Do you really think uncle Dennis is the kind of guy who is willing to part with \(500 for any purpose whatsoever if he can do a similar thing for \)4.99 online

Pablo didn’t find the document unprompted, he likely was tipped off by someone who worked for Aspiration where the employees considered it an open secret the deal was for cap circumvention

Uncle Dennis and Kawhi still had their names all over the papers, so not necessarily. But obviously that made it more noticeable.

I sincerely doubt that.

You think Torre just trolls through bankruptcy filings at random?

Obviously someone from the company pulled his coattail.

It wouldn’t matter what the company was called.

It’s not about the name necessarily at all.

After all, Ballmer (Polpat LLC) and Dennis Wong (DEA 88 Investments LP) created companies that did not reference their names or the clippers but any examination of the address and registered agent, officers etc would reveal that it was indeed controlled by Ballmer and Wong respectively.

So even if KL2 Aspire was named something innocuous, it would still list the relevant information to make the link to Kawhi.

Or if Kawhi didn’t pursue the last 7m in bankruptcy. Or if Ballmer picked a stable company instead of a fraud to help funnel money to Kawhi. Everything had to line up for this to get caught.

Uncle Dennis isn’t gonna have a lawyer taking a cut of his payday just to cover his tracks better

I bet they just wanted to manage it to look like all their other LLCs which aren’t all shady. Make it all look as normal as possible to anyone who can’t see the dollar value or the no work required contract.

A lot of otherwise unrelated shit had to come together for this to be revealed. 

Like the company going bankrupt in the first place. 

There’s like at least five major different things, that if any of them had occurred differently, nobody would be the wiser. 

This was never supposed to go public so it shouldn’t have mattered. Uncle Dennis never thought about this Tree Company going bankrupt.

The Fact we never would have heard of this if not for them going Bankrupt makes me really wonder how often shit like this is done? I’d bet my next paycheck that Mark Cuban had the same arrangement with Dirk.

With being a corporate attorney, is it fair to say that a lot of people end up getting busted due to these type of minor/obvious slip ups?

He wasnt listed as just a manager. Since the articles state the LLC is managed by all members, it discloses him as essentially the sole member. So it was set up with him as the member (aka owner) of the LLC.

Worse still, until they submitted their Statement of Information in June, none of this was known (although that means it was out of statute at the time).

To top it off, the LLC hasnt been paying its taxes and has been suspended by the franchise tax board.

Full of rookie mistakes. Lol.

That’s the funniest part to me. They should have named it Kawhi Leonard criminal enterprises

If they weren’t so stupid to file as a creditor owed fraudulent endorsement money, we wouldn’t know either

Saul Goodman would have really helped them out.

Pablo alludes to pointing out it being just one line on a bankruptcy filing and him seeing it is how the whole thing transpired. Its probably deeper than that, he was probably tipped off. But to give some credit. Had it not been named KL2 Aspire. Essentially Kawhi Leonard 2(his jersey number for the clippers) there’s no real thread to tie it directly to Kawhi. Could have literally pinned the whole thing on Dennis (Robertson, not Wong) and then Kawhi and Ballmer might have had slightly more credibility. I still dont understand how there hasn’t been more reports put out that Uncle Dennis did all this on his own. Just to fan the flames off of Ballmer and Kawhi.

Bro setting up an LLC takes 20-30 minutes and $80 in my state. You would have to be an idiot to not be able to do it yourself.

This is the biggest reason I want them punished. How sloppy. They’ve been annoying as shit to deal with through his entire tenure but this lazy crime? Yeah, I can’t have that.

No. you’re really believing pablo is there looking at all bankruptcy filings? someone pointed it to him and I believe that to be the trainer that espn reported about who did start with all these claims.

It’s important to remember that If Kawhi took a picture standing next to a tree with a shovel in one hand and a big smile and thumbs up and then marked it as HashtagAspiration once a year they would have probably gotten away with all of this. It’s a much more boring story if we’re arguing ‘what is the fair market value of a Kawhi sponsorship’ instead of just pointing to the fact that he literally did nothing to help the company ever.

For all the people who are saying Ballmer is too smart for this, or similar nonsense, the Aspiration + Kawhi side being dumb is all you need to connect the dots. It’s entirely possible the Ballmer/Clippers just trusted the Aspiration/Kawhi side to do this in a less stupid and obvious way.

Pls watch Pablo’s report in full. You’d know how he found out kawhi was being sponsored by aspiration. It wasn’t the name.

To your edit:

1. Aspiration intended Kawhi to perform. They wouldn’t want to be doing business with a random LLC Kawhi wasn’t responsible for the management.
2. Even if they did Kawhi has reason not to cede control of these sponsorship dollars. Again at best it’s just another layer and another person he has to pay a cut. At worst it opens himself up to get ripped off.

This was set up like his other deals because it was just another deal.

In Canada most shell companies like this just use a number instead of a name, so you’d have “123456 BC Ltd”. Is that not a thing in the US? When I heard about this story that was the first thing that came to mind, what dumbass decided to name it Kawhi’s initials and number lol.

You make an excellent point–but I think Pablo inadvertently undermined the dramatic nature of his “discovery” in the bankruptcy petition. In the podcast, which dropped on Sept. 3 Pablo was emphatic and clear that the investigation took seven (7) months. I believe him. The only problem with that is that Aspiration (Actually, CTN Holdings Inc.) filed chapter 11 on March 30. Thats. 5 months and 25 days – not 7 months. So that means the investigation began 5 weeks before Aspiration even filed for bankruptcy.

Pablo has been super meticulous about setting up the timelines of all the conduct in this saga–as he should because it makes the lines between the dots easier to see and connect. I don’t see any reason to assume he isn’t just as fastidious in communicating the length and breadth of his investigation. And If it began 5 weeks before he could even have seen the K2 Aspire entry on the creditors list attached to the bankruptcy petition, then I think we can safely assume he was working off of insider tips rather than scouring bankruptcy petitions for random information.

Possibly but the registered agent was Uncle Dennis so it’d just take one person opening that document.

And also someone might still have come forward to a reporter about the deals, which is likely what happened anyway

Its so amateur, it’s actually stunning. In Canada we have numbered companies that everyone uses as bare trustees, its very easy to use them to obscure beneficial ownership from the public in anything but a KYC or Tax related situation.

A bunch of ex-employees from Aspiration reached out to Pablo. Even if the name was different, the fact that it was Kawhii was well known inside Aspiration.

The Legalzoom thing caught my eye in the original Pablo Torre video too. Absolutely mental that someone with this much money and access to legal help would use that.

It is mind boggling that this was as brazen as it appears. Is it actually possible that Ballmer is telling the truth (that he had no knowledge of this and that’s what the investigation will find)?

It goes to show there are more shadier deals to undercover later. Kawhi isn’t going to be last NBA player to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He just got outed because he was beyond reckless with a shady ass uncle and company like Aspiration.

I’ve been looking at it as these guys are so fucking rich that buying/starting a company to solve everyday problems is normal so they just got complacent and added “KL2” so they wouldn’t forget what this generic-sounding company was actually being used for among their ledger of dozens if not hundreds of companies owned.

I wonder if the earlier news that Aspiration’s senior team was against the deal is indicative that, for some unknown and implausible reason, Kawhi and Steve didn’t get any attorneys to set up this deal. It reads like they used legal zoom or watched a TikTok about setting up an LLC. Like you said, so many ways to insulate this instead of what happened. 

I wouldn’t be so sure. I think the federal investigation into fraud would eventually uncover a lot of these “irregularities”. 

I think it would have still gotten figured out. There were enough angry people at Aspiration that knew what was going on and the dots were still easy enough to connect for the public to understand what is going on. It would give more plausible deniability by like 2% and maybe would have taken longer to come out, but it still would have.

LeBron’s PEDs in Miami were left for pickup by “LJ” lol

Not really. They still have the person running the LLC under a name that isn’t surprisingly as common as you would think. So finding uncle Dennis by going through LLC filings with that name isn’t that difficult.

They should’ve used an entity manager company, which would have added a layer too. But no, they had to be frugal.

No one wants us common folk to see how the sausage is made. Now look the other way as you pony up 20% more this season. Will it be better? No. I’d like to trust “fair play”, but NBA has zero integrity ( at least a slight more than NFL ).

What if it was actually a $48M LegalZoom ad?

Pablo Torre is a fucking bloodhound, I think he still would have sniffed this out.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Whatever it’s name, he’d have seen an LLC he’d never heard of mixed in with creditors who were all large well established brands. And as a journalist, doing a business search would’ve taken him literally under a minute. Just a “huh, what’s that” *google: CA business entity search. click link. copy paste name.* Just as a sanity check I did it myself and it took me under 15 seconds to find that document with Kawhi’s name on it, and it’s not like an obscure document. If you’re looking for the name of a person attached to a random LLC, that’s the first one you’d check.

https://www.veritaglobal.net/ctnholdings/document/2510607250330000000000001 - 4th creditor listed (tied for 3rd largest)

ETA: it looks like they also owed ~\(3 million to various law firms, including large, well-known, expensive firms like Sidley for \)900k and Gibson Dunn to the tune of $500k. Can’t wrap my head around using Legal Zoom to form the LLC.

Hm, as a corporate attorney, or investigative journalist, would you not carefully look at the top creditors of a high profile bankruptcy regardless of their names and their registry representatives? 

Unc Dennis writing notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy

usually we see multi millionaires like kawhi create layers/traunches where they’ll still get the money but its harder for snoopers to know whos behind the layers unless they spend multiple months going through all the paperwork

I wonder if it’s so blatantly and obviously named because there’s more than one and that helps them keep track lol

Maybe the lawyer would advise him to have another layer on the LLC, but that is just more risk and another person taking a cut. I don’t know if it’s really odd or not. But as far as the setting up the LLC, whether it’s legal zoom or $500 an hour lawyer there is no difference.

But here you go ‘corporate lawyer’ maybe the obvious name KL2 Aspire LLC and Kawhi’s personal name attached weren’t cover up because…. They didn’t do anything wrong.