Inside Madison Square Garden's Surveillance Machine

I've spent years covering national security,

but I've never encountered people

taking such elaborate steps

to avoid being outed as a source,

as I did on reporting this story.

This included warnings about being tailed,

and insistence to meet outside

during what was one of the coldest winters on record

in New York, and even a brush pass,

like you see in the spy movies

where agents pretend to walk past each other

and plant information.

But first, let's start at the beginning.

This is James Dolan.

He's the 70-year-old billionaire owner

of the Knicks, the Rangers, Madison Square Garden,

Radio City Music Hall, the Sphere in Las Vegas,

and lots of other venues.

He's also the owner of an increasingly sophisticated

surveillance machine.

Reports of the Garden

using facial recognition date back to 2018.

But a more recent lawsuit by a former member

of the MSG Security team lifted the veil,

and so we decided to dig deeper.

Bobby Silverman, my co-author on this story, and I,

spoke with seven current and former employees

of the security team at MSG

and reviewed confidential internal reports

and signal group chat messages.

We discovered that Dolan's security team

obsessively tracked a trans woman over a two-year period,

monitoring her movements down to the second.

We learned that an NYPD officer's photo

was added to a facial recognition database

and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolan's venues.

You don't even have to be in a venue to be watched.

Dolan's Head of Security, John Eversole,

had his team cosplay as cops,

patrolling the neighborhood to spy on protesters.

In a 2025 lawsuit,

former MSG staffer, Donnie Ingrasselino,

alleged that Eversole instructed his deputies

to surveil a trans woman,

and eventually she was banned.

There's a game that coincided with Pride Night in 2022.

The woman and her friend attended.

Eversole's threat management group

prepared an 18-page report, reviewed by WIRED,

that showed how they tracked her movements

throughout the venue, second by second.

MSG Entertainment declined to comment

specifically on our reporting,

but said in the statement that, quote,

This story is built on false, misleading,

and unverified allegations, including claims

drawn by lawsuits filed by a rapacious litigators.

We categorically reject such reckless reporting

and are actively evaluating

our legal options against 'WIRED.'

All of this goes way beyond the venues

in New York or Las Vegas.

It has implications for you

even if you've never stepped foot

in Madison Square Garden.

What happened in MSG isn't an outlier, it's a model.

Read our full story at WIRED.com.