(Bloomberg) -- Calls for billionaire Tom Gores to cut ties with a controversial prison phone company have reached the National Basketball Association, days before the start of the new season.
In a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and in a full-page ad published in Sunday’s New York Times, criminal justice advocates are calling on the league to force Gores to sell the Detroit Pistons and step down from the NBA board because of his ties to Securus Technologies Inc.
The letter is part of a broader campaign that has called on private equity firms, investment managers and pension funds to divest from companies that operate in correctional facilities and profit from mass incarceration. Those efforts have intensified after the killing of George Floyd in May became a catalyst for protests against systemic racism in the U.S. criminal-justice system.
“If Black Lives Matter, what are you doing about Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores?” reads the ad, which is addressed to other club owners including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder Joseph Tsai, former Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and NBA legend Michael Jordan.
“Mr. Gores continues to amass wealth and benefit from a system that exploits Black people and profits from their pain,” Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, the organization that placed the ad, wrote in a Dec. 10 letter seen by Bloomberg.
Representatives for Securus owner Platinum Equity, the private equity firm Gores founded, as well as Securus and the NBA couldn’t be immediately reached on Sunday. Gores has said previously that he is committed to reform Securus’s business practices and to make its services more accessible and affordable.
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