Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Every now and then, we like to feature the work of our colleagues at WNYC Radio. This week, it's the turn of the New Yorker Radio Hour, hosted by David Remnick, who spoke to the host of a YouTube show with a quarter of a million subscribers who this year collected one of journalism's biggest prizes. Here's David.

David Remnick: The sports journalist Pablo Torre once described what he does as, "taking stupid things seriously". Now he's being kind of a smartass. He certainly doesn't think sports are stupid, but he does take them very seriously. In fact, Torre just won the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. That's a feat because the number of Pulitzers given for sports journalism in any medium is tiny. He investigated a scheme by one NBA team to circumvent the salary cap, and that story aired on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Now that kind of work is hard to do. The industry of sports, the leagues, the team owners, the top players, none of them like it when a journalist asks too many questions. Too much money is at stake. Torre got his start as a staff writer on Sports Illustrated in the twilight of that magazine's tremendous reach and influence. He later became a familiar presence on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption as debate shows were replacing old-fashioned sports reporting.

Pablo Torre: I got into the end, and I could taste the exhaust pipes of what this great institution used to be. What if we argued instead of reported? Really, it got to the point of being-- I would say it got to be such a big box office that the question became, who is left to make it deeply uncomfortable using journalism for the people in power?

David Remnick: Now we get to the crux of the matter because there's plenty of entertainment around. I can go all over the place and get podcasts about the NBA, but you did something extraordinary this year. You won a Pulitzer Prize in audio for rigorous sports journalism. Listeners should know that I'm on the Pulitzer board. I'm raising my hand and being transparent about that, but just an amazing piece of work. Tell me about the sTORY and take us through it. What happened and what you found out.

Pablo Torre: I did not launch my show to investigate a guy with $145 billion.

David Remnick: We're talking about Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft executive and innovator who now owns a professional basketball team.

Pablo Torre: The Los Angeles Clippers. I got a tip at some point that said, "Hey, there's a team sponsor with a very on-the-nose brand name called Aspiration. They are a big sponsor of the Clippers. You should look into them."

David Remnick: What does Aspiration do?

Pablo Torre: Aspiration is a carbon credits company, which means that they plant trees to help zero out the footprint of your company. They were started by these two democratic power players, Joseph Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. This is one of these good guy companies with a good guy name. When I was told, "Check this out," I didn't really know what to do with it because I was like, "Okay, they have a $300 million 23-year deal with the Clippers to be their sponsor." I was like, "Okay, this seems, I don't know, kind of banal." Then what happens as I go through my life is I see that this company eventually files for bankruptcy.

In the bankruptcy filing, which I go, and I'm the type of guy who, as the show indicates, wants to find out stuff. I love documents. I went and pulled the bankruptcy filing for Aspiration and saw a list of creditors. On the list of creditors, there is Meta, there's the Red Sox, there are the Clippers, and also there's this LLC called KL2 Aspire LLC. I'm a basketball fan, and all you need to know about basketball in this case is that the star player of Los Angeles Clippers is this guy, this enigmatic character named Kawhi Leonard, and his jersey number is, you will be shocked to hear, two.

KL2 Aspire LLC led me to this question of why is this LLC, if it is in fact Kawhi Leonard's LLC, owed $7 million outstanding by this now-defunct carbon credits company. You do the thing where you look for every available public record in which there is proof of some business relationship, and there is not. One of the other things that happens when you are going through the remains of a bankrupt company is that you can start calling people, current and former employees who now might have insight and more willingness to speak about this. What they say is, "Oh yes, this was a really big part of our lives working at this company.

Kawhi Leonard was not just an endorser of Aspiration; he was the highest-paid endorser of Aspiration. In fact, we had other endorsers. We had Robert Downey Jr. We had Leonardo DiCaprio, we had Drake, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, on and on and on."

David Remnick: Kawhi Leonard as a personality, you use the word enigmatic. What were you getting at?

Pablo Torre: He doesn't advertise things in general. He's kind of famous for being uncomfortable in the public. The idea that that guy was paid, I was told more than four times what everyone else was making, all the A-listers were making combined, it was something that didn't add up to me. I said, "Okay, if I'm being told about a $28 million deal in which Kawhi Leonard was his endorser, but yet there is no proof of it, the question becomes, if he was being paid as an endorser, how is it that no one ever even announced that this deal existed?" This is something that I think I've buried even in our recap here. Kawhi Leonard did nothing. Not only did he not publicly endorse, he never did anything as part of this deal.

David Remnick: It wasn't in TV commercials?

Pablo Torre: It was a no-show job.

David Remnick: Like in The Sopranos.

Pablo Torre: He was importing, exporting on the dock somewhere.

David Remnick: Webistics. [laughs]

Pablo Torre: The follow-up question, the rabbit hole you fall into, is what was happening here? To speed-run through the big takeaways, it turns out that according to my reporting, Steve Ballmer entered into a secret deal to pay Kawhi Leonard through this company that he was personally invested in to the tune of $50 million, the biggest investor in the company, individually. Steve Ballmer was, according to my reporting, using Aspiration to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard to circumvent the NBA salary cap, which is-

David Remnick: Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Pablo Torre: Not a law in America. It's not a federal statute. For that reason, it's actually fascinating because this is something that fell in between the cracks of the collapse of Aspiration. It was not something that came to light because the federal government was investigating the collapse of Aspiration, which they were. Joe Sanberg has since pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud. It was something that fell inside of the cracks of this company because it wasn't explicitly illegal. The NBA salary cap, not a federal law

David Remnick: Within the ethics of the NBA is dubious at best.

Pablo Torre: The NBA has some cardinal rules, and one of them, for those not familiar, is that you cannot spend whatever you want to get the thing that in this sport particularly matters the most, which is a superstar player. For those not familiar, five players to a team, that is the fewest of any of the major sports, so a superstar is the thing you need to contend. What I love about investigating sports billionaires and leagues and these power players is that sports it's this industry in which the richest people, more than ever, in accordance with the surging values of these teams, are hungrier and hungrier to join the most exclusive country club, which is sports ownership.

They find that once they show up, they can't merely buy the thing they want the most, because in sports there are rules, there are regulations around fair play. There are these norms because of fans, I would argue, that are cardinal rules that are to be taken seriously.

David Remnick: What do you mean?

Pablo Torre: For instance, the salary cap. I am not saying that on a moral cosmic level we must regulate spending in the NBA, but because that is the regulatory landscape that rules over how superstars join different teams, when Steve Ballmer allegedly breaks that cardinal rule, it's at the expense of his competitors. That zero-sum game in which if there's an advantage over here by rule breaking, that there is suffering over here by some fan whose owner stupidly decided to play by the rules. Now we're in a position in which there is something like an attention that does follow ethics and norms.

For those who don't give a shit about sports, just know that in sports, at the very least, shame for rule breaking may yet remain possible.

David Remnick: You think you have the story, and then you go to Steve Ballmer or his representatives, and you go to Kawhi Leonard and you go to the company, and you present them with your evidence and your thesis. What did they say?

Pablo Torre: We assemble in the end, before publishing part one, more than 3,000 pages of internal documents. We go to the Clippers and Steve Ballmer before publication, of course. The quote we get is that these allegations of salary cap circumvention are provably false.

David Remnick: What were the extent of the denials on the side of the other parties? Steve Ballmer, et cetera?

Pablo Torre: It was, "This is provably false. We had a deal with Aspiration in which we transacted along the lines of carbon credits. They were a sponsor." As the series went on, it became clear that Steve Ballmer wanted to establish he in fact, was a victim of Joe Sanberg, lost his investment to $50 million, and he put in another $10 million in the spring of 2023.

David Remnick: What's going to happen to him?

Pablo Torre: The NBA launched an investigation.

David Remnick: Where is that investigation now?

Pablo Torre: The investigation is ongoing. They hired Wachtell Lipton, their preferred outside counsel, a big [unintelligible 00:11:34] law firm who I have visited with and talked with. They have the joy of, I suppose, subscribing to my show and trying to make sure that they're not missing anything, and vice versa.

David Remnick: What would be the upshot if they determine that your story is true? What do you think would happen to Steve Ballmer?

Pablo Torre: What we are describing here is the largest salary cap circumvention scheme in the history of the NBA and possibly professional sports. I have not done the analytics across all sports. I just know that the money here and the ambition here, in which this company, which was supposed to go public, was also a team sponsor and was also selling carbon credits to the team and the owner was personally invested. You had Kawhi Leonard secretly being paid off to the side, allegedly to circumvent the cap. This is a level of enmeshing with a fraudulent entity that raises questions that I should also say the federal government has recently been reexamining.

I say this because one of the things that we also reported deeper into the series is the existence of a whistleblower complaint that was filed by two Aspiration employees in February of 2023.

David Remnick: You're continuing to drop episodes about this?

Pablo Torre: Yes.

David Remnick: Now, here's the problem. We go to sports as human beings for escape. Do your fellow sports writers celebrate you for this kind of investigative work? What's the reaction?

Pablo Torre: I have been very, I think, deliberate in signaling whenever possible, the water's real warm where I am.

David Remnick: Jump in.

Pablo Torre: Jump on in. The pool is empty, largely. There's not only now substance, but there is now attention. There is juice. It is fun to talk about investigative journalism in sports. It gets to the thing that fans, I think, and I am so grateful that they feel this way, are actually intrigued by.

David Remnick: They are.

Pablo Torre: I have been on paper carbon credits, salary cap circumvention guy who's the most boring superstar in sports, arguably--

David Remnick: He's up there.

Pablo Torre: Those are not the ingredients for an algorithmic viral success, and yet I have been hardened that whether it's the way that we have been reporting this story, maybe even just the basic premise of we're going to take on an entity that has $145 billion plus and telling you what they don't want you to know. That's exciting to fans, it turns out. I have been hardened by that, and yet when I signal, and I get to part 10, and I'm backed by a whistleblower complaint in which specifically they're saying carbon credits to circumvent the cap involving Kawhi Leonard. They are spelling it out before every published episode one, which is so vindicating on some level.

As much as I am doing that and urging people to join me in the pool, it kind of feels like I'm the guy who is the proverbial turd.

David Remnick: At the garden party.

Pablo Torre: Inside the pool itself. Like, "We got out of here actually, because of you." That has been a little disappointing.

David Remnick: You feel lonely.

Pablo Torre: It is. It is lonely. I wish it was not as lonely as it has been.

David Remnick: Isn't that because I'm watching ESPN, because I'm escaping CNN or the like? Precisely because I can't stand to listen to any more politics or corruption or the horrible parts of public life?

Pablo Torre: I think that, in fairness, a bunch of people, because I worked at ESPN, it did feel sometimes like-- I want to credit my friend Ethan Strauss for this metaphor, but sports television is a vending machine that typically sells candy. Sometimes the person--

David Remnick: You're the broccoli guy?

Pablo Torre: I'm the sardine popped out. I wanted something sweet. What is this? What is this ancient fish? In that regard, I get it. I think what's been so heartening is that where we are now, sports have never been more valuable. In this era of fragmentation in which sports media has been deeply disrupted in the ways that you led with, sports have never been more relevant.

David Remnick: It's the only thing we all watch. It's the one monocultural thing that's still there.

Pablo Torre: See how everyone else is using it politically. It's being used all of the time as the MMA fight at the White House or Donald Trump and his conversation around being invited to a Knicks game by his good friend Jim Dolan, the owner of the team. All of that, as all of that suggests, sports are increasing in value. At some point, what I am betting on is that fans, the people who want otherwise candy, realize that knowing the truth about their favorite thing that has never been more important and more valuable and more powerful does not need to feel like just vegetables or just sardines. It can be fun to know the truth.

David Remnick: What are some of the biggest stories in sports that have so far eluded us that you want to know about?

Pablo Torre: What we are doing as we consider the demand for sports to be inelastic is we are raising the values of these franchises, of these assets to a point at which no individual can even afford them.

David Remnick: Their value is unbelievable. I just did an obituary; I wrote an obituary for Donald Newhouse, who's one of the heads of the family that owns The New Yorker and much else and many newspapers. His father had a choice between buying the Yankees and buying four newspapers in Syracuse, New York. He went for the newspapers. What would the Yankees be worth now?

Pablo Torre: What would this office be like?

David Remnick: [laughs]

Pablo Torre: I marvel that there was once a choice like that because no human, individually, even Steve Ballmer, is going to be able to individually afford these teams.

David Remnick: There'll be consortiums.

Pablo Torre: That's what we're seeing now. What's happening in sports is that private equity is now being welcomed in. Institutional investors, hedge funds, and the like, they are going to be the things that can actually afford these teams. The reason I spotlight that is because we are watching in sports right now, as the green arrow on sports continues to go up and to the right, we are watching the replacement of fans as owners. We're watching them be replaced by institutional investors who are here for the growth, for the profit, for the money, because it's only going up.

What sports is running the risk of now as they become so big and as, by the way, there is a challenge because the cable television faucet is almost turned off, because again, media has been disrupted because the cable bill no longer supports the tonnage. That was how these things got to be billion-dollar assets was, "Wow, media rights deals. TV networks need us." Now the value is contingent on the last gasps of the networks. The new buyers are going to be tech companies. Netflix, Apple, Google. These are companies--

David Remnick: Amazon.

Pablo Torre: Amazon. These are companies that don't need sports existentially. They are fun to have, but not necessary. The question becomes, in a world in which the things that desperately need this are unable to afford them, and the things that can don't care about it in the same way, what happens to the product?

David Remnick: Pablo Torre, thank you.

Pablo Torre: David, thank you for inviting me into the pool. [chuckles]

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Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. We'll be back in a couple of days with a big show. See you then. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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