Over the years, there have been many memorable pieces of journalism that started with one focus and radically evolved into something else. Some of those have been about pushback on the original story, with that then becoming a story in its own right.
The 1970s Watergate scandal is a notable example of that. There, several attempts to stop investigations into the scandal backfired, leading to a lot of “the cover-up is worse than the crime” discussion. (That includes an apparent “It’s not the crime that kills you, it’s the cover-up” from former U.S. president Richard Nixon himself, but the citations on it are dubious.) And that comes to mind with a sports media story this week.
Of course, Pablo Torre and Tim Rohan aren’t necessarily doing the exact same thing as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (Although, they do have the appropriate contrasting haircuts.) And the various past scandals around current St. John’s Red Storm men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino are far less significant to the United States as a whole than the ones around Nixon and his administration. But the way one of this week’s episodes of Meadowlark Media’s Pablo Torre Finds Out played out is certainly reminiscent of some of that, as it also came from beginning to dig in one area and finding something even more interesting in the backlash:
Many PTFO episodes go into detail on the process of a story as well as its eventual result. But even by those standards, this is unusual. But it makes sense; the real story here is the process of trying to get this story, and the pushback they got for it.
This all centers from Torre commissioning Rohan (a prominent journalist who’s done significant work for The New York Times, Sports Illustrated/The MMQB, Religion of Sports, and more) to dig into Pitino. And that digging was set to include not just the scandals around the coach (which include a sex scandal/failed extortion attempt in 2009, a failure to monitor assistants around a sex-for-pay for recruits scandal that led to penalties in 2017, including the eventual vacation of Louisville’s 2013 title, and a scandal around payments to players from adidas and an eventual FBI investigation that led to Pitino’s firing later in 2017), but also the people around him and their role in dealing with those scandals.
And while Rohan did find some interesting information on a few of those figures connected to Pitino, he wasn’t able to get any of them to talk. The main person he did get an on-the-record interview with was former FBI agent Carl Christiansen, a private investigator employed by Pitino who administered lie-detector tests to him. And that was mostly Christiansen saying Pitino appeared truthful in passing that test.
As Rohan talks about here, this had somewhat of the feelings of striking out on the story. But then, this January, he got a remarkable warning letter from the Clark Hill law firm that represents Pitino. That is screencapped below:
As Torre and Rohan discuss around that (starting around the 17-minute mark here), this is not normal. Both of them have done a lot of reporting on controversial stories and subjects (for Torre, including Pitino for Sports Illustrated in 2009 around the first scandal here, with that story also focusing on the people around the coach, and for Rohan, including Oscar Pistorius), and neither recalls having received a warning letter like this. (And it was both a physical and email letter to Rohan.)
Torre says “This feels extreme, this feels like somebody who is very conspicuously on guard against you finding out something.” And Rohan agrees, saying “Yeah, that was my reaction too. I hadn’t really done anything. I had made a couple phone calls.” Torre then says “And this feels, I mean, just to put a blunt point on this, it seems like the point of this letter is to intimidate you and me into not continuing with this episode.” Rohan says “Yeah, I think the point was to scare us.”
But it’s where this episode goes afterwards that gets really wild. They then discuss how this was getting “weird,” with Rohan saying “This is where it gets weird, and it’s actually going to get even weirder.” He relays that the day before he received this letter, he got a phone call from a Massachusetts number from someone who didn’t identify themselves and was “talking in circles” for 20 or 30 seconds.
Rohan hung up then, then received two calls from the number after 10 p.m. the next day, which he did not answer. He called back the following day and got a response of “I’m busy right now, I’ll call you back in two minutes,” still with no identification, and with no follow-up call until two days later. That came on a Sunday morning when he was sleeping, and he didn’t answer. He then called back later that day and got a voicemail box for John Moynihan. The number then called back, and Rohan asked “Who is this?”, and got hung up on. He then tried to call back, asked “Is this John?”, and got hung up on.
That sent Rohan and Torre down a whole rabbit hole. They found a page for a John Moynihan on Clark Hill’s website (where he’s listed as a “special advisor”). They also found Moynihan’s 2018 testimony before the House Oversight Committee on an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, which can be seen in this clip starting around 1:28:47. There, Moynihan describes himself as a former DEA agent and an “expert in investigation,” who claims he is “apolitical” and “we follow facts, that is all. None of this is our opinion.”
Rohan identifies the voice there as the one he heard on the phone. And he and Torre are also able to find Clark Hill releases and video of panels on Moynihan’s work representing Pitino, including with Steve Stapleton, the lawyer who sent Rohan, the letter.
There’s a lot of further strangeness that ensues in this saga. That includes Rohan trying to call Moynihan again and getting hung up on. And then, at the 35-minute mark, they dive into Moynihan’s work with Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent turned conspiracy theory blogger who made a OANN appearance in 2019 that got tweeted about by then-president Donald Trump. Rohan and Torre then reach out to Clark Hill (as the law firm had expressed a request for in their letter), and get an extremely limited response from Stapleton, albeit one that did offer to pass on a list of questions to Pitino.
Rohan and Torre send those questions off to Stapleton, and get no response. Rohan also texts Moynihan to try and arrange an interview, outlining some of his questions. Moynihan texts back and confirms that is him, but gives a “Leave Britney alone!” response, and a “It wasn’t my fault calling you, it was my phone!”
Rohan then adds that Moynihan follows that with “The carrier has opened an investigation into that, and stated to me that they were contacting the FCC to review.” That leads to Torre saying “Thank god the FCC is getting involved! Tim, it’s just phenomenal b*******.”
There isn’t necessarily a full “gotcha” moment here. While the letter from Clark Hill is certainly unusual, it’s far from illegal. And the same can probably be said for the calls-and-hangups from the person presumed to be Moynihan (there’s a point at which that could rise to harassment, but it’s probably not here). And there’s no specific evidence of Pitino having anything to do with Moynihan’s calls to Rohan (although, the Clark Hill letter does indicate they sent this as a result of “concerns recently expressed to our client”). So this probably isn’t going to be a major problem for him.
But this is still an interesting episode, and one well worth publishing. And through the pushback from Clark Hill and the figure presumed to be Moynihan, it illustrated the actual subject Rohan set out to explore. That would be the curious group of people around Pitino who have protected and continue to protect him.
And it’s fascinating that this pushback wound up illuminating that story, especially considering that almost no one else around it was willing to talk. That makes for the second notable sports Streisand Effect this week. And while this story wound up taking a lot of twists and turns along the way, it fits the Douglas Adams Dirk Gently quote of “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
The Torre and Rohan effort here may ultimately feel more like Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency than All The President’s Men. (Albeit with far less Samuel Taylor Coleridge.) But their holistic detective work led to some interesting outcomes. And if nothing else, it’s remarkable to see how a former DEA agent who’s investigated the Clinton Foundation and is now a “special advisor” for a notable law firm is the one repeatedly calling a journalist investigating Rick Pitino, quickly hanging up, and refusing to identify himself. And that certainly adds to the central thesis of both Torre’s 2009 SI story and this current PTFO episode on how interesting it is to see the remarkable cast of characters that have lined up to defend Pitino.
Update: As Torre noted on Twitter, Barstool’s Big Cat recently relayed to Pitino a story of the years of threatening texts he’s gotten from someone defending Pitino from an untraceable number, which certainly adds to this mystery:
Sooooo Rick Pitino is on the new @PardonMyTake and what he says in response to @BarstoolBigCat and @PFTCommenter's question at the 1:37:37 mark here may be of interest to anyone who's watched our episode above https://t.co/Ut9HvVZ1Nd
— ‘Miserable’ Pablo Torre 🕳️ (@PabloTorre) March 11, 2024
[Pablo Torre Finds Out on YouTube]
