to Ja unveiling a new celebration, of course, in which he pantomimes throwing a grenade.
3:13 Speaker 01 And then, in another celebration this month...
3:16 Pablo Torre? Yeah, this is new. Here's Morant. Line up a long range...
3:20 Speaker 01 Slam! Money!
3:24 Speaker 01 Ja pantomimes a rocket launcher. And it goes on from there.
3:29 Pablo Torre? But while the rest of the sports media wants to focus in on Ja, he is not the subject of our investigation as much as he is thematically very essential to understanding the implications of it.
3:39 Speaker 01 Most sports fans know a lot about Ja Morant. He's a super polarizing player, and we're not gonna retread any of that here today.
3:48 Pablo Torre? Because, Sam, the main character of the report that you have done here with your investigative team at Hunter Brook Media, which we are always glad, always honored to feature here, if a public Torre finds out, is a guy that I think most fans could not pick out of a lineup, even though he happens to also be the billionaire deciding the entire question of whether the Grizzlies should actually pull the trigger, as it were, on a Ja Morant blockbuster trade. And so, this guy, this billionaire that no one else is talking about, this Mr. Invisible of the NBA...
4:19 Pablo Torre? Who is he?
4:20 Speaker 01 The owner of the Memphis Grizzlies is a man by the name of Robert Pera. He left Apple, where he was an engineer, to become the founder and CEO of a relatively obscure, but very important company called Ubiquity Networks.
4:36 Pablo Torre? And Ubiquity, for those who are not familiar, as I imagine almost all of our audience is not, what does Ubiquity do?
4:43 Speaker 01 They promise to, quote, "democratize the internet." They offer affordable, easy-to-use, high-quality Wi-Fi equipment.
4:51 Pablo Torre? So we're talking like Wi-Fi routers?
4:53 Speaker 01 Routers and switches and radios and antennae with full local control and privacy. More on why that matters in a minute. And basically, what Pera did is he helped spread internet connectivity to remote areas around the globe.
5:07 Pablo Torre? And so, in the world of tech, what's his reputation like?
5:12 Speaker 01 Back in 2012, one former member of Ubiquity's board of directors, the legendary investor, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, he tweeted that Robert Pera is, quote, "the most successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley that you don't know."
5:25 Pablo Torre? Right. And so, 2012 happens to be the same year when Robert Pera bought the Memphis Grizzlies at age 34, which made him, and this was the thing that first put him on my radar before he disappeared off of it entirely, it made him the youngest controlling owner in the history of the NBA.
5:41 Speaker 01 A kid owner.
5:43 Speaker 03 I'm an NBA superfan. I believe it's the greatest sport in the world, just from a fan perspective, from a player's perspective. Memphis as a city, it's unbelievable. The people have been great. I can tell the community is really special. And those two things combined, I consider myself very, very fortunate, probably the luckiest man in the world right now.
6:09 Speaker 01 That's Robert Pera doing a Lou Gehrig impression.
6:12 Pablo Torre? By the way, super clean shaven, boyish. He is this baby-faced billionaire. And so when Para bought the Grizzlies alongside a group of minority owners, including Memphis native and literal boy band superstar Justin Timberlake, who bought less than a 3% stake. Para was less than four years older than Tony Allen, who was the team's best defender and also clearly just one of the most popular people in Memphis.
6:38 Speaker 01 The grindfather.
6:39 Pablo Torre? When I started talking to you, Sam, about the angle that you were reporting on this story, which we will get to, I just want to admit to everybody, like, I didn't know a ton about Robert Para either. And so I started making some calls, and pretty soon, four people around the Grizzlies told me the same story, which is that a very frustrated Robert Para wanted to actually buy out his minority owners at one point, because he had met a woman who thought that Justin Timberlake, and not Robert Para, was the actual, real owner of the Memphis Grizzlies.
7:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, Robert Para wanted to make it very clear that he was the one bringing sexy back to Memphis. Him and Zach Randolph.
7:23 Pablo Torre? Yes. And so I should say that we here at Palatouria Finds Out did reach out to the Grizzlies about the more basketball-related stuff that'll be in today's episode, and they did not respond. Yeah, and this all tracks, because Mr. Invisible does not show up in public anymore, really. He's not spotted at games, he's not holding pressers, and that is extremely different. You need to understand from how he started his tenure, because there was this one day, it's September 2013, Sam, when the six-foot-three, to his credit, six-foot-three Robert Para logged on. Yeah, he's a strapping young owner, and he logs on to Twitter. And Robert Para has since deleted these tweets, but I want you to first examine a copy of his old Twitter avatar.
8:08 Pablo Torre? Because I think it's important for people just to visually, if you're just listening to this, visually understand how he presents himself.
8:15 Speaker 01 So, Robert Para's Twitter avatar is a picture of Robert Para shooting a basketball, where, I have to admit... His form is fucking incredible. This guy's elbow couldn't be more in if he tried. He looks like Dirk Nowitzki. Down to the shooting sleeve on his left arm, showing he's not one of these noobs who thinks that you gotta put the shooting sleeve on your shooting arm.
8:40 Pablo Torre? No.
8:41 Speaker 01 And he's mid jump shot, about to release.
8:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah, wearing like tactical sleeveless Nike gear as well.
8:47 Speaker 01 Yes, and you can see some biceps in the photo as well.
8:50 Pablo Torre? Oh yeah, absolutely. And so here are the tweets that this avatar sent out.
8:53 Speaker 01 "September 9th, 2013. Hey Grindfather at AA000G9, presumably Tony Allen. How about we play one-on-one in Memphis before training camps start? I'll spot you a couple baskets to make it a game."
9:06 Pablo Torre? And for people who just don't know the legend of Tony Allen, the dude was the best perimeter defender in the NBA, one of the most terrifying people to encounter in sports. And so what the Grindfather does is he replies in a tweet that has notably not yet been deleted, and he says this.
9:22 Speaker 01 "That's free money, exclamation point, exclamation point, boss."
9:27 Pablo Torre? But what everyone sort of realized pretty immediately in this exchange was that even though Robert Pera had never played college basketball, this game, like that shooting sleeve, was not a bit. The Grizzlies front office, the coaching staff, the NBA league office, I am told, none of them wanted this to happen. According to another former Grizzlies employee who has played in pickup games against Pera, quote, "Robert kinda liked to swing his elbows in a way that could start fights. And Tony is the last person in the league you wanna [bleep] with. I just think Robert had no idea how badly an NBA player would kick his ass. He really just didn't know," end quote. So Pera had his increasingly panicked... Imagine being the PR staff for the Grizzlies and you got this new boss.
10:11 Pablo Torre? And one of his first directives is, hey, not only make a press release, but make this.
10:20 Pablo Torre? You're holding now, Sam, a printed out fight poster.
10:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, this looks like it's the Thrilla in Manila. Except you've got Para in the identical outfit to his Twitter avatar. Also says that you, the viewer, can watch live on grizzlies.com or listen live on ESPN Radio 92.9 FM. And the $100,000 Tony Allen ultimately chose the charity, the Children's Research Hospital.
10:49 Pablo Torre? Yes.
10:49 Speaker 01 And a fun detail on the bottom right corner of this poster.
10:52 Pablo Torre? There's a seal there.
10:52 Speaker 01 He has a stamp that says, "Special guest referee, Zach Randolph."
10:58 Pablo Torre? What I was told is that Robert Para, in advance of this event, actually consulted with a longtime NBA trainer named David Thorp, who I talked to about this, to discuss conditioning and strategy. He was training to beat the Grindfather, his own employee. And by the way, on our YouTube channel, just so you get a sense of Robert Para's actual, like, basketball abilities in action, practicing on the Grizzlies' practice court. Also, again, as always, wearing that same shooting sleeve.
11:34 Pablo Torre? Among the ranks of NBA owners who are not named Michael Jordan, Robert Para is actually clearly pretty good at basketball, for sure. And what happens about two hours before the Battle on the Bluff was set to start, as they were calling this, a one-on-one game, and Grizzly staffers, by the way, had set up chairs all around the practice facility. The team winds up posting a new and definitely sadder press release, because the Battle on the Bluff gets canceled.
12:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, because the Grindfather would have definitely played real [bleep] defense on Para.
12:09 Pablo Torre? Yes.
12:09 Speaker 01 And it would have been a very awkward video to exist out in the world.
12:14 Pablo Torre? Everybody knew that the Grindfather wasn't going to be one of the Russian goalies playing hockey against Vladimir Putin.
12:27 Speaker 01 It looks like that goalie literally takes a dive so that he doesn't save the goal
12:32 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
12:33 Speaker 01 against Vladimir Putin.
12:34 Pablo Torre? It's harder to imagine a more stark example of someone not wanting to beat their boss at something. And so the aftermath of this, in which the billionaire doesn't get the thing that he wants to happen, Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated reported this. The person Robert Para apparently blamed for the collapse of his duel with Tony Allen was the head coach of the Grizzlies, who was a guy named Dave Yeager. Robert Para, I am told, then tried to fire Dave Yeager after the first five games of that 2013 season.
13:02 Speaker 01 Yeager bomb, dropped.
13:04 Pablo Torre? And the person he offered Yeager's job to was the aforementioned would be trainer David Thorpe. And so I'm further told that Thorpe declined the offer and that cooler heads prevailed. But a couple of weeks later, in October 2013, in a series of yet more deleted tweets, Robert Para logs back onto Twitter and he turns his attention, Sam, to someone else.
13:27 Speaker 01 He says, "What's with all the one-on-one with Mark Cuban talk? I'm in, but I would make quick work of him."
13:33 Pablo Torre? And there's another Robert Para tweet that same day in October 2013.
13:37 Speaker 01 "If we're talking an owner game, get me MJ. I'll up the charity contribution to $1 million. Can you imagine the emotional journey St. Jude's Children's Hospital is on? Suddenly they went from 100K to zero, now millions on the line."
13:51 Pablo Torre? I'm so mad that none of this happens because Michael Jordan's response to the Charlotte Observer, of course, is...
13:57 Speaker 01 Quote, "I think that's comical. It didn't make any sense. Why would I play one-on-one?"
14:03 Pablo Torre? And so eventually, Robert Para resorts to getting himself into the 2015 Celebrity All-Star Game here in New York, and he leads his team to a win, but the MVP trophy goes, apparently, I just think by NBA decree, it always must go to Kevin Hart, and so it does. And then Para ends up tweeting a two-second video of himself dunking.
14:23 Pablo Torre? This is 2016, but at some point in the decades since then, it just feels like Mr. Invisible, Seb, comes to this realization that he should focus on the arena where he might actually dominate. And this happens to make Robert Para, in retreat, one of the five richest owners in American sports with a net worth now of more than $30 billion.
14:47 Speaker 01 And Ubiquiti, which most listeners probably haven't heard of, is a $34 billion American tech company hiding in plain sight. They don't take earnings calls or have bank coverage. And yet Ubiquiti's devices are truly ubiquitous. They can be spotted in garages and broom closets and backyards across the world.
15:09 Pablo Torre? And so you talk about the routers, the dishes, the antenna. It's just funny because everybody I've talked to who worked for the Grizzlies, they have like various criticisms of Robert Para, but they just love Ubiquiti's technology. Because Para at one point gave his employees as a gift these devices, which work phenomenally well, it seems.
15:28 Speaker 01 There's like Ubiquiti super fans out there.
15:32 Speaker 06 Today we're going to be having a look at what is in this box.
15:34 Speaker 01 Who are making YouTube videos where they don't just plug these in and show you how to work them.
15:40 Speaker 06 These are what you get in the box. This one here is a little bit more like getting a Lego kit. So we'll show you how to put it all together as well.
15:47 Speaker 01 Just watch this YouTube video from influencer @MyMateVince.
15:50 Speaker 07 Hi there, my name's Vince from MyMateVince.com.
15:52 Speaker 01 Almost a million subscribers called, quote, "Trying long-distance Wi-Fi in London using Ubiquiti light beams."
15:58 Speaker 07 Around Richard's house, he has really good internet access. My brother's house, unfortunately, the signal is absolutely awful.
16:04 Speaker 01 They try to jerry-rig Ubiquiti devices to their homes, to various areas where they live because they just like these devices so much.
16:14 Speaker 07 So that's it, up on the pole and plugged in. You can see little blue lights. Now we're going to go to Paul's house.
16:18 Pablo Torre? We're going to be putting a dish on his side pointing in this direction. And I just want people to understand what this specific light beam, ubiquity light beam device looks like, Sam? Because how would you describe?
16:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's basically like a flat rectangle reflector with a small cylinder sticking out front.
16:34 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I would say imagine there's like a dish that's kind of like flat. And then there's this dildo just coming out of the center of it.
16:41 Speaker 01 A dildo in a dish.
16:42 Pablo Torre? Yeah, with a ubiquity U, the logo, the U, right at the tip facing outwards.
16:47 Speaker 01 Yes, and this is where the radio lives and where the signal is sent and received. So it's kind of like a radio and antenna combined.
16:54 Pablo Torre? But the big important takeaway here is that these things apparently are very effective.
17:01 Speaker 01 Although what's so weird is that when we asked one NBA owner about Robert Para, we didn't even ask about ubiquity.
17:08 Pablo Torre? Right.
17:08 Speaker 01 He said to us unprompted, quote, "No one knows where their sails come from."
17:12 Pablo Torre? Which is a great premise for an episode and also a good reason to come back around to the incredible athlete we mentioned before, who loves increasingly sophisticated weapons.
17:24 Speaker 01 Vladimir Putin, whose military, it turns out, happens to be ubiquity's biggest fan.
17:48 Pablo Torre? I actually want to start the story of your investigation here with another video from a Russian state-run media network, which also happens to broadcast sports like hockey and soccer. But in this specific case, is showing what?
18:02 Speaker 01 So this is a news segment from October 10th, 2025. And what you see, standing amid the ruins of an abandoned plant in the occupied Ukrainian territory of Donbass.
18:14 Pablo Torre? Which is a long way from Memphis.
18:15 Speaker 01 Is a Russian soldier, a signalman. And on his vest is a chevron.
18:20 Pablo Torre? Which is like a badge of sorts.
18:21 Speaker 01 Yes, of a Russian special forces unit. Their elite military intelligence agency, the GRU. And this soldier in an interview is describing the importance of their job. Quote, "A break in communications means total loss of control over combat operations."
18:36 Pablo Torre? And the reporter is saying what?
18:38 Speaker 01 The reporter agrees. They say, quote, "No communication, no front." But what I want to draw your attention to is look at this other shot of an antenna a bit later in the news segment. It's on this tower. And Pablo, if you look closely at it, what do you see?
18:55 Pablo Torre? Yeah, you see the signature Ubiquiti U on the tip of this dildo-shaped device as we're watching this soldier climb up this tower.
19:03 Speaker 01 This is the popular antenna that helps Robert Para make his fortune.
19:08 Pablo Torre? The technology that made him his billions, that made him the youngest owner in NBA history.
19:13 Speaker 01 And it also, we have figured out, is the Choice wireless antenna for the Russian military.
19:21 Pablo Torre? These products are allegedly being used to do what by Russia in Ukraine?
19:27 Speaker 01 This is the question we spent six months investigating. And what we found is that the Ubiquiti radio bridge antenna serve critical communications needs for the Russian military. It's basically like a long, invisible ethernet cable between two places. And it actually works up to 18 miles apart, which is clutch in a war zone, particularly a war zone where you need Wi-Fi to do things like fly drones. And what Ubiquiti, this American company, is doing is it's helping power Russia's communications grid. And what experts told us is that this enables precision drone attacks against Ukrainian civilians, the types of massacres of innocent people
20:12 Speaker 01 that the UN has called crimes against humanity.
20:18 Pablo Torre? And so what I'm imagining as I hear you explain this is something that is familiar to anybody who's been like, I guess, out in the woods and your cellphone reception is bad, your signal's [BLEEP] and you wish you had like a Wi-Fi connectivity because that is what Ubiquiti's devices are enabling in this drone war in Ukraine.
20:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's kind of exactly what's going on here. This is how drones called first-person view drones work. They stream real-time video of where the drone is going over a radio link so that you can pilot the drone over long distances. And where Ubiquiti's radio bridges come in is that they allow the pilot to share that video to headquarters and to other people in the military so that they can coordinate attacks, do reconnaissance, and avoid enemy fire. We actually spoke to a Ukrainian soldier currently in the war zone who told us at Hunter Brook that without Ubiquiti, these drones from Russia, the ones leading to these massacres, they would not work. Quote, "They'd be flying blind."
21:18 Pablo Torre? And the issue of drones is not just something that you're taking interest in. Here is President Zelensky of Ukraine warning-
21:25 Speaker 03 But weapons are evolving faster than our ability to defend ourselves. Now, there are tens of thousands of people who know how to professionally kill using drones.
21:39 Speaker 01 We actually interviewed a woman who lived in a Ukrainian city bordering occupied Crimea, where drone attacks on residents have been so frequent, they've earned the gruesome moniker "Human Safari." More than 3,000 civilians in that city have been struck by Russian drones since December 2023. And this Ukrainian woman told us, quote- [SPEAKING USKH] They just mercilessly shell this poor city and poor people. [SPEAKING USKH] No one is protected from this.
22:14 Pablo Torre? And so the next video that we've got to play here to fully understand what modern warfare is like is a clip that's not from a Russian drone but from a Ukrainian drone? Because Sam, what we're seeing through this camera here as this Ukrainian drone flies through the air to a soundtrack, incidentally, that I think Americans might find familiar, is what?
22:33 Speaker 01 It turns out the Ukrainian military has similar taste in music to someone else known for taking on the Russians, Rocky Balboa.
22:43 Speaker 01 And it's a video of a drone approaching a church steeple, which our team geolocated and identified as the Church of Elijah the Prophet, near the contested border between Ukraine and Russia. And this church steeple is housing what looks like more than a dozen ubiquity antennas.
22:59 Pablo Torre? Yeah, it looks like an infestation of these devices, like a bunch of my mate Vince's jerry-rigged this thing together.
23:07 Speaker 01 Yes, and a close-up of one of the antenna looks pretty identical to a by-now-familiar ubiquity radio bridge antenna model.
23:13 Pablo Torre? The ubiquity light beam is very clearly visible in this video.
23:17 Speaker 01 Yes, right down to the mounting hardware.
23:19 Pablo Torre? How omnipresent are they compared to other technologies? Like, I'm thinking of Starlink, made by Elon Musk, which offers satellite internet, which would seem to be even stronger than Wi-Fi?
23:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, so one Ukrainian communications officer we spoke to, who uses the call name Django, which really just shows Tarantino's influence knows no bounds. He told Hunter Brook, quote, "There is simply no alternative." And he estimated that about 80% of Russian radio bridge antennae observed on the frontline is ubiquity.
23:50 Pablo Torre? 80% is staggering.
23:52 Speaker 01 These signalmen in Ukraine explained to us that most Western competitor brands are either too complicated to use, as you've seen, ubiquity very easy to set up, or like Starlink, Elon Musk's company, those devices can be disabled remotely. And what Django told us was, quote, "Ubiquity is made for regular people." Basically, plug and play. He said there were tons of tutorials on YouTube.
24:16 Pablo Torre? Which we have obviously found.
24:18 Speaker 01 But inside Russia these days, YouTube tutorials aren't the way young men communicate, because the Russian backyard is a [bleep] battlefield. And so instead, they make Telegram videos. And we found example after example of Russian military units begging for donations so they could buy more $65 ubiquity products.
24:41 Pablo Torre? Yeah, look, I love an unboxing video. This seems like a different kind of variation on the genre.
24:48 Speaker 01 Different vibe, yeah.
24:49 Pablo Torre? Yeah, these are guys in a bunker, holding these boxes.
24:52 Speaker 01 They're saying, quote, "We thank the People's Militia Assistance Group for providing communications equipment in the form of Ubiquity antennas."
24:59 Pablo Torre? And in fact, let's just play that for a second. You can hear him say... Ubiquity. Ubiquity.
25:04 Speaker 01 Ubiquity.
25:05 Pablo Torre? Video antenna Ubiquity.
25:07 Speaker 01 Antenna Ubiquity. The soldier goes on to say, quote, "Reliable communications are the key to success. The enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours."
25:18 Pablo Torre? Not super subtle, in terms of the importance of the product as described.
25:21 Speaker 01 No, they pretty clearly just explain what's going on.
25:24 Pablo Torre? And the thing that I just want to explain here is, isn't Vladimir Putin, isn't the government itself actually supposed to pay for all this?
25:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, why are there crowdfunding campaigns?
25:32 Pablo Torre? Yes.
25:32 Speaker 01 It's because Russia's actually kind of broke right now, and so military units, even the top ones, they're saving Putin and the oligarchs funding the war money by begging for help to procure their own supplies. And based on our review of these Telegram accounts, ones like the video you just saw, we found that nine of the military units that received Ubiquity gear, or individuals associated with those units, have been accused by human rights groups of having committed war crimes.
26:03 Pablo Torre? And so this is where I just need to acknowledge that by any objective measure, we have buried the lead of this story. We wanted to start with this as a sports story, and it still is, but just to be very clear, isn't it illegal in America to sell American devices exactly like this to the Russian military?
26:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, man, there are rules called sanctions, which are a way that the United States can try to stop its adversaries from getting access to technology that they might want to use in a war. And Russia has been sanctioned since before invading Ukraine, but especially since, there are very tight export controls on what you're allowed to send to Russia. And they, of course, include the types of dual-use devices like Ubiquity's that the military might need to go do horrible [BLEEP].
26:51 Pablo Torre? And so how aware is Ubiquity with this entire issue?
26:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, Ubiquity should definitely know about sanctions, because they've actually had issues with them, where in 2014, federal regulators fined Ubiquity for, quote, "reckless disregard," end quote, of its compliant obligations, when its products ended up in Iran.
27:11 Speaker 01 And at the time, Ubiquiti was let off fairly easy. US authorities slapped them with just a $560,250 fine.
27:19 Pablo Torre? Yeah, that's like vanishingly small to Robert Para. Or to, quote, Tony Allen, as he described their one-on-one game that never happened. Free money, boss.
27:29 Speaker 01 But it kind of made sense at the time because it was Ubiquiti's first violation. And the company took, quote, remedial action, according to the government. And what Ubiquiti said back then to investors was that if violations should occur in the future, the response of regulators may be more severe in light of prior compliance concerns.
27:49 Pablo Torre? And so I think the question now that we have to begin to answer is just how directly responsible Ubiquiti is.
27:55 Speaker 01 So if you're a big company, normally you have a massive team of compliance people who are in charge of making sure that your products don't violate export bans. But one of the weird things about Ubiquiti is how small the entire company is. They actually make more money per employee than like Nvidia. And we spoke to a former employee of Ubiquiti's who told us that almost no one worked in compliance there. The employee said, quote, "All those processes you would see at large-scale businesses, they don't really solve the problem." And this former employee added of Robert Para, quote, "The CEO of Ubiquiti recognizes that and just doesn't care about all the extra garbage."
28:34 Pablo Torre? And so what does Robert Para recognize about what their products are being used to do?
28:41 Speaker 01 We reached out to Ubiquiti with detailed questions on their compliance practices, and they didn't respond.
28:47 Pablo Torre? But we should note, I think, that in their SEC filings, Ubiquiti was very careful to say this, quote, "We do not have any visibility on the location or extent of purchases of our products by individual network operators and service providers from our distributors." End quote.
29:03 Speaker 01 And Hunter Brook can report that according to trade records, Ubiquiti did halt direct shipments to Russia following the invasion, without ever acknowledging that change. But their products still flowed into Russia, obviously, through dozens of intermediaries, according to that Hunter Brook analysis of trade data. And over 10 legal and sanctions experts we talked to said that pleading ignorance, it's not a defensible argument. Especially because, as we mentioned, this is not the first time Ubiquiti devices ended up where they shouldn't.
29:34 Pablo Torre? Right. They got fined half a million dollars, or, again, about what half of what Robert Para was supposed to pay Michael Jordan if they had played one-on-one and lost. They got fined that much because the products ended up, that time, in Iran.
29:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, so...
29:48 Pablo Torre? 2011?
29:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then US officials found out that Ubiquiti had sold products to a distributor who ended up sending them to Iran. And after that debacle, Robert Para acknowledged that this was a huge problem. And in a rare interview with Forbes, he said, quote, "This can't happen again. If it happens again, I'll be in trouble."
30:08 Pablo Torre? And so now the question for us comes, how do you prove that this is, in fact, happening again?
30:14 Speaker 01 Obviously, we have the video that we played that clearly shows Ubiquiti's devices on the front lines, and we have trade data that shows millions and millions and millions of dollars of Ubiquiti equipment ending up in Russia. But we wanted to see exactly how this happens. How, if you're a Russian soldier,
30:33 Pablo Torre? Right.
30:33 Speaker 01 and you're raising money on Telegram, and you're desperate for that Wi-Fi connection, how easy is it to get a Ubiquiti device? And so, we went undercover.
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31:56 Speaker 02 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market. Love the crown molding. Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile. Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet? No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen. No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you. Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.
32:20 Pablo Torre? Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
32:32 Pablo Torre? So we mentioned earlier, Sam, that an NBA owner had told us of Robert Para's company Ubiquiti, quote, "No one knows where their sales come from." And so in our effort to actually solve this mystery and find out where they're coming from, I do want to acknowledge that Ubiquiti's sales team is now of interest to me. I know they're a lean company by design, but how does sales work?
32:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it's important to know that it's not just their compliance department. Ubiquiti also barely has a sales team, and they rely on third-party vendors to sell their devices.
33:06 Pablo Torre? Which means that if you were to, say, order, I don't know, a dozen Ubiquiti light beam devices to, I don't know, say, the Church of Elijah the Prophet, you don't go directly to Robert Para or to Ubiquiti.
33:17 Speaker 01 No, you go to one of their third-party vendors that actually do a lot of their e-commerce sales for them.
33:22 Pablo Torre? Which is to say, like, not grizzlies.com to get your official John Moran jersey, but grizzlies dot RU.
33:29 Speaker 01 Exactly. Ubiquity dot RU is one of the places from which we ordered Ubiquity devices when, in October of 2025, after about a month of reporting on Ubiquity, one of our reporters went undercover. He signed up for a Russian email account, used a VPN, posed as a Russian military officer, who is ostensibly procuring goods to fight Ukraine. And he visited all of these third-party websites, websites like ubiquity dot RU.
33:57 Pablo Torre? And just to be very clear, from an ethics perspective, in case it's not obvious, I consider personally this kind of undercover journalism really important because I don't know of another way to pressure test the hypothesis of this is how these products are getting from America to Russia under life and death circumstances.
34:17 Speaker 01 Correct. Hunter Brooks, reporter, who is staying anonymous for obvious reasons.
34:21 Pablo Torre? Right.
34:22 Speaker 01 Contacted a dozen Russian e-commerce sites openly selling Ubiquity items. And one of the first vendors we reached in our undercover reporting was a woman named Nina Kuznetsova. So here's the deal with Nina. She operates multiple Russian storefronts with domain names like ubiquity dot RU, and she openly sells Ubiquity products that have been banned from export to Russia since the war began.
34:46 Pablo Torre? And we're looking at the website now, and it is covered in Ubiquity's logo. I mean, there's the big U that we've seen over and over again. There is, again, the dildo-shaped antenna. These are official Ubiquity products. And when you click on the English translation on the website, you even get a contact page with an office in Moscow.
35:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, Nina isn't operating in the shadows here. We didn't have to go sign up for some secret group chat to be able to contact her. We were able to actually do open source intelligence on her, and she appears to be doing quite well. She lives in an apartment on Leninsky Avenue in Moscow. Not going to be more specific, but it's one of the most iconic streets in the city. And then we actually found social media pages belonging, presumably, to her son and business partner, Andre, who's been posting photos from trips to Bali and is
35:32 Pablo Torre? When you check the timeline here, it's important to point out that these trips appear to be taken during the war, living a pretty comfortable life while the technology, the American technology from Robert Para that they're selling is being linked to what the UN has been calling, again, crimes against humanity.
35:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and Nina was eager to help our undercover reporter and to prove her bona fides, to show that her products were the real deal and actually reaching the front lines. Nina was basically sending us evidence that her [BLEEP] was good, like a weed dealer who comes over with a briefcase, except she's not slinging purple haze.
36:08 Pablo Torre? The Alaskan thunder [BLEEP].
36:09 Speaker 01 Sure, she's slinging Wi-Fi antennae, to be specific.
36:13 Pablo Torre? But just what was she sending you?
36:16 Speaker 01 So, you remember that video that we started this whole conversation with? [speaking Russian] From Russian state media showing the GRU soldier. That actually came to us from Nina. She wanted us to see, this is legitimate military equipment. This is what troops are actually using. And when we asked about alternatives, she was blunt. She said, quote, "There are no stable, inexpensive alternatives to this manufacturer."
36:40 Pablo Torre? Which is an incredible review for the product, much to the disappointment, on some level, to Elon Musk.
36:46 Speaker 01 And they specified, quote, "95% of shipments to the SVO are ubiquity."
36:51 Pablo Torre? And the SVO, just to clarify here, is...
36:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the Russian euphemism for the war against Ukraine, special military operation. But even after Nina gave us that 95% number, we kind of just wanted to see what she'd tell us if we kept pushing.
37:05 Pablo Torre? Right.
37:05 Speaker 01 If we really leaned into quality control.
37:08 Pablo Torre? Yeah, what would happen if you didn't take yes for an answer?
37:10 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, once our undercover reporter had this Tech Gear saleswoman in the upscale Moscow apartment, showing us how much Putin's special ops guys loved using it, we ended up asking if she had any other evidence that these devices were safely being delivered to Russian soldiers.
37:26 Pablo Torre? You mean something clearer than the video that seems pretty clear of these Russian soldiers using these devices?
37:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you know Pablo, how when you're reporting a story, you hope there's gonna be a true smoking gun?
37:37 Pablo Torre? Yes.
37:38 Speaker 01 Like, if you had that picture of Steve Ballmer handing Kawhi a check-
37:42 Pablo Torre? Like a giant novelty check.
37:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, saying like, "Do not do work for aspiration. They must pay you to not show up." On this one, we actually got one of the [bleep] craziest smoking guns I've ever seen.
37:52 Pablo Torre? So what qualifies as a true smoking gun in this story?
37:55 Speaker 01 Nina sent us thank you letters, thanking her for providing equipment to troops fighting in Ukraine.
38:03 Pablo Torre? And so, right now, on our YouTube channel, you can see the thank you letter that Nina received from-- these are Russian soldiers who wanted to make this very official-looking insofar as this thing has a crown and a crest, and I think that's a tiny dragon holding a sword. It looks medieval in how official it is.
38:23 Speaker 01 And it's a letter specifically from Russia's 623rd Inderspecific Regional Training Center. It's addressed to Nina, thanking her for providing, quote, "wireless bridges for Russian servicemen in Ukraine," which is exactly what Ubiquiti sells.
38:37 Pablo Torre? It seems clear.
38:38 Speaker 01 And there's another one. This is a letter from a Russian company called Valtek.
38:42 Pablo Torre? And this one is far more corporate. It has Valtek's letterhead across the top, and it has, you know, like, a letter of recommendation that you would hope that your boss writes for you.
38:51 Speaker 01 Confirming that the radio bridges Nina transferred to them were, quote, "sent to the combat zone," and were, quote, "ensuring reliable communications in critical situations."
39:00 Pablo Torre? And I just need to keep on stressing this: You guys refuse to stop finding out about this.
39:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, we, like, wanted to make triple, quadruple, quintuple sure that Ubiquiti was really selling these devices, so Nina wasn't the only vendor we contacted. We actually reached out to a dozen Russian e-commerce sites. Many had Ubiquiti right in the domain name: ubnt.ru/ubiquiti-russia.com/ubiquiti.ru. We gave each one the same proposition: A Russian military unit needs prohibited Ubiquiti equipment for operations in occupied Ukrainian territories.
39:35 Pablo Torre? And what was their response like?
39:37 Speaker 01 Almost all of them confirmed our shopping list and promised delivery to the war zone in as little as a week.
39:44 Pablo Torre? Amazon Prime level expediency.
39:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I will note that one vendor actually set a condition. They said, "We will only do it if you give us an order of over $100,000."
39:53 Pablo Torre? And why did they set that standard, that minimum?
39:56 Speaker 01 It's funny because this is a direct translation. They said, quote, "You're asking for sanctioned equipment. We carry orders starting at $100,000."
40:06 Pablo Torre? And so, given that this is an admission of sanctions evasion, essentially, and given that this is not the only example of written acknowledgement of what this is all about here, does Robert Para, the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies, know that this is happening?
40:21 Speaker 01 Our team at Hunter Brook reached out to Robert Para's company with detailed questions, and they didn't respond. Look, we have a relatively small newsroom, small but mighty, but we figured this out with a team of a few incredible reporters. You'd think that a 35 or so billion-dollar company could trace its own devices if they wanted to figure out where they were going.
40:47 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the thing I've learned about finding out is that you need to want to find out.
40:51 Speaker 01 You can't just put on earmuffs and figure out what's happening, but these guys should know this. And that's true in part because, Pablo, it's not just the Russian distributors selling these devices to Russian soldiers.
41:02 Pablo Torre? And this is the other important part of this chain of custody, which is if you're a Russian soldier at the war front, can you order these devices from American ubiquity suppliers?
41:15 Speaker 01 So we actually called up one ubiquity distributor in America.
41:26 Speaker 01 Thank you for reaching Multi-Link Solutions, Inc. Multi-Link Solutions. It's an Ohio-based official ubiquity reseller.
41:35 Pablo Torre? And so, what's happening here and what are we hearing? Hello, good morning. I'm calling from Multi-Link Solutions. We missed a call on this number.
41:42 Speaker 04 You need to speak about ubiquity devices, is that correct?
41:45 Speaker 01 A Hunterbrook reporter posing as a Russian customer is asking about 450 ubiquity devices.
41:51 Speaker 04 Not much of a difference, but we are authorized and directly partnered with Ubiquity. We only carry US products, so I believe that's already provided to you, a lot of information. So once payment is received, we will proceed with shipping out the order.
42:05 Speaker 01 And initially, the multilink rep says that they can deliver these to Russia.
42:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you can use your own carrier if you want, and yeah, we can ship to Moscow too, no problem.
42:16 Pablo Torre? Which is an incredible thing to say to a stated Russian customer for all the sanctions reasons.
42:23 Speaker 01 So I want to be clear that they followed up saying they couldn't ship directly to Russia.
42:28 Speaker 04 So I'm honestly saying that we have not exported before to Russia, so I am not sure if there will be any delays or any expected problems with the delivery.
42:42 Speaker 01 It's not like FedEx was going to agree to that shipment, but there was some wiggle room.
42:48 Speaker 04 Yes, let's figure out the best shipping method over there and make sure like, you know, all the products that you're looking for, everything.
42:55 Speaker 01 Where they could send these products to the Russian end customers through an intermediary third country.
43:03 Speaker 04 Is there anything else I can help you with?
43:06 Pablo Torre? Right, so here's the email from Sales Multilink to your undercover Hunterbrook reporter, and it reads, quote, "We may be able to use the alternative countries provided. Please provide the full address to provide shipping estimate."
43:19 Speaker 01 So we provided an address in Turkey, and Multilink sent an invoice confirming delivery.
43:25 Pablo Torre? And this is an invoice for 450 devices that you ordered at the grand total of $79,988.
43:36 Speaker 01 Again, to be very explicit here, they still thought we were Russian. And they know that you're not allowed to sell these devices to Russia. So instead, they sell them to us as Russians through an intermediary address in Turkey. And this is bread and butter sanctions evasion. This is literally in the guidance on sanction evasion, red flags.
43:59 Pablo Torre? Right, just like, what if, instead of giving you the money directly, we funneled it through another entity? Which is to say that in this case, what you're reporting is that an American company, an official ubiquity reseller, actually agreed to help circumvent US sanctions.
44:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
44:17 Pablo Torre? And to make this all now, again, a sports story, it brings us back to that NBA owner who told us, quote, "No one knows where their sales are from."
44:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I told that owner Pablo that we now know where at least some of those sales are coming from. And the answer is Russia.
44:36 Pablo Torre? Which raises a question, which is, what is the NBA now going to do about any of this?
44:57 Speaker 01 Full disclosure, as we mention every time I'm on this show, Hunter Brook has a fun business model that sometimes involves taking positions long or short in the companies we report on. You can see our disclosures about all of that on our website, hunterbrook.com, where you can also subscribe to our, I'll just say, pretty awesome investigative reporting.
45:17 Pablo Torre? So the one thing that I find myself thinking about a lot in reporting this show is the notion of consequences.
45:24 Speaker 01 The [bleep] around and then the finding out.
45:25 Pablo Torre? Yes, it's the question of, if you're the billionaire owner of an NBA team whose boss is actually your employee, meaning the commissioner of the league, Adam Silver, for instance, what kind of accountability is even possible in the event that wrongdoing is reported and established? What happens to you when you have more money and more power in some cases, such as, I don't know, one of the top five richest owners in all of sports, Robert Para, than nations themselves?
45:55 Speaker 01 And I think it's interesting to compare the accountability that owners face to the accountability reserved for players. Take, for instance, Grizzlies star Ja Morant.
46:08 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the issue here for Ja is just that flexing, his recidivism in said flexing, cost him about $8 million in salary on account of those suspensions. And also, by the way, he was forced to apologize, including in a very memorable ESPN interview.
46:25 Speaker 07 Whose gun were you holding?
46:27 Speaker 03 Well, the gun wasn't mine. No, it's not who I am. I don't condone any type of violence, but I take full responsibility for my actions. Made a bad mistake.
46:41 Pablo Torre? And so what we return to after seeing that video is the problem of violence in the NBA. And here's the question, Sam. Will Robert Parra, who employs the guy who had to apologize for waving around guns, will that billionaire owner be forced to answer for your reporting?
47:02 Speaker 01 And here, the government might really do something. They did last time when Ubiquiti's devices started showing up in Iran. And the reason the penalty was soft back then was because it was a first offense. As Parra said at the time, if this happens again, I'm in trouble. And it happened again.
47:19 Pablo Torre? The thing I've been finding out in my other reporting on various NBA scandals, from gambling to alleged cap convention, is that the thing the league office is most afraid of, it seems, is whether the US government might make them look stupid, depending on how they choose to punish or not punish.
47:39 Speaker 01 And this raises another question. It's the question that I came here to talk to you about, the reason I wanted to work on this story with you. And it's this. Does the NBA commissioner care more about a player brandishing a gun on Instagram? Or if one of his billionaire bosses is enabling Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine?
48:03 Pablo Torre? To return to how we started this whole episode, is Adam Silver going to accept this challenge like Tony Allen? Or like a diving goalie?
48:27 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
48:33 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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