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Brian Barrett: Noah, you’re a national security journalist. You. I’ve covered national security for a long time and I’ve covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. I was deep into it. How does that compare to this in terms of dealing with the source in terms of the process here? Because it really rhymes, doesn’t it?
Noah Shachtman: behind. So look at WIRED the other day, I went to Iraq several times. I went to Afghanistan. For WIRED, I cover all intelligence agencies. I have never encountered such a situation where people were so afraid and took such elaborate steps to avoid revealing their source. In spy movies, there’s what’s called a brush pass where someone pretends to bump into you or pretends to hug you or something and puts some information in your pocket. As far as I know, this shit never happens in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in real life during the story.
Brian Barrett: amazing.
Noah Shachtman: There will be people I’ll reach out to, they’ll be like, “Sorry, wrong number.” And then I get a response from them on a different number 2 seconds later. We’ve had a very cold winter here in New York, the coldest in decades. However, outside I am frozen out of everything with the Source, because the Source will not meet inside for fear of eavesdropping. And you think, well, these people must be paranoid. They’ve watched a lot of spy movies themselves. Well, not exactly. Famously, and we chronicled this in our story, two Knicks legends met one night at the park, one of whom was Charles Oakley, who was a famous critic of Jim Dolan. His former teammate, Patrick Ewing, one of the Knicks’ greatest players of all time, told him to shut up because listening devices were everywhere. So these people acted more paranoid than spies, but they had a reason to act that way.
Brian Barrett: Tell me more about Charles Oakley out of all of that, because that was a really cool part of this story, I think, because that’s the guy who you think is a fan-favorite Knicks icon. You would think he would be an outcast just because of his association with the franchise. He is not what he seems. Would you mind talking about his experience a little more and what you got from talking to Oak?
Noah Shachtman: If you look at the Finals now, you see during the broadcast that there are all these Knicks legends, guys like Luke Charles Breuel, Patrick Ewing, Allan House, John Starks, what have you. The guy you don’t see there – the only guy you don’t see – it’s really shocking not to see him there, is Charles Oakley, who was kind of the Knicks’ most powerful enforcer during the ’90s, and he’s a great player. Why isn’t he there? He’s not there because he has been openly critical of Jim Dolan’s management of the team for years. Then in mid-2010, he got into an altercation. I mean there’s a lot of different ways to spin it, but he got into an altercation with MSG security and got kicked out of the park and banned from there. There was a series of accusations back and forth. There’s still all kinds of lawsuits going on, but yeah, he’s the one guy that’s kind of been ostracized and we’ve talked to some sources within the Madison Square Garden security community. Suppose there were orders issued to follow him to monitor him. So this isn’t just a typical situation of a franchise not getting along with a particular player. There has been a long, ugly legal battle. There were accusations that the man was digitally, audio- and physically monitored.
