Community groups stuck panhandling to pay for police cameras on Beacon Hill | T lax on collecting commuter rail fares, watchdog contends | Vokes go woke with new lottery-style admissions process | Sox fans wound up supporting sketchy greenwashing startup |
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Green scam? Sox ticket money went to celebrity-backed California enviro startup whose co-founder now faces federal fraud charges
The last few years haven’t exactly been great for the Fenway faithful.
Red Sox fans have been slammed in the wallet with some of the league’s highest ticket prices - all to watch a series of stubbornly mediocre teams stumble their way to irrelevance.
Now it turns out that some of that ticket revenue - likely in the seven figures - went to a controversial, celebrity-backed California green startup whose co-founder has now been charged with fraud.
With great fanfare, Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner announced a deal in 2022 with Aspiration Partners, whose investors included Drake, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, and Robert Downey Jr., to contribute a portion of every ticket sale at Fenway to the Aspiration Planet Protection Fund.
For his part, Werner has a foot in that celebrity culture himself, having dated Katie Couric and founded a production company with Marcy Carsey that churned out hits like “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne,” “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “That '70s Show.”
The Sox even affixed Aspiration’s name on the grass at Fenway - royal treatment, given that it was a first for a team sponsor.
“We are thrilled to be working with a company that is fighting climate change by infusing that mission into every aspect of their business,” Werner said when the deal was announced.
Fast forward to this week and the arrest of Aspiration Partner co-founder Joseph Sanberg on charges by federal prosecutors in California that he conspired to defraud investors of at least $145 million through a pair of crooked loan deals, one of which he has since defaulted on.
Former Aspiration independent board member Ibrahim AlHusseini has pleaded guilty to wire fraud for helping Sanberg, a long-time anti-poverty activist in the Golden State, with the scheme, having agreed to backstop the loan.
AlHusseini worked with a graphic designer in Lebanon to gin up a phony brokerage account that would make it look like it had tens of millions dollars more in it than it actually did, prosecutors contend.
Contacted by Contrarian Boston, a spokesperson for the Red Sox said the team had ended its relationship with Aspiration at the end of the 2023 season.
It’s not clear how much ticket money the team forked over to Aspiration over the course of two seasons. That said, when the deal was announced, a top team executive called it a "substantial seven-figure contribution," according to a Yahoo Finance story.
In particular, the Sox agreed to buy carbon credits through Aspiration’s Planet Protection Fund to “help neutralize” not just electricity, gas and water usage at Fenway Park, but the carbon emissions indirectly generated by fans driving to and from Sox games.
Still, the fraud charges are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues with Aspiration, whose slogan was “clean rich is the new filthy rich” and which just a few years ago was looking at a $2 billion-plus deal to go public.
There has been a simmering controversy for years now over whether Aspiration was really as green-friendly as it has claimed.
In 2021, a year before the Sox went all in with Aspiration, ProPublica dug into the company’s claims and found a number to be very misleading, such as claiming 5 million members when it was more like 592,000.
Aspiration also boasted it had planted 35 million trees.
The real number? More like 12 million.
Stolen credit? Beacon Hill groups raise money to pay for a police security camera at a neighborhood blind spot, only to have the mayor swoop in and claim the win
After a series of break-ins at businesses along Charles Street, Beacon Hill civic leaders took matters into their own hands and asked Boston police for a security camera on the street.
Told there was no money for a camera there, the Beacon Hill Civic Association and the Beacon Hill Business Association went out and raised the funds on their own to pay for it, The Boston Guardian reports.
Now that’s not a particularly good look for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who has been scrambling as of late to address rising concerns over open-air drug dealing and crime in downtown Boston, as Contrarian Boston has reported.
But wait, because it gets worse.
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