09 July 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
he former guy is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms.
Perhaps someone should remind him that they’re private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply.
Presumably Trump or his lawyers know this. The purpose of the lawsuit isn’t really to win it. It’s to give him more ammo for his incessant grifting – raising more money from followers who are eager to show their support for him, now by “sticking it” to Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
The irony here is that in many respects Facebook, Twitter, and Google are mini-governments. They’re monopolies with extraordinary power over both the economy and our personal lives. They should be brought under control – but by antitrust laws and government action, not by a failed president who has used them to sow lies and inspire sedition.
NBA Basketball players LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. (Getty)
t a concession stand at Staples Center in Los Angeles, Adelaide Avila was pingponging between pouring beers, wiping down counters and taking out the trash. Her Los Angeles Lakers were playing their hometown rival, the Clippers, but Avila was working too hard to follow the March 2019 game.When she filed taxes for her previous year’s labors at the arena and her second job driving for Uber, the 50-year-old Avila reported making $44,810. The federal government took a 14.1% cut.
On the court that night, the players were also hard at work. None more so than LeBron James. The Lakers star was suffering through a painful strained groin injury, but he still put up more points and played more minutes than any other player.
In his tax return, James reported making $124 million in 2018. He paid a federal income tax rate of 35.9%. Not surprisingly, it was more than double the rate paid by Avila.
The wealthiest person in the building that night, in all likelihood, was Steve Ballmer, owner of the Clippers. The evening was decidedly less arduous for the billionaire former CEO of Microsoft. He sat courtside, in a pink dress shirt and slacks, surrounded by friends. His legs were outstretched, his shoes almost touching the sideline.
Ballmer had reason to smile: His Clippers won. But even if they hadn’t, his ownership of the team was reaping him massive tax benefits.
For the prior year, Ballmer reported making $656 million. The dollar figure he paid in taxes was large, $78 million; but as a percentage of what he made, it was tiny. Records reviewed by ProPublica show his federal income tax rate was just 12%.
That’s a third of the rate James paid, even though Ballmer made five times as much as the superstar player. Ballmer’s rate was also lower than Avila’s — even though Ballmer’s income was almost 15,000 times greater than the concession worker’s.
Ballmer pays such a low rate, in part, because of a provision of the U.S. tax code. When someone buys a business, they’re often able to deduct almost the entire sale price against their income during the ensuing years. That allows them to pay less in taxes. The underlying logic is that the purchase price was composed of assets — buildings, equipment, patents and more — that degrade over time and should be counted as expenses.
But in few industries is that tax treatment more detached from economic reality than in professional sports. Teams’ most valuable assets, such as TV deals and player contracts, are virtually guaranteed to regenerate because sports franchises are essentially monopolies. There’s little risk that players will stop playing for Ballmer’s Clippers or that TV stations will stop airing their games. But Ballmer still gets to deduct the value of those assets over time, almost $2 billion in all, from his taxable income.
This allows Ballmer to perform a kind of financial magic trick. If he profits from the Clippers, he can — legally — inform the IRS that he is losing money, thus saving vast sums on his taxes. If the Clippers are unprofitable in a given year, he can tell the IRS he’s losing vastly more.
Glimpses of the Clippers’ real-world financial results show the business has often been profitable. Those include audited financials disclosed in a Bank of America report just before Ballmer bought the team, as well as NBA records that were leaked after he became owner.
But IRS records obtained by ProPublica show the Clippers have reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes in recent years. Not only does Ballmer not have to pay tax on any real-world Clippers profits, he can use the tax write-off to offset his other income.
Ballmer isn’t alone. ProPublica reviewed tax information for dozens of team owners across the four largest American pro sports leagues. Owners frequently report incomes for their teams that are millions below their real-world earnings, according to the tax records, previously leaked team financial records and interviews with experts.
They include Shahid Khan, an automotive tycoon who made use of at least $79 million in losses from a stake in the Jacksonville Jaguars even as his football team has consistently been projected to bring in millions a year. And Leonard Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer who owns the Minnesota Vikings with family members, has taken $66 million in losses from his minority stake in the team.
In a statement, Khan responded: “We’re a nation of laws. U.S. Congress passes them. In the case of tax laws, the IRS applies and enforces the regulations, which are absolute. We simply and fully comply with those very IRS regulations.” Wilf didn’t respond to questions.
Ballmer’s spokesperson declined to answer specific questions, but said “Steve has always paid the taxes he owes, and has publicly noted that he would personally be fine with paying more.”
These revelations are part of what ProPublica has unearthed in a trove of tax information for the wealthiest Americans. ProPublica has already revealed that billionaires are paying shockingly little to the government by avoiding the types of income that can be taxed.
The records also show how some of the richest people on the planet use their membership in the exclusive club of pro sports team owners to further lower their tax bills.
The records upend conventional wisdom about how taxation works in America. Billionaire owners are consistently paying lower tax rates than their millionaire players — and often lower even than the rates paid by the workers who staff their stadiums. The massive reductions on personal tax bills that owners glean from their teams come on top of the much-criticized subsidies the teams get from local governments for new stadiums and further deplete federal coffers that fund everything from the military to medical research to food stamps and other safety net programs.
The history of team ownership as a way to avoid taxes goes back almost a century. Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland Indians in the 1940s and later the Chicago White Sox, stated it plainly in his memoir: “Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes too?”
Veeck is credited with convincing the IRS to accept a tax maneuver even he described as a “gimmick.” Player salaries were already treated as a deductible business expense for a team. That was not controversial in the slightest.
But Veeck dreamed up an innovation, a way to get a second tax deduction for the same players: depreciation. The way he accomplished this was by separately buying the contracts before the old company was liquidated, instead of transferring them to the new company as had been done before. That meant that the contracts were treated as a separate asset. The value a new owner assigned to that asset when he bought the team could be used to offset taxes on team profits, as well as any other income he might have. (Defenders of the practice contend that it’s not double-dipping since the deductions are taken against two separate pools of money: the money used to purchase the team and the day-to-day operating budget.)
Team owners, Veeck wrote in his memoir, had won “a tax write-off that could have been figured out by a Texas oilman. It wasn’t figured out by a Texas oilman. It was figured out by a Chicago hustler. Me.”
Once the IRS accepted this premise, the natural next step — owners assigning as large a portion of the total team purchase price as possible to player contracts — was elevated into a sport of its own. Decades ago, Paul Beeston, who was president of the Toronto Blue Jays and president of Major League Baseball at various times, famously described the result: “Under generally accepted accounting principles, I could turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss and I could get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”
The depreciation of tangible assets, and their decay over time, is often intuitive. A machine in a factory and a fleet of cars have more obvious fair market values and life spans before business owners will have to pay to replace them. Take, for example, a newspaper business with a printing press that cost $10 million and will last for, say, 20 years. The idea of depreciation is that the newspaper owner could deduct a piece of that $10 million every year for the 20-year lifespan of the press.
But amortization, the term for depreciating nonphysical assets, was less straightforward. Sports teams are often mainly composed of these assets. Valuing and assigning a life span to a player contract or a TV deal was more subjective and thus vulnerable to aggressive tax maneuvers by team owners.
Several NBA teams claimed that more than 90% — in one case, 100% — of their value consisted of player contracts that could be written off on the owner’s taxes, according to league financials that emerged in an early 1970s congressional investigation.
By that time the IRS had begun a series of challenges of valuation methods by team owners, part of a larger fight across industries about how business owners should be allowed to write off so-called intangible assets. The tax agency insisted that companies should only be able to write off assets with a limited useful life.
In an effort to stop the endless litigation, Congress inaugurated the modern era of amortization by simplifying the rules in 1993: Under the new regime, the purchaser of a business would be allowed, over the span of 15 years, to write off more types of intangible assets. This might have been welcome news for the sports business. But Congress explicitly excluded the industry from the law.
Following lobbying by Major League Baseball, in 2004, sports teams were granted the right to use this deduction as part of a tax bill signed by President George W. Bush, himself a former part owner of the Texas Rangers. Now, team owners could write off the price they paid not just for player contracts, but also a range of other items such as TV and radio contracts and even goodwill, an amorphous accounting concept that represents the value of a business’ reputation. Altogether, those assets typically amount to 90% or more of the price paid for a team.
That means when billionaires buy teams, the law allows them to treat almost all of what they bought, including assets that don’t lose value, as deteriorating over time. A team’s franchise rights, which never expire, automatically get treated like a pharmaceutical company’s patent on a blockbuster drug, which has a finite life span. In reality, the right to operate a franchise in one of the major leagues has in the last few decades been a license to print money: In the past two decades, the average value of basketball, football, baseball and hockey teams has grown by more than 500%.
ProPublica uncovered the tax breaks used by team owners by dissecting reports sent to the IRS that capture the profit or loss of a business. Still, untangling the precise benefits can be difficult. For example, some owners hold their team stakes in companies that also had unrelated assets — a corporate nesting doll that makes it impossible to determine the losses a team produced. The examples mentioned in this article are instances in which it appears the owners did not intermingle assets and the team’s ownership structure is clear based on ProPublica’s analysis of the tax records, court documents, corporate registration data and news reports.
Amortization allows sports team owners to take nearly all of the team purchase price as a tax deduction. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say, for example, that you purchase a sports team for $2 billion.
Typically about 90% of that purchase price, or $1.8 billion, is amortizable, which means it’s treated like an asset that loses value over time — and can be expensed.
This means that under the tax code, over the next 15 years you can claim a $120 million expense for your sports team business each year.
Let’s say your sports team makes $50 million per year and you have other sources of income that add $150 million on top of that.
Normally, you’d pay almost 40% of your income in taxes.
However, with amortization, you can remove $120 million from your income, which means you don’t have to pay taxes on it.
Then, you only pay taxes on the rest. You save about $45 million in taxes each year — or $650 million over 15 years.
In some cases, owners can write off even more than 90% of the purchase price.
When Steve Ballmer offered to buy the Clippers in 2014 for a record sum, the team’s longtime owner, Donald Sterling, was taken aback.
“I’m curious about one thing,” Sterling said at a meeting later recounted by his lawyer.
“Of course, what is the question?” Ballmer responded.
Sterling proceeded: “You really have $2 billion?”
The size of the offer was impressive considering the context. In 1981, Sterling had paid $12.5 million for the club. In the three decades that followed, Sterling had become notorious for neglecting and mistreating the team. He didn’t provide a training facility for years, forcing the team to practice at the gym of a local junior college. He heckled his own players during games. After games, Sterling was said to parade friends through the locker room so they could gawk at the players’ bodies.
But even Sterling’s mismanagement couldn’t stop the Clippers’ rise in value. Players kept signing with the Clippers — drafted rookies because they typically have no other option if they want to play in the NBA and veterans because there are a finite number of teams to choose from.
TV deals also grew in value. The Clippers had little fan support, and they oscillated between being league bottom-dwellers and a middling franchise. But before Sterling sold the team, the Clippers were expected to sign a new local media deal worth two to three times more than their previous deal.
The beginning of the end of Sterling’s tenure came when he was recorded by his mistress telling her not to bring Black people to Clippers games. The NBA moved to force Sterling out. Ballmer swooped in, outbidding Oprah Winfrey and others. (ProPublica couldn’t reach Sterling for comment. His wife, Shelly, who co-owned the Clippers with him, defended their tenure in emails to ProPublica, saying they weren’t the only owners whose team didn’t own a practice facility and suggesting her husband did not heckle players. “I GUESS WHEN THERE IS NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT WHY NOT TRY TO WRITE SOME SCUM,” she wrote.)
Ballmer, one of the richest people in the world, wasn’t just motivated by his love for basketball. He expected the team to be profitable. “It’s not a cheap price, but when you’re used to looking at tech companies with huge risk, no earnings and huge multiples, this doesn’t look like the craziest thing I’ve ever acquired,” he said at the time. “There’s much less risk. There’s real earnings in this business.”
Two years later, as the league negotiated a new contract with the players union, Ballmer portrayed the team’s finances in a much different light. “I’m a new owner and I’ve heard this is the golden age of basketball economics. You should tell our finance people that,” he told a reporter in 2016. “We’re sitting there looking at red ink, and it’s real red ink. I know, it shows up on my tax returns.”
But losses on a tax return don’t necessarily mean losses, as large or at all, in the real world.
Ballmer was acquiring a team that had skyrocketed in value over the previous decade. And there was the benefit for his taxes: He was allowed to start treating the Clippers — including those player contracts and TV deals — as if they were losing value.
From 2014 to 2018, records show Ballmer reported a total of $700 million in losses from his ownership of the Clippers, almost certainly composed mainly of paper losses from amortization.
The evidence examined by ProPublica showed the Clippers have often been profitable, though many of the glimpses into the team’s finances are from before Ballmer took over. Leaked NBA records during Ballmer’s tenure showed the Clippers in the black as recently as 2017. Audited financials disclosed in the Bank of America report just before the sale showed the team netting $14 million and $18 million in the two years before Ballmer took over, with projected growth in the future. Tax records for the pre-Ballmer era examined by ProPublica showed the team consistently making millions in profits. Forbes has also estimated the team generates millions in annual profits.
Nevertheless, Ballmer reported staggering losses from the Clippers to the IRS. Those losses allowed him to reduce the taxes he owed on the billions he has reaped from Microsoft stock sales and dividends. Owning the Clippers cut his tax bill by about $140 million in just five years, according to a ProPublica analysis.
Unlike billionaire team owners, millionaire players are virtually guaranteed to pay a large share of their income in taxes.
The law favors people who are rich because they own things over people who are rich because they make a high income from their work. Wages — the main source of income for most people, including athletes — are taxed at the highest rates of all, topping out at a marginal rate of 37% plus an extra 3.8% for Medicare. The government takes a smaller share of money made from, say, selling a stock. That’s not to mention the benefits available to people who own businesses, such as the paper losses created by buying a sports team.
So while Ballmer’s tax rate for 2018 was 12% on his $656 million of income, Lakers star Anthony Davis paid 40% that year on $35 million of income. Golfer Tiger Woods made $22 million and paid 34%. Boxer Floyd Mayweather paid more than 37% on his $53 million income. Star Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander made $30 million and paid a 39% cut.
(In each instance in which ProPublica refers to “income” in this article, we are referring to adjusted gross income, which the IRS defines as earnings minus certain items like alimony or student loan interest payments. We calculated tax rates the way government agencies and many economists do, by including not just the Medicare and Social Security taxes automatically taken out of workers’ paychecks, but also the share employers are required to pay for those programs on behalf of their employees. The rationale for including the employer’s share as part of the employee’s tax burden is that employers pay less in wages because of these costs. These levies make up most of the tax burden for the typical worker, a low but still significant percentage for millionaire players, but a negligible share or nothing for billionaires like Ballmer who typically don’t take salaries and other forms of income these taxes apply to.)
In a few cases, star players have bought pieces of pro sports teams. But that doesn’t automatically get them the low rates enjoyed by the typical billionaire owner. Basketball great Michael Jordan, for instance, owns the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets and a tiny stake in the Miami Marlins baseball team. His share of the Hornets produced $3.6 million in tax losses in 2015, even though the team was estimated to be in the black that year. He still makes a large portion of his money from Nike though, which is taxed at a high rate. That year, for example, he paid 38% in federal taxes on $114 million in income. Jordan’s spokeswoman declined to answer specific questions.
Ballmer’s tax advantages reduce the revenue flowing to the federal government. At the same time, he has publicly bemoaned the perils of having a government that spends more than it takes in. He has founded a nonprofit, USA Facts, that provides data on government spending. “Nobody wants to sacrifice anything in the short term so that we don’t leave these huge debt and deficits to our children,” he told Fox Business three years ago. “That drives me crazy.”
Perhaps the savviest tax play for billionaires interested in pro sports is buying a football team. Financial analysts believe it’s exceedingly difficult to lose money running an NFL franchise. “I think the NFL is the only sport where each team is profitable and viable,” said mining tycoon Alan Kestenbaum, now a part owner of the Atlanta Falcons, in an interview with Bloomberg.
The NFL’s TV ratings dominance, easily surpassing the NBA and other major leagues, is at the center of the sport’s money machine. Each of the 32 teams — from the small-market Buffalo Bills to the behemoth Dallas Cowboys — takes an equal share of national revenue, mostly derived from broadcasting deals. In 2019 alone those deals generated $9.5 billion, divided into $296 million slices for each team. The league recently re-upped its contracts with the networks and added Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service in an 11-year, $105 billion deal. On the expense side of the ledger, the biggest line item, player salaries, is limited since the league enforces what’s known as a hard salary cap.
Those two sources of profitability drove the record $2.3 billion price of the last NFL team to change hands, the Carolina Panthers. But the sale triggered a dramatic swing in how the team’s finances were reported to the IRS, records show. The Panthers suddenly went from producing large profits to suffering major losses.
The Panthers were built into a thriving business by Jerry Richardson, a onetime NFL player turned fast food restaurant magnate, who was awarded the expansion franchise in the early 1990s. In addition to its share of the league’s national TV deals, the team quickly built up another major revenue source, selling out virtually every game to an enthusiastic local fan base in Charlotte. Success followed on the field. By 2016, led by MVP quarterback Cam Newton, the Panthers won the NFC Championship and made the Super Bowl.
With the amortization benefit from the early years of the team used up, the Panthers produced millions of profits every year, with margins growing annually in the five years through 2017, tax records of Richardson and several previous minority owners show. ProPublica estimated the team’s annual income based on the tax information of a complex web of team entities, as well as leaked financial statements published by Deadspin.
That year, after Richardson was at the center of a lurid racism and sexual harassment scandal, he announced he was putting the team on the auction block. Several billionaires put in bids.
The winning bidder was David Tepper, founder of the hedge fund Appaloosa Management. Tepper, who made his fortune trading distressed debt and once hired Ashlee Simpson to play his daughter’s bat mitzvah, is now the league’s richest owner.
The $2.3 billion Tepper paid would produce amortization expenses of around $140 million per year, according to the IRS’ general guidelines. That annual expense would wipe out any Panthers profits for tax purposes.
The team swung from a large taxable profit before its sale to a tax loss of about $115 million, according to a ProPublica analysis of IRS records, after Tepper’s purchase in 2018. There’s no evidence anything significant about the Panthers’ real-world revenue and expenses changed between 2017 and 2018. The only major difference is the team changed hands, and Tepper now gets a tax benefit through his new entity, Tepper Sports Holdings.
Tepper’s hedge fund is a massive producer of capital gains income — in the past decade, he has often reported more than $1 billion in annual income — so the tax losses produced by the Panthers are extremely valuable to him. A spokesman for Tepper didn’t respond to questions.
The same year Tepper bought the Panthers, the NHL’s newest hockey team, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, accomplished what only one expansion team had done before by making it to the league finals in its inaugural season. Since then, the Golden Knights have continued to win. Off the ice, they’ve been among the best in the NHL at motivating fans to spend money on team apparel, and the Golden Knights have consistently sold out their home games.
The team’s owner, William Foley, the chairman of insurance giant Fidelity National Financial, made it clear he wasn’t in the business of losing money. “We developed a conservative business plan,” Foley told a reporter in 2017, the first year the team played. “I didn’t want to write $20 million checks every year.” He likely didn’t have to. Forbes estimated millions in profit for the team from 2017 to 2019.
But for tax purposes, records show, the team produced losses of more than $57 million during those years. That was thanks in part to the team’s ability to write off the $500 million expansion fee that Foley paid to the NHL in 2016.
In a statement to ProPublica, Golden Knights Chief Legal Officer Peter Sadowski did not respond to questions about amortization. He did respond to a question about one of the team’s income streams, noting that the money from season ticket deposits was “used to pay rent, to employ hundreds of people, provide outstanding entertainment and create a source of pride for our community.”
The Golden Knights’ tax losses helped offset the money Foley made from his other ventures, saving him more than $12 million in taxes over two years, according to a ProPublica analysis.
The value of sports franchises, as noted, tends to rise inexorably — but teams sometimes lose money along the way. Internal NBA records obtained by ESPN in 2017 showed that the league’s clubs were averaging almost $18 million in net income that season. But nine of the 30 clubs were in the red.
Even when a team spends more than it takes in, an owner can still end up on top. The amortization benefit can turn a loss into an even larger loss, which can then be used to offset other income and save money on taxes.
For example, Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, was able to lower his taxable income by about $443 million from 2005 to 2018 because of his stake in the Cleveland Cavaliers, tax records show. In that same period, the team reached the pinnacle, winning its first-ever NBA championship in 2016.
In emails to ProPublica, Gilbert’s lawyer wrote that the team consistently loses money. “During the entire time after Mr. Gilbert’s purchase of the team, the Cavaliers has operated with an actual loss (negative cash flow/negative income) unrelated to any depreciation or amortization and there have been no funds to distribute to Mr. Gilbert or any other owner,” he wrote.
The tax write-off for amortization, Gilbert’s lawyer argued, is essential to all businesses, from restaurants to factories to sports franchises. Without it, he wrote, “there would be no capital investments made by owners and businesses would be taxed on revenue without properly taking into account all costs necessary to generate that revenue. That would be antithetical to capitalism and fatal to the United States’ economy.”
Gilbert’s lawyer added that the Cavaliers owner has paid “enormous” taxes for many years. He also wrote: “Your e-mail makes reference to other wage earners such as the players and their salaries. The facts are this: Mr. Gilbert is the only party referenced in your e-mail who has undertaken any risk. Mr. Gilbert has risked the purchase price paid for the Cavaliers, his subsequent capital contributions, the debt he has personally guaranteed and the players’ salaries which are guaranteed. ... To compare the guaranteed salaries of the Cavaliers’ players as an applicable measure of Mr. Gilbert’s tax rate is absurd.”
Advocates for team owners point out that when owners sell their teams, they have to pay back the taxes they avoided by using amortization. But even if owners ultimately repay the taxes they skipped, deferring payment of those taxes for years, sometimes decades, essentially amounts to an interest-free loan from taxpayers. An owner could reap huge gains by investing that money.
If owners die while holding their stake, as many do, the tax savings may never be repaid. And their heirs can generally restart the amortization cycle anew.
Bob Piccinini was a minority member of the group that purchased the Golden State Warriors in 2010. He made his fortune turning Modesto-based Save Mart Supermarkets into the largest family-owned grocery chain in California. Already a part owner of multiple baseball teams, he entered the basketball world not because he had a particularly keen interest in the sport, but to make money. “Sports franchises continue to go up in value,” Piccinini said at the time.
His tax information shows he bought more than 7% of the Warriors. From 2011 to 2014, he reported total losses of $16 million. Nearly a decade’s worth of tax data from other Warriors owners, also reviewed by ProPublica, showed many millions in losses — all of it during a period when the team rose to become historically dominant. Meanwhile, leaked financials obtained by ESPN from 2017 show the Warriors to be an extremely profitable business, netting $92 million in one season alone. Forbes estimates also put the team well in the black during that period. A Warriors spokesperson declined to answer a series of specific questions, instead providing a one-sentence statement: “Over the course of the last decade, we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into our team on the court, our overall operation and, of course, the construction and opening of a new, 100 percent privately financed arena in San Francisco.”
Piccinini died in 2015. The court records about the inheritance he left his children don’t specifically mention his stake in the team or whether his estate paid taxes following his death. But the tax code likely would have allowed his children never to repay the government for the paper losses their father enjoyed. It would also have permitted Piccinni’s heirs to begin claiming paper losses of their own.
In the years since, Piccinini’s son, Dominic, has been a courtside regular at Warriors games. An occasional actor in his 20s, Dominic has an Instagram profile that shows him high-fiving Stephen Curry and other players midgame and posing for photos with rappers including Drake and E-40. In 2019, he and a friend went viral when ESPN panned to them drinking from golden chalices.
In an interview, Dominic told ProPublica that he allowed his family’s lawyers to handle the tax details of his inheritance, which granted him and his siblings equal shares of their father’s stake in the Warriors.
“It’s just the darndest thing,” he said in a phone call from a vacation in Mexico. “I’m a lucky son of a bitch, there’s no way around it.”
Matthew Zadok Williams, in a selfie taken with his mother, Chris Ann, in 2005. (photo: Hahnah Williams)
n the afternoon of April 13th, around two o’clock, Hahnah Williams, a lawyer in Atlanta, received a call from her twelve-year-old niece, who told her to come to her mother’s house right away. Hahnah could hear her mom, Chris Ann Lewis, crying in the background. The phone rang again a few minutes later, as Hahnah was putting on her shoes; it was an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He said that Hahnah’s younger brother, Matthew Zadok Williams, a self-taught investor in his thirties who lived alone and went by his middle name, had died the day before in “an officer-involved shooting.” “I thought, How?” Hahnah recalled later. “He doesn’t leave the house!” Zadok preferred solitude and rarely went anywhere. When she arrived at her mother’s house, the agent was there. Hahnah asked him where the shooting happened, and he gave her the address. “He lives there!” she exclaimed. “Did they just come and hunt him?” she recalls thinking.
The DeKalb County Police Department had issued a statement about the shooting that morning, though it did not mention Zadok by name. The statement reported that a man “aggressively wielding a knife” had “lunged at officers with the knife causing one of them to discharge their firearm” and then had “fled into a vacant residence.” He had, according to the statement, come back out and lunged at officers with the knife, again “causing an officer to discharge his firearm,” and then gone “back into the residence.”
Hahnah did not stay long at her mother’s place. She and her mom got in the car and headed to Zadok’s house, a townhome-style duplex in a wooded subdivision near a highway, about fifteen minutes from Chris Ann’s house. On the way, Hahnah got another call, from an investigator with the DeKalb County medical examiner’s office. She put him on speakerphone, and he summarized the version of events he’d been given. The officers were responding to a 911 call, he told them. At one point, he said that “there wasn’t anything spectacular that happened” to Zadok.
“Sir, wait a minute, don’t be disrespectful,” Hahnah said. “Something spectacular did happen. My brother got killed.” She added, “He owns that apartment. He was in his own home when they killed him.”
“O.K.,” he said. “I apologize.”
Hahnah pressed him for details, but he couldn’t answer her questions, and he gave her the number for the homicide unit. Before the call ended, Chris Ann said, “I want you to know my son was a good person. Never been in trouble. He owned his home outright. Rehabbed it. The house next to him is abandoned. They probably went to the wrong door.” She went on, “My son is saved. I got a good son. He’s never been in trouble. Ever. He helped his sisters get through law school, medical school. He helped me—I was an R.N.—he helped me to retire.” She repeated, “He was a good son.”
The idea that Zadok would pull a knife on anyone made no sense to his family. He was the youngest child, and the only boy, in a family of six children. Zadok is an Old Testament name meaning righteous; his family also called him Pure of Heart, because he always seemed to assume the best in people. Hahnah couldn’t recall a single heated argument with him and told me that he’d never been in a fight, as far as she knew. Once, at Six Flags, when Zadok was a teen-ager, a security guard pulled him out of a line and frisked him as white boys his age filed past, she said. “We were so mad,” Hahnah told me. “But he said, ‘They do this randomly.’ He tried to convince us that it had nothing to do with race.”
Hahnah’s sisters include a nurse, a general contractor, a doctor, and a specialist in risk management, but Hahnah believed that Zadok was the smartest of all of them. He’d started a computer-repair business at thirteen. He drifted out of high school, eventually earning a G.E.D. at his mother’s insistence. He rarely bothered storing numbers in his phone, Hahnah said; he preferred to memorize them. He bought his house, in a complex called the Terraces, in a working-class corner of DeKalb County, for less than fifteen thousand dollars, after the 2008 financial collapse. The complex was not well maintained, but Zadok was proud of his place, which is where he spent basically all of his time—day-trading, listening to gospel music, reading about finance. “He was almost out of touch with reality, he was so focussed on the cyberworld,” Farah Bryant, his longtime girlfriend, told me. She and Zadok spoke four or five times a week for years, she said, even after breaking up, and she still imagined marrying him someday. He did well enough to buy another home, where one of his sisters has lived since being diagnosed with cancer a decade ago. For years, his sisters and mother would check in on him and bring him groceries when he asked. In 2018, he told his family that a gun was put to his head at a nearby convenience store; he stopped going to convenience stores. “His house was his sanctuary,” Hahnah told me. “His safe place. There was nothing we could do to make him leave. He was quarantined before we were all under quarantine.”
After the pandemic began, he spent even more time alone. But, on calls and in texts, he seemed like himself to his sisters and his mom. He talked about wanting to have kids one day, and about the most humane ways to deal with household pests. “Rodents and all beings should be treated equally,” he texted them in March. Later that month, Zadok invited Hahnah inside on one of her visits, which was unusual. He gave her advice on how to improve her law firm’s ranking in Internet searches, and asked her to recommend a plumber. She was careful not to wear out her welcome, she told me, hoping that he’d invite her in again on the next visit. On April 11th, she brought groceries, including some surprise fried chicken. “He smelled it and gave me the biggest smile,” she said. “And, for the first time in a long time, he hugged me.” She was vaccinated, but he was not; worried about infecting him, she pulled away. Later, she recalled that Zadok had been talking “a little slow” that morning. “I thought, Maybe he just woke up. Maybe I caught him off-guard.”
Late on the afternoon of April 13th, Hahnah and her mother joined other members of the family at the Terraces. Inside Zadok’s home, they saw blood on the floor and walls. They also noticed what looked like marks from a knife on the door handle. The condo attached to Zadok’s was being renovated by its owner, Jeffrey Dotson, who usually rented it out—it was unoccupied, and the family suspected that this was the vacant residence the police had mentioned in their initial statement, which informed early news reports of the incident. Dotson told me that, in early March, Zadok had called him to let him know about a leak in his place that could be damaging Dotson’s side, and offered to pay for any damages. “He was very proactive,” Dotson said. “A good neighbor.”
The family walked around the complex, asking neighbors what they had heard and seen. Among the people they spoke to was Jason Neal, who later told Channel 2 News in Atlanta what he’d told the Williams family, that he’d seen “a young man running from the police” who had “jumped on the rooftop, kicked in a window” and then jumped through it. Other neighbors told the Williams family that they’d seen a man with a bucket, but no knife. Zadok’s sisters had seen him with his bucket before, dealing with some kind of plumbing issue in the crawl space beneath the house. Neighbors also said that a long time passed before anyone helped Zadok. “When we interviewed witnesses,” Hahnah said, “they told us that E.M.S. did not enter the house until over an hour after the shooting.”
That evening, one of Zadok’s sisters posted a video on Instagram. The family was huddled around Chris Ann as she spoke. “My son was murdered last night by DeKalb County police,” she begins. She says that she has talked to witnesses, and calls it a case of mistaken identity. “My son happened to turn the corner with a bucket in his hand and the police started shooting at him and he ran,” she says. A state legislator named Renitta Shannon, who represents part of DeKalb County, reached out to Hahnah and offered to help.
The family also sent e-mails and made phone calls to news outlets, asking them to correct the narrative of Zadok’s story and to demand that DeKalb County release body-camera footage taken by the police who shot him. The next day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran its second story about the incident, this time including comments from Hahnah and from the family’s attorney, Mawuli Davis. Channel 2 sent an open-records request for the body-camera footage that evening, and the following day, the station received approximately three and a half hours of footage from cameras worn by the first two responding officers. The department was not obligated to release the footage, per the Georgia Open Records Act—a spokesperson told me that the department had done so in part to counter “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading eyewitness accounts” of the incident, specifically citing the family’s Instagram video and the second Journal-Constitution story.
The Williams family went to watch the footage at department headquarters about an hour after the footage was released to Channel 2, which then aired it on the news that evening. The person who called 911, a young Black woman, had told dispatchers about “a very suspicious man who’s been lurking around the woods around my house” and then had called back, twenty minutes later, saying that the man had a knife. The knife was visible in the footage: it had a long blue blade and a short handle. Zadok didn’t appear to respond verbally when the officer addressed him on his porch or as he descended his stairs, at the officer’s insistence, which seemed strange to his family. He’d then run, briefly, with the knife in his hand, in the direction of the retreating officer, who tripped and fell and then circled back toward the house—along with Zadok, who fell toward him. Zadok had clearly spooked the officer, but the family wasn’t convinced that he had meant to attack him. Zadok quickly retreated under his house, and spent the vast majority of the encounter on the defensive, behind a door, pleading with officers who did not believe that he was inside his own home.
Davis said that the family was grateful to the police for releasing the video, and that it “changes the narrative” they had pieced together about what had happened. “They acknowledge that what they saw was their brother, their loved one, having a mental-health crisis that they had never seen before,” he said. Channel 2 aired similar comments in a follow-up story. Davis told the station that he believed the officers “acted in self-preservation mode” when they encountered Zadok outside his home, but that they should have called in standoff negotiators once he had gone inside. In its segment, Channel 2 twice played a clip of the moment when Zadok appeared to run toward the officer, and included audio of one officer saying, “Please, sir. I’m begging you. You’re a Black man. I’m a Black man. You don’t have to die today. I don’t want you to die today.” The story ended with Hahnah thanking the department for releasing the footage.
The story did not address one of the family’s lingering questions: Why had the officers left Zadok inside after firing their weapons, without rendering aid, for nearly two hours, until medical personnel were allowed in? Davis had hired a pathologist named Jackson Gates, who had examined the victims of other police shootings, to make a preliminary determination about the cause of death. Later that week, the family organized a press conference so that Gates could share his findings, and the family and Renitta Shannon could call for justice and transparency. At the event, on April 20th, Gates said that he believed that prompt medical aid would likely have saved Zadok’s life. Zadok appeared to have died from “a slow hemorrhage,” he said, caused by a gunshot wound to his shoulder. The shot seemed to have been fired down on Zadok, as he knelt on the floor behind an ottoman.
Marc Morial, center, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League, talks with reporters outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, July 8, 2021. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Fort Bliss in Texas, which holds temporary housing for migrants, in June 2018. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
The contractor taking care of thousands of migrant children had no experience in child care, said the federal workers.
hildren housed in one of the Biden administration's largest shelters for unaccompanied migrant minors were being watched over by contractors with no Spanish-language skills or experience in child care who usually stood idly at the edge of crowded tents, according to two federal workers who have come forward to file a whistleblower complaint to Congress.
The contractor for the Department of Health and Human Services, Servpro, specializes in cleanup after water, fire and storm disasters. It shows no record of having handled a contract related to child welfare before it took on the care of nearly 5,000 children who were housed at the facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, in May.
By late June, Fort Bliss held fewer than 800 children, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. It had been the subject of repeated allegations of inadequate care for children.
A spokeswoman for Servpro Industries said that the contract was entered into by a franchise holder without the company's knowledge and that therefore Servpro did not have a comment on the specific allegations. Servpro has more than 1,700 franchisees.
"When we became aware of this issue, we immediately advised the franchise operator that these are not approved Servpro service offerings," said Kim Brooks, a spokeswoman for Servpro. "We have been informed by the franchise operator that it is no longer providing these services through the Servpro franchise."
Servpro Industries did not provide the name of the franchise when contacted, and the whistleblowers were not aware of which franchise held the contract, only that the contractor's workers wore Servpro uniforms with the motto "Like it never even happened."
Two federal workers detailed to Fort Bliss, Laurie Elkin and Justin Mulaire, filed the whistleblower complaint Wednesday to publicly share their experiences at the facility under Servpro's leadership from May to early June. Elkin and Mulaire are lawyers for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Chicago who were temporarily employed at Fort Bliss when the Biden administration called for volunteers across the federal government to help deal with the influx of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border.
"Contractor staff told Ms. Elkin and Mr. Mulaire that they had received no training prior to beginning work and had little guidance about what their role was," Elkin and Mulaire said in their whistleblower complaint, which was sent Wednesday to committees in the House and the Senate, as well as the inspector general for Health and Human Services.
Elkin and Mulaire are represented by the Government Accountability Project, which filed the complaint on their behalf. The whistleblowers' attorneys said that "the conditions they witnessed caused physical, mental and emotional harm affecting dozens of children" and that management at Fort Bliss ignored their concerns. The complaint does not allege illegal behavior, but rather gross mismanagement and a threat to public health and safety.
The Servpro supervisors were responsible for overseeing large tents, at the time filled with 1,000 to 1,500 children, according to Elkin and Mulaire, where "they did not initiate interaction with the children and generally simply stood quietly, passively watching the children."
They said many of the contractors from Servpro viewed the job "more as crowd control than youth care" and documented that they used loud music and, at one point, a bullhorn to wake children in the morning. Mulaire said the ratio of federal detailees to Servpro employees in the boys' tent he supervised was about 1 to 6 by the time he left in June.
The Servpro contractors are alleged to have told Elkin and Mulaire that none of the tent supervisors were to interact with the children "unless a child specifically approached them." But Elkin and Mulaire said that children in acute mental or medical distress were less likely to seek help and that, when they did, contractors questioned why the children needed the attention.
Elkin and Mulaire said that children's days were largely unstructured and that they passed the time "either sitting or lying in their beds or milling around with relatively few activities available to them."
Some of the federal detailees bought board games and balls with money from their own pockets to entertain the children, they said.
Immigration advocates have called for the Biden administration to end the use of emergency intake shelters like Fort Bliss and to use only facilities that operate under state licensing requirements for children, especially as the number of unaccompanied migrant children in the care of Health and Human Services has declined from over 20,000 to fewer than 15,000. So far, HHS, which has closed some emergency intake facilities, has not announced plans to close Fort Bliss.
Elkin and Mulaire said that it was impossible to supervise all children and that they grew particularly worried about children who might be in distress on bottom bunks that could not be seen.
Elkin said that she found three girls in bottom bunks who needed urgent medical or mental health care but that she was met with resistance when she tried to get them help. One girl was sleeping continuously and, when approached, told Elkin that she had a sore throat. According to Elkin, a contractor said the medical staff would not be able to do anything for her, but Elkin took the girl anyway.
Elkin said that another had a panic attack after learning her sister was in a coma and that Elkin was told to walk the girl around outside to calm her down. Elkin said that in the third case, she discovered a girl in a bottom bunk who was ghostly pale and revealed that she was having profuse vaginal bleeding. Elkin said that her supervisor questioned her decision to take the girl to see a doctor but that Elkin insisted and the girl was ultimately given medical treatment.
Mulaire and Elkin also alleged that clean bedding and clothes were not regularly provided.
Because of the dry, hot air in Fort Bliss, the tents were often filled with sand and dust, but even children who were kept there for more than two months were never given clean sheets, according to Mulaire and Elkin.
"The children also reported having insufficient clean underwear and socks, which in turn made them reluctant to exercise or to bathe because they knew they lacked clean clothes to change into," they said in the complaint. Elkin said some girls would plead for clean underwear.
Elkin and Mulaire said they had few places to raise the alarm over what they were seeing. They said they were told at orientation by U.S. Public Health Service workers not to make complaints about anything they witnessed for the first 10 days of their employment and only then to send complaints to a "suggestions" email address.
“We take our humanitarian mission and the well-being of children in our care seriously,” said an HHS spokesperson in a statement. “HHS has taken action to improve the conditions at Fort Bliss and at all Emergency Intake Sites. Children are receiving nutritionally appropriate meals and there are now 60 mental health professionals on site at Fort Bliss and counselors at all other emergency intake sites.”
The spokesperson did not comment on how a Servpro franchisee got the contract for Fort Bliss.
People pressure police on Thursday to hand over men who were arrested and the bodies of two men who were brought in by police after they were killed by police in the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (photo: Joseph Odelyn/AP)
eventeen suspects have been detained so far in the stunning assassination of Haiti's president, and Haitian authorities say two are believed to hold dual U.S.-Haitian citizenship and Colombia's government says at least six are former members of its army.
Léon Charles, chief of Haiti's National Police, said Thursday night that 15 of the detainees were from Colombia.
The police chief said eight more suspects were being sought and three others had been killed by police. Charles had earlier said seven were killed.
"We are going to bring them to justice," the police chief said, the 17 handcuffed suspects sitting on the floor during a news conference on developments following the brazen killing of President Jovenel Moïse at his home before dawn Wednesday.
Colombia's government said it had been asked about six of the suspects in Haiti, including two of those killed, and had determined they were retired members of its army. It didn't release their identities.
The head of the Colombian national police, Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia, said President Iván Duque had ordered the high command of Colombia's army and police to cooperate in the investigation.
"A team was formed with the best investigators ... they are going to send dates, flight times, financial information that is already being collected to be sent to Port-au-Prince," Vargas said.
Who are the two Americans in custody?
The U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports that Haitian Americans were in custody but could not confirm or comment.
The Haitian Americans were identified by Haitian officials as James Solages and Joseph Vincent. Solages, at age 35, is the youngest of the suspects and the oldest is 55, according to a document shared by Haiti's minister of elections, Mathias Pierre. He would not provide further information on those in custody.
Solages described himself as a "certified diplomatic agent," an advocate for children and budding politician on a website for a charity he started in 2019 in south Florida to assist people in the Haitian coastal town of Jacmel. On his bio page for the charity, Solages said he previously worked as a bodyguard at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti.
Canada's foreign relation department released a statement that did not refer to Solages by name but said one of the men detained for his alleged role in the killing had been "briefly employed as a reserve bodyguard" at its embassy by a private contractor. He gave no other details.
Calls to the charity and Solages' associates at the charity either did not go through or weren't answered.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's foreign ministry said Haitian police had arrested 11 armed suspects who tried to break into the Taiwanese embassy early Thursday. It gave no details of the suspects' identities or a reason for the break-in.
"As for whether the suspects were involved in the assassination of the President of Haiti, that will need to be investigated by the Haitian police," Foreign Affairs spokesperson Joanne Ou told The Associated Press in Taipei.
Police were alerted by embassy security guards while Taiwanese diplomats were working from home. The ministry said some doors and windows were broken but there was no other damage to the embassy.
Haiti is one of a handful of countries worldwide that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of the rival mainland Chinese government in Beijing.
In Port-au-Prince, witnesses said a crowd discovered two suspects hiding in bushes, and some people grabbed the men by their shirts and pants, pushed them and occasionally slapped them. An Associated Press journalist saw officers put the pair in the back of a pickup and drive away as the crowd ran after them to a police station.
"They killed the president! Give them to us! We're going to burn them," people chanted outside Thursday.
The crowd later set fire to several abandoned cars riddled with bullet holes that they believed belonged to the suspects. The cars didn't have license plates, and inside one was an empty box of bullets and some water.
Later, Charles urged people to stay calm and let his officers do their work. He cautioned that authorities needed evidence that was being destroyed, including the burned cars.
Doubts arise about the government's version of events
Officials have given out little information on the killing, other than to say the attack was carried out by "a highly trained and heavily armed group."
Not everyone was buying the government's description of the attack. When Haitian journalist Robenson Geffrard, who writes for a local newspaper and has a radio show, tweeted a report on comments by the police chief, he drew a flood of responses expressing skepticism. Many wondered how the sophisticated attackers described by police could penetrate Moïse's home, security detail and panic room and escape unharmed but then be caught without planning a successful getaway.
A Haitian judge involved in the investigation said Moïse was shot a dozen times and his office and bedroom were ransacked, according to the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste. It quoted Judge Carl Henry Destin as saying investigators found 5.56 and 7.62 mm cartridges between the gatehouse and inside the house.
Moïse's daughter, Jomarlie Jovenel, hid in her brother's bedroom during the attack, and a maid and another worker were tied up by the attackers, the judge said.
Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who assumed leadership of Haiti with the backing of police and the military, asked people to reopen businesses and go back to work as he ordered the reopening of the international airport.
Joseph decreed a two-week state of siege after the assassination, which stunned a nation already in crisis from some of the Western Hemisphere's worst poverty, widespread violence and political instability.
Haiti had grown increasingly unstable under Moïse, who had been ruling by decree for more than a year and faced violent protests as critics accused him of trying to amass more power while the opposition demanded he step down.
"Every one at home is sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed"
The U.N. Security Council met privately Thursday to discuss the situation in Haiti, and U.N. special envoy Helen La Lime said afterward that Haitian officials had asked for additional security assistance.
Public transportation and street vendors remained scarce Thursday, an unusual sight for the normally bustling streets of Port-au-Prince.
Marco Destin was walking to see his family since no buses, known as tap-taps, were available. He was carrying a loaf of bread for them because they had not left their house since the president's killing out of fear for their lives.
"Every one at home is sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed," he said. "If the head of state is not protected, I don't have any protection whatsoever."
Gunfire rang out intermittently across the city hours after the killing, a grim reminder of the growing power of gangs that displaced more than 14,700 people last month alone as they torched and ransacked homes in a fight over territory.
Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said gangs were a force to contend with and it isn't certain Haiti's security forces can enforce a state of siege.
"It's a really explosive situation," he said.
Dead mussels at the waterline in British Columbia. (photo: Christopher Harley)
British Columbia scientist says heat essentially cooked mussels: ‘The shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk’
ore than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures.
The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures in communities along the coast to 40C (104F) – shattering longstanding records and offering little respite for days.
The intense and unrelenting heat is believed to have killed as many as 500 people in the province of British Columbia and contributed to the hundreds of wildfires currently burning across the province.
But experts fear it also had a devastating impact on marine life.
Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, has calculated that more than a billion marine animals may have been killed by the unusual heat.
A walk along a Vancouver-area beach highlighted the magnitude of devastation brought on by the heatwave, he said.
“The shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk on it. But there were so many empty mussel shells lying everywhere that you just couldn’t avoid stepping on dead animals while walking around,” he said.
Harley was struck by the smell of rotting mussels, many of which were in effect cooked by the abnormally warm water. Snails, sea stars and clams were decaying in the shallow water. “It was an overpowering, visceral experience,” he said.
While the air around Vancouver hovered around the high 30s (about 100F), Harley and a student used infrared cameras to record temperatures above 50C (122F) along the rocky shore.
“It was so hot when I was out with a student that we collected data for a little bit and then retreated to the shade and ate frozen grapes,” said Harley. “But of course, the mussels, sea stars and clams don’t have that option.”
Mussels are hardy shellfish, tolerating temperatures into the high 30s. Barnacles are even sturdier, surviving the mid-40s (about 113F) for at least a few hours.
“But when the temperatures get above that, those are just unsurvivable conditions,” he said.
The mass death of shellfish would temporarily affect water quality because mussels and clams help filter the sea, Harley said, keeping it clear enough that sunlight reaches the eelgrass beds while also creating habitats for other species.
“A square meter of mussel bed could be home to several dozen or even one hundred species,” he said. The tightly bunched way mussels live also informed Harley’s calculation of the scope of the loss.
“You can fit thousands on to an area the size of a stove top. And there are hundreds of kilometres of rocky beach that are hospitable to mussels. Each time you scale up, the numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger. And that’s just mussels. A lot of sea life would have died.”
While mussels can regenerate over a period of two years, a number of starfish and clams live for decades, and they reproduce more slowly, so their recovery is probably going to take longer.
Harley has also received reports from colleagues of dead sea anemones, rock fish and oysters.
Experts have cautioned that the province needs to adapt to the reality that sudden and sustained heatwaves are likely to become more common as a result of climate change.
Another heatwave is expected to strike the western United States and south-western Canada in the coming week, highlighting the relentlessness of the dry summer heat.
“The nerdy ecologist part of me is excited to see what will happen in the coming years,” said Harley. “But most of the rest of me is kind of depressed by it. A lot of species are not going to be able to keep up with the pace of change. Ecosystems are going to change in ways that are really difficult to predict. We don’t know where the tipping points are.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
