Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a respected and respected national security journalist. You are. You’ve covered national security for a long time and you’ve covered, for lack of a better word, actual intelligence. You’ve gone too deep. How does that compare to this in terms of source maintenance in terms of the process here? Because it’s really poetry, isn’t it?
Noah Shachtman: More than. So look, for WIRED back in the day, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I reported on all the intelligence agencies. And I’ve never had a situation like this where people were so scared and took extreme measures to avoid being singled out as a source. In spy movies, there’s something called a brush pass where someone pretends to bump into you or pretend to hug you or whatever and slip some information into your pocket. As far as I know, that shit never happened in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in real life during the story.
Brian Barrett: Wow!
Noah Shachtman: You’d have people that I’d reach out to, they’d be like, “Sorry, wrong number.” And then I would hear from them on a different number two seconds later. We had a very cold winter here in New York, the coldest in decades. And yet here I am outside freezing with the source because the source will not meet inside for fear of being disturbed. And you think, well, wow, these people must be just crazy. They have seen many spy movies themselves. Well, not exactly. Famous, and we captured this in our story, two Knicks legends met one night in the park, one of them was Charles Oakley, who was a famous critic of Jim Dolan. And he was told by his former teammate, Patrick Ewing, one of the best Knicks of all time, to get off because there were listening devices everywhere. So these people acted more controversially than the spies, but they had some reason to act like this.
Brian Barrett: Tell me more about Charles Oakley of all, because that was the most interesting part of this story, I thought, because here’s a guy who you would think is a fan favorite Knicks icon. You would think he would be untouchable just because of his association with the franchise. He does not seem. Do you mind talking through his experience a little more and what you got out of talking to Oak?
Noah Shachtman: If you’re watching the finals right now, you see during the commercials that there are all these Knicks legends there, guys like Luke Charles Brewell, Patrick Ewing, Alan House, and John Starks, what have you. Who you don’t see there—one person you don’t see—it’s surprising not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was kind of the Knicks’ strong enforcer in the ’90s, strong player. Why is he not there? He is absent because for years he was openly critical of Jim Dolan’s stewardship of the team. And then in the mid-2010s, he entered the fray. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to spin it, but he got into a fight with MSG security and got thrown out of the park and was banned from it. And there have been a series of accusations back and forth. There are still all kinds of cases going on, but yes, he is one person who has been singled out and we’ve talked to some sources within the Madison Square Garden security community. Let’s say there were orders to follow him to track him down. So this isn’t just a typical case of a franchise falling out with a certain player. There has been a long ugly legal battle. There have been accusations of digital audio monitoring and physical tailgating by the guy.
