Star Tribune
Timberwolves exec had hard drive stolen with ‘strategic NBA information’ on it copied, charge says
The head of the Minnesota Timberwolves’ analytics department had his work hard drive holding sensitive strategic team information stolen from his Target Center office and copied last month by a disgruntled underling, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.
Sachin Gupta got the hard drive back a little more than a week later but not before roughly 5,700 files were copied that held employment and player contracts, “as well as strategic NBA information.” Also on the hard drive were Gupta’s tax returns and other financial information, and his login and passwords from a password management app, the complaint read.
As head of the analytics department, Gupta would have sensitive and proprietary data in his possession that the Wolves would conceal from other teams, like information about players and decision-making, contracts or trade negotiations. The dissemination of information of that nature to other teams could be damaging to the on-court success of the Wolves in the highly competitive NBA.
The team fired Somak Sarkar, 33, after learning of the hard drive’s disappearance. He was arrested Monday and charged in Hennepin County District Court with felony third-degree burglary. Sarkar remains jailed in lieu of $40,000 bail ahead of a court appearance Thursday afternoon. Court records do not yet list an attorney for him.
Questioned by police after his arrest, Sarkar said that as a member of the coaching staff he had Gupta’s hard drive to “put some stuff on it” but forgot to return it, according to the complaint.
The team released a statement to the Star Tribune that it’s “aware of these allegations and will have no further comment as it is an ongoing legal matter.”
Sarkar has been in NBA front offices since he interned with the Houston Rockets in 2012 while on his way to graduating in 2013 from Rice University, according to the Texas school’s Department of Sports Management. He landed his first permanent job in NBA with the New Orleans Pelicans later that year as a strategic analyst, a Rice online profile noted.
His online professional profile said he then spent a year with the New York Knicks before joining the Wolves in August 2021.
Details of the suspected theft are spelled out in the complaint and a search warrant affidavit filed by police seeking court permission to look for evidence in Sarkar’s apartment near Target Center, including the discovery of any “monies to show profit of the sale of the stolen financial information and proprietary Timberwolves information.”
A search of the apartment turned up several hard drives, a computer, three tablets and multiple USB drives, the complaint read. Police then determined that one of the devices “contained all the information from [Gupta’s] hard drive.”
According to the court documents, Gupta met with police on March 4 and said Sarkar had worked in analytics for the coaches until last summer but was reassigned after “butting heads” with his immediate superior, incorrectly entering computer coding and missing meetings.
Gupta told Sarkar of the transfer over a beer. Gupta said he thought the news went down well, but that Sarkar became standoffish from then on.
On Feb. 2, Gupta left his hard drive on his desk connected to one of his two laptops. Late in the afternoon of Feb. 3, a Saturday, security video captured Sarkar entering Gupta’s office. He then exited, looked around, went back into the office and left a minute later.
Gupta came back to work on Feb. 5 and saw his hard drive was missing.
On Feb. 9, Sarkar was fired without explanation and escorted by security from the building.
An analysis of Sarkar’s work computer found that he used his device to open Gupta’s hard drive.
On Feb. 12, a friend of Sarkar’s who is also a Wolves employee got the hard drive and brought it to Gupta. A forensic analysis revealed that 1,200 files were copied on Feb. 11 in one instance and another 4,500 later that same day.
“Gupta is concerned that Sarkar is going to disseminate the proprietary Timberwolves information and his private information,” one of the court documents reads.
Gupta came to the Wolves in 2019 when then-President Gersson Rosas brought him aboard as executive vice president, the front office’s No. 2 position. Rosas was hired in May 2019.
After the team fired Rosas in September 2021, Gupta became the interim head of basketball operations for the 2021-22 season.
The team did not hire Gupta for that role permanently and instead chose Tim Connelly from Denver in May 2022. Gupta has remained with the Wolves as executive president since then, leading the analytics department under Connelly.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
