My colleagues and I had been digging for days. We’d heard a rumor that a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin named Umar Kremlev had attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding this past May in the Bahamas. But to confirm that, we needed visual proof. 

First, we scoured everything the Trumps had released from the event, held on a pair of private islands. On social media and in the pages of tabloids such as Page Six and Hello! magazine, official photos from the weekend showed an intimate chapel ceremony alongside lavish beach parties. Several photos depicted guests, including Jared Kushner and Eric Trump, and we scanned them all for signs of Kremlev. Still, nothing had turned up yet.

We then turned to Kremlev’s social media profiles on the off chance that he’d posted about the wedding. Incredibly, on Telegram, Kremlev had posted videos over the same weekend as Trump Jr.’s wedding that appeared to be from someplace tropical. In one, a single detail caught our attention: As Kremlev speaks in Russian to the camera, the frame gives a partial view of an outdoor patio setting. It wasn’t palm trees or crystal water we noticed, but the wicker furniture.

The chair and its affixed cushion in Kremlev’s post matched what we’d seen in photos of the private islands elsewhere online, such as the promotional image below:

But of course, we couldn’t hang such a big claim — that this Russian oligarch had attended the president’s son’s intimate wedding weekend — on a wicker chair analysis. The Trump family appeared to be curating the wedding’s visual footprint, and not much seemed to exist outside of its control. 

So when my colleagues Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and I finally found a photo that confirmed what we’d been looking for, we were floored. The proof had been hiding in an Instagram gallery posted months earlier by a swimsuit model and friend of the bride, nestled among glamour shots and lifestyle photos.

The sunset group shot on a white sand beach shows wedding guests, barefoot and smiling against a backdrop of palms. One guest throws up a shaka. Front and center is the president’s eldest son and his bride, Bettina Trump, surrounded by close friends and family.

But in the back row, just behind the newlyweds, the top half of a man’s shaved head is visible.

We recognized him instantly: Kremlev.

That photo was at the center of our story this week, in which we revealed that Kremlev secretly bankrolled much of Trump Jr.’s wedding weekend, paying to rent out a private island, among other big-ticket items, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the events. The photo also showed two others associated with Kremlev, part of a larger group of Russians whose presence puzzled some attendees. That made their absence from all other official wedding photos all the more noteworthy — especially for a gathering of only 50 or so guests.

The story spread quickly. Within hours of publication, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev, asking for communications between the two and records of “all purchases made for your wedding by foreign nationals.” (Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment on the investigation.) It also prompted Bettina Trump to post a joint statement with Trump Jr. on her Instagram, which included even more photos from the wedding weekend.

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesperson said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with.” In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship,” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

Other than the photo we’ve shared, the images from that weekend remain tightly curated and don’t seem to tell the full story. So we thought we’d share a few examples with the added context from our findings. Sometimes, what — or, in this case, who — isn’t pictured is just as important as what is.

The Setting

The weekend festivities were spread across two ultra-exclusive private islands in the Exumas, a chain of storybook Caribbean destinations with white sand beaches and brilliant turquoise water. Islands there have been owned by the likes of Johnny Depp, David Copperfield and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault. People arrived by helicopter and seaplanes to infinity pools and oceanfront villas. 

The island where Trump Jr. and his bride exchanged vows on Friday was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Casino Royale.” (Kremlev was not present for the Friday ceremony, which involved an even smaller group.) 

On a second nearby island, about 10 minutes by boat from where the ceremony took place, a reception party was held. This island can rent for around $100,000 per night, and Kremlev paid for multiple nights. 

The Caribbean-Themed Party

On the second night, more guests arrived for a party on the same island where the ceremony took place. The evening was Caribbean themed, with a beachside DJ and a performance by a Junkanoo band. On Instagram, Bettina Trump described the night as “an unforgettable night of pure joy, music, sunset, and dancing barefoot in the sand, surrounded by nothing but love in paradise…It was everything we dreamed of and more… pure magic.”

Among the guests was Kremlev, arriving just days after accompanying Putin in China as part of a Russian delegation, according to Chinese state media. (Kremlev’s press office said that he was not part of Putin’s “official delegation” in China.) Kremlev’s ties to Putin and the Russian security services prompted the Ukrainian government to impose sanctions on him personally. 

In their joint statement on Instagram, the couple said that Kremlev paid for the parties on both the second and third night of their wedding weekend, but they drew a distinction between the ceremony itself and the rest of the events. 

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful,” the couple wrote.

The First Dance

On Sunday, the newlyweds shared their first dance to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Photos published in Hello! magazine showed the couple on the dance floor underneath disco balls strung up among palm trees. They embraced as guests watched. Bettina Trump wore her wedding dress. The night was nautical themed, complete with a seafood boat buffet, an illusionist and scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor outfits.

The wedding payments came from a Dubai entity affiliated with the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that Kremlev heads. The IBA has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. Kremlev picked up the tab for the festivities on Saturday and Sunday.

Kremlev’s press office described him as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. It said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity.

The Fireworks

At the Sunday reception, Trump Jr. and his new wife stood on the beach, gazing out as a barge launched a spectacular fireworks display over the ocean. It was an extravagant cap off the wedding weekend. 

Kremlev picked up the tab for the fireworks display. The company that put it on typically charges around $70,000 for such shows.

There are still lingering questions we didn’t get to the bottom of. Among the most pressing: Why did a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin pay for much of the president’s son’s wedding? What is the nature of Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev, and, importantly, how might it change over time? Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles, put it this way:

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something.”

The post “Our Dear Friend Umar”: How We Uncovered That a Russian Oligarch Bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding appeared first on ProPublica.

A federal judge has denied efforts to remove oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, saying the agency continues to show racial disparities in traffic arrests of Latinos — and that there is not enough evidence that efforts to improve would stick without legal monitoring.

In his 72-page ruling issued Sept. 10, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow stressed Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s role in the department’s racial profiling since the start of the case more than a decade ago, including fighting court-ordered reforms and stymieing investigations. Sheridan was the No. 2 under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio when the county was found out of compliance with federal law.

“Then Chief Deputy, now Sheriff, Sheridan in particular was found to have abused his authority over MCSO’s internal affairs process by obstructing and manipulating misconduct investigations and disciplinary proceedings — including those involving himself — to shield deputies and Command Staff from accountability and undermine the enforcement of remedies designed to address the constitutional violations against the Plaintiff class,” the judge wrote in an opinion that mentions Sheridan 30 times.

The department declined to comment on Snow’s statements about Sheridan. But the sheriff previously told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he disagreed with Snow. “I was very truthful. To this day, I think he got that wrong about me,” Sheridan said.

In his ruling, Snow said it may no longer be necessary for the court to track some areas originally identified for oversight in the 2013 decision, recognizing the “burdens” that go into monitoring certain elements. 

County leaders have repeatedly cited costs as they’ve called for an end of court oversight. Maricopa County filed the motion in December, with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office later joining, arguing the violations were no longer occurring.

The yearslong federal monitorship of Arizona’s largest sheriff’s office dates back to a 2007 class action racial profiling lawsuit that found the department under Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos in the state’s most populous county. Today, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, there are an estimated 1.5 million Latino or Hispanic people living in Maricopa County — all of whose rights are protected under the lawsuit.

In 2013, Snow ordered the department to document all traffic stops to detect any patterns of racial bias and to employ additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct. Snow also appointed a monitor to oversee compliance with the settlement.

In the 13 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct. In denying the recent motion, Snow cited data showing that sheriff’s deputies in Maricopa County continue to search and arrest Latino drivers at a higher rate than white drivers, echoing the racial disparities that first led to court oversight of the department.

“Those disparities remain,” Snow added.

A key part of the judge’s analysis results from traffic reports collected by the sheriff’s office. An analysis of those reports on behalf of the plaintiffs by a professor of computer science from the University of California, Berkeley approximates that Hispanic motorists are 40% more likely to be arrested than white motorists, are stopped 30% longer than white motorists and are 2.5 times more likely to be searched than white motorists. 

The responsibility is on the defendants to explain the stark disparities for Latino drivers, Snow said. “They have failed to do so.” To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in full compliance with the reforms continuously for three years.

An investigation by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found that despite the monitor’s annual reviews showing ongoing racial disparities in traffic stops, Sheridan and county leaders continued to press for an end to court oversight. 

Arpaio’s wide-ranging, illegal traffic sweeps prompted the lawsuit, known originally as Melendres v. Arpaio, named for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in such a sweep.

Under Arpaio, Maricopa County became an early testing ground for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which lets local police enforce federal immigration laws. Many Arizonans say abuses from that time, including profiling of Latino motorists, foreshadowed what’s playing out now under the Trump administration’s expanded use of 287(g) and its mass deportation system.

The arrests of hundreds of American citizens by immigration authorities since President Donald Trump returned to the White House have prompted widespread accusations of racial profiling. In response, the Department of Homeland Security told ProPublica that agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

The decade-plus of legal oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, criminal justice experts have said, offers insight into the difficulties of reforming law enforcement agencies charged with endemic racial bias.

Sheridan, a Republican, was found in civil contempt in 2016 for denying knowledge of Snow’s court order to stop making illegal immigration arrests. Sheridan has said he was always truthful. He inherited the settlement when he took office in January 2025. 

A 2025 evaluation by the monitor found the department complied with more than 90% of the requirements but fell short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.

In trying to end federal oversight, Sheridan and county supervisors argued that racially biased Arpaio-era policies were no longer written department policy and there were few complaints of misconduct by deputies against Hispanic drivers.

“MCSO has reformed its policies, improved its workforce, and implemented mechanisms to assure that racial profiling never occurs. This litigation has been a success, and the time has come to allow MCSO to stand on its own two feet, freed of oversight,” the county’s original motion said.

Since joining the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported Snow’s federal oversight and the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, an attorney with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division informed the court in January that the department supported ending oversight.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Kate Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Debbie Lesko, both Republicans, as well as a spokesperson with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said they were disappointed by the judge’s ruling. Steve Gallardo, the county’s lone Democrat on the five-member board, has opposed ending oversight, advocating for continued progress toward eliminating racial bias in policing.

“The court has maintained an unelected and unaccountable federal monitor over MCSO – creating bureaucracy and regulatory burdens that have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That ‘oversight’ comes at the cost of public safety, as the county must pay the monitor and his staff by foregoing other critical services,” said a joint statement from McGee and Lesko. 

Following complaints by Sheridan and Republican county supervisors that oversight costs topped $200 million, the court ordered an audit of the sheriff’s office spending. Court findings, shared in 2025, showed that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said. 

Officials with the sheriff’s office, however, welcomed parts of the judge’s latest ruling.

“We believe MCSO has implemented durable remedies for violations that occurred 19 years and three administrations ago,” Sgt. Joaquin Enriquez said. “We are encouraged that the Court has provided a framework on eliminating portions of the Order that are no longer necessary and focusing compliance efforts on the remaining issues to be addressed.” 

Speaking to a Phoenix-area radio station, Sheridan said he saw positive elements of the judge’s order but wondered whether his office could ever satisfy all parties to the lawsuit.  

“We at the sheriff’s office feel we’re in compliance with all the” court’s orders, Sheridan told KTAR News. “But the court-appointed monitor does not believe so. It’s a matter of us making a pitch to the court directly, not through the monitor.” 

Notably, the judge’s ruling said, there was no evidence that the department would continue to remedy the violations should oversight to ensure Latinos’ constitutional rights end. 

“The record does not support a finding that, absent federal monitoring, Defendants are unlikely to resume the conduct that necessitated the Court’s injunctive Orders,” the ruling stated. 

Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated community advisory board tasked with helping the sheriff’s office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the problems at the department went beyond one specific leader, to multiple systems that have allowed biased policing long-term. To change that, Piña said, you need a broader overhaul. “You can paint the house, but if the foundation is broken you will have the same problem,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which originally filed the lawsuit on behalf of citizens and legal residents caught in Arpaio’s sweeps, celebrated the current ruling. 

“Any other decision would have had a devastating impact on Maricopa County’s Latino residents,” Christine Wee, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, said in a statement. “The Court’s decision recognizes that any current and future misconduct committed by MCSO will not be tolerated. Simply put, MCSO is not ready for the court-ordered reforms to end.”

The post Judge Denies Efforts to End Oversight of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as Racial Profiling of Latinos Persists appeared first on ProPublica.

Four Democratic Tennessee state lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of Children’s Services demanding answers about safety and oversight in the state’s juvenile justice facilities.

The letter cites a recent WPLN and ProPublica investigation that found that juvenile justice facilities run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews repeatedly failed to report abuse of children and other serious incidents to the state as required. The reporting involved interviews with dozens of former staff and youth, along with a review of emergency call logs, company records and state documents. Crews and his company Wayne Halfway House run all three of the state’s highest-security youth prisons. 

“The allegations that serious physical and sexual abuse, dangerous restraints, injuries, and other critical incidents have gone unreported by WHH demand an urgent, transparent, and independently verifiable response from the Department of Children’s Services,” lawmakers wrote. 

After WPLN and ProPublica sent a copy of the letter to the company, a spokesperson said that Wayne Halfway House “continues to meet or exceed performance standards set by Tennessee,” citing state audits. The spokesperson also said that Wayne Halfway House has helped more than 200 youth earn a high school diploma or equivalent in the last three years.

In emailed statements to WPLN and ProPublica about the previous reporting, the company said it follows state policy and law and “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state. It described former employees who spoke with us as “untrustworthy sources” with a “clear bias” against the company and called their allegations “substantially flawed.”

Lawmakers are asking for answers to several questions raised by this investigation, including what steps the department is taking to address the allegations, how much money the state spends to place youth in Wayne Halfway House facilities, and who is being considered to operate new juvenile facilities the department is building. 

“We also request an opportunity to meet with Department leadership to discuss these issues, review the Department’s response, and identify the legislative and administrative actions necessary to ensure that no child’s safety depends on abuse first becoming a news story,” lawmakers wrote.

In response to the news organizations’ initial investigation, DCS said it is looking into incidents that were uncovered by the reporting. DCS did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.

Lawmakers noted that the latest investigation joins a “long and deeply troubling record of reports” on juvenile justice facilities across the state. They referenced previous reporting from WPLN and ProPublica that found a county-run East Tennessee juvenile detention center was locking kids in solitary confinement in violation of state law. The department said it would take steps to address the findings from the 2023 investigation, and the superintendent of the facility, Richard Bean, later stepped down. 

State Sen. Heidi Campbell, who signed onto the letter, also pushed for independent oversight of juvenile justice facilities in 2024, after WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting from East Tennessee. Campbell and others working on that bill said a lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House asked them to exempt privately run facilities from oversight. The oversight bill eventually failed. A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House told the news organizations at the time that the company was concerned about giving regulatory power to an outside agency “without more extensive consideration.”

Lawmakers are also worried about the state’s increased spending on juvenile justice, especially as Tennessee plans to spend more than $400 million to build more facilities. The cost to hold 31 youth at a Wayne Halfway House facility for a year is roughly the same amount it would take the state to expand grocery benefits for 700,000 school-aged children during the summer, lawmakers wrote. 

“Given the amount of money Tennessee is currently spending, and plans to invest, in juvenile justice and residential facilities, we have serious concerns about repeated findings and allegations of lack of oversight, transparency, and accountability in these facilities,” lawmakers wrote.

The post Tennessee Lawmakers Demand Answers on Safety in State Youth Prisons appeared first on ProPublica.

Landmark legislation designed to alert consumers to where their drugs were made is headed for a full Senate vote, but safety experts say the transparency bill has been stripped of two of its most critical provisions.

The Clear Labels Act was introduced earlier this year by Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., after lawmakers and drug safety experts called for more transparency in the industry. Last year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that the U.S. kept importing generic drugs from foreign factories after inspectors had identified quality and safety lapses at the sites, including leaks, mold and contaminated water.

Medications made at these facilities were linked to thousands of reported adverse reactions in patients.

The bill aims to allow doctors and patients to see on the label exactly where a medication was made — details that had largely been withheld until now, even from Congress. Current generic drug labels often include only the location of the packager or distributor, which can be thousands of miles away from the actual manufacturer. 

One provision made the law particularly strong, experts said: The label was supposed to include a unique code that the Food and Drug Administration uses to identify factories. That code would have made it easier for researchers and the public to track the regulatory histories of specific facilities. 

The requirements also were supposed to take effect as early as a year after the bill’s passage.

Senators have now struck both of those provisions. People familiar with the deliberations said lawmakers worried the requirements would raise drug prices and weaken national security by revealing the precise locations where lifesaving medications are made. 

The unique identifier requirement has been removed from the bill, and the timeline for companies to come into compliance was extended to five years.

“It’s just a clear watering down of the original bill,” said retired Army Col. Vic Suarez, a former medical supply-chain commander who has been leading a push for more domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing. 

He and others also questioned why drug companies need multiple years to comply.

“Five years after it passes might as well be a lifetime,” said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University who has researched the economic pressures that lead to poor-quality generic drugs. “Why is it that the supply chain, the medical distributors and the retailers don’t want to make sure that they supply the highest-quality product?”

In a joint press release, Scott and Gillibrand praised the bill’s progress in the Senate, calling it a “massive win for consumer safety and transparency,” but did not address the changes.

A representative from Gillibrand’s office said the five-year delay is meant to give the FDA time for rulemaking, which is a complicated, often yearslong process used to introduce new regulations. The delay would also give manufacturers time to come into compliance and redesign their labels, the representative said.

But Peter Baker, a former FDA inspector whose work involved the very companies impacted by the bill, said that amount of time is unnecessary. 

“If they wanted to do it in one year, they could,” Baker said. “I would love to hear their justification on why they need five years to develop some rules and guidance on transparency. … I mean, it’s a simple label change.”

The new version of the legislation also removes the key requirement to include a unique facility identification number on labels, called a DUNS number, which would have allowed the public to more easily trace a generic drug and its active ingredients to the factories where they were made. In some cases, that identifier could also be used to find FDA inspection reports that describe contamination and other safety breakdowns on factory floors.

ProPublica used that ID number to collect data for Rx Inspector, a first-of-its-kind tool that allows consumers and doctors to look up where more than 40,000 generic drugs are made. Pharmacists and patients are already using the tool to learn more about the drugs they take and prescribe.

Under the bill’s updated language, drug labels will only be required to include factory addresses, which can be inconsistent and hard to trace to a manufacturing facility. A single address in India, for example, can house multiple factories, each producing its own drugs, or each with a slight variation on the same address. 

ProPublica reporters ran into this issue when collecting data for the Rx Inspector tool. In 69% of prescription drug labels, reporters found a generic drug manufacturer’s DUNS number and were able to directly connect it to a specific facility. However, when only a manufacturer’s address was available, linking a drug to a particular facility became much harder, requiring a complicated process of automated address verification, geolocation and extensive manual review.

Experts also worried about certain language in the legislation that could allow manufacturers to avoid identifying where their factories are at all. Representatives for the bill’s sponsors have said that manufacturers are required to identify the factory where drugs were made, but the legislation only mentions a “place of business.” Drugmakers could potentially list the address for their headquarters or a subsidiary location in the United States rather than a factory overseas.

“If, in fact, ‘place of business’ can be interpreted as the location of the importer or the headquarters or something like that, it would be no different than what we have today,” said Ohio State University professor John Gray, who testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, led by Scott and Gillibrand.

“Then we’ll be right back to where we are,” Gray said. “It’ll say ‘Manufactured for So-and-So in New York City,’ but it’s actually made somewhere else around the world.”

People familiar with negotiations over the bill’s language said they are confident that manufacturers won’t have a loophole. The changes to the bill were primarily made as a compromise between committee offices and stakeholders, they said, and the FDA will have final say in what counts as an acceptable address.

The Association for Accessible Medicines, the generic drug lobbying group, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the association previously spoke out against the bill to ProPublica, saying the additional requirements would cause “significant costs in exchange for limited return.”

The lobbying group spent over $1 million between January and July on healthcare and generics-related bills, including the Clear Labels Act, according to its public filings. 

The trade group for brand-name manufacturers did not respond to a request for comment. Previously, a spokesperson for the brand-name trade group said the industry would “welcome conversations about how to strengthen the biopharmaceutical supply chain.” 

The bill faced pushback from some lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H, raised the national security concerns, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-K.Y., said he worried about creating an additional hurdle to drug production.

Ultimately, the revised bill passed the committee in July, with only Paul dissenting. The full Senate is set to take up the measure; a date has not yet been scheduled.

Congress will work with the FDA to make sure the law is properly interpreted and enforced, according to those familiar with the negotiations.

Baker said the burden of ensuring compliance will fall to already-overworked inspectors, who will be forced to determine whether manufacturers are skirting the address requirement. It would be easier to require the unique identifier, he said, because inspectors could more easily verify the information.

“The more flexibility they allow, the more complex it is to enforce it,” Baker said.

Baker also pushed back against concerns about a potential national security threat. He said data about where U.S. drugs come from is already well known, so including factory information on labels wouldn’t pose a significant risk.

“It’s a public health concern over a national security concern,” he said. “I would say that those risks outweigh the national security concerns.”

The post “A Clear Watering Down”: Drug Transparency Bill Stripped of Critical Provisions Ahead of Senate Vote appeared first on ProPublica.

If you have seen the headlines of the major investigation we recently published, “The Dominican Baseball Factory,” you may have wondered: Why is ProPublica, with its serious-sounding mission of accountability and its focus on abuses of power, reporting on baseball?

The answer would be: Exactly.

Baseball fans have long marveled at how the Dominican Republic, a tiny island nation with a population akin to Ohio, has produced so many brilliant players — roughly 10% of the major league. Major League Baseball and the owners of its 30 teams have regularly harvested bumper crops of sluggers to build their rosters and their fanbase, including most recently the Toronto Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr., whose playing contracts total more than $1.6 billion.  

But as with many such tales of extraordinary success, the origin story is much darker. 

When we hired reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts from The Washington Post as our first reporter dedicated to sports, he arrived with an idea: He’d long heard that the Dominican Republic system that had churned out so many stars was deeply problematic. Garcia-Roberts wanted to dig into that world, not just to explain how it operated but to identify the individuals who were taking advantage of the young players and those who were allowing it to happen. What if he was afforded the time to track a promising young player — a potential superstar — as he was plucked from obscurity by a major league team?

Even prepped, Garcia-Roberts was surprised by what he found: For generations, poor parents in the Dominican Republic have shunted their children into an unforgiving juggernaut of baseball academies praying for a chance at a life-altering signing bonus from an MLB team. Since the bonus could not be delivered until age 16, teams had begun locking up talent younger and younger with verbal IOUs. As for the kids who don’t make the cut, well, they paid with their childhoods, and sometimes with their health.

Garcia-Roberts also detailed the rapacious industry that had sprung up around these young players and their parents: Trainers and moneylenders, he found, were siphoning away those signing bonuses with predatory, high-interest loans and other, often questionable, claims before they even arrived.

Significantly, Garcia-Roberts found, MLB itself has long known about the often brutal world surrounding its youngest prospects. The players union has as well; Dominican players, led by former Boston Red Sox star David “Big Papi” Ortiz, have argued against efforts to establish an international draft — a move that would end early bonuses, cutting off a revenue stream for moneylenders. Ortiz told players, according to an audio message, that an international draft would be “trouble” for people in the Dominican Republic. In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz told Garcia-Roberts that his opposition to the proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.” 

There’s big money in sports, and with it lots of reasons to explore how it is being wielded and who is paying the cost. And that is why ProPublica is diving in.

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a slice of society untouched by the Big Money tentacles of the sports industry — and the lack of accountability that often goes along with them. Got a gleaming new stadium in town? Your tax dollars likely paid for much or all of it, despite its billionaire owners (while you may not be able to afford a ticket — unless it’s to a Mets game). Got a kid in youth sports? You may have experienced the boggling cost of travel teams or noted that private equity is buying up leagues and tournaments. Watch sports on TV? The ads for online gambling can seem as ubiquitous as the score, luring legions into a new scourge of addiction. And the Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion! With a B, amid, of course, a scandal about how the previous owner financed his purchase.

All of that big money is ramping up just as the landscape of sports journalism has contracted along with the larger media industry.

What ProPublica brings to sports is the time, the skill set and the resources to go beyond the games and the individual stories. Our approach to investigative reporting required Garcia-Roberts to get inside the system, to find out how it works and who is being harmed, and then reveal who is responsible and who is preventing the problems from being fixed. 

Without the expectation to cover games or daily sports news, reporters like Garcia-Roberts won’t be hamstrung by what one of my colleagues called “the conundrum of access.” You dig out the unsightly bits and suddenly your sources dry up and with them your scoops. And we haven’t covered a topic so long that we have become blind to its flaws. 

This isn’t ProPublica’s first dive into sports investigations. In 2021, reporters Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Ellis Simani were scrutinizing a trove of federal tax data and noticed that the billionaire owners of the nation’s sports teams were taking fat write-offs on team assets, from media deals to player contracts. 

In 2015, former ProPublica reporter David Epstein wrote about how one of the most powerful track coaches in the world was accused of experimenting with testosterone and pressuring athletes to use prescription medications they didn’t need to gain a performance benefit. The story touched off an investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that eventually led to the coach’s four-year ban. And most recently, Molly Hensley-Clancy, in partnership with The Washington Post, published an investigation that found a youth sports giant failed to put in place promised reforms to prevent child abuse. 

You can expect to see more of ProPublica’s reporting on sports in coming months, and like the box scores, they will be spelling out who is winning and who is losing. That’ll just likely mean something different to us. If you’d like to read those stories, we’d love to send our Big Story newsletter right to your inbox. In the meantime, if you have a story tip for a terrific sports investigation, or just something sports-related you think we should know, we’d love to hear it. Please get in touch with reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts or contact ProPublica via any of these secure methods.

The post Why ProPublica Is Leaning Into Sports Investigations appeared first on ProPublica.

Two Oregon lawmakers want to end an unusual exemption in the state’s records law that has kept the public from learning how hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money is spent on subsidized housing — and the effort has already landed key industry support.

Rep. Pam Marsh, chair of Oregon’s House Committee on Housing and Homelessness, told ProPublica that she plans to introduce legislation next year to eliminate a law that shields key details of state spending on low-income housing.

The southern Oregon Democrat said she didn’t realize the documents were being kept secret until reading about it in a ProPublica story. She said previous leaders of her committee told her they were also unaware.

“I think this is an issue that will have very broad interest,” Marsh said.

State Sen. Khanh Pham, a Portland Democrat and chair of the Senate Committee on Housing and Development, said she also wants the Legislature to tackle the issue in its next session.

Meanwhile, a lobbying group for low-income housing developers, lenders and related businesses, Housing Oregon, said it strongly supports repealing the secrecy provision; the organization has asked the state to disclose more about projects that it funds in the meantime.

“Oregon’s affordable housing providers share the public’s interest in ensuring that public investments in housing are used effectively, responsibly, and with visibility,” said Kevin Cronin, a spokesperson for the group. “The questions raised in your recent ProPublica article regarding development costs deserve serious attention.”

Cronin said Oregon can increase transparency around development costs “while still protecting genuinely proprietary or competitively sensitive information.”

“More consistent reporting of costs and outcomes will help policymakers, providers, researchers, and the public understand where the system is working and where it needs improvement,” Cronin said.

ProPublica highlighted Oregon’s secrecy around low-income housing in August. Since 2021, our story noted, Oregon has given developers an unprecedented $1.4 billion, and the cost of developing each low-income apartment has nearly doubled, to $540,000. Dozens of projects are lined up for another $850 million in future state funding, and costs are expected to continue rising.

“We are spending, as you said, a lot of money on the development of affordable housing,” Marsh said. “We really need to understand what it is that we’re funding, how much it costs, why it costs that much, and be able to justify the investments that we’re making.”

In other states, researchers and journalists have used the financial records from subsidized housing projects to investigate their spiraling costs and the drivers behind the growing price tag.

Marsh said after reading the ProPublica story that she “pretty much immediately” looked up the provision in Oregon public records law that officials cite for keeping cost details secret. She said financial documents that show where a project’s money is coming from and what it’s going to should be public and easily accessed. She said she would like to see them posted online as part of the public materials that Oregon’s Housing Stability Council receives for each project before awarding subsidies.

Pham, in a written statement, said: “It’s imperative that Oregonians can trust that our state government is investing in affordable housing as cost-effectively as possible. I appreciated ProPublica’s reporting on Oregon’s inadequate public records law that hinders our ability to monitor how affordable housing funds are being spent, and I’m hopeful legislators can address this next year.”

Oregon’s Sunshine Committee, which reviews public records exemptions and recommends ones that could be rolled back, is also examining the exemption for housing financials as a result of ProPublica’s coverage, co-chair Charlie Fisher said.

It’s not clear where opposition to repeal efforts, if any, might arise. Officials in Washington and California, where the details of state spending on subsidized housing are available to the public, have said it hasn’t interfered with low-income housing efforts.

Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state housing agency that persuaded lawmakers to create the records exemption in 1997, cited the law in redacting major sections of developers’ cost reports that ProPublica requested in May.

The agency’s current executive director, Andrea Bell, told ProPublica in July that she is committed to transparency but that the agency is following the law as it stands today. 

Asked to comment this week about whether the agency would support efforts to change the law, a spokesperson said by email that state agencies don’t take positions on bills. “OHCS appreciates the opportunity to review the legislation” that’s introduced in 2027, the spokesperson wrote.

The post Oregon Lawmakers Seek to Open Up Affordable Housing Records Following ProPublica’s Reporting appeared first on ProPublica.

This week, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s plans to impose new rules for mail-in voting for the midterm elections in November. 

In a March executive order, President Donald Trump had instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create rules for election officials sending mail-in ballots to voters. If a state didn’t comply with the new rules, the Postal Service wouldn’t deliver the ballots to voters. State officials said it would have been impossible to comply in time, and two federal judges blocked the rule for the November elections. Lawyers for the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

In a brief, unsigned order on Monday, the court’s majority denied the administration’s request, writing that the “Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge.” Justice Samuel Alito wrote an eight-page dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, saying he would have allowed the rules to go into effect. The court has not yet decided whether the rules can move forward after the November election.

Trump criticized the Supreme Court’s order in a Truth Social post on Tuesday, calling it “a big loss for Republicans, and America itself.”

The result of the Supreme Court order is that nothing has changed for states. 

“State and local election administrators all across the country will continue to do what they always do, which is run safe, secure and transparent elections,” said Barbara Smith Warner, a senior adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “Everyone can and should be sure that they can vote in this election.”

We’ve been reporting for months on the Trump administration’s efforts to issue new regulations on mail-in voting, gather state voter data and investigate voter eligibility ahead of the November elections. We spoke with experts on mail-in voting to answer practical questions about voting by mail.

Why is Trump trying to restrict mail-in voting?

Mail-in voting has become more common over the decades. Roughly a third of Americans cast their ballots through the mail nowadays, according to the Brookings Institute. Trump himself voted by mail twice this year. But mail-in voting varies dramatically from state to state. While more than 95% of voters cast their ballots by mail in Oregon and Washington state, which have all-mail elections, less than 3% of voters vote by mail in West Virginia and Tennessee.

Trump has attacked mail-in voting for years, calling it “cheating” and “corrupt.” And as Trump has tried to exert more federal control over elections, he’s also sought to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting and voter eligibility. The president has claimed, without evidence, that voting by noncitizens is rampant. He’s pushed Congress to create stricter voter identification requirements, and with legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, he set out to regulate mail-in voting through an executive order.

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement that the president wants “commonsense exceptions” for Americans to vote by mail because of an illness, a disability, travel or service in the military. And she said Trump’s use of mail-in ballots to participate in Florida elections while living in the White House “is a nonstory.” But “universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud,” she added.

Studies have consistently found voter fraud is exceedingly rare. 

What did the USPS rule say?

Trump’s order instructed the Postal Service to set criteria for mail-in ballots. The USPS finalized the rule in August. If it went into effect, the Postal Service wouldn’t mail ballots for states that failed to comply. 

The USPS rule set design standards that required envelopes for mail-in ballots to include the official election mail logo and a unique bar code. States were required to upload lists of their eligible voters’ names and mailing addresses to a portal that’s still being built. (On Sept. 1, the Postal Service said the portal would be available soon.) The bar codes on the envelopes needed to match the voter information in the lists states uploaded to the portal. If the ballot envelope failed to fit the criteria, USPS would reject and return the mail to election officials.

In August, an anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, calling the Postal Service’s new system untested and error-prone. The employee described the process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

According to a September audit by the agency’s Office of Inspector General, some Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections. (In a response included with the findings of the audit, USPS wrote that “overall ballot mail performance is strong,” while acknowledging “we can always reinforce and amplify our internal processes and procedures.”) As ProPublica’s Jen Fifield reported, top USPS officials expressed concerns in meetings about how the new rules could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters. 

The rule change would’ve affected the people who rely on mail-in voting the most: older people, people with certain disabilities, and people who live in remote or rural areas, said Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the school’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, in an interview before the Supreme Court order. On Sept. 3, a bipartisan group of 99 current and former state and local election officials said in a court brief that it would have been impossible for states to comply with the rules ahead of the midterms.

The Trump administration said in its filing to the Supreme Court that the Postal Service rule “imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements” on mail-in ballots.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment. In a previous statement, a spokesperson said the agency had spent months developing its system, in a manner consistent with federal court orders. The spokesperson added that the agency’s goal is to ensure “that Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably.” In response to concerns raised by the whistleblower, Postmaster General David Steiner said in a statement that the agency “takes these concerns seriously” but added that “our standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised.”

In a concurring opinion with this week’s decision blocking the new mail-in ballot rules, Justice Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged that state and local election officials didn’t have enough time to implement the Postal Service changes before the November midterms. But Kavanaugh added that the rules may fall within the Postal Service’s authority, not ruling out that they could be implemented for future elections. 

Can I vote by mail?

State laws vary on who can vote by mail, and when. Your eligibility depends on the law in your state.

Every state offers some version of voting by mail, but your state may require you to have a reason to vote absentee, such as an illness, a disability or travel out of state. 

Check the rules for mail-in voting in your state. Take note of whether your state requires you to request a mail-in ballot ahead of the election and what the deadlines are for those requests, as well as when ballots must be returned in order to count. Before you request a mail-in ballot, make sure you’re registered to vote and the local election office has your address.

Eight states and the District of Columbia proactively mail ballots to every registered voter. In 29 states, voters can request a mail-in ballot without providing a reason. The other 13 states require voters to provide an eligible excuse when they ask for an absentee ballot.

How do I make sure my mail-in ballot counts?

We asked experts what voters should know if they plan to vote by mail. Keep in mind that the rules for mail-in voting depend on where you live.  

Read the directions carefully, Smith Warner said. Make sure you fill out the ballot completely and don’t leave any stray marks.

Sign the ballot with your typical signature. Use the same signature you have on other government documents, such as your driver’s license, experts say. That signature is printed on your license, and you can pull it out to refresh your memory.

Don’t miss the deadline to turn in your ballot. Deadlines for turning in absentee ballots vary by state. The U.S. Postal Service recommends voters mail their completed ballot at least a week before their state’s deadline to ensure it arrives in time. 

The Postal Service’s routes may have changed, so delivery of your mail-in ballot may take longer, said Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at the Election Center. “So, make sure you get your ballot back as early as possible,” she said.

Consider dropping off your ballot at a local election office. Election experts we spoke to recommend voters return their completed ballots to a ballot drop box or their local election office. Drop boxes are often found at city halls, libraries and schools. Check with your local election office to find locations near you.

Track your ballot. State and local election officials often have online portals where you can check to see whether your ballot has been received, approved or rejected. 

What if I change my mind and prefer to vote in person?

It’s not unusual for people to vote at the polls after requesting a mail-in ballot, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Washington that works with election officials and conducts research to build trust in the voting process. States have systems in place to prevent people from voting twice.

Some states allow voters to bring completed mail-in ballots to polling places, but check with your local election office before relying on that method. If you decide you want to vote in person instead, experts recommend you bring your mail ballot and envelope so the poll workers can cancel or spoil it (mark it or rip it up).

We also asked experts what to do if a voter has already sent in their mail-in ballot but wants to make changes. Experts said to avoid this if possible. Depending on where you live, if the mail-in ballot hasn’t yet been accepted and cast by election officials, voters may be able to change their mind and vote in person, Patrick said.

“As long as it hasn’t gotten back to the elections office and it hasn’t been accepted,” she said, “then the voter can usually still be provided another ballot.”

The post What to Know About Mail-In Voting for the 2026 Midterms appeared first on ProPublica.

Samantha Ramos stood at the front of her second grade classroom, a small mic clipped to her lanyard amplifying her instructions as she began a phonics lesson.

“Can we get our arms ready?” asked Ramos, who’s taught at the John B. Wright Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, for 15 years. She brought her right palm to her left shoulder as the students imitated her movements.

Ramos, who specializes in teaching English as a second language, was leading a lesson that day on the short “i” sound. She told the students to pronounce each letter with a different gesture — touching the shoulder for the “w,” the elbow for the “i” and the hand for the double “l” — before sounding out the word “will.” They repeated the process for other short “i” words — “dig,” “wig” and “fit.”

The lesson is part of a daily block of language instruction, ranging from two to four hours long, that Arizona students learning English as a second language are required to take. The students, most of them Spanish-speaking Latino children, remain in the program, separated for part of that time from their peers whose primary language is English, until they pass a test showing they’re fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom.

The program is known as “structured English immersion,” or colloquially as “English-only” because all instruction is required to be in English. This limits their time for core subjects, like math and science, that are critical to academic success and college readiness. Arizona is the only state with English-only laws still in effect for its public schools.

But the number of students enrolled in the curriculum has tumbled dramatically this year. At the Tucson Unified School District, where Ramos teaches, the percentage of test-taking students who scored high enough to be classified as proficient in English more than doubled — from 10% in 2025 to 24% in 2026.

Rather than a big leap in fluency, however, the test results reflect the Arizona Department of Education lowering the grade needed to pass. The changes were approved by outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a longtime Republican defender of Arizona’s English-only policies.

Experts warn this change will do lasting harm to tens of thousands of Arizona students who will exit the structured English immersion program before they know the language well enough to succeed. Such students are already part of the lowest-performing group on standardized tests, and the loss of specialized instruction could further harm their long-term academic success, according to education researchers.

Past attempts by the Arizona Department of Education to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations by the departments of Justice and Education. Federal officials contended placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights, and Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago.

What’s happening now could be a repeat of that, said Katie Bernstein, an applied linguist and professor of early childhood education at Arizona State University.

“If you’re put in a class where you don’t understand what’s going on at all, you’re not learning language or content,” she said. “And so those are the worst outcomes of all, are students who are not given any language services.”

---

Nearly 1 in 10 students enrolled in Arizona public and charter schools marked in their school registration forms they speak a language other than English at home. State law mandates that they be assessed for fluency and placed in structured English immersion, and each spring they take the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, or AZELLA, to measure their progress in reading, writing, speaking and listening.

This approach has been required since Arizona voters passed a 2000 ballot initiative, Proposition 203, banning bilingual education in public schools. Still, officials have periodically made changes to the proficiency test.

The U.S. departments of Justice and Education determined the version of AZELLA administered between 2006 and 2012 — coinciding with Horne’s first two terms as the state’s top education official — was “not a valid measure of English language proficiency and readiness.” As a result, the state had removed at least 28,000 students from structured English immersion who still lacked proficiency in reading and writing the language.

The Arizona Department of Education was found to be in violation of civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of race and national origin by schools that receive federal funds. The state voluntarily entered a settlement, which stressed that the law requires “education agencies to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede students’ equal participation in instructional programs.”

The settlement agreement stipulated that the state would immediately help school districts find the students who had been harmed and offer “reading and writing intervention services.” In the long term, the state was required to revamp the AZELLA test.

Similar issues prompted a second voluntary settlement four years later, which instructed the state to raise the threshold for a test score to qualify as proficient in English. The state was also required to retest English-language learners using more rigorous standards, among other things.

Ida Rose Florez, a psychologist and former professor and researcher at Arizona State University, conducted a study published in 2012 that found the AZELLA test was “ineffective and obsolete” and its results could be arbitrary. The research concluded there was no evidence the test could “accurately differentiate” between children who need English-language services and those who don’t.

“What I examined, and what I saw, was a test that was absolutely not developed correctly,” Florez told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “I don’t see any basis for validity whatsoever.”

After dropping during the pandemic, AZELLA passing rates held steady at 12% statewide for three school years, including in 2025, when more than 118,000 took the test and just over 14,000 scored well enough to be reclassified as proficient.

After the Arizona Department of Education lowered the score needed to pass the test, the statewide reclassification rate for 2026 jumped to 26%, according to the department’s official tally announced to teachers at a September training. Nearly 113,000 students took the 2026 AZELLA, according to the department, resulting in the reclassification of about 30,000 students as proficient and their removal from English-language services this school year.

---

The state Department of Education said its decision to make it easier to pass the AZELLA came after it administered the test last year to 600 native English speakers.

Each new version of the test is given to native speakers first and the results are used as a baseline, said Deputy Superintendent Margaret Dugan, who chaired the group that advocated for passage of Proposition 203 and has served with Horne during all three of his terms as superintendent.

The department skipped this step in 2020, when it made the last major change to the test, following a State Board of Education decision granting more flexibility in how schools teach students English. “Because of COVID and all of that that went on in 2020, things were not done in order,” Dugan said. “When we walked in, it was a new test and they had never tested the native speakers, so now they had to.”

When that version was belatedly administered to native English speakers, nearly half failed, said Adela Santa Cruz, who leads the Office of English Language Acquisition, which oversees the test. “With a native not being able to pass that test at a high percentage, there’s something that was just quite awry,” she said.

She said the issues were reflected in the pass rate of English learners plateauing at 12% for three years.

Using this information, education officials adjusted the grading criteria for students learning English, requiring a lower score to pass all four portions of the test: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Previously, all students needed a combined score of at least 1,000 out of a possible 1,405 to pass. This year, the minimum passing score for all grade levels ranged from 962 for high schoolers to 944 for kindergartners.

“My hope is that all of you will see an increase in proficiency,” Anju Kuriakose, the director of psychometrics at the Arizona Department of Education, told school district representatives upon announcing the changes in April.

Kuriakose noted half of the native speakers who had been tested to inform the changes were in kindergarten and first grade. Students in fifth grade or higher accounted for less than one-fifth of test takers.

Florez’s 2012 study found that when scoring guidelines are based too heavily on the test results of native-speaking kindergartners — without enough data from older children with more advanced language skills — pass results can be artificially elevated. She sees similar problems with the 2026 changes.

The Arizona Department of Education said Horne, who approved the changes, was unavailable for an interview. But he has played an outsize role in the state’s structured English immersion program. 

This is Horne’s third nonconsecutive term as superintendent, having served from 2003 to 2011 before returning to the office in 2023. In a 2024 interview with Arizona Luminaria, he boasted that students’ reclassification rates were highest during his terms from 2003 to 2011. “After I left office, things deteriorated,” he said. “I implemented structured English immersion, and equally important, undertook intensive training for the teachers as to how to do it, and then we got it” — the reclassification rate — “up to 31% in three or four years,” he said.

The Arizona auditor general, however, questioned the validity of the test’s results during Horne’s tenure. An audit released in 2011 found that “because data is either unavailable or unreliable, the effect of SEI models is unknown.”

Horne lost his bid for reelection in July’s Republican primary and will leave office in December.

---

Juana Casas was relieved when her son Arturo, a fourth grader at Tucson’s John B. Wright Elementary School, passed the AZELLA test this spring after three years in structured English immersion classes.

Casas said she learned from the experience of her oldest daughter, who had struggled to learn English and fell behind her classmates. She and her husband sought after-school tutoring to help Arturo, and his two older sisters helped him learn English at home.

“I couldn’t help my oldest daughter, and she really struggled,” Casas said in Spanish. “Their two experiences are totally different. Arturo doesn’t speak Spanish very well because they’ve always spoken to him just in English so that he wouldn’t have to struggle like my oldest struggled.”

English learners already lag far behind their peers, resulting in lower rates of graduation and postsecondary attainment. In 2025, standardized reading tests administered to all Arizona third graders showed a 31% disparity between English-language learners and other students, according to the Center for the Future of Arizona’s Education Progress Meter. The standardized math exam administered to all Arizona eighth graders in 2025 showed a 23% disparity between English-language learners and other students.

Since Proposition 203 was debated 26 years ago, proponents have argued it helps students learn English more quickly and gets them into mainstream classes faster. There is limited research to support this. Ample studies, however, show students taught under English-only policies have bigger achievement gaps compared to students instructed using bilingual or multilingual education, which reinforces the student’s primary language while accelerating their learning in academic subjects and a second language.

A landmark 32-year study spanning 16 states analyzed various language-learning models, including structured English immersion, and found that “the key to accelerated progress is for English learners to receive peer-equivalent, grade-level bilingual schooling,” according to researchers Virginia Collier and Wayne Thomas.

Florez, the former ASU professor who studied Arizona’s model, said, “The fundamental problem with the AZELLA is that it’s trying to measure a system that should never be in place to begin with.”

Bernstein, the ASU early childhood education professor, said, “There is no linguistic, educational, economic, or research-based reason why we shouldn’t have dual-language programs in the state. And so I think that potentially leaves politics as the only answer to why.”

With more students passing this year’s proficiency test, the Tucson Unified School District is preparing to continue supporting students like Arturo within the mandates approved by voters in 2000.

Patricia Sandoval-Taylor, the district’s director for language development, said state law requires teachers to track reclassified students’ progress in their classrooms for two years and intervene with additional support like tutoring or summer school if needed. Arizona schools don’t receive additional funding for such services, as they do for students who are not proficient in English.

And since part of the district’s funding for English learners is based on the number of students in structured English immersion, more students passing the 2026 AZELLA will mean less funding in the 2027 school year.

“They’re not going to have the direct services to ensure they become fully English proficient,” Sandoval-Taylor said.

At John B. Wright Elementary, Ramos is still getting to know her second graders’ abilities and adjusting her teaching methods accordingly.

Teaching students who are learning English comes with additional responsibilities but no additional pay. Still, Ramos believes it’s where she can make the biggest difference. For her, that includes celebrating when students pass AZELLA and are classified as proficient in English.

“I think they need to be celebrated because they’re going above and beyond,” she said. “Before they did the change to the cut scores, it was like, ‘Well they passed this really incredibly difficult test that even English speakers couldn’t even pass themselves.’”

The post Arizona Lowered the Bar for Its English Fluency Test. Experts Say It Will Harm Students in the Long Run. appeared first on ProPublica.

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into Donald Trump Jr.’s relationship with a Russian oligarch who paid for much of Trump Jr.’s wedding earlier this year.

Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., sent two letters on Monday to the White House and Trump Jr. requesting records related to Trump Jr.’s financial relationship with the oligarch, Umar Kremlev.

“The secretive, close relationship between the son of a sitting U.S. President and a member of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s inner circle raises serious national security and public corruption concerns,” Garcia wrote. Garcia told Trump Jr. it “may be the most serious allegation against you to date.” The letter to Trump Jr. asked for documents including Trump Jr.’s communications with Kremlev and “financial records of all purchases made for your wedding by foreign nationals.”

Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Garcia’s investigation.

The letters were prompted by a ProPublica investigation published Monday, which revealed that Kremlev secretly covered hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses for Trump Jr.’s wedding. That included renting out a private island in the Bahamas for multiple nights. The wedding guest list numbered around 50, including Jared Kushner and other members of the Trump family. Kremlev, who first met Trump Jr. recently, also attended the intimate affair with a large group of other Russians.

Kremlev is close to Putin and serves as the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

Kremlev’s press office previously told ProPublica that he and Trump Jr. “have a friendly relationship” and that they don’t talk politics.

After ProPublica’s story was published, Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Trump, released a joint statement confirming Kremlev’s role. “Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us,” they said in a statement published on her Instagram account. “It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.” They added, “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.”

The couple also drew a distinction between the ceremony itself, which was just family, and the rest of the wedding weekend. In a statement released by the White House after the story was published, President Donald Trump echoed that. “I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding, which took place at a totally different location, and on a different day from the wedding,” he said. “It was an ‘afterparty’ given in their honor. Not a big deal!”

The couple exchanged vows on Friday, May 22, on a private island in the Bahamas. The wedding festivities then continued for two days. The Saturday, May 23, event, which Kremlev paid for, was held on the same island as the ceremony. (“Night 2. One Love!” Bettina Trump posted about the Saturday festivities on Instagram.) The Sunday reception was held a roughly 10-minute boat ride away on a neighboring private island, rented out by Kremlev. At the Sunday reception, the couple had their first dance, with Bettina Trump wearing her wedding dress, and ate a five-tier wedding cake topped with a miniature bride and groom. 

Afterward, the couple’s wedding planner talked to Hello! magazine about planning the three-day affair with Bettina Trump. “She wanted a progression,” said the planner, Lewis Miller. “The ceremony was very serene and pretty and soft, and the dinner was very elegant, and then the next night was much more colorful, and then the last night was more kind of cool and fun tropical vibes.”

The post Top Oversight Dem Opens Investigation of Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian Oligarch-Funded Wedding appeared first on ProPublica.

For more than 40 years, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has advised Congress and the president on what to study in the frigid and dynamic far north, from the environment to military security. It’s typically done so without making waves, led by people well-versed in science and public policy.

That was until December, when President Donald Trump appointed a Texas venture capitalist and MAGA influencer with no formal background in science as the commission’s chair. Since then, Thomas Dans has traveled the globe generating headlines. Serving as the administration’s main voice on the Arctic, he’s advanced some of the president’s wildest ambitions, like a takeover of Greenland, and rankled NATO allies in the process.

Yet as Dans holds forth in the U.S. and abroad, it’s not always clear where the administration’s agenda ends and his own begins.

He has repeatedly said, for example, that the U.S. needs more icebreakers, ships that Trump has long viewed as critical to dominating the Arctic. In doing so, Dans has championed one shipbuilder in particular — Damen Shipyards, a Dutch company with which he had a business relationship.

“They’re the largest builder of icebreakers and ice-class vessels in the world,” Dans said at an event in Anchorage, Alaska, in April. At the time, his consultancy was working to help Damen land an icebreaker contract with the federal government.

As he’s spoken to audiences of government officials, diplomats, academics and journalists, Dans — who wears his Arctic commission lapel pin and exudes a professorial air — has also waded into foreign policy.

In the media and at public events, he’s backed Trump’s push to take over Greenland. And he’s advocated enthusiastically for closer U.S. relations with Russia — even as a bipartisan group of lawmakers calls for tougher sanctions on the country and more aid to Ukraine. Dans and Damen have long done business in Russia, and Dans has regularly shared social media posts that reflect a pro-Kremlin viewpoint.

“We want a peaceful Arctic, we want a peaceful world,” he said at an event a few days after he announced plans to travel to Moscow. “Russia and the United States gotta get along for that to happen.”

Opining so broadly on foreign policy is “far beyond” the Arctic Research Commission’s scientific mandate, said Fran Ulmer, who served as commission chair for more than nine years before being replaced by Trump in 2020. “And certainly outside the bounds of what the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has done in the past.”

Dans, whose consultancy Almiranta Strategies “advises investors and businesses working in the Arctic,” according to his profile on the Arctic commission’s website, is far from the first in the Trump administration to mingle public and personal interests. The finances of many senior officials and the industries they regulate have drawn scrutiny as Trump has disarmed government safeguards against conflicts.

“It’s become standard for people to pursue their personal financial interest,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen.

Under the law, Dans’ position gives him access to government information from other federal agencies — an arrangement that could benefit his private interests. Such potential conflicts are typically governed by federal ethics rules. But the nature of Dans’ role affords him more leeway than other appointees. Commission members are not considered government employees and thus not required to file an ethics form disclosing conflicts.

Indeed, a White House official told ProPublica that Dans’ consulting work did not constitute a conflict of interest for that very reason.

“Tom Dans is doing a great job leading the Arctic Research Commission, and his shipbuilding expertise has helped him succeed in this role,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The President appreciates all he is doing to advance American interests in the Arctic.”

The White House official said Dans is one of two commission members the law designates as representatives of “the interests of industry.”

Even so, Dans’ lack of research experience stands out. The other industry rep is a Ph.D. and former director of the United States Geological Survey.

Dans declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to written questions from ProPublica, but he told The New York Times this year that his post did not preclude him from working in private business.

The Arctic commission has arguably never been more important. The region is warming at unprecedented rates, accelerating sea-level rise and causing severe weather in the U.S. and elsewhere. The melting ice also has geopolitical consequences. Russia and China are conducting joint military exercises in the far north. New shipping lanes have opened there. And mineral deposits are becoming potentially more accessible.

At a public appearance in July, Dans cited the commission’s four priorities: military and national security, energy security, economic development in the Arctic and “what we’ll call ‘community security.’” He did not define the term.

From Russia, With Love

Dans has long been taken with Russia, the country that has by far the most Arctic coastline.

His fondness dates back at least to seventh grade, when he says he was recruited to learn Russian in his Maryland public school. He later visited Moscow as an exchange student, then returned to work in finance in the mid-1990s.

He worked at a private equity fund financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which aimed to grow the private sector after the Soviet Union’s breakup. In a LinkedIn post last year, he reminisced about how he and Kirill Dmitriev, a Harvard-educated banker who now serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intermediary with Trump officials, traveled in the same circles early in their finance careers.

Decades later, in Trump’s first term as president, Dans landed a job in the Treasury Department as a senior policy adviser for international affairs. There, he served on a secret National Security Council task force on U.S. control of Greenland, a role first reported by The New Yorker. A former Trump administration official told ProPublica the group’s purpose was to strengthen the United States’ strategic position in Greenland and devise policies to bring the two closer.

Perhaps because of that work, Trump named Dans to the Arctic Research Commission for the first time in late 2020. His tenure was short-lived. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the new administration fired Dans and three other Trump appointees.

Dans was angry.

“We were fired without notice and anonymously slandered by the White House for ‘lacking relevant expertise,’” he wrote in The Hill. “At the time, I was the first commissioner in the agency’s 37-year history to speak fluent Russian, the language of the world’s largest Arctic nation.”

Dans launched an investment firm with two other former Trump Treasury officials, but it was short-lived, closing in late 2023. That year, Dans said on Substack that he was the “first American” to launch an effort to buy the Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, where about half the global icebreaker fleet was built. One of its Russian owners at the time was a business partner of a former Putin deputy minister. The effort failed.

He traveled the world, talking with officials in places like Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Romania. He lobbied on behalf of the Kazakhstan Embassy and that country’s state-owned national oil and gas company, records show. He devised policy recommendations “for Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction” as a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, his LinkedIn profile says. He also contributed to Heritage’s federal workforce-slashing Project 2025, of which his twin brother Paul was director.

Then in May 2024, he launched a nonprofit called American Daybreak. Its goal was to foster ties between the U.S. and Greenland.

After Trump’s victory, Dans promised in comments on Substack that “the next Trump Admin is going to Make America a Great Arctic (MAGA) nation!” In early January 2025, Dans and American Daybreak helped arrange a visit by Donald Trump Jr. and late conservative activist Charlie Kirk to the Arctic island. He then sought to bring Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha, to watch a popular dog sled race (the trip was scaled back after protests). Dans also enlisted Greenland’s most outspoken MAGA enthusiast, a bricklayer named Jørgen Boassen, whom Dans has called a “good friend,” to generate support for U.S. control of Greenland.

“The Best Icebreakers in the World”

Dans was not named to a new full-time post in the second Trump administration. But he remained in the Trump orbit.

He was a frequent guest on conservative activist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. He spoke for one episode from Romania, plugging far-right Romanian presidential candidate George Simion (who was later seen with Republicans at the Kennedy Center cutting up a cake shaped like Greenland with American flag frosting). “There’s a phenomenon here that’s the silent George Simion voter, kind of like your silent Trump voter,” Dans told Bannon. “And that’s significant.” (Simion lost and afterward unsuccessfully sought to have the election annulled.)

By August of last year, Dans found another opportunity in the private sector. He posted on LinkedIn that he was “very excited to announce that I am working with Damen Shipyards Group, one of the world’s leading shipbuilders.”

At the time, Dutch prosecutors were investigating the company for supplying Russia with equipment that they said could be used for military purposes, in violation of European sanctions. In his post, Dans shared a photo of himself arm-in-arm with three high-ranking company executives, including Rutger Dolk, who was later detained by Dutch authorities as part of the probe. The case is ongoing. (Dolk did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions, Damen shared a press release that said it “has always acted in accordance with the applicable sanctions packages and that full transparency has been exercised about its activities.”)

Dans said he was working with the shipbuilder “to bring some of the best icebreakers in the world to the United States” and noted that the U.S. Navy had recently chosen Damen “to help it fast-track a new fleet” of a different type of vessel: up to 35 medium-sized ships to move troops and supplies to shorelines. According to records, the Navy bought the designs for the ship from Damen for $3.3 million without going through the typical bidding process, saying it would save time and money to go with a “proven” design. (The Navy did not respond to requests for comment.)

In December, Trump appointed Dans to head the Arctic Research Commission. The announcement said Dans’ primary focus as a businessman was “shipbuilding and transportation where, among other projects, he is leading an effort to develop icebreakers and ice-class vessels for the United States while helping restore America’s Maritime Base.”

Since then, Dans has championed Damen in conversations and at a public appearance. In April, he said that “outside of the commission, I wear a hat working for one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, which is a group called Damen.”

While ProPublica was reporting this story, Damen terminated its agreement with Dans, which would have paid him if the company got a contract to build an icebreaker.

If Dans was seeking to advance Damen’s interests, he may have been required under the law to register either as a lobbyist or a foreign agent, said Josh Rosenstein, an attorney who is an expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Documents show he’d done neither.

“It certainly would raise questions, you know, in my mind about what sort of interactions he, on behalf of Damen, had with the U.S. government,” Rosenstein said. “And with whom.”

The White House pushed back. “These so-called ‘experts’ have no idea what they are talking about,” said Kelly, the spokesperson.

Whether Dans has other business ties that could impact his government job is unclear. When at the Treasury, he reported holding a stake in Global Restaurant Management LLC, the parent company of a firm that operated multiple Papa Johns restaurants in Russia at the time. The status of that investment — which Dans reported had a value of between $250,000 and $500,000 — isn’t publicly known today because he’s no longer required to disclose his financial interests.

Christopher Wynne, who headed Global Restaurant Management, said he could not discuss another person’s investments.

Unlike most high-level presidential appointees, the Arctic commission chair — who is eligible only for a stipend of up to about $55,000 a year — is not a federal employee under the law. And while the commission has a policy seeking to prevent conflicts of interest, there are no penalties for violating it.

Dans’ outside commitments could be problematic if he used his access to the federal government to improperly benefit another employer or country, said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House and other agencies during Republican and Democratic presidencies.

“The fact that he has foreign entanglements and access to government-wide information,” she said, “it should raise national security concerns.”

ProPublica asked the White House about Canter’s comments but it did not respond.

A Chilly Reception in Greenland

Tensions over Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, have flared since Dans returned to the Arctic commission.

A month into Dans’ tenure as commission chair, Trump said he would take Greenland “one way or the other.” He initially refused to rule out military force. Dans echoed Trump, telling the BBC that month that “everything’s on the table.”

While Dans is a minor player in the federal government, “when he speaks, international audiences and officials see him as representing U.S. policy,” said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In his first five months as chair, Dans spoke often to the foreign press and traveled to locales that included Denmark, Norway, Italy and Canada — as well as Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Explorer’s Club in New York City, records show. The commission spent about $87,000 on his travel expenses.

He did not return to Greenland. But the administration’s rhetoric put Denmark on a war footing. The country sent soldiers to Greenland armed with explosives and plans to blow up airfields in the event of an American invasion. At one point, a Greenlandic politician told ProPublica, some schoolchildren were instructed to practice hiding under their desks in case of such an event.

Greenlanders have repeated a refrain: Open for business, not for sale. Dans’ remarks only seem to have further deepened divisions. In February, while at a conference in Norway, he was caught on a hot mic telling a Greenlandic politician that “the check’s in the mail.” A former chairman of the Arctic Research Commission, Michael Sfraga, was at the same conference and publicly told the politician to “rip the check up.”

Trump has continued to press the cause. In mid-July, he posted a picture on Truth Social of a map that included Greenland with the American flag superimposed on it.

The rhetoric has had consequences for Arctic research. Several Danish researchers said they will no longer participate in research with the U.S. One noted that her colleagues avoided Dans at a recent conference.

Dans’ current role in Greenland is unclear. He said at a recent conference he is not involved in talks among negotiators for the U.S., Greenland and Denmark that began earlier this year. In May, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, and the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, attended a business conference in the capital of Nuuk without Dans. Landry and Howery appeared for photo ops and opened a new, bigger consulate building, as protesters shouted outside.

A White House official told ProPublica that Greenland is “critical from the standpoint of U.S. national security” and “we are very optimistic that we’re on a good trajectory” in the diplomatic talks. The official did not address Dans’ role.

Reposting Russian Propaganda

Official visits to Russia have been exceedingly rare since the U.S. and its European allies froze ties with the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, yet at his appearance in Anchorage in April Dans announced that he was planning to go to Moscow “probably in the next month” to discuss research cooperation. The trip never happened; the State Department’s official guidance on Russia is “Do Not Travel for Any Reason.”

Asked about Dans’ push for reestablishing ties and travel plans, a State Department spokesperson referred questions to Dans.

His social media feed on X is filled with foreign news accounts, sometimes from outlets sympathetic to the Kremlin.

He reposted a story last October from Kazakh media on Putin’s warning that the U.S. would fracture relations with Russia if it supplied Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.

In May, he wrote of his grandfather’s participation in the perilous Murmansk Run to supply the Soviet Union during World War II. “Happy Victory Day,” Dans wrote in Russian and English, reposting a video of Putin from Russian state media laying flowers at a soldiers’ memorial. The original poster of the video has been called a source of Russian propaganda by the Ukrainian government.

“Everyone obviously needs to be incredibly cautious when you’re reposting Russian information,” Conley said, because such posts could promote a narrative that is “against U.S. national interests.”

Posting “Happy Victory Day” in Russian may sound innocuous, but it is “a super-loaded thing to do right now,” she added. Putin has conjured Russia’s World War II victory when talking about Ukraine, even equating Ukrainians to Nazis in Germany.

The White House did not respond to questions about Dans’ Russia-related posts.

Under Putin, Russia has tied its future to the Arctic and the region’s natural resources, including liquefied natural gas. U.S. sanctions, which targeted the country’s energy sector, have set those efforts back — something that Russia has sought to reverse in ongoing talks with the Trump administration.

Dans has remarked on the developments on social meda, calling Dmitriev, the Russian who now serves as a key Putin negotiator with the Trump administration, “the Kremlin’s ace in the hole.”

“We’re older now and have some grey hair, but it’s neat to see who the Trump Administration is negotiating with,” Dans wrote of Dmitriev, who rose to head one of Russia’s sovereign wealth funds before being sanctioned by the Biden Treasury Department in 2022 for his ties to Putin and work raising funds from the U.S.

Asked about Dans’ calls for cooperation, Kelly, the White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump and his entire administration are willing to work with anyone in order to advance American interests, including peace in the Russia-Ukraine War. This approach has helped the United States bring both sides of the conflict together for historic peace talks.”

Dans seemed to downplay any differences with the Trump administration over Russia in one recent appearance, where he told an audience that included State Department officials, Russian Embassy personnel and Greenlandic diplomats that “getting Russia-Ukraine war ended, I think, is a priority. Stopping the killing.”

But the following month, in July, Dans opened and closed his remarks at a conference in Aspen by calling Russia a “neighbor.” He again urged that the U.S. repair its relationship.

“We need to be able to communicate with the Russians,” he said. “We’ve got some very important things to clear up with them with Ukraine, absolutely, but we have to work towards peace in the Arctic.”

Kelly said there was “nothing controversial about Mr. Dans’ remarks calling for an end to years of bloodshed and expanded dialogue.”

The post Papa Johns, Propaganda and Putin: How a MAGA Influencer With Ties to Russia Became Trump’s Arctic Adviser appeared first on ProPublica.

Baseball is everywhere in the Dominican Republic, which sends a disproportionate number of players to the American major and minor leagues, including Hall of Famers like Pedro Martínez and Adrian Beltré. Playing fields and training academies dot the country in villages where players who’ve made the leap to the pros are immortalized in murals.

For nearly half a century, the Dominican Republic has sent more players to the majors than any country outside the United States. The nation, which has a population roughly that of Ohio’s, had 144 players reach the major leagues last year. That’s about 10% of the league.

The Dominican baseball factory is a volume business, with teams paying signing bonuses to about 450 prospects each year. Fewer than 10% of those young players will ever see a single pitch in the majors, but in a country as impoverished as the Dominican Republic those bonuses — worth several times the country’s average annual income — could be life-changing for the players and their families. Yet Major League Baseball has long allowed a corrosive system to fester that rigs the game against young players in favor of opportunistic trainers and predatory moneylenders.

Here are the key highlights of ProPublica’s investigation into the Dominican baseball system.

Trainers coach children in exchange for future earnings.

Young baseball players in the United States and Canada must enter the major league system through its annual draft of young prospects. But in the Dominican Republic it’s a free-for-all, with players going to the highest bidder. 

After MLB scouts began to recognize the Dominican Republic as a source of cheap talent, teams opened bare-bones training academies to develop young players. Eventually, the buscones — men relied on by teams to identify local talent — realized they could start their own academies. There are now hundreds of such facilities and, according to a national trade association, approximately 6,000 trainers. 

In addition to coaching, the trainers who operate these academies generally provide room, board and equipment. Education often falls by the wayside. In return, they receive a share — typically 35% to 50% — of a player’s signing bonus. Most of those bonuses are valued at around $30,000, but they can be as high as six or seven figures.

From 2012 through the beginning of 2026, major league teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in bonuses, according to a ProPublica analysis. But much of that money — up to half a billion dollars — is almost immediately siphoned off by trainers and lenders.

To get around league rules, MLB teams make handshake deals with underage players.

Major league rules bar teams from making official deals with players under the age of 16, but teams have long circumvented this ban through the use of unwritten early agreements, or preacuerdos. In these handshake deals, typically arranged through a player’s trainer, the team pledges to pay a certain amount to the player once he is of legal age to be signed. 

With players as young as 11 involved in such deals, it can be years before the prospect receives his bonus. 

Moneylenders persuade families to sign over players’ bonuses for high-interest loans.

Preacuerdos and the lure of these promised payouts have created a cottage industry of prestamistas, or moneylenders, who persuade players’ families to sign away portions of these impending bonuses in exchange for loans with sky-high interest rates. 

The Dominican Republic repealed its usury laws 24 years ago. High-interest lenders advertise online, targeting young ballplayers and their families. One WhatsApp ad touted loans for “baseball players who have agreements.”

Belfi Rivera was 14 when he made a handshake deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks that would pay him $1.8 million after he turned 16. (The Diamondbacks did not respond to a request for comment.) Ultimately, he’d see very little of that money. The trainer who had brokered the deal got his share, worth $630,000. More than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball: Santo Caraballo, a lender who formed a business partnership with  Red Sox legend and Hall of Famer David Ortiz.

In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said that his business relationship with Caraballo “began to come to an end” more than 18 months ago.” He added that he ended his personal relationship with Caraballo “a year and a half to two years ago” after “noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate. I started distancing myself from him personally and placed the relevant matters in the hands of my legal advisors.”  

However, in September 2025, Ortiz and Caraballo filmed themselves heading for Puerto Rico on a private jet, drinking and dancing on their way to a Bad Bunny concert. 

In a brief conversation, Caraballo told ProPublica that his business was not the biggest or “that lucrative.” He added that the risk in loaning money to families is that “you never know if it will succeed or not because if the player doesn’t get signed, you don’t get paid.” Multiple attempts were made to reach him again, including sending him a summary of ProPublica’s findings. He never responded.

One lender used a player’s deadly car crash to start his empire.

Before becoming a fixture in the prestamista sphere and partnering with Ortiz, Caraballo played a shadowy role in salvaging the career of rising MLB prospect Oneil Cruz. In 2020, while Cruz was a player in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ minor league system, he crashed his Jeep into the back of a motorcycle, killing three people. Prosecutors initially said the ballplayer had been drinking, and he faced the possibility of three years in prison. According to numerous interviews and court records, Caraballo was brought in by Cruz’s parents and negotiated payments to the victims’ families. In exchange, they signed agreements withdrawing all claims against Cruz, who is currently the starting center fielder for the Pirates. The case against Cruz, who denied any wrongdoing, was dismissed. ProPublica made numerous attempts to reach Caraballo about his role, including sending him a summary of our findings. He never responded.

Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”

A spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Pirates said the team and Cruz “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”

That lender then partnered with the Dominican Republic’s biggest baseball star.

By 2021, records show that Caraballo and Ortiz had entered into a business partnership, with both men listed on corporation records of a Florida company called Big Papi Sports Group. The company was dissolved the next year. What, if anything, it did is not clear. Their financial and personal relationships, however, continued. Ortiz acknowledged to a ProPublica reporter that he had invested millions of dollars into Caraballo’s baseball business. He added that his business with Caraballo was limited to making loans to trainers, not kids. At Ortiz’s 2022 Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Caraballo sat with the retired player’s family.

Why did David Ortiz oppose an international draft?

Ortiz’s connection to Caraballo doesn’t just spotlight the power and influence that these moneylenders can attain in the Dominican Republic. It also raises questions about the Red Sox legend’s involvement in persuading major league players to oppose an international draft. 

For more than a decade, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has made the case in favor of a draft for prospects from Latin America. Last year, during a visit to the Dominican Republic, he acknowledged that preacuerdos were “problematic” and argued that the “best solution to early deals is a draft.” Manfred and supporters of an international draft say it would make early agreements impossible. 

The players union has opposed such a draft, arguing that it would restrict a prospect’s ability to choose his employer and eliminate bidding wars that drive up bonuses. The union has acknowledged that the Dominican system of early deals is troubled but has maintained for years that this is due to the league not enforcing its own rules. 

During contract negotiations in 2022, the league was again pushing for an international draft, and the issue had become a major sticking point. But then, said people on both sides of the discussions, Ortiz got involved, sending a voice message to Dominican players and trainers, declaring a “red alert.” 

“If we allow the draft to happen here in the Dominican Republic, even your great-great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s, will be affected by it,” Ortiz said, according to an audio copy of the message obtained by ProPublica. “If we let them push that thing through here, we’ll be in deep trouble.” 

In the message, Ortiz shared the phone number for Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, and urged everybody to express their opposition to the draft. What he didn’t share was that he had a financial interest in preserving the system. 

When asked over the phone if his opposition to the draft had anything to do with his partnership with Caraballo, who profits from the current system, Ortiz didn’t answer and hung up shortly afterward.

In a subsequent statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said his position regarding the international draft “was never motivated by personal interests.” The statement went on to say that his opposition “was based on my views regarding the development of Dominican players and the impact I believed such a system would have on baseball in our country.”

“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here.”

Major League Baseball is a formidable economic and political presence in the Dominican Republic. But outside of the league’s push for an international draft, it’s done nothing that would put an end to or reform the early agreement system. It has never publicly warned or penalized a team for making an early deal, and its attempts to educate families about moneylenders have been ineffectual. A spokesperson for MLB declined to comment and referred to past statements by league officials calling for an overhaul of the Dominican system.

“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” said Piñao Ortiz, who was the Dominican commissioner of baseball from 1996 to 2000, “but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”

The post Underage Players, Predatory Moneylenders: 7 Findings From Our Dominican Baseball Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection? 

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million. 

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.” 

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.

Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too. 

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

---

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.” 

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come. 

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

The post Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin appeared first on ProPublica.

It’s after 6 p.m. by the time Angela Johnson hurries home from work. Her 12-year-old daughter, Amelia, is at their house outside of Pensacola, Florida, with a nurse trained to care for medically fragile children. Amelia, who was born with a rare genetic anomaly, has endured many surgeries and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube.

The nurse starts caring for Amelia as soon as a bus from the public school drops her off. Johnson loves much about the school. But as a physical therapist, she also recognizes its limitations. The district’s physical and occupational therapists have to travel from school to school. The classroom teacher can become overburdened.

For all of Amelia’s life, Johnson has had to fight for the education and the school resources her daughter is entitled to receive under federal law. It has exhausted her.

Two years ago, she thought she’d found a better option for Amelia when she learned Florida has a state-funded voucher program for children with disabilities. She jumped at the promise of “school choice.” The program, the largest of its kind in the country, channels taxpayer dollars into accounts that parents can use to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses.

Johnson envisioned a private school with smaller classes and more one-on-one time with trained staff, a place where she didn’t have to battle for every minute of therapy her child required. She imagined Amelia learning to cut a straight line and to write her name.

In 2024, Amelia was awarded about $10,500 from the program. Thrilled, Johnson embarked on a weekslong hunt for a private school.

She began scouring school websites, most of which said nothing about services for children with disabilities. She started calling schools, first an upscale Christian one nearby with a strong reputation. It had no nurse trained to care for medically fragile children, so she reached out to several other schools. At first, some said they could help — until Johnson explained that her daughter had a feeding tube, that she couldn’t yet hold a pencil correctly and needed assistance toileting. Then they all said no.

Johnson couldn’t find a single one that provided nurses equipped to care for her daughter’s medical needs. Or teachers trained to educate nonverbal children. Or even a bus ride home.

Therein lies the catch in “school choice” for children like Amelia. Unlike public schools, private ones generally aren’t required to educate students with disabilities. And they often don’t.

The choice wasn’t hers, Johnson realized. It was the schools’. The vouchers “are basically designed to make you go to private school,” Johnson said, “but my kid can’t access private school.”

Johnson returned the money to the state, along with a very stern email.

Voucher programs and the private schools they increasingly fund have proliferated across the country. Yet those schools often reject children with disabilities — the very kids who were used to help sell early voucher programs to lawmakers and the public — for having needs that are too costly, complex or disruptive. That leaves those children with few options beyond the public schools. And as public schools lose enrollment as a result of more and more voucher use, they lose resources that would benefit children who remain, including those with disabilities.

About 3 million school-age children with disabilities live in states with universal voucher eligibility. Florida, one of those states, illustrates how the promise of school choice can be empty for these children.

When children are approved for education savings accounts, a voucher-style program like the one Florida uses, states often put public money into accounts parents can use to pay expenses like tuition. If families can’t find a private school and don’t use the money, it may roll over to another year or, depending on the state, get returned.

About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its voucher program for disabled children was returned because recipients — kids like Amelia — were enrolled in public school instead, according to data from the nonprofit that disburses most of the funds. By comparison, just 1% of money in the state’s program open to all students was returned for the same reason.

Florida is one of three states where ProPublica obtained data allowing us to make such comparisons.

Louisiana, which launched an education savings account program in the 2025-26 school year, delivered $43.1 million to parent-controlled accounts. Overall, 6% was returned because the families didn’t spend the money, state data shows. But among students with disabilities, that rate was far higher at 30%.

In Texas, data is still coming in for the first year of its $1 billion voucher program. But so far, students with disabilities are opting out of using the money at slightly higher rates than all other students.

Though families return the money for multiple reasons, many have indicated they did so because they couldn’t find suitable private schools that would enroll their students.

“Families are at the mercy of the schools — and schools choosing their kid — versus the other way around,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national association working on behalf of children with disabilities.

Today, at least 18 states have voucher-style programs with universal eligibility or are phasing them in. Florida eclipses them all. More than a half-million Florida schoolchildren — roughly 1 in 6 — use a voucher today. When lawmakers opened the state’s voucher program to all children in 2023, two-thirds of the newly enrolled students were already attending private schools.

Yet private schooling often remains out of reach for children like Amelia, the children lawmakers once used to gain a toehold for future voucher expansions. They shared disabled children’s compelling stories, named legislation in their honor and created some of the nation’s first statewide voucher programs specifically for these students.

They started in Florida.

Illusion of Choice

In 1999, an unassuming man wearing glasses and a lavender tie stood before his colleagues in the Florida Senate to champion a bill that would change the trajectory of American education. John McKay, a Republican, wanted to give parents of children with disabilities a chunk of taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.

McKay pointed to his own family’s experience. Public schools had failed to meet the needs of his daughter, who had significant learning disabilities. He and his wife could afford to send their daughter to a private boarding school, but not all parents had that option.

“We’re alienating parents,” McKay argued. “I’ve been alienated by the public system when I was told I didn’t have any choices with regard to my children.”

The McKay Scholarships began as a pilot program — the nation’s first voucher system specifically for students with disabilities. Lawmakers soon expanded it, creating the nation’s first statewide voucher program for this group of children. Ohio followed Florida’s lead, then Utah and Arizona and Georgia and, later, Louisiana and Oklahoma and others.

Across the statehouses, politicians stressed one sentiment: choice. Parents would no longer be tethered to their local public schools and could choose where to send their children.

Georgia’s sponsor said he sought “to give any disabled student whose parents are dissatisfied with their assigned public school the ability to attend the public or private school that best fits their needs.”

“They can just take the scholarship and go to private school,” an Oklahoma lawmaker pledged.

The programs have since helped thousands of children with disabilities move to private schools, including those designed to meet their unique needs. But for many children, especially those with more severe disabilities or who live in areas where few if any private schools operate, the promises of choice were never realistic.

Some legislators backing those early programs said they recognized this problem but argued that any children helped by the new options made the effort worthwhile. And they hoped that competition fueled by money flowing into private schools would create a more robust school marketplace in the long run, one that would accommodate students with special needs.

In 2021, West Virginia lawmakers adopted their first and only foray into vouchers, an education savings program that they have since opened to all students. To get the bill passed, some legislators made familiar promises to disabled children — even though the state has only a handful of schools that specifically say they will serve even the least-intensive of children’s needs.

“Our kids can’t go to a private school,” said Christy Black, an advocate for Disability Rights of West Virginia who has a daughter with Down syndrome. “I called every private school from Huntington to Charleston because that’s as far as we could drive her and work. But no one would accept her because she has a cognitive disability.”

More than half of Utah’s counties have no private schools that take its vouchers for students with disabilities. In Georgia, 71% of counties have none. And in Louisiana last year, among about 350 private schools, only 14 reported enrolling a single child with a disability. Eight of those admitted five or fewer such students.

Even in Florida, with its urban centers and roughly $5 billion voucher programs, ProPublica found that more than a dozen counties have no private schools that serve kids with disabilities or have only one school with limited offerings. Our analysis of state data also shows that more than half of Florida’s private schools say they do not serve students with any type of disability.

“It’s touted that this program is an equalizer, and then people have choice,” said Jinny Kim, managing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a national civil rights and policy nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. “But then if you really look at the details, it’s not actually how it happens.”

Anxious about her daughter’s upcoming transition to middle school, Atlanta-area mother Marguerite Lane decided to explore private schools that take the state’s voucher. Her daughter, who has autism, does well academically but can be very sensitive and struggle in bigger classrooms without enough behavioral support.

Lane applied to and visited several private schools and found a small, arts-infused one that said it would accept some children with learning challenges. She thought it would serve her daughter well, but then she opened an email from the enrollment director.

“We don’t believe we can support her needs and help her thrive in this class,” it read, “and we also don’t want to compromise the educational experience of the other students.” The last part hurt most. Lane thought, “God forbid the other children learn empathy.”

Toehold Strategy 

As politicians debated those first voucher programs for children with disabilities, a common refrain echoed across statehouse chambers: The plans were just small programs for a specific group of students.

“It’s a very limited scholarship,” a Utah representative assured colleagues in 2004. “This really is about special needs.”

“It’s not, as I heard some of you say to me, the beginning of vouchers. No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a program to help a group of students that need our help,” a Georgia House member told colleagues in 2007.

Behind the political scenes, a different message spread.

As Arizona adopted its first program for children with disabilities in 2006, Clint Bolick wrote an essay entitled “Toe-Hold Strategies.” Bolick, who was then president of the advocacy group Alliance for School Choice, is now a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.

Voucher advocates, he wrote, were “acting smarter.” Rather than take on powerful teachers unions directly, they were pushing smaller programs geared toward specific students whose needs were harder for politicians to oppose. “The strategy makes sense from a moral perspective, for it focuses assistance on the neediest schoolchildren,” he added. “It also works politically, because choice begets choice: Once the Rubicon is crossed and legislators vote to adopt a school choice program — no matter how small or targeted — it becomes easier to support a new one, or expand the old one, the next time around.”

By 2011, a half dozen states had launched voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. At a “school choice” conference that year, Howie Beigelman sat on a panel that discussed the strategy. At the time, he was deputy director of public policy for the advocacy arm of the Orthodox Union, a prominent Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization. He offered guidance to those who might want to get into vouchers.

“Special needs is a very easy way to get into this business,” Beigelman said. “Anyone, no matter how partisan they are, it’s very hard to say special needs is not where people need ‘special’ education.” (He recently told ProPublica via email that this was his opinion and he had “never seen anything ‘intentional’ about using special needs scholarships for anything more than what they are plainly for: helping educate children with special needs.”)

Shortly after vouchers for disabled children spread to Arkansas in 2016, the University of Arkansas posted on its website an essay by Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the college’s Office for Education Policy. “Special education private school choice programs are often seen as a ‘foot in the door’ for school choice laws,” she wrote. “Once some success has been shown to the public, more laws can be passed to expand these programs.”

Indeed, following those wins, lawmakers across the country opened the floodgates, often to all or most comers, expanding voucher-style programs into a $10.6 billion tide of public money.

Today, two-thirds of states have some kind of voucher-style program on the books. These programs mostly serve a very different population of students than the early ones did. Most current voucher recipients don’t have disabilities, nor do they need to hunt for a private school that will enroll them. They were already in private schools when they tapped this new windfall.

North Carolina state Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer who advocates for people with disabilities, opposes her state’s voucher system, which is now open to all students. “The thing that genuinely infuriates me,” she said, “is when people with disabilities are used as pawns.”

Failure to Address Access

Two decades after states began adopting vouchers for children with disabilities, lawmakers have done little to improve access to private schools for them — even as they have created programs open to all comers. Most legislatures haven’t required private schools that take this public money to accept even a few kids with such needs. Nor have they created effective incentives to help operators open more specialized private schools, which can be costly to run.

That’s largely because one of the driving forces behind vouchers is the goal of keeping rules to a minimum so private schools will take the public money.

“Getting the government involved in private schools isn’t the answer,” said former West Virginia Delegate Amy Summers, a Republican who played a central role in creating her state’s universal voucher-like program. She thinks competition for students will prompt private and public schools to better serve children with disabilities.

Another key advocate in West Virginia was Republican state Sen. Patricia Puertas Rucker. She homeschooled her two children with disabilities, including a now-adult daughter who she said came home from public school with bite marks and bruises.

Rucker hopes that the state’s voucher program will give more families a way to foot tuition bills or band together to create small schools called microschools. But she regrets that her colleagues approved the payments without additional money for students with disabilities, as some states offer. That extra money could help families afford the higher tuition often charged by specialized schools — and make it more viable for operators to open them.

“It is very expensive to have all this special equipment and to even build the buildings for children that have very specialized special needs,” Rucker said.

But beyond raising those payments, she doesn’t think the state should do anything to cajole or require private schools to enroll children with disabilities. “The minute you start doing that, you are basically disincentivizing private schools from participating, and then you’re denying parents. I do not want to do that.”

It’s not that private schools haven’t opened to take advantage of the voucher windfall. They in fact have been proliferating in recent years. And some of these new schools specifically welcome children with disabilities. But most of them do not.

The Pain of Rejection

Parents described private school rejections as “insulting” and “heartbreaking,” especially when school personnel have met the children. But families don’t always need to apply or even call the schools to get a denial. Some websites or handbooks make it clear.

One small Baptist academy in rural Georgia invites applicants to “join our family” but declares in its handbook that it isn’t equipped to educate children with learning disabilities or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. “If such students are accepted in our school, it is up to the parents to provide extra services other than what the classroom teachers would do in the confines of the classroom.”

In 2023, Taylor Cordes, a former special education teacher, embarked on what she calls her “personal passion project” to see how many private schools in her home state of North Carolina post such clear rejections. She dug into every handbook she could find for 660 schools and found that only about a third of them indicated they would accept students with even limited disabilities. More than 1 in 10 declared they would not serve such students, she said.

Many families endure deeply hurtful personal rejections in the search for education. Private schools typically decide who to enroll after meeting parents and their children, as Diavonni Jordan, an Atlanta-area mother, learned. Her now-8-year-old son, Jamir Souders, has ADHD. When he was suspended multiple times from his public school and started to get into fights, she searched for an option with smaller class sizes where she thought he would focus and learn better.

A single mother of two, Jordan applied to a local Christian school, then took time off work to visit it. She filled with hope as she toured the well-kept campus and spoke to its friendly staff. But within a week, she opened an email from the school. “The support that we could give in our 1st grade would not be enough for him this year,” it read. The school’s program was small, ill-equipped to provide for his needs, it added.

Jordan expanded her search to other traditional private schools, even when they would mean longer drives for her. She applied to five and toured two. But the verdicts never changed.

“Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family,” another Christian school wrote. Jordan wondered what child constituted a “good fit” for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son. Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future. But for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.

The post Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration is poised to loosen environmental restrictions on oil and gas wells that produce very little energy but release vast amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to drastically weaken requirements for leak inspections and equipment upgrades at more than 700,000 low-producing “stripper wells,” according to a draft rule being reviewed by the White House and seen by ProPublica. These wells — which tend to be old, poorly maintained and thus prone to leaking — produce just 6% of the country’s oil and natural gas but are responsible for roughly half the sector’s methane pollution, studies show.

The EPA acknowledged similar figures in the draft. But it said that the cost of complying with existing regulations would force the lowest-producing wells to shut down and that this was “unreasonable” — even though it would eliminate just 0.4% of U.S. oil and gas production, according to an industry estimate cited in the proposed rule.

The proposal, which would also weaken methane controls in the wider oil industry, is expected to save companies $42 billion through 2050. An attached memo says the rollback will help to “unleash” American energy, one of President Donald Trump’s favorite slogans.

Environmental advocates said deregulating stripper wells will do little to boost energy output while significantly increasing climate pollution.

“This is not about energy dominance,” said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group. “It’s about padding the pockets of oil and gas operators and saddling society with the costs.”

The proposed changes are the culmination of a campaign by a previously low-profile faction of the oil industry that has gained unprecedented influence during the second Trump administration. In the draft, the EPA said it is deregulating stripper wells — defined as those that produce up to 15 barrels a day — in response to petitions from the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the National Stripper Well Association, among other groups.

As ProPublica reported in June, the IPAA has long enjoyed the support of a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand. He is the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, poorly maintained stripper wells — a business that was threatened when the Biden administration imposed aggressive restrictions on methane pollution in 2024.

In response, Hildebrand became one of the oil industry’s biggest Trump donors. Trump, back in office, promptly appointed a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to a top post at the EPA, putting him in charge of the effort to unravel the new methane rules.

Szabo had previously helped to draft a letter on behalf of the American Exploration and Production Council — which has Hilcorp’s CEO on its board — opposing those rules. He also gave advice on climate regulations for Project 2025, the deregulatory roadmap for the current administration.

Among Project 2025’s recommendations: eliminate an EPA program that would track “super-emitter” events — enormous methane releases that have long plagued the oil industry — and would oblige companies to respond to them. The AXPC and the IPAA have also called for an end to the program.

And the current proposal from Trump’s EPA aims to do just that.

An IPAA spokesperson declined to comment on the group’s influence in the Trump administration but said in an emailed statement that its lobbying “has focused on ensuring regulations are workable for low-production and marginal wells.”

The NSWA and AXPC didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. NSWA representatives previously told ProPublica that they had asked the EPA to soften restrictions on stripper wells because many of their members couldn’t afford the compliance costs. AXPC CEO Anne Bradbury previously told ProPublica that the group’s members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.”

Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek didn’t provide a comment either but previously told ProPublica that the company was “proud” of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.

While Szabo didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica, the EPA’s press office said in a statement that he “had not done any work for AXPC for well over a year before he started working for the federal government” and that he had reviewed federal ethics rules with the agency’s ethics staff upon joining. The agency declined to comment on the substance of the methane rule revisions except to confirm that they were being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The OMB’s press office didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

The rules now being rolled back were a key component of former President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. They would have cut methane pollution from the oil industry by 80%, the EPA said at the time. Because methane breaks down relatively quickly — in about a dozen years — cutting these emissions is one of the few known ways to reduce global warming in our lifetimes. Methane accounts for one-third of the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Since methane is the main component of natural gas, the rules would also have prevented useful energy from being lost to the atmosphere in the form of leaks and other releases. All told, Biden’s EPA had valued the rules’ climate, health and energy benefits at more than $7 billion a year, even after accounting for increased compliance costs.

Breaking with precedent, Trump’s EPA didn’t include calculations of the environmental and health impacts of the new proposal. But if it goes into effect, much of the public benefit will evaporate while oil and gas producers see increased profits.

The post EPA to Loosen Methane Rules, Boosting Pollution From Oil and Gas Wells appeared first on ProPublica.

Three years ago, the Defense Department led an ambitious international effort to better protect civilians during combat, a movement built on the bloody lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pentagon created a network with European partners, driving the creation of shared standards. Civilian harm experts described the moment as a “unique opportunity” for American leadership by example.

Today, those efforts continue — without the United States, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the civilian protection mission.

And Thursday, no U.S. delegation will be in the room when the international forum the U.S. cofounded meets at NATO headquarters in Belgium.

The country’s absence from the International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response summit reinforces the abandonment of a mission the Pentagon had encouraged partners to embrace, said current and former officials. Most spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from President Donald Trump’s administration.

They called the step back “humiliating” and “dangerous,” pointing to reports of rising civilian casualties in Iran following strikes on schools and homes.

“There will be a day when people who care about mitigating civilian harm can come back and say, ‘OK, are we ready to solve this problem?’” said Jenny McAvoy, a former Defense Department official who helped shape the U.S. civilian protection program. “But there are already enormous consequences of abandoning this work.”

The Pentagon declined to comment about the lack of U.S. participation in the Brussels talks. A spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the Defense Department factors civilian protections into all phases of operational planning and “remains committed to fulfilling its civilian harm mitigation and response responsibilities.”

The Pentagon adopted the civilian harm mitigation and response mission in 2022 after years of bloodshed in the post-9/11 “forever wars.” Known as CHMR and pronounced “chimmer,” the framework called for a specialized center to collect strike data and for advisers embedded with regional commands to help mitigate the risk to noncombatants.

Not long after, the U.S. teamed up with the Netherlands to coordinate efforts internationally. The two countries had been frequent partners in recent military campaigns, including the fight against the Islamic State group, and were both coming to terms with high-profile civilian casualty incidents. For the United States, years of harm in Iraq and Afghanistan had drawn international outrage and pledges from commanders to better collect data and learn from deadly mistakes.

The Dutch were still addressing the fallout from a 2015 operation in Iraq in which air strikes targeting a car-bomb factory ignited a nearby munitions depot, setting off an enormous explosion that killed at least 70 civilians and wounded hundreds. Dutch responsibility wasn’t revealed until 2019, causing a national scandal and accusations of a cover-up.

In 2023, the U.S. and the Netherlands formed the loose coalition on CHMR. Participants described a small, informal group that has met half a dozen times since 2023 to share best practices and hear briefings on civilian casualty trends.

Advocacy groups said it had taken years to get the U.S. military to think of civilian casualties as more than “collateral damage,” showing commanders how the deaths of innocents were anathema to their morals and strategically harmful to their missions. The eventual adoption of CHMR guidelines by American defense officials helped their counterparts abroad make the case for programs in their own countries.

“By the U.S. putting itself out there and saying, ‘We learned, we can do better,’ it gives permission and makes it OK for other governments to similarly acknowledge, ‘Yeah, we can do better too,’” said McAvoy.

As participants gather this week in Brussels to discuss how to continue strengthening CHMR, however, the early momentum from the U.S. side has evaporated.

Hegseth, who derides rules of engagement as “woke,” gutted the CHMR program over the objections of the nation’s top commanders, ProPublica reported last month. Staff plunged from nearly 200 to about two dozen.

Days before the latest summit in Brussels, the United States wasn’t listed as a participant and there was no sign anyone from the Defense Department would attend. Current and former officials predicted either a no-show or, at most, a single delegate from one of the commands showing up.

To experts, the message was clear: The era of U.S. leadership on civilian protection was over.

“The U.S. stopped participating in this group last year and people assumed that meant the group would die,” said McAvoy. “But the group continued to exist and to meet — without the U.S. — under the leadership of the U.K. and the Netherlands.”

The two-day summit opens with a broad discussion of CHMR, such as how it applies in coalitions or in operations at sea, that includes advocacy groups and academics, a draft agenda reviewed by ProPublica shows. Day 2 is a closed-door session for more intimate talks among senior representatives of member states. The meeting wraps with a “looking ahead” panel.

Past attendees included Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway. The nations represent a wide variation in approaches and needs when it comes to CHMR, participants said.

The U.K., for example, doesn’t have a formal framework for civilian harm mitigation and response, and advocates have spent years pushing the British Ministry of Defense to adopt policies similar to those of the United States. Though humanitarian groups generally regarded the American CHMR enterprise as nascent and imperfect, the overall framework provided a worthy standard, said Mae Thompson of the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, a London-based advocacy group.

Advocates have framed the Pentagon’s rollback as an opportunity for the U.K. to step into a leadership role, Thompson said, and they’ve been encouraged by a recent internal report by the defense ministry that calls for formalization of a program in Britain, including systems to track civilian harm, investigate, and make amends and offer post-harm response.

NATO boasts a civilian protection policy that predates the American model, but the organization is now incorporating elements of the U.S. approach, said Andrew Hyde, who studies U.S.-European relations at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank.

Hyde said international talks are important for sorting out how CHMR applies in joint operations when the United States, NATO and European nations all have different interpretations of harm mitigation. The diminished U.S. role, he said, means NATO and other partners must step up on coordination.

The shift in leadership could end up shielding civilian protection work from the whims of whichever U.S. administration is in power and leading to more enduring reforms, Hyde said.

“NATO has continued to push forward without U.S. support or participation, keeping up the momentum and ready for U.S. re-engagement,” Hyde said.

The post Empty Seat: U.S. Absent as Western Powers Meet on Wartime Protections for Civilians appeared first on ProPublica.

Within a few days of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, FBI agents identified an important possible suspect: a middle-aged Saudi graduate student who provided crucial help to two of the al-Qaida hijackers as they settled in San Diego early the year before.

The Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, had since moved to England, and he was arrested there at the FBI’s request. A police search of his home and office yielded a trove of evidence that quickly deepened investigators’ suspicions about Bayoumi and his dealings with the terrorists. But what happened to much of that evidence after it was delivered to the FBI remains a mystery.

Bayoumi was questioned and released by British police and later returned to Saudi Arabia. For years thereafter, the FBI would insist he wasn’t really a suspect at all — that Bayoumi had met the hijackers by chance, had helped them unwittingly and seemed nothing like a militant Islamist.

As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is marked Friday, questions about how the FBI handled Bayoumi’s case have only grown, driven in part by evidence that was seized from him in 2001 but not made public for years or even shared with field agents who sought to investigate his role.

That evidence and other FBI information, now filed in a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims of the attacks, has undercut both Bayoumi’s claims of innocence and the FBI’s profile of him as a genial, pro-American civil servant. While he was living publicly as a student, it shows, Bayoumi worked closely with Saudi religious officials, operated as a Saudi intelligence asset and collaborated with several clerics who would later emerge as militant Islamists tied to al-Qaida.

This week, representatives of the 9/11 families are again demanding an end to what they have called the Justice Department’s silence about what happened to the Bayoumi evidence and why he and other Saudis were not more aggressively pursued. The families have also questioned whether the Trump administration — which has strengthened U.S. diplomatic and business ties to the Saudi royal family — is committed to pursuing the truth about the possible role of Saudi officials.

“We still have not been given the full picture of what happened,” said Kathleen Zapata, whose father, Joseph Coppo, was killed in the World Trade Center. “Why are we having to fight against our own government simply to get answers about the most horrible attack ever on American soil?”

A White House spokesperson said, “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and his team is working diligently on identifying records that are responsive to these families’ request.” A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that many of the officials involved in the early 9/11 investigation no longer work for the government.

While former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected to attend a ceremony at the 9/11 memorial in New York, President Donald Trump has said he will commemorate the anniversary separately at the Pentagon.

The Saudi government has long denied any role in the attacks, often citing FBI and CIA statements that the royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden. A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages asking for comment, including a request to speak to Bayoumi.

From San Diego to Dulles International Airport

A ProPublica examination of how the FBI handled the Bayoumi evidence shows that questions surrounding the Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot date to Jan. 15, 2000, when the first two hijackers landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok.

The CIA had followed the two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia days before. But the agency said it lost track of them when they flew to Thailand and then entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports. (The CIA did not inform the FBI of their presence in the United States until Aug. 24, 2001, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission.)

Unlike several Qaida operatives who led the hijacking teams, Mihdhar and Hazmi spoke no English and knew almost nothing of life in a Western society. The mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told CIA interrogators he advised them to seek help from Muslim communities in California, according to the 9/11 Commission. But the commission and many U.S. terrorism experts expressed skepticism that he would deploy such ill-equipped operatives without providing them with any contacts in the United States.

Bayoumi claimed his meeting with the hijackers was happenstance. After driving from San Diego on Feb. 1, 2000, he said, he had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and then went to a nearby halal cafe. There, he later told the FBI, he overheard Hazmi and Mihdhar speaking Gulf-accented Arabic and introduced himself. Seeking to be hospitable, he said, he told them they might want to try San Diego.

Shortly after the men stepped off a bus there three days later, Bayoumi said, he happened to run into them again at a local mosque. The next day, he arranged for them to rent an apartment in the building where he lived with his family, co-signed their lease and set up a bank account for them, briefly loaning them about $1,500 for the deposit. He went on to introduce them to more than two dozen local men who helped them in various ways.

The FBI had already looked closely at Bayoumi, launching a preliminary investigation in 1998 after neighbors reported what they said were suspicious gatherings of young Arab men at his apartment. That inquiry determined that Bayoumi, who had worked for the Saudi civil aviation ministry, was still receiving a generous government stipend through an aviation company for which he did no work. The investigation found no criminal activity, however, and it was closed after six months, officials said.

Barely a week after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI asked the British authorities to arrest Bayoumi in Birmingham, England, where he had begun graduate business studies at Aston University.

David Campbell, then a young terrorism investigator, was dispatched from London by the Metropolitan Police Service, which is responsible for counterterrorism efforts across Britain. He recalled flying back down the highway in a special police vehicle with his handcuffed prisoner in the back seat, the sirens blaring. “They’d been told they had one of the 9/11 terrorists,” he said in an interview.

The FBI sent three agents from the United States to assist with Bayoumi’s interrogation at the Paddington Green police station in Central London. They were joined by a senior FBI attache, Joseph Hummell, who worked closely with the police service’s  Anti-Terrorist Branch, known as SO13.

But despite those close contacts and the FBI’s considerable information about Bayoumi, very little of it was shared with Campbell and the Birmingham detective who joined him in questioning the suspect.

“We were really in the dark,” Campbell recalled. “They never even mentioned that he had been under investigation by the FBI in San Diego in 1998.”

Nor, Campbell said, were the interrogators briefed about the materials that had just been taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home and office, which included boxes of papers, correspondence, photographs, computer disks, videotapes and an address book. Yet some of those items had been immediately flagged as important, records show.

Among them was a diagram in Bayoumi’s handwriting that appeared to calculate the trajectory of an airplane to a point on the horizon. Another was a video of Bayoumi touring and describing the U.S. Capitol, a building that had been identified by U.S. investigators as a prospective al-Qaida target.

After questioning Bayoumi for almost a week, Campbell said, he and the Birmingham detective joined two senior SO13 officers on a conference call with Justice Department attorneys in the United States. The two interrogators were given a brief opportunity to express their view that Bayoumi’s account seemed deeply suspicious and full of falsehoods, Campbell said.

It didn’t seem to matter. The U.S. officials, who included lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors in New York, concluded quickly that they did not have sufficient evidence to seek Bayoumi’s extradition.

“When the call ended, we just looked at each other in complete disbelief,” Campbell recalled.

FBI documents declassified in response to a 2021 executive order by Biden give a partial answer to what happened to the Bayoumi evidence.

One memorandum on Oct. 11, 2001, notes that New Scotland Yard, as the Metropolitan Police Service was often called, had provided the FBI attache’s office with “copies of all recovered exhibits, including mirror images of all computers.” A complete copy of the trove was also sent via Federal Express to the FBI’s New York Field Office, the memo noted.

By then, however, the agency’s new director, Robert Mueller, had taken the unusual step of ordering that the 9/11 case be run out of its Washington headquarters. The Penttbomteam, as it became known in the FBI’s clunky acronym for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing, mobilized thousands of FBI agents and analysts around the world.

One group focused on the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, tracing the path of Hazmi and Mihdhar from Southern California to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where they abandoned a used Toyota Corolla registered to one of their former addresses in San Diego.

How the headquarters team translated and analyzed the materials obtained from Bayoumi in Britain is unclear. But the team did not appear to share the evidence widely. In another memo, dated May 15, 2002, the San Diego FBI office noted that it was asked to review only five of the more than 80 VHS tapes seized from Bayoumi in Birmingham. Two of those were duplicates and included footage of a paintball fight and a family trip to Sea World. “Nothing of significant investigative/evidential value has been discovered,” the memo stated.

Although Bayoumi’s friends and associates helped the hijackers with everything from part-time jobs to flying lessons (they flunked out because their English was so poor), FBI leaders dismissed the idea that any of the people who helped them knew they were Qaida operatives sent on a still-evolving terrorist mission.

“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” Mueller told a joint panel of the Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2002. “To this day, we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.”

The FBI’s more conclusive account of its Penttbom findings came before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. The young agent leading the Flight 77 investigation team, Jacqueline Maguire, echoed Mueller’s earlier testimony, saying in 2004 that Bayoumi’s meeting with the California hijackers had been “a random encounter” and that he had helped them without knowing their true aim. Maguire also said the FBI had no indication the hijackers had initially sought out another figure who raised suspicions, Fahad al-Thumairy, the imam of the Saudi-built King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California.

Michael Jacobson, a former State Department counterterrorism official who was a key commission investigator, said he knew some FBI agents in California were convinced that Bayoumi and Thumairy had helped the hijackers deliberately. But Maguire and her boss, Mary Galligan, who oversaw the Penttbom team, “were both consistently pushing back hard on any narrative of a support network,” Jacobson said in an interview.

Maguire and Galligan declined to comment.

When investigators from the 9/11 Commission interviewed Bayoumi and Thumairy in Saudi Arabia in 2003, Maguire — who had already interviewed the two Saudis for the FBI months earlier — joined them as an official escort. The interviews, which were managed by Saudi intelligence officials, were notable for Bayoumi’s efforts to ingratiate himself and Thumairy’s seemingly brazen lies, former officials said. Thumairy said he had never met the hijackers and did not even know Bayoumi, despite telephone records showing numerous calls between them. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to Thumairy.

In its final report, the commission said it could not confirm that Thumairy helped the two terrorists but found it was “fairly certain that Hazmi and Mihdhar spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.”

Echoing the FBI’s assessment, the commission described Bayoumi as “a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” and found no evidence he “believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.” It would take years before those conclusions were forcefully challenged.

Daniel Gonzalez, a San Diego FBI agent who had been looking at Hazmi and Mihdhar’s circle since the day after the attacks, became the case agent for Operation Encore, a “subfile” or follow-on inquiry to the original 9/11 case. But while he and other agents made significant breakthroughs, former officials said, they faced constant skepticism from FBI headquarters and were sometimes blocked outright in their efforts to pursue the case.

In 2007, in an interview with a key source in Jordan, Gonzalez learned of two other important witnesses in Los Angeles, young Muslim immigrants who had also helped the hijackers. The two later confirmed the hijackers had gone to the King Fahd Mosque after arriving in Los Angeles and met repeatedly with Thumairy. One of the men said Thumairy also arranged for the hijackers to be driven to their first meeting with Bayoumi at the halal cafe — undercutting Bayoumi’s claim that he met them by chance.

For years, Encore agents said, they continued to press for more of the materials seized from Bayoumi in Britain. At one point, Gonzalez got a phone call from Washington asking if he wanted some old Penttbom evidence that was about to be destroyed. The materials — copies of some of Bayoumi’s long-sought papers, including the suspicious flight diagram — stunned the Encore team, Gonzalez said.

In June 2012, a small group of Encore investigators and analysts flew to London to try to review the Bayoumi search evidence more thoroughly. According to three former officials familiar with the trip, they viewed dozens of hours of videotapes and took new copies of much of the Metropolitan Police material.

For reasons that remain unclear, however, the team either did not see or did not focus on a few videotapes that would later become evidence in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, including the tape of Bayoumi at the U.S. Capitol. While some terrorism experts have interpreted the recording as Bayoumi’s effort to “case” the site for a possible attack, lawyers for the Saudi government described it as a tourist video.

The Bayoumi videos also included extensive footage of two Saudi religious officials who not long before had commanded attention from both the FBI and CIA. The two men, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were emissaries of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs who had traced what intelligence officials saw as a strikingly suspicious path around the United States. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to the men.

In addition to traveling to Washington, D.C., with Bayoumi, the two clerics visited Los Angeles and San Diego a year before the hijackers and stayed at one of the homes where Hazmi and Mihdhar later lived. Sudairy also spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with an American al-Qaida member, Ziyad Khaleel, who provided Osama bin Laden with the satellite phone that FBI officials said he used to orchestrate the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Just before and after the hijackers arrived in San Diego, telephone records show, Bayoumi also made a series of calls to Sudairy in Washington, Thumairy in Los Angeles and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Yemeni American cleric. Aulaqi, who ran a San Diego mosque that Bayoumi had funded through Saudi donations, was described by FBI witnesses as a spiritual adviser to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Aulaqi later emerged as an important al-Qaida leader before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

Unanswered Questions

In 2014 and 2015, a panel of security experts was assembled to review the FBI’s implementation of reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Review Commission, as the second panel was called, was also tasked with looking again at questions about the 9/11 plot that remained unanswered.

Maguire, the FBI’s primary liaison to the review panel, again disputed suspicions about Bayoumi. “He came here for school and everything seems accidental with Bayoumi,” the commission was told in a 2014 briefing led by Maguire.

The review panel concluded there was not enough new information to revise the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there was no “witting assistance” to the hijackers. But Tim Roemer — a Democratic former congressman from Indiana who served on the 2002 joint intelligence inquiry, the 9/11 Commission and the Review Commission — made a point of pressing for further investigation into the Saudi question. He was struck that Maguire and other FBI officials were still pushing back.

“There was consistent feedback from some levels of the FBI that simply wanted to close the case and claim that what Bayoumi did was purely coincidence and somehow accidental,” Roemer said.

Roemer insisted that the Review Commission formally recommend that the FBI continue to examine the Saudi issue. But shortly after it did so, officials at FBI headquarters renewed their pressure to shut down Operation Encore. In 2016, the head of the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces finally relented, reassigning the case and disbanding the team that had been investigating it for years.

The next year, a pair of memorandums sent by the FBI’s Washington field office confirmed something that the Encore agents had long suspected: Between the late 1990s and Sept. 11, 2001, Bayoumi was paid a monthly stipend as a co-optee, or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence services.

By then, Gonzalez had retired. The Encore investigators who remained were working new jobs. Along with other documents from the FBI investigation, the memos were initially withheld from the 9/11 families by the Justice Department, which classified them as state secrets during Trump’s first term. The Encore agents saw the memos for the first time when they were finally made public in 2022 under Biden’s executive order.

“Somebody needs to explain to the American people why we didn’t see this information before,” Gonzalez said in an interview.

The post 25 Years After 9/11, Questions About the FBI’s Pursuit of Saudi Suspects in the Case Have Only Grown appeared first on ProPublica.

Major League Baseball teams sign more players from the Dominican Republic each year than any nation besides the U.S. Almost every neighborhood is home to a baseball field where kids as young as 4 begin learning to play. In our months of reporting, we’ve rarely come across anyone in the Dominican who doesn’t have some connection to the sport: a sibling or uncle or son who aspires to be a professional player, or who once did.

As beloved and important as baseball is in the Dominican, industry practices can hurt young players and their families. Dozens of trainers and players have told us that adolescents are expected to perform at levels never asked of their peers from other countries and enter into agreements with teams at much earlier ages. (We just published a story about abusive moneylending practices that have sprouted from this system.) We’re planning more stories brought to our attention by this community.

We want this work to reach people whose lives are touched by the issues we’re investigating. If that’s you, we want you to be able to easily connect with our reporting team and share tips or experiences you think we should know about Dominican baseball. The more people we hear from, the more impactful our reporting on these complex issues can be. (Learn more about ProPublica and our mission.) 

For this series, we’re opening a WhatsApp line because it’s a popular way to keep in touch in the Dominican, and international calls and texts are free. All you have to do is text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447.

If you’re not a WhatsApp user, if you can still get in touch with our reporting team via email:

• Gus Garcia-Roberts: Gus.Garcia-Roberts@propublica.org
• Maryam Jameel: Maryam.Jameel@propublica.org

If you would prefer another way to get in touch, see our advice here.

What can you expect if you text our number? 

You’ll get a link to our latest stories about baseball. We’ll also ask about your connection to baseball and ask you to share anything that you think our reporters should look into as we continue investigating. 

If you give us permission, we’ll also send you quick updates from our series every now and then. 

What kind of tips and comments are helpful? 

We want to hear about baseball-related issues and experiences that are important to you, whether they’re connected to finances, health, education or something else. Below are a few of the topics we’re already reporting on; if you have related experiences to share, we would appreciate hearing about them.

• Illness and injury related to performance pressure 
• Wide availability of anabolic steroids and consequences of use
• Conditions at training academies (pensiones)

If you have a connection to baseball — whether you’re a current or former player, trainer, parent of a player, doctor who treats athletes, someone who works for an MLB team or you have some other link — we would love to hear from you.

If I don’t have a connection to baseball but want to follow along, should I sign up?

Yes, we’ll share updates from our investigations, along with links to our latest reporting.

What if I know someone who has a connection to baseball?

Please send them a link to our baseball series or have them text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447. And thank you — we need to reach as many people as we can.

What will you do with the information I share with you?

We will read everything you send and follow up with you if we have further questions or are interested in including something you’ve shared in our investigations. 

We take your privacy very seriously. Our reporters speak to people every day who want to share information but fear retribution. Our reputation is built on protecting sources, and we take that responsibility to heart. You can request to speak on background, which means you would not be named in our stories.

Will ProPublica sell my information to anyone?

No.

The post Got a Connection to Dominican Baseball? Text Us on WhatsApp. appeared first on ProPublica.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2020, Luis David Saba arrived at a desolate stretch of highway along the southern coast of the Dominican Republic. Police and paramedics had left by then, taking with them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a crumpled hood and the tangled remains of the cheap motorcycle it had smashed into. Also gone were the motorcycle’s two critically injured passengers. The only signs that an accident had occurred a few hours earlier were the blood and debris smeared across the asphalt and a pile of neatly placed branches.

Saba knew what to expect underneath that pile. It was a Dominican custom to use anything on hand to shroud a body abandoned by paramedics. Pushing away the branches, Saba saw shredded clothes, torn skin and long, curly hair forming a halo over a battered face. He covered the body of his 20-year-old younger brother, Yohan Saba Mercado, with a sheet. In shock, he felt nothing but the need to get his brother out of the road. 

Saba sat and waited for forensic investigators he was told were on their way. Hours passed, the sun rose and traffic began to stream by them. Finally, he gave up. With the help of friends, he loaded his brother’s body into a van, and hours later it was at his mother’s house.

Later that morning, two other families were experiencing similar horrors. Deby Beato Charles, 20, and Daniela Perez Garcia, 19, had been riding on the back of Yohan’s motorcycle when the Jeep rear-ended them. When Deby’s older brother, Ruben, got to a nearby hospital, he was met by a doctor who handed him a wallet and bracelet. Deby had died of a severe head injury and blunt chest trauma. At another hospital, Daniela’s uncle was ushered into a room where his niece lay. Her face was so swollen he didn’t recognize her. According to her death certificate, she had suffered injuries to her head, chest and hip and went into hypovolemic shock, in which the loss of bodily fluids causes a person’s organs to shut down. 

The families of Daniela and Yohan held funerals in their homes that afternoon. During the proceedings, word spread about who had been driving the Grand Cherokee. It was Oneil Cruz, a “pelotero,” a ballplayer, with a fortune and a future, the 21-year-old scion of a local baseball family, a top prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. Seemingly everyone in the area knew how much he received from his major league signing bonus five years earlier: $950,000.

The families also knew what was going to happen next. 

Yohan’s mother told me that after all the mourners left the house, a driver showed up holding out a phone. On the line was Cruz’s mother offering condolences — and wanting to negotiate.

---

Less than 7 miles from the site of the accident is the striving farm town of Nizao. Even though it has a population of just 32,000, Nizao has produced dozens of professional ballplayers, including three-time All-Star Ketel Marte and, most famously, Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero Sr., one of the best hitters in modern baseball and father of Vladimir Jr., the star first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays. Looming over the main road into town is the Guerreros’ mansion. Right below it, a giant 27 has been carved into the hill — the jersey number the two share.

By 2020, Oneil Cruz Ureña looked poised to be among the best of Nizao’s ballplayers. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed him when he was 16 and over 6 feet tall. They traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who considered him their future shortstop. The statistics website FanGraphs ranked him as one of baseball’s top prospects, declaring that “there aren’t many who have a chance to be what this guy might.” 

But the accident on a darkened road threatened to destroy that chance before Cruz even made it to the major leagues. Police detained him at the scene. In a court filing the following day, prosecutors said that they had opened an investigation “en contra del imputado,” “against the accused.” They sought “coercive measures,” a mechanism in Dominican law by which a suspect can be forced to remain in custody while an investigation continues. In a press release, they alleged that Cruz “had consumed alcoholic beverages prior to the accident.” 

The scandal made headlines in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and then, in a matter of days, it evaporated from the public eye. How that happened has been unknown, until now.

I’d heard about the Cruz case last year when I began reporting on the booming industry of “prestamistas,” moneylenders, who exploit major league prospects in the Dominican Republic by getting their undereducated parents to give up sizable portions of their signing bonuses. The case’s disappearance, I was told, marked the origin story of the most dominant prestamista in the country’s chaotic baseball ecosystem: Santo Caraballo. At the time, Caraballo was an obscure businessman with political connections. He rose to prominence after forming a business partnership with national hero David Ortiz, the retired Boston Red Sox great who remains an influential figure in Major League Baseball. (In a statement, Ortiz said his business relationship with Caraballo “began to come to an end” more than 18 months ago.) I wrote about Caraballo’s practices in “The Dominican Baseball Factory.”

To find out how Caraballo made the case against Cruz go away, I interviewed more than 30 people in the Dominican Republic. Some were afraid to talk, but others, primarily family members of the victims, were eager to speak publicly for the first time. I also obtained hundreds of pages of previously unreported documents, including court records and bank receipts, as well as voice notes. I made numerous attempts to reach Caraballo about his role, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded. 

The Dominican court system gives victims or their families significant input on whether to pursue a prosecution. Caraballo oversaw a campaign to persuade the families of the three victims to accept cash in return for signing documents withdrawing all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz. 

The effort rescued Cruz’s baseball career — he is now the starting center fielder for the Pirates — and it launched Caraballo’s. He became a ubiquitous operator in the sport, feared for the sort of high-powered connections that could make a deadly crash disappear. But for some of the victims’ relatives, the money they received — roughly $66,000 in total for the three families — hasn’t lasted nearly as long as the hurt: six years of unresolved grief, resentment and regret that they allowed their forgiveness to be purchased.

Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”

A spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Pirates said the team and Cruz “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”

---

Yohan and Deby lived in and around a barrio of Sabana Grande de Palenque, known as “Sal Si Puedes,” Get Out If You Can. Five miles from Nizao, it is marked by ruddy dirt roads and half-built homes and is separated from the rest of the town by a deep canal. Some residents have to cross makeshift footbridges to reach their front doors. Daniela grew up in the nearby village of Juan Baron.

As was the case with Deby and Daniela, Yohan’s parents separated when he was young. His early childhood was spent in a small wooden home where his paternal grandmother took care of him while his mother worked in Santo Domingo as a housekeeper. A teenager when his father suffered a stroke, Yohan would bring him blood pressure medicine and take him to the beach to exercise in the ocean. Yohan worked as an air conditioning mechanic, telling his dad his goal was to pay for a new roof for his mom’s house so that it wouldn’t flood every time it rained. He commuted to Santo Domingo on a X1000 motorcycle he had bought secondhand. In a country where it’s common to see three or more people on a “moto,” the noisy rig was also how his friends got around.

The best of those friends was Deby. The third of four boys, all right-handed pitchers growing up, he lived in his mother’s immaculate home. After she moved to Chile six years earlier to find work, Deby spoke with her every day, updating her on his love life. He had her name tattooed within an infinity symbol on his arm. When he failed to make a top-level baseball academy, the most common route to be signed by a major league team, Deby returned to high school. At the time of the crash, he was days away from graduating, bagging groceries and taking care of his younger brother.

Deby and Daniela had known each other since they were kids and, according to their families, had an off-and-on relationship. Videos and photos of Daniela often show her dancing and singing. “She never wanted the party to end,” a friend said. The youngest of four, she lived with her mother, who considered Daniela her best friend. She was her “chiquita,” or “little girl,” Daniela would remind her mother when she insisted on sitting on her lap. Many nights, they slept in the same bed together. She had graduated high school and was taking English classes in Santo Domingo.

Deby, Yohan and Daniela were in that hopeful, stressful, liberating period between adolescence and adulthood. They had no intention to be out late that September night, but they were also not going to turn down an impromptu plan to party. 

Daniela told her mom she was going to meet girlfriends at the Nizao River and would be back by early evening. It was still daylight when she recorded herself at an outdoor bar, wearing a red dress and singing along to a salsa song. Nobody was in a rush to return to the stagnant indoors. As for the country’s 5 p.m. COVID-19 curfew, few young people took it seriously. In Baní, the nearest sizable city, there was a bar referred to as Escondido, or Hidden, because it served drinks past curfew. Daniela and a friend recruited Yohan and Deby, who were home but easy to persuade to join. 

At around 11 p.m., according to court records, they were riding on the four-lane highway heading home. Late at night, the road is desolate and poorly lit. Trucks and cars howl by at high speeds, and accidents are frequent. A security guard who works at a snack stand across from the site of the accident told me that his boss was killed when a car smashed into his business. 

Yohan was at the handlebars, with Daniela and Deby seated behind him. None wore a helmet. A friend on his own motorcycle was riding alongside them. They had just passed the shuttered snack stand when Cruz rear-ended Yohan’s motorcycle, smashing its rear tire and throwing the three friends onto the pavement. 

Cruz called 911, according to his lawyers. A lieutenant from the national police responded to the scene, but his subsequent report, which he filed in court, offers little detail about the accident site or investigation that followed. If there was any forensic analysis, prosecutors never produced it. There is no mention of whether police believed either Yohan or Cruz was driving recklessly or speeding. The report does not indicate whether the victims were tested for their alcohol levels. It makes no reference to the second motorcyclist. When I reached him, he said that the authorities never questioned him. He declined to be interviewed further.

According to the report, Cruz told the lieutenant that “en ningun momento,” “at no time,” did he see the motorcycle before colliding with it in the passing lane. He said it didn’t have lights — an assertion that would later become a point of contention in court. Cruz’s legal team filed a photo of the motorcycle that showed missing lights, but it was taken after the accident, when the bike was barely intact. Luis David, Yohan’s brother, told me that the motorcycle had working lights in the front but not in the rear. 

The day after the accident, stories were posted on Facebook that included photos of Yohan, Deby and Daniela lying mangled on the highway as emergency responders attempted to save them. On Dominican gossip and news sites, opinions poured forth. Some were convinced that Cruz would get preferential treatment. Others predicted that the families of the victims would be seeking a payday. Many asserted that the deceased were as much at fault as Cruz since they were all out past curfew.

---

The families of Yohan, Deby and Daniela all knew of the Cruzes. Oneil’s father, Rafael, played pro ball, first in Japan and then in the Atlanta Braves organization until 2009, when he was suspended after testing positive for steroids. He returned to Nizao, where he opened a baseball academy. His most promising pupils included Oneil and his brothers, Rafael Jr. and Homer, who played pro ball in the United States. Oneil was named after Rafael’s favorite ballplayer, New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill. 

Among the Cruzes’ inner circle was Osvaldo Tamarez, a trainer known as Cabezon, Big Head. He told me that in the hours following the accident, when Oneil was still in custody, he went to see the Cruzes and advised them to handle the aftermath of the accident carefully. “Cuidado, tu hijo va a ser una figura pública,” Tamarez said he told them. “Your son is going to be a public figure.” According to Tamarez, the Cruzes assigned him to speak with Daniela’s and Deby’s family members, some of whom he knew from baseball. He told me that from the beginning, their focus was on how to pay off the victims’ families so they wouldn’t sue and wouldn’t demand that prosecutors pursue the case. A person close to the Cruzes confirmed Tamarez’s account. 

Tamarez said that another trainer recommended that Cruzes bring in Santo Caraballo, a businessman he knew from the baseball industry. Among Caraballo’s many companies was a legal services firm, even though he wasn’t a lawyer. More relevant, Caraballo had political connections. He was an ambassador in the ministry of foreign affairs, a patronage position awarded him four years earlier by President Danilo Medina.

Tamarez said that Caraballo immediately got to work on multiple fronts, including organizing a legal team. But that wasn’t his most important role. Caraballo’s most important job was simple, Tamarez told me: Fix the problem. 

At Cruz’s initial court appearance, which came a little more than two days after the accident, one of his attorneys asked to delay the case so his representatives could “in a humane way, seek solutions” for the families and their “material hardships.” The judge postponed the hearing for two days. Family members told me that Caraballo, or those working with him, had already begun reaching out to them.

---

The last time Mercedes Garcia saw her daughter, she had helped Daniela pull the price tags off her red dress before she went to the river with her girlfriends. In the days after the accident, Garcia was haunted by a vision of her daughter plastered to the road in the torn dress, yelling, “Ayúdame Mamá, ayúdame!” “Help me, Mama, help me!”

I found Garcia where she spends much of her day: seated alone in her tiny living room, rocking back and forth on a couch, her hair neatly pulled back, digging under her fingernails with a bobby pin. I could hear the shouts of a woman preaching at the church next door.

Garcia, who is 65, says she was clear from the beginning that she didn’t want money from the Cruzes. “Rich people, especially baseball players, like to pay for dead people with money,” she told me. “I am poor, but I have honor.” All she wanted, she said, was for Cruz to answer for what happened and apologize. Instead, she said, her family — most prominently, her son — tricked her into agreeing to a deal. 

Garcia told me that in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, she entrusted her son Porfirio with handling all the paperwork. Porfirio was a traffic cop in Santo Domingo who moonlighted as an Uber driver. What Garcia didn’t know, but what Tamarez later confirmed, was that Porfirio was already working with Caraballo.

According to Garcia, Porfirio brought her a document to sign that he partially obscured with his hand. Shortly afterward, Porfirio drove her and another of her sons, Juan Manuel, to Caraballo’s office in Santo Domingo. Porfirio went in by himself and brought out another document for his mother to sign. She was in a fog of grief, she told me, and didn’t read it. Juan Manuel confirmed his mother’s account that she didn’t understand what she was signing and that Porfirio didn’t explain what it was. 

Daniela’s father, Porfirio Perez, co-signed the documents. Perez, who can barely read, parks cars at a bank for tips. He told me that Garcia’s brother brought him the papers but didn’t tell him that they exonerated Cruz. “Because they saw that I’m a simple person, they took advantage of me,” he said. Garcia’s brother declined to comment. 

I reviewed the two documents, which were dated the same day as Cruz’s court appearance. One was filed in court by Cruz’s attorney; the other was not. The document filed in court states that the family sought to “withdraw” all legal claims against Cruz. It also says that the family had not received any “pecuniary interest” in return for withdrawing the claims. They were doing so out of an awareness that the accident was not caused by Cruz, the document says, “but rather by circumstances of life.” 

The contract not filed in court is signed by Daniela’s parents and Oneil’s mother. It’s a “discharge and legal settlement” stating that the parents were paid 900,000 pesos, about $15,000, for Daniela’s “funeral expenses.” That amount is more than twice the average annual income in the Dominican Republic. The document says that the money represented a settlement for “damages caused” by Cruz to Daniela’s family. But Garcia and Juan Manuel said that Porfirio controlled the payout and that he gave them around 300,000 pesos, or less than $5,000. Daniela’s father told me he received nothing.

Garcia said that she didn’t talk to much of her family for years after she realized what had happened. Once they decided to take that money, they lost her, too, she told me. “I was buried along with Daniela.” 

I left multiple voice and text messages for Porfirio, who declined to be interviewed.

Cruz’s mother, however, did agree to hear my questions. I met her at the Cruzes’ gated home on a busy street in Nizao. With wary politeness, she indicated that we sit on the front porch. Batting cages were in the back. 

I asked her about Caraballo’s role in persuading the victims’ families not to sue, but she denied that she knew him, contradicting several witnesses. When I showed her a photograph of Caraballo, she told me she didn’t recognize him. Before I could ask my next question, she stood up, making it clear the interview was over. No more than five minutes had passed. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I can’t really answer because I don’t know anything.”

---

When Deby’s mother, Elena Charles, left for Chile to find restaurant work, it fell to Ruben, the eldest of her four sons, to take “las riendas de la casa,” the reins of the house. So it was Ruben, who turned 27 the night his brother died, whom Tamarez visited shortly after Cruz’s court appearance. Ruben told me that Tamarez encouraged him to strike a deal, arguing that the ballplayer was never going to be punished and that Daniela’s family had already received a million pesos for agreeing not to sue. He should meet with a man named Caraballo and hear what he had to say.

Ruben spoke with his father, who told him the same thing: Deby was not coming back. Take the money, even if you just keep it in an account. (Deby’s father did not agree to an interview.)

When Ruben got to Caraballo’s office, he said Cruz’s mother was there. All he wanted, Ruben told me, was justice — he didn’t care if the courts administered it or if he did. But he was also aware that Tamarez and his father were probably right: He and his family were powerless. 

Ruben yelled at Caraballo that he wasn’t there to negotiate over his brother’s death like it was a car for sale. Caraballo, he said, responded like a man used to people exploding with rage in his office. He pointed out all of his surveillance cameras. According to Ruben, he then made his offer. Because both of Deby’s parents lived outside the country — his father had been in Spain for years — additional legal work would be required if Ruben’s family made an agreement. Therefore, he was willing to go as high as 2 million pesos, roughly $34,000. 

Deby’s mother returned home a couple of weeks after the accident. I recently met with her and her three surviving sons in their comfortable and tidy living room. Fifty-two years old, dressed in a patterned jumpsuit and a necklace bearing her nickname — Ramonita — she frequently wiped away tears as she discussed Deby. On the wall were portraits of each of the boys. Deby’s brothers are wearing their high school graduation robes. Deby is pictured shirtless, sporting sunglasses, ripped jeans and a knowing grin. 

As we discussed the negotiation with Caraballo, Ruben and his mother revisited an argument that seemed as fresh as those they had during hourslong phone calls six years ago. She was absolutely clear about what she wanted: Cruz should be in prison for 120 years.

“Te dije no lo hagas,” she said to him, her voice rising. “I told you not to do it.” 

“And what did I tell you?” Ruben responded. “That they were going to release him anyway!” 

Ruben signed a document on behalf of his family called an “act of withdrawal,” which Cruz’s attorneys later filed in court. Similar to the document signed by Daniela’s parents, it attested that Cruz “had not the slightest intention of causing the accident” and that Deby’s family had agreed to withdraw all legal claims against him, including criminal and civil, without “any type of pressure [or] pecuniary interest.” 

Caraballo, though, wasn’t done. Ruben told me that Caraballo then pitched him on turning his brother’s death into an income opportunity: Rather than give the family the 2 million pesos in a lump sum, Caraballo would invest the money for them and pay 15,000 pesos, just over $265, a month indefinitely. 

Ruben, though, was done with Caraballo. “I don’t want to do business with you,” he said he told him, “and I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”

The family put the money in a bank account. Except for the interest, roughly $65 a month, which the family has used to help pay for the youngest’s tuition, the money is still there, they told me. Charles explained that there’s been plenty of times that they could’ve dipped into the principal, but the money repels her. “It doesn’t have an end,” she said of the anguish she feels about having made a deal with the Cruzes. “For the rest of my life, it’s going to be a conflict.”

---

Genny Mercado, after turning away the driver with Cruz’s mother on the line, faced a similar gantlet of pressure from her family. Word spread that the other families were accepting a deal. Genny earned about 16,000 pesos, about $275, a month as a housekeeper, so a settlement would likely exceed several years of income. Rejecting the money, Yohan’s half brothers told her, would accomplish nothing. 

Mercado, who is 48, was also the de facto decision-maker. Yohan’s father, Pedro Saba, had suffered a second stroke the day he learned of his son’s death. She hired the only lawyer she knew, who negotiated a deal on the parents’ behalf. The document was a withdrawal like those signed by the other families, exonerating Cruz. Mercado said that she couldn’t think clearly about any of this at the time: “My mind was set on my son.” 

Minus the lawyer’s cut, Mercado and Saba received approximately 800,000 pesos, or $14,000. Yohan’s father spent 300,000 pesos on a refrigerator, a television and a bed. Mercado used the money to buy rebar and 75 bags of cement to build the roof that Yohan had promised. She stopped working for seven months and rarely left her home except to put flowers on his grave.

When I showed up, two of her sons arranged plastic chairs in the living room so I could speak with her and her husband, José Enrique. She had never been interviewed, and it had been years since anyone outside the family even pretended to care about what happened to Yohan. “Any family that goes through something like this just wants justice,” Mercado told me. “Everyone who kills has to go to jail.” But in Cruz’s case, “No one wanted to hurt the future del muchacho.”

There were no second thoughts about having accepted the money, only resignation that there was never going to be a fair outcome for Yohan. “Around here, the police let a lot of things slide, especially when it involves people who have money or connections or whatever else,” said José Enrique, tossing shucked pea shells on the cement floor. “We’re not going to try to dance around that fact anymore.”

Later I visited Yohan’s father, who spends his days in a spartan home with three of his elderly brothers, two of whom are blind. “Terminator” blared on the television. Saba doesn’t have any photos of Yohan on his walls because, he said, it would make him too sad. In a voice slurred by his two strokes, Saba told me how Yohan would put him on his motorcycle and take him to the ocean. “Wherever I wanted to go,” he said, “he would take me there.” He hasn’t been back to the beach since Yohan was killed.

---

Cruz’s second court date occurred on the Friday following the accident. Prosecutors were seeking to keep him in custody for three months. The victims’ families weren’t present. The court didn’t know how to reach two of them, a clerk explained to the judge. Prosecutors didn’t even get the names of the victims right, referring to Yohan Saba as “Jons Sabab” and Deby as “Baby.” The charges they sought against Cruz included reckless driving and causing an accident that resulted in death. If convicted, he could face one to three years in prison. 

Most striking was what was not said. In their press release after the crash, prosecutors had referred to evidence that Cruz had been drinking before the accident. But they never made that claim in court. I reached out to the lead prosecutor as well as the prosecutor’s office to ask why they had decided not to charge Cruz with driving while intoxicated. Both declined to comment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist asked the same question the week of the court date. He reported that a spokesperson for the prosecutors explained that Cruz had “smelled of alcohol” after the accident but that police hadn’t performed a sobriety test because of a “procedural error.” 

While Cruz remained in police custody, his legal team submitted the withdrawals that had been signed by the victims’ families. In addition to offering his condolences, an attorney explained that Cruz was providing “material support” to the families for their “basic needs of being human: education, food, clothing, among other matters.” He also submitted numerous testimonials praising Cruz’s good character, including from his pastor, who attested that Cruz had demonstrated “loyalty and absolute fidelity to the gospel,” and from a local marble and granite contractor who said that Cruz was a responsible client “deserving of an open line of credit.” The attorney emphasized that Cruz was one of baseball’s “five highest-rated prospects internationally.”

The accident, he told the judge, “hurts the whole town, Oneil above all, who for this will have to go to professional therapy so that he can cope with the trauma … For God’s sake, let’s try to ensure that Oneil Cruz Ureña’s mental health is now a priority.” 

The judge released Cruz on a bond of 2 million pesos, or $34,000. A couple of weeks later, Cruz posted a photo of himself with Caraballo, grinning while seated on a golf cart at the Miami airport. 

The following March, Cruz was at the Pirates’ spring training facility in Florida. An article at the time mentioned the accident in passing, buried under the news that the team was moving him into the outfield. It’s the only time I know of in which Cruz has been quoted discussing the accident.

“In the beginning, I was very fearful of not being able to continue to play the game that I love and to reach the dream I’ve always had, which is to reach the big leagues,” Cruz said through an interpreter. “However, when things became clear later and everything was solved, I was able to … hope again that I’ll be able to play. Now, I have peace.”

The press, both in the United States and the Dominican Republic, stopped covering the accident after that. 

The man who helped deliver him that peace used the incident to become one of the most powerful figures operating in the shadows of Dominican baseball.

Cruz’s next court appearance was Aug. 30, 2021. Almost a year had passed since the accident, and he was in the States playing for the Altoona Curve, a Pirates minor league team. He attended virtually. Despite the families’ withdrawals, prosecutors still had the power to pursue charges against him, but their case was flimsy. The only evidence they submitted were death certificates and a police report that offered little more than the date and time of the accident and the names of Cruz and the three people he killed: Yohan Saba Mercado, Deby Beato Charles and Daniela Perez Garcia. The judge dismissed the case, ordering the return of the 2 million pesos bond. 

Just over a month later, Cruz made his major league debut against the Cincinnati Reds, scorching a single that was the hardest recorded hit by a Pirate, a mark he has broken many times since. He is now a fixture of the team and will earn $3.3 million this year. He is projected to make far more once he becomes a free agent in a few seasons.

The post The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer appeared first on ProPublica.

Chapter 1

On an evening in late 2021, in a pristine baseball complex in central Santo Domingo, a baby-faced 14-year-old outfielder in athletic gear named Belfi Rivera huddled in front of a computer screen. Next to him was John Carmona, who had been Belfi’s trainer and de facto caretaker since he was 11 years old. In a nearby office, Belfi’s parents stared anxiously at a separate computer. On the screen, calling into the Dominican Republic, were representatives of the Arizona Diamondbacks, there for a conversation that promised to shift forever the fortunes of Belfi and his parents.

The team, they would soon learn, had agreed to pay Belfi $1.8 million after his 16th birthday. It was a deal Carmona had negotiated without consulting Belfi or his parents. It was also a handshake agreement that skirted Major League Baseball’s rules that bar teams from signing players younger than 16. Every year, all 30 major league teams reach preacuerdos, or early deals, with hundreds of Dominican prospects — a practice they make little attempt to hide. (The Diamondbacks did not respond to a request for comment.)

The baseball men said Belfi was now part of “la familia.” They asked him about his favorite player and how he learned to swing his bat so fast and whether he understood the importance of discipline. The conversation washed over Belfi, who, on the rare occasions when he spoke, did so in a tumbling, nervous cadence. He had spent his childhood in a shanty outside of the capital. Meals often consisted of sugary cornmeal or a piece of bread. But he had a talent “gifted by God,” as an early trainer put it, with the skills — speed, arm, glove, contact hitting — treasured by scouts. The size of this bonus, once made official, would establish him as one of the highest-paid prospects outside of the United States.

If he fulfilled his promise, he might join an ever-expanding list of Dominican legends: San Francisco Giant Juan Marichal, the winningest pitcher of the 1960s; Tony Fernandez and George Bell, Toronto Blue Jays teammates who hailed from the same baseball-mad town of San Pedro de Macoris; Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, and David Ortiz, the pitcher and sluggers who in the early 2000s turned the Caribbean nation into an unlikely bastion of Boston Red Sox fandom; and swaggering, bat-flipping modern superstars like Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto, and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. — with playing contracts totaling more than $1.6 billion — who have helped to revitalize baseball’s popularity.

For the past four decades, no country outside the United States has sent more players to the majors than the Dominican Republic. With a population under 12 million, it is roughly the size of Ohio, a state that last year claimed two dozen major league players. The Dominican Republic had 144, roughly 10% of the league. The country is a baseball factory. Talented players are sent to practice full time at one of hundreds of academies when they are as young as 10 years old.

That’s how old Belfi was when he went off in tears to live in the home of a stranger who trained boys on a shaggy ball field in the capital. The best players are then sold to increasingly more prominent trainers until they wind up at an elite academy run by men like Carmona, who have close relations with major league teams and receive a sizable percentage of a player’s signing bonus. 

As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it. 

But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”

In a brief conversation with Caraballo, he told me his business was not the biggest or “that lucrative.” I made multiple attempts to reach Caraballo again, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded.

Thanks to early agreements, prestamistas, or moneylenders, like Caraballo now wield singular power within Dominican baseball, amassing millions of dollars by persuading undereducated parents to sign away portions of their sons’ future bonuses in exchange for loans with exorbitant interest rates. Major League Baseball has known for years about early agreements and the predatory industry that has grown around them. Even though it has a formidable economic and political presence in the Dominican Republic, it has done little about either. It has never publicly warned or penalized a team for making an early deal, and its attempts to educate families about moneylenders have been ineffectual. (A spokesperson for Major League Baseball declined to comment and referred to past statements by league officials calling for an overhaul of the Dominican system.) 

It is not just Major League Baseball that has allowed this corrosive system to continue. When the league proposed changes that would have eliminated early deals and made it more difficult for moneylenders to prey on baseball families, David Ortiz used his influence within the powerful players union to help block the reform. At the time it was unknown outside of Dominican baseball that he had a financial interest in preserving the system. (In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said that his opposition to the league’s proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.”)

Chapter 2

I’d long been told that the Dominican Republic’s wildly successful baseball industry was plagued with abuse and exploitation — that for decades Major League Baseball has presided over a massive unregulated system that treats tens of thousands of Dominican boys like commodities. But when I began making calls last year, I expected those most involved to defend it. Instead, trainers — the men integral to the industry as instructors, surrogate parents and agents — virtually all told me they felt forced to participate in a system that is broken and costly. 

I also spoke with team executives, agents, scouts and parents. Between the exorbitant commissions that go to trainers, the pressure to evaluate prepubescent players on how skilled they will be in four or five years, and all the education lost while those players are pulled out of school, nobody would purposefully design a system this way, they said.

“This is a system that is allowing corruption at all levels,” said one longtime trainer, Eddy Fontana.

Major League Baseball, too, doesn’t deny this, declaring recently that it was “long past time to reform” Dominican baseball. The players union also acknowledges that the industry is troubled but says it’s “a people issue, not a system issue.” 

What I found most surprising was the common opinion that, despite widespread acknowledgment that Dominican baseball needed to be overhauled, the industry has gotten even more exploitative. Arturo J. Marcano, who has spent most of his career as a sports attorney, published a book in 2002 comparing the Dominican baseball pipeline to human trafficking. He didn’t hesitate when I asked how today’s industry compares. “A hundred times worse,” he said.

I set out to learn why the league and the players have done little to fix these problems. I crisscrossed the Dominican Republic and met people in shabby dugouts and gleaming stadiums, under a palm tree on a rocky beach coated in shattered beer bottles and at a café on a touristy plaza where a gold-covered street performer posed as a batter atop a trophy. I reviewed hundreds of pages of unreported court records, contracts, bank statements and WhatsApp messages, among other documents. 

Wherever you go, there are reminders of el pelotero who achieved the Dominican dream of playing American baseball. Virtually every village has el play, a ball field, lovingly painted and filled with boys of all ages even during a downpour. Watchful men fine-tune the swings of adolescents hammering balls toward scampering elementary-age outfielders not yet deemed ready to take cuts themselves. Road signs announce not just the name of the town you are entering but its native sons who cracked a major league roster. Hall of Famers are depicted in grandiose murals throughout the capital. All 30 major league teams have training academies, and they rise up from the countryside like castles.

Every team participates in the Dominican Summer League, where 1,500 prospects from Latin America compete to get promoted to the lowest minor league teams in the United States. Hundreds more professional players, including established stars, draw sellout crowds in the offseason in what’s known as the winter league. Steven Puig, the president of BHD, the Dominican bank that is a corporate partner of Major League Baseball, told me that the sport generates as much as $400 million annually.

American baseball executives began scouting, signing and developing Dominican teenagers in earnest in the 1980s. A handful of teams, recognizing the island as a source of cheap talent, built bare-bones training academies on former sugar plantations. They relied on buscones, finders, to bring them the best players. But the buscones soon realized they could make more money by opening their own academies. There are now, according to a national trade association, more than 6,000 trainers, ranging from the off-duty car mechanic to the millionaire former big leaguer. In return for providing room, board, equipment, coaching and — they claim — education, these men typically receive between 35% and 50% of a player’s signing bonus, which they negotiate. 

In their search for the next Dominican star, major league teams pursue what one general manager called a “boatload mentality.” Every year, teams sign about 450 Dominican prospects, most for bonuses around $30,000. Fewer than two-thirds will make it to the lowest minor leagues, and less than 10% will play a day in the majors, according to MLB data. (Teams treat Venezuelan prospects, many of whom train in the Dominican Republic, in much the same way, signing them in bulk.) It’s a Darwinian system paid for by players like Belfi — the hundreds of thousands of dollars his trainers took out of his bonus subsidized dozens of prospects who sacrificed their childhoods only to come up short.

In the United States, no professional sport operates this way, including baseball. Every year, major league teams select players from the U.S. and Canada in a draft. Signing bonuses are mostly dictated by the order in which the players are chosen. Last year, the top pick was worth $11.1 million, while the final slots were worth $187,000. Sports agents typically receive a 5% commission.

In the Dominican Republic, it’s a free-for-all. Teams vie for talent, outbidding one another for the best prospects. Major League Baseball does limit how much a team can spend on new players each year. But the other guardrail that the league put in place — that players can be signed only if they will be 17 by the following September — is widely circumvented.

“Everybody makes early agreements,” a major league scout told me. “You got to do it. If not, the system will eat you.”

During the past offseason, trainers touted on social media the early deals they negotiated with major league teams for their players. There was the 11-year-old said to be under agreement with the Philadelphia Phillies for $1.8 million, the 12-year-old said to have a deal for $2.8 million with the Cincinnati Reds and the 13-year-old said to have an agreement with the Milwaukee Brewers for $2 million. (The Phillies, Reds and Brewers did not respond to requests for comment.) 

In 2022, the parents of a 14-year-old prospect, Willy Fañas, sued the Los Angeles Angels for reneging on an early agreement for $1.8 million. A scout for the Angels testified that the team’s general manager had authorized the deal. The case was dismissed; Fañas’ parents have appealed the decision. 

No data exists on how many Dominican players have been offered early deals because the agreements are verbal — by design there are no records. But Sandy Alderson, who has been a top executive for several teams and in 2010 served as  Major League Baseball’s emissary to the Dominican Republic, told me that the vast majority of players who get signed were offered deals before they hit 16.

In the absence of any enforcement, Major League Baseball has created the perfect market conditions for las prestamistas like Caraballo, who has become a ubiquitous figure in Dominican baseball in the past six years. The loans he offers come with interest rates that would be illegal in the United States and many other countries. The Dominican Republic repealed its usury laws 24 years ago. High-interest lenders are now as ingrained in Dominican baseball as trainers, and they advertise online. One banner circulating on WhatsApp offered “préstamo para jugadores de beisbol que tenga acuerdos,” “loan for baseball players who have agreements.”  

Yaniris Paula, an attorney who has represented teenage ballplayers in disputes with trainers and lenders, estimated that 80% of all major league bonuses paid to Dominican prospects have a loan attached. 

From 2012 through the beginning of 2026, major league teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in bonuses, according to a ProPublica review of signing data. But much, if not most, of that money — up to half a billion — is almost immediately siphoned off by trainers and lenders, according to experts familiar with the industry. 

“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” Piñao Ortiz, who was the Dominican commissioner of baseball from 1996 to 2000, told me, “but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”

Chapter 3

The night that Belfi’s parents — Eduardo Rivera and Rita Muñoz — learned of the Diamondbacks’ promise, they had to sleep at a nearby baseball academy. Their ride home didn’t have working headlights. When they made it back to Pedro Brand, a town outside the capital, their tiny home looked different to them. Eduardo had built it out of wood planks and tin. Buckets caught rain from the leaky roof. Musty beds lay strewn on the concrete floors. A climbing wall, salvaged from a children’s park, served as a room divider. Facing the same poverty while an unimaginably huge windfall awaited them in just over two years was a new sort of mental challenge.

Eduardo worked as a farmhand during the day and as a sereno, a watchman, for a school at night — jobs that were increasingly difficult because of a foot ailment he couldn’t afford to get checked out. He made as little as $150 a month. Rita had mostly stayed home, raising 11 kids. But now they were — almost — millionaires and already felt pressure to pay back those who had helped them. One of those was Belfi’s first trainer, who had made only a few hundred dollars trading Belfi to another trainer. He now wanted a “thank you” and arranged for them to speak with a man who told them that his boss, Santo Caraballo, could help them bridge their old existence with their future one. 

What Belfi’s parents didn’t know is that Caraballo had a network of informants — many of them trainers — who let him know when a player had reached an early deal with a major league team and for how much. When Caraballo got a name, he would send one of his finders to speak to the parents.

Eduardo and Rita traveled to Caraballo’s small office in a strip mall in Santo Domingo. The figure who greeted them had perfect hair and white teeth and was dressed like a deportista, or sportsman, in athletic leggings and a T-shirt, they told me. Diplomas and certificates covered a wall. Familiar and charming, he spoke of having been a consul for the Dominican government, and he repeatedly mentioned that he was “la mano derecha,” “the right hand,” of David Ortiz, they said. That made them trust him more. 

Eduardo and Rita told me that they were looking to sell just 5% of Belfi’s future bonus — roughly $90,000 — for upfront money, enough to pay off some debts, give Belfi’s first trainer a little cash and waterproof their home. But Caraballo, they said, advised them that they would need more and that they should sell him 10%.

The parents emerged from the office with a paper bag full of pesos, their thumbs wiped clean of the ink they had used to stamp a contract. They hadn’t been given a copy, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to understand it. Eduardo is illiterate. Rita struggles to read. They said they received 1.6 million pesos, roughly $25,000. 

Miguel Hidalgo, a former employee of Caraballo’s who had a falling out with him over money, told me that the lender tries not to give his clients a copy of the contract. “That’s the trick,” he said. If they don’t have a copy, it makes it harder for them to understand what they owe, he explained. 

Rita and Eduardo shared what they remembered of the loan terms with one of their sons, who called Jhonatan Jimenez, a former trainer of Belfi’s. Jimenez did the math. In return for the $25,000, Eduardo and Rita had agreed to give the lender $180,000 when Belfi received his bonus. 

“¿Tú estás loco?” he asked. 

That was the first deal Belfi’s parents made with Santo Caraballo.

Soon after, the lender sent men to check out their home, and his prognosis was that it could not be repaired. They needed a new place fit for the family of a ballplayer. There was a building available next door. On the second floor was space for a three-bedroom apartment, which the Riveras would need to fix up and furnish. On the first floor was a storefront appealing to one of Belfi’s brothers, who envisioned a barbershop where customers could drink alcohol.

Caraballo would show up at their new apartment, usually in a different car — a Range Rover, a Porsche, a Lamborghini. He was, Eduardo told me, like a member of the family. He reached his spoon into their pot of simmering beans. He drank Presidente beers. He gave Belfi advice about girls. He urged Rita and Eduardo to further fix up the place. “You’re already rich,” they said he told them. “You can’t live this way.” 

Caraballo said he’d loan them an additional $70,000 at 7% monthly interest, a rate he had assured them was “mejor que banco,” “better than the bank.” Throughout 2023 and the first half of 2024, bank records show, Caraballo doled out the money to the family in dozens of payments ranging from $88 to $8,350. According to Rita, Caraballo said he was not giving them the money all at once because they would fritter it away.

Rita also told me that roughly $7,000 of the loan came in the form of certificates redeemable at a supermarket Caraballo owned near his office. She said she used them to buy rice, beans, oil, diapers and other staples but that the certificates didn’t last long because Caraballo’s prices were “carisimo,” “extremely expensive.” The only customers she saw at the market were the families of young ballplayers.

Chapter 4

The origins of Caraballo’s wealth and power remain murky — striking for someone with tentacles throughout the sport. Some within the industry described him as a savvy hustler, exploiting a corrupt system that Major League Baseball had created. Or as an opportunist using little more than a fortunate link to one of the country’s most beloved peloteros. Or as a man with almost magical reach who was not to be crossed. Many demanded to know whether I was a spy for him. 

“I already have problems, and you’re asking me about a boss,” said a former minor league pitcher whom Caraballo represented during a brief stint as an agent. 

A longtime trainer spat in the ground and called him a ladrón, a thief. He refused to discuss Caraballo further. “What if I get killed?” he asked.

A major league agent who represents Dominican players told me that every year Caraballo has a stake in dozens of prospects’ bonuses. Two former employees corroborated that figure, telling me that they helped Caraballo reach loan agreements with the parents of 60 to 70 players a year. The agent said that every signing day, when prospects consummate their preacuerdos, Caraballo shows up to remind families that they will soon have to pay what they owe him. 

I spoke with the parents, trainers or lawyers for six prospects whose families took high-interest loans from Caraballo. The father of Ricki Moneys told me he borrowed 1.7 million pesos, roughly $27,000, from Caraballo, after the Brewers offered his son a $1.15 million early agreement. Thirteen months later, after Moneys officially signed with the team earlier this year, his father said that Caraballo collected 4.5 million pesos — an effective annual interest rate of nearly 150%. The father of another Brewers prospect, Kenny Fenelon, said that his son was offered a $1.3 million early agreement and that he used it as a guarantee to borrow $50,000 from Caraballo at 5% monthly interest. When his son received his signing bonus less than three years later, in 2025, the father told me that Caraballo claimed he was owed $400,000. They eventually settled on a $75,000 interest payment, he said. (In our brief conversation, Caraballo said that the risk in loaning money to families is that “you never know if it will succeed or not because if the player doesn’t get signed, you don’t get paid.”)

Caraballo has a second business loaning money to trainers at similarly high interest rates. In many of those deals, the guarantee is a percentage of a player’s bonus money that is owed to the trainer. 

He has also entered the training business himself. Records and interviews show that he has signed players as young as 10 years old to contracts in which parents agree to give him half, or sometimes more, of their sons’ potential signing bonuses. Caraballo himself doesn’t do the training. “He doesn’t even know how to hold the bat, bro,” Edgar Mercedes, a trainer who has taken loans from Caraballo, told me. Instead, he sends the boys to trainers with whom he has made separate financial arrangements. 

A birth certificate states that Caraballo was born in 1986 in the mountain city of Constanza, the son of a farmer and a housewife. According to a childhood friend, he departed for the capital as a teenager with just $16. In Santo Domingo, he pumped gas before opening a series of small businesses. He co-founded a company that turned fruits into pulp and juice. He financed new and used vehicles. He established a legal services business, Caraballo Lora & Asociados, though he was not an attorney. 

But mostly, according to interviews with those who have worked for him, he lent money. A Facebook banner for one of his companies consists of stock art depicting a man turning an empty pants pocket inside out. Another hand offers a full wallet, with the text, “Podemos Ayudarte,” “We can help you.” 

In 2016, he returned to Constanza to run for mayor. “I’m from the hills and it’s in my blood/ By the grace of God, I’ll be your mayor,” declared a ballad he commissioned. Despite President Danilo Medina campaigning for him, he lost the four-person race. He was a “joven muy inquieto,” “a restless young man” seeking glory in his hometown, Ambiorix Sanchez, who won the election, told me. 

After his defeat Medina offered Caraballo a consolation prize. He appointed him as an ambassador attached to the minister for foreign affairs, a common arrangement for an incoming president to reward a losing allied candidate. The position came with a diplomatic passport, a $600 monthly salary and few responsibilities. Caraballo left the ambassadorship in 2021, a few months after Medina’s term ended.

The beginning of Caraballo’s ascent in Dominican baseball can be traced to his shadowy role in salvaging the career of Oneil Cruz, a rising star in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ organization. In late 2020, Cruz crashed his Jeep Grand Cherokee into the back of a motorcycle, killing three people. Prosecutors initially said the ballplayer had been drinking, and he faced the possibility of three years in prison. According to numerous interviews and court records, Caraballo was brought in by Cruz’s parents and negotiated payments to the victims’ families. In exchange, they withdrew all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz. Prosecutors never presented evidence that he was drinking, and a judge dismissed the case. Cruz denied any wrongdoing. I wrote about the incident in “The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer.”

Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”

By 2021, corporate records show, Caraballo had found a partner that would instantly boost his credibility — David Ortiz. By helping the Boston Red Sox win three world championships, the first one ending an 86-year drought, Ortiz secured his legacy as one of the most revered players in all of baseball. He retired in 2016 and became a popular analyst for Fox Sports. In the Dominican Republic, he is un muchacho de abajo, someone who rose from a Santo Domingo slum and is not afraid to return.

How an obscure moneylender from Constanza became partners with a famous ballplayer is a mystery to mutual acquaintances I spoke with. Ortiz has said that he first met Caraballo when he was managing a gas station. The two were close enough that when Ortiz announced his divorce in 2021, he did so with a post of himself posing with Caraballo and a caption that read, “My compadre, the show must go on.” Ortiz sat Caraballo with his family at his 2022 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and they appeared in videos together at the presidential palace. 

The financial side of their relationship is more shrouded. In 2021, both were listed on corporation records of a company in Florida called Big Papi Sports Group. What, if anything, the company did is not clear. It was dissolved the following year. 

It is, though, the earliest record I could find of a partnership that Caraballo trumpeted frequently. Parents, trainers and lawyers who have done business with him told me that Caraballo claimed that Ortiz, whose signed jersey hangs in his office, bankrolled him. “Every time he did business with [my client], Caraballo would mention it,” a lawyer named Jose Eduardo Martinez said. 

My reporting eventually got back to Ortiz. He called me last year to find out what I was working on and seemed surprised to be asked questions about Caraballo. He acknowledged that he had invested millions of dollars into Caraballo’s baseball business. Although he wouldn’t tell me the name of the company, they’ve posted to social media photos of themselves wearing matching ballcaps with the logo “CS,” for Caraballo Sports Enterprise. Caraballo has founded companies by that name in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, though Ortiz is not on those documents. Dominican records say the company’s goal is to “promote education and sports as a mechanism for the social development of underprivileged youth throughout the country.”

Ortiz said that his business with Caraballo is limited to making loans to trainers. Among those who have struck deals with Ortiz and Caraballo is retired star infielder Carlos Guillén, who trains players in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic and said that he has borrowed significant sums from them.

Ortiz told me that he doesn’t work with the parents of players, because it’s too difficult to be repaid. However, court records show that, in at least one case, Ortiz’s name is on a contract with a player’s parents. According to its terms, Ortiz and Caraballo agreed to provide their 13-year-old son with “economic support, food, studies, housing, training, clothing for practice and games, supply of protein and vitamins” and scouting opportunities in return for 35% of the boy’s potential signing bonus. The boy was never signed, leading to the lawsuit, which was eventually dismissed on procedural grounds.

The contract, similar to many others I reviewed between Caraballo and parents of young baseball prospects, gave him and Ortiz extraordinary control over the boy’s life. It contains a clause not allowing him to “leave or abandon” the academy where they assigned him without their “prior permission” and granting them power of attorney so that they could receive “all kinds of information,” including a bonus payment schedule, from Major League Baseball and any team that signs him. 

It also made explicit that the boy would be unable to get out of the deal. Even if he were to become emancipated from his parents, the contract states he would still owe a portion of his potential signing bonus. The contract allows Caraballo and Ortiz to terminate their responsibilities toward the boy due to “poor performance,” but he would still owe the same percentage if he were signed. 

In our conversation, Ortiz distanced himself from Caraballo’s many enterprises. “Caraballo, my compadre, he has a whole bunch of different businesses that I don’t know,” he said. “I know the one that I know. But I’m not his guard. Hopefully, he’s not doing anything illegal — not that I know.”  

Later, after I sent him a detailed list of questions, Ortiz sent an additional response through his lawyer. The statement said he had “never authorized Santo Caraballo to use my name or reputation to gain the trust of young baseball players or their families, to promote loans or investments, or to represent financial transactions as being personally backed or endorsed by me. I have always sought to make a positive contribution to Dominican baseball. I would never knowingly participate in any operation intended to take advantage of a young player or his family.”

Ortiz said that he ended his personal relationship with Caraballo “a year and a half to two years ago” after “noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate. I started distancing myself from him personally and placed the relevant matters in the hands of my legal advisors.”  

However, last September, Ortiz and Caraballo filmed themselves heading for Puerto Rico on a private jet, drinking and dancing on their way to a Bad Bunny concert. 

Chapter 5

Around 4 a.m., Jan. 15, 2024, Belfi Rivera got out of his bunk bed at John Carmona’s academy. The complex was nearly empty, with most of the other boys home for the winter holidays. Belfi put on a white dress shirt, a navy blue business suit — his first — Alexander McQueen shoes and a gold necklace, all of which Caraballo had purchased. Years earlier, Belfi had promised himself that if he made it as a pelotero, he’d have a chain that would glitter over his dirt-stained jersey, just like the pros. 

It was signing day.  

Belfi’s parents arrived, and they drove to Baseball City, headquarters for the Diamondbacks and several other major league teams. Teenage boys and their parents, all dressed up, filled the place. 

Belfi leaned over a desk and put his signature on the contract he had been promised two years earlier. He and another Dominican outfielder were the only Diamondbacks prospects whose bonuses exceeded $550,000. Many more prospects, if they were lucky enough to be noticed by a major league team at all, fared more like Belfi’s older brother Bernardo, a right-handed pitcher who a few months earlier had signed with the Texas Rangers for $10,000. 

For Rita, the moment was a miracle. “When you have absolutely nothing,” she told me, “when you’re starting from zero, enduring great hardship, and your children are going hungry. And then, suddenly, we would finally be able to resolve so many of the problems we were facing — paying off our debts, taking the children to the doctor, getting them enrolled in school.”

Belfi posed for photos in front of a banner filled with Diamondbacks logos. In one, he is flanked by Carmona and Caraballo. Carmona said that he was not aware that the lender had made deals with Belfi’s family until he showed up at the signing, strutting around as if he had played a key role in Belfi’s success. “The team asked me, ‘What’s going on? What is this man doing here?’” Carmona said.

Less than a month later, the first installment of Belfi’s bonus came in — $900,000.  He and his parents drove to the Boca Chica branch of the BHD bank, a sleek glass building adorned with the Major League Baseball logo and ringed by the flags of all 30 teams. The branch is where almost every prospect collects his bonus payments, and it regularly plays host to one of the most unsightly scenes in Dominican baseball, as trainers and lenders show up to demand their cut. 

Caraballo, Carmona and Belfi’s early trainer, Jhonatan Jimenez, were waiting. By BHD and major league policy, only a player and his parents can receive the bonus. But Belfi’s parents told me that Caraballo took the lead, collecting IDs and handing them to a clerk. Neither Rita nor Eduardo had ever held a bank account. Now a banker helped Belfi open one, and the convoluted divvying up of his payday began. 

By the terms of their contract with Rita and Eduardo, Carmona was due $630,000 and Jimenez $90,000. However, Jimenez had earlier sold his stake to Caraballo, one of at least two deals the lender had made with Belfi’s former trainers. 

That left $180,000, which Caraballo was owed as repayment of the $25,000 loan.  Carmona described the vibe as one of “mucha duda, mucha desconfianza,” “much doubt, much distrust.” The exception, he said, was Belfi, who seemed oblivious, confident that everything would work out. Belfi told me that other players had warned him that he would see little of his first bonus installment. He left the bank with nothing. 

At a meeting at Caraballo’s office, Eduardo and Rita said that he ripped up a contract. They understood this to mean the debt was paid. As the day approached when Belfi was set to receive the second half of his bonus, Rita and Eduardo said that Caraballo began to sell them on an idea — they could become partners with him and David Ortiz. They would be out of their depth managing the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Diamondbacks still owed Belfi. Instead, they could invest the money, which would produce a steady income and keep them from  squandering their fortune. 

Eduardo told me that he couldn’t follow all the details but said he was sold from the moment Caraballo described going into business with Ortiz. “I was happy because now my boy was going to have people to give him advice,” he said. 

Eduardo did have a brief moment of doubt. After a call with Caraballo, he said to Rita, “Maybe he’s lying to us.” But they both agreed he was too kind for that.

Chapter 6

Throughout my reporting, the great mystery was if the problems with baseball in the Dominican Republic were so well-known, why hadn’t the league or the union fixed them?

I posed this question to Lou Melendez, who worked for Major League Baseball from 1983 to 2016, including as vice president of international operations, and now consults for the players union. He told me he was baffled by the inaction of the league, which has in the past penalized teams and executives for violating international rules. “If they wanted to, they could have just said, ‘Look, memo to clubs from the commissioner’s office. If we find that you have any pre-agreements with any players, we’re going to discipline you.’” 

Instead, Major League Baseball officials have vacillated between indifference and helplessness. Testifying in court in 2023, Yerik Perez, the league’s director in the Dominican Republic at the time, downplayed the significance of early agreements. They were, he said, “conversations that take place between players, their families and the teams, where estimates and projections are made.”

When Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked last year about preacuerdos during a visit to the Dominican Republic, he acknowledged that they were “problematic” but said the “best solution to early deals is a draft.”

This has been his position since he took office in 2015, arguing that the league needs to institute a draft for Latin American prospects that functions similarly to the draft for American and Canadian players. The change would make early agreements impossible since a team would not know which player they would be able to sign until draft day.

This single-mindedness has led some observers to wonder whether the league’s  neglect of the issue is intentional. “If they wanted to enforce it, they would,” said Rafa Nieves, one of the top agents for Dominican players. “They want to make it worse and worse so the only solution is an international draft.” 

The chief obstacle to establishing an international draft has been the players union. Its reasons are straightforward: A draft would restrict a prospect’s ability to choose his employer and eliminate bidding wars that drive up bonuses. While the union acknowledges the Dominican system is troubled, it, too, blames the league for not enforcing its existing rules. 

The league and the union have been haggling over the issue for decades. Before the 2017 baseball season, both sides agreed to impose a “hard cap” — a limit to how much money a team can spend on signing international players. The amount changes each year and by team. In 2026, the total a team can spend ranges from $5.4 million to $8 million. The hard cap, though, had an unintended consequence: It led to a surge in early agreements. If teams could not beat their competitors with money, they could by making commitments to younger and younger players.

In early 2022, the league and the union came close to establishing an international draft when negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. Talks broke down, and the owners locked the players out of spring training. The international draft, it was widely reported, had become a major sticking point, and the union was close to accepting it. 

This was when David Ortiz intervened. Although he is retired, players listen to what he has to say. Ortiz circulated a voice message to Dominican players and trainers, declaring a “red alert” that the union was on the verge of agreeing to the international draft. He shared the phone number for Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, and urged everybody to express their strong opposition. 

“If we allow the draft to happen here in the Dominican Republic, even your great-great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s, will be affected by it,” Ortiz said, according to an audio copy of the message, which I obtained. “So we have to start this strong ‘No to the draft’ campaign. Take my word for it. I don’t play baseball anymore, but I know what I’m talking about. If we let them push that thing through here, we’ll be in deep trouble. You know that in this nation, in one way or another, more than 40% of the population depends on baseball, to put it mildly.”

That percentage was an exaggeration, but lots of retired players, including Ortiz, own training academies. Amaurys Nina, a highly regarded trainer, told me that many of them have long used their clout to block any changes to the industry. “These players want the business to stay the way it is,” he said. 

Active Dominican players also spoke out, including Fernando Tatis Jr., the shortstop for the Padres, whose father, a retired major league ballplayer, owned an academy. With an international draft, teams would likely sign fewer Dominican players, especially marginal prospects. Tatis appeared to be alluding to this when he told a reporter that an international draft would “kill baseball in the Dominican Republic.” Tatis did not respond to a request for comment sent to his agent.

The day after Ortiz sent his voice message, the league ended the lockout, and both sides agreed to shelve the idea of an international draft and settled the contract. The draft is once again a point of contention as the two sides have begun negotiating a new contract. (The union declined to comment on Ortiz’s voice note.) 

When I spoke to Ortiz last year, I asked him if he opposed an international draft because of his and Caraballo’s business interests. He did not answer and hung up shortly afterward.

In his statement, Ortiz said his position regarding the international draft “was based on my views regarding the development of Dominican players and the impact I believed such a system would have on baseball in our country.”

Chapter 7

Belfi’s second bonus day arrived on June 13, 2024. When his parents and a brother came to pick him up at the Diamondbacks’ training academy, Caraballo was waiting in the parking lot. He invited the family to jump into his tricked-out Mercedes SUV so they could head to the BHD branch together. 

As he drove, Caraballo hardened his pitch. He said he would pay them a dividend of several hundred thousand pesos, as much as  $10,000, a month, according to Rita and Eduardo. In describing their understanding of the proposal, they told me that the lender promised once again to put the money in a fund or a business involving Ortiz but that they had no idea what kind. Caraballo, they said, assured them they would work out the details the following day at his office. 

This car ride was the first time that Belfi learned that he would leave the bank with little or nothing. But he told me he trusted his parents, Caraballo and any plan that involved Ortiz. 

Already at the bank was Jimenez, Belfi’s former trainer. He told me he was there as a family friend to keep an eye on how things went. But he allowed that he was also there with the hope that Rita and Eduardo would give him another cut for his years training Belfi. 

Belfi’s family was ushered into a room to go over paperwork with a banker. According to Rita and Eduardo, Caraballo came in and out to make sure the family repaid their debt and signed over the rest of the money for him to invest. Unlike Belfi, his brother was alarmed by what was happening. He texted Jimenez that Caraballo was stealing the bonus. Jimenez said he started chasing Caraballo around the bank, calling him un ladrón. Eduardo recalled Jimenez yelling, “Caraballo, no engañes a esos pobres infelices,” “Caraballo, do not deceive these miserable people.” The lender, in turn, accused Jimenez of attempting to fleece the family himself. 

Amid the shouting, Belfi told the banker that he wanted to keep some of the money so he’d have it when he got promoted to the minors in the United States. With the banker’s guidance, he kept $196,000. According to Rita, Caraballo was upset he wasn’t getting the whole amount and angry the family didn’t trust him. After receiving a cashier’s check for $703,900, he left the bank, flanked by two bodyguards. The check’s memo line read “pago entrenador,” “trainer payment.” 

In his statement, Ortiz said he was never aware that Caraballo “operated an investment fund through which money belonging to players was allegedly taken or used for investment purposes.” 

BHD did not respond to detailed questions concerning Belfi’s experiences at the Boca Chica branch. The bank said in a statement that it is committed to “the protection of all our clients, including young baseball prospects. Decisions regarding the use of our clients’ funds rest exclusively with the account holders or those legally authorized to act on their behalf.”

Eduardo told me he often replays that day in his mind, realizing that it was the culmination of his being played for a fool. He hung on every word of Caraballo’s advice, all of it leading to “el gancho,” “the hook” — handing over the money in the bank “without paperwork, documents or anything else.”

Rita said that she called Caraballo about meeting the following day, but he told her he had flown to Miami. In the weeks afterward, they tried calling him numerous times, she said, but that he would either not pick up or the calls would drop. Bank statements show that he did send them three payments totaling less than $10,000. 

Finally, Rita said, Caraballo made clear that the investments with Ortiz hadn’t panned out and that he wouldn’t be paying the family a monthly dividend as he had promised. But, according to Rita, he assured her that he was “always going to be there” to support the family. 

By then Rita and Eduardo had learned of other parents who had accused Caraballo of stealing their sons’ bonuses. The family, she realized, needed to get a lawyer. She knew of only one, a local commercial attorney who agreed to take on the case and who brought on a criminal specialist from Santo Domingo.

In the lawyers’ view, the interest Caraballo charged Belfi’s family was legal under Dominican law. However, in a complaint to prosecutors that they filed in November 2024, they described Caraballo’s promise to invest the family’s money and pay them dividends as fraud preying on Belfi’s “vulnerability as a minor.”

“It is obvious that the accused never intended to invest in any stock market, but rather took advantage of his apparent friendship with David Ortiz [and] the admiration the public has for the former baseball player,” they wrote. 

Soon after, Rita’s mother died, and Caraballo called, offering his condolences as well as 100,000 pesos, a little less than $1,600, to cover the funeral and other expenses. Rita said she told him to have his attorney call hers.

Belfi, too, had lost trust in Caraballo. The necklace the lender had given him on signing day, the one that made Belfi feel like he had made it as a ballplayer, had started to turn black. The chain, Belfi realized, was iron, and he threw it away. 

Caraballo continued to message him, Belfi told me, attempting to get him to persuade his parents to drop the legal claim. On the lawyers’ advice, Belfi blocked him. Just before his 18th birthday in December 2024, Belfi was in Pedro Brand, walking back from a local ball field when, he said, a white Volvo truck pulled up next to him. The driver, a man Belfi had never met, told him to get in. Belfi said the man had a gun holstered on his hip. 

Once in the car, Belfi said, the driver informed him that he was taking him to see Caraballo in Santo Domingo. Belfi was sure that the lender had dispatched “una maldad,” “something evil.” The man drove Belfi to a jewelry store, where Caraballo was waiting. He was in an expansive mood, Belfi told me. He greeted  him warmly and after consulting with the jeweler, he picked out a necklace and told Belfi it was a gift.

They then headed to Caraballo’s office, where the lender revealed the purpose of the meeting. According to Belfi, Caraballo told him that the Diamondbacks wouldn’t want a prospect involved in something as ugly as a lawsuit. Belfi also said that Caraballo warned him that if he had an open legal case, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country to play in the minors. The last claim is not true, but Belfi didn’t know that. 

The day after Belfi legally became an adult, he said the driver picked him up and took him to the capital to get his Dominican national ID. Afterward, they went to Caraballo’s office, where the lender and a lawyer were waiting, and Belfi signed the papers they put in front of him. “Y ya, el miedo habló,” Belfi told me. Fear talked. 

The significance of those documents became clear the following month. With his signature, Belfi had fired his lawyers, hired Caraballo’s attorneys as his own and withdrawn the complaint. The criminal action against Caraballo, the prosecutor wrote in a final decision, “has been extinguished.”

Chapter 8

Almost immediately Belfi regretted signing the documents that harpooned the case against Caraballo. He tearfully apologized to his lawyers. When I spoke to one of the attorneys, Omar Chapman, he said he thought the lender had taken advantage of Belfi. “Caraballo told him, ‘Look, this document will solve all your problems, don’t worry,’” said Chapman, who added that Belfi might have been legally an adult but “only made it to about third grade.”

Belfi told me that by last Christmas he had gone through the $196,000. He paid off his family’s numerous debts, covered foot surgery for his father, sunk money into his brother’s struggling barbershop and, by his own admission, spent money on dumb stuff — loans to friends he won’t get back and jewelry for himself and girlfriends. 

As the holiday approached, Caraballo sent a messenger to Rita with 20,000 pesos, just over $300, for food and clothes for the children. Rita told me she knew what Caraballo was up to. “He’s basically trying to buy us again so he can keep our money,” she said. But this time, she didn’t reject the handout.

When I visited Rita and Eduardo this summer, they appeared to be worse off than the first time I saw them. With four kids still in the house, Rita had recently opened a food stand across the street, selling salami, plantains, eggs and coffee to commuters. It’s a miserable, fly-infested venture that requires her to rise at 4 a.m. and earns her as little as $5 a day. Eduardo continues to work as a night watchman at a local school.

Belfi told me that the Diamondbacks pay him $100 a week only during the two and a half months he plays in the Dominican Summer League and that the team provides its players with baseball equipment when they sign, but after that they’re on their own. Before the latest season, Belfi borrowed roughly $2,500 from a local lender, part of which he spent on cleats, a glove, bats and medicine for his father. The loan came with 30% biweekly interest. The ballooning debt has caused Belfi to stay away from Pedro Brand. 

I went to the Diamondbacks’ academy, an immaculate new facility, hoping to watch Belfi play. The summer league, which has so many players that most organizations fill multiple teams, is a study in Major League Baseball’s volume approach to Latin talent. Few players last beyond three seasons  — they’re either promoted or cut.

Belfi is now in his third year. In his first two seasons, he struggled, hitting a meager .202 with one home run. He no longer appears in the international prospect rankings. Friends who signed the same year as he did have been promoted. So has his brother Bernardo, who is now on a Rangers minor league team in the U.S.

When Belfi and I spoke, he admitted it’s been hard playing baseball with everything that’s been going on in his head. “I mean, why keep working, if everything I earn, I lose?” he asked.

Trainers and scouts who have watched Belfi for years told me it’s obvious that what he’s gone through has affected his game. One said, “These guys took everything he had and stole his motivation.” 

On a muggy, overcast June day, Belfi’s team was hosting the Seattle Mariners’ squad. It was a sloppy contest full of errors and batters getting plunked by fastballs the pitchers hadn’t yet learned to corral. The only people in the stands, besides a few family members, were scouts and officials recording every data point. But the players cheered and chanted and shook the dugout’s chain-link fence. Belfi wasn’t in the lineup. 

When I found him afterward, he explained that his coaches had him doing batting practice for most of the game. They wanted him to work on “a little bit of everything,” he said. Despite the Diamondbacks frequently benching him, Belfi still appeared hopeful. I asked him what his immediate goal was, and he said with a smile, “Get out of here as soon as possible.” 

A month later, in a tied game in extra innings against a Cubs team, the Diamondbacks called on Belfi to pinch hit with two outs and two men on. He stroked a game-winning single into center field. His teammates mobbed him, and a grinning Belfi jumped up and down, holding his arms aloft in joy.

The post The Dominican Baseball Factory appeared first on ProPublica.

Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. 

The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner.

“While instances of non-compliance were low relative to overall volume, the presence of similar procedural gaps across multiple facilities indicates a need for improved understanding and increased enforcement of Postal Service policies among its employees,” it said.

The findings come as the Supreme Court weighs whether to allow the Postal Service to move ahead with new rules that would allow the agency to regulate mail voting, under a March executive order signed by President Donald Trump. The order requires states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requires USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. 

Top Postal Service employees, along with a whistleblower who filed a disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have expressed concern that the new system stands to disenfranchise large swaths of eligible voters, both by its design and lack of testing, ProPublica reported last week.

Election experts told ProPublica the new audit findings should be considered by the Supreme Court, as they make even clearer what election officials already know. 

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer, said the audit confirms that USPS has “a long way to go to meet its core obligations of delivering election mail in a timely manner.”

“The administration and USPS are simply incapable of successfully meeting vast and radical new responsibilities under the president’s executive order,” Becker said.

Postal workers, through the American Postal Workers Union, also said Wednesday in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that it is not practical to implement the rules, which pose a “significant risk of wide swaths of Americans not being able to vote by mail.”

Even if the Supreme Court allows the new rule to move forward, some state election officials say the requirements would be impossible to meet for the November election, with mail ballots starting to go out this month.

Chelsey Wininger, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the audit shows the Postal Service “struggles to implement even basic changes to postal process consistently” and reinforces the organization’s opposition to any new rules this close to an election.

In a response included with the findings of the audit, the Postal Service wrote that “while we acknowledge that we can always reinforce and amplify our internal processes and procedures (and will continue to do so between now and November) — overall ballot mail performance is strong.” The agency acknowledged that there are some instances in which employees didn’t follow policies and procedures, but called other errors “isolated incidents,” such as when some New Jersey ballots were delivered to Tennessee before being sent back.

The Postal Service agreed with all recommendations on how to protect against future problems, except for one that suggested promptly notifying customers impacted by new regional transportation plans.

The Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Wednesday evening. 

The Postal Service typically goes to great lengths to handle election mail in an expedited and careful manner. And overall, it delivered in this year’s primaries: Completed ballots from voters to election officials were processed “on time” nearly 99% of the time during the primaries, up from about 98% in 2024, for the about 6.3 million ballots that the Postal Service was able to track, according to the report. The definition of “on time” is not provided in the report. It refers to how quickly the ballot was handled by the Postal Service, not whether the ballot reached the election officials on time.

But when observing election mail at 14 processing facilities and 73 delivery units across eight states, the auditors found significant flaws in the handling of mail ballots.

There were no election-related training materials posted at 22 of 73 delivery units, or about 30%. In some locations, local management and employees weren’t familiar with requirements on how to process election mail, the report said.

In 14 states and Washington, D.C., election officials count ballots only when they are postmarked by the Postal Service by Election Day, making the correct postmark crucial for understanding which ballots to count and which to reject.

But the audit found that in 10 of 82 facilities, or about 12%, management wasn’t aware of the proper way to postmark a ballot. Some thought ballots should be postmarked at that time they go out to election offices instead of earlier on when they reach a processing facility or retail counter. 

Also, at five of nine mail processing facilities studied, retail clerks who were postmarking ballots by hand sometimes used stamps with inaccurate dates, according to the report. That included a facility in Pennsylvania on the state’s primary election day, which caused 56 ballots to be postmarked with the wrong date.

In 13 of 82 facilities, Postal Service workers didn’t complete proper procedures to make sure election mail had been sent out from the delivery units each day. In one instance at a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, processing plant, 108 ballots were grouped with other mail and had to be expedited to Pittsburgh on the morning of the election so they would count.

The post U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds appeared first on ProPublica.