why did stern and silber turn a blind eye to the slumlord billionaire all this time?

Donald Sterling -- NEW AUDIO RELEASED ... I Put Food on Black People's Tables

rsn |  Sterling is narcissistic and CliffsNotes literate enough to present himself as a self-made Gatsbian figure. He even has “white parties” at his Bevery Hills home where guests all wear white “like in the book.” He’s a Gatsbian who never read The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was running from his past, hiding his rough background behind the artifice of taste and wealth. Sterling presents himself as the tony developer of high-end properties in the Hollywood Hills, and plays it much closer to the street. Sterling is also the Slumlord Billionaire, a man who made his fortune by building low-income housing, and then, according to a Justice Department lawsuit, developing his own racial quota system to decide who gets the privilege of renting his properties. In November of 2009, Sterling settled the suit with the US Department of Justice for $2.73 million, the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals. Reading the content of the suit makes you want to shower with steel wool. Sterling just said no to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and just said hell-no to African-Americans looking for property in plush Beverly Hills. Sterling, who has a Blagojevichian flair for the language, says he did not like to rent to “Hispanics” because “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” He also stated that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”

The Slumlord Billionaire has a healthy legal paper trail, which creates a collage of someone very good at extorting rents from the very poor. In 1986, the spiking of rents in his Beverly Hills properties—the so-called “slums of Beverly Hills”—led to a large march by tenants on City Hall.

Former NBA commissioner David Stern, always so PR-conscious when it comes to where players mingle, how players dress, whom players consort with after hours, has turned a blind eye to this disturbing pattern. Now these chickens have returned to Stern’s back porch to roost. There is a second racism lawsuit buzzing around Sterling’s helmet of hair.

Sterling’s other lawsuit comes from inside his own NBA offices: his long-time general manager Elgin Baylor. Baylor, an NBA legend with the Los Angeles Lakers, has spent more than two decades making a series of personnel decisions that have ranged from depressing to enraging. Baylor’s was called without irony by a television commentator as “veteran of the lottery process” watching the ping-pong balls bounce around to see who gets the number-one pick. The Clippers draft picks under Baylor’s tenure—and their entire roster—have largely been a dyspeptic horror show. According to Baylor, one reason for their continued ineptitude was Sterling in telling Baylor he wanted to fill his team with “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach.”