ProPublica
· 2 min

The Dominican baseball machine signs children at 11 — and a fixer showed how the system protects valuable players

ProPublica’s investigation into Dominican baseball is excellent and unexpectedly revealing. Major League Baseball formally prohibits international signings before age 16, yet teams routinely make informal multimillion-dollar commitments to prospects as young as 11. Poor families then borrow against promised future signing bonuses, leaving them vulnerable to trainers, lenders and middlemen if the deal collapses. The Dominican Republic produces more MLB players than anywhere outside the US, but this pre-signing economy is largely unregulated. A companion investigation shows the power surrounding valuable prospects. In 2020, Pirates prospect Oneil Cruz crashed into a motorcycle, killing three people. ProPublica obtained court records, bank receipts and interviews showing that a fixer, Santo Caraballo, helped arrange roughly $66,000 in payments to the three victims’ families in exchange for withdrawing civil and criminal claims. Dominican law gives victims considerable influence over whether such prosecutions proceed, so the case disappeared and Cruz’s MLB career continued. Caraballo subsequently became an influential baseball operator. MLB’s Dominican talent pipeline functions less like a normal youth-sports system than a lightly regulated financial market built around children whose future earning potential can be traded years before they are legally signable.

ProPublica
· 2 min

Twenty-five years later, the FBI’s handling of possible Saudi links to 9/11 looks increasingly difficult to explain

ProPublica has reconstructed what happened to evidence seized from Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi man who provided extraordinarily useful assistance to the first two 9/11 hijackers who arrived in California. Bayoumi helped Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar find an apartment, co-signed their lease, helped establish a bank account, temporarily provided their deposit and introduced them to a network of people in San Diego. He always maintained that he encountered them by chance after visiting the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. ### What investigators were given After 9/11, British police arrested him at the FBI’s request and seized computers, documents and more than 80 videotapes. A British terrorism investigator now tells ProPublica that US agents gave his team surprisingly little background information during interrogation. More strangely, the FBI’s San Diego investigators were later asked to review only five of the dozens of tapes. One seized video showed Bayoumi extensively filming the US Capitol; Saudi lawyers say it was simply tourist footage. ### Evidence that emerged later Evidence accumulated later. Operation Encore, the FBI team that revisited Saudi connections, found witnesses saying Saudi cleric Fahad al-Thumairy helped arrange the hijackers' movements before their supposedly accidental meeting with Bayoumi. Phone records connected Bayoumi around that period to Thumairy, other Saudi religious officials and Anwar al-Aulaqi. Most strikingly, FBI memoranda written in 2017 concluded that Bayoumi had been receiving money as a co-optee — essentially a part-time asset — of Saudi intelligence from the late 1990s through September 11. The investigators who had spent years examining him did not see those memos until they were declassified years later. ### What remains…

ProPublica
· 1 min

A USPS audit found small but consequential ballot-handling failures just as Trump wants the agency to police mail-voter eligibility

The reassuring number is that USPS processed nearly 99% of tracked primary ballots “on time.” The audit’s details are less reassuring. At 22 of 73 delivery units inspected, election-mail training materials were missing. Management at 10 of 82 facilities did not understand correct postmark procedures. Clerks at five of nine processing facilities sometimes used incorrect dates; in Pennsylvania, 56 ballots received the wrong Election Day postmark. Another 108 ballots were accidentally mixed with ordinary mail and required an emergency transfer on election morning. Normally these would be operational problems to fix. They matter more because the Supreme Court is considering whether USPS can implement Trump’s executive order requiring states to provide lists of eligible mail voters and the Postal Service itself to decide whether ballots should be sent. USPS officials and election administrators have warned that the new role has not been adequately tested. An institution that performs ordinary ballot delivery very well may still be a poor place to suddenly add a politically sensitive voter-eligibility gate only weeks before the midterms.