A fired Minnesota Timberwolves staffer has been put on probation for stealing the computer hard drive of a Minnesota Timberwolves executive’s Target Center office.
Somak Sarkar, 33, was sentenced Tuesday in Hennepin County District Court to two years’ probation after pleading guilty to a gross misdemeanor count of unauthorized computer access in connection with the Feb. 3 theft of the hard drive belonging to Sachin Gupta, who heads the NBA team’s analytics department. A felony burglary count was dismissed.
The hard drive contained roughly 5,700 files that held employment, player contracts and other strategic information. Also on the hard drive were Gupta’s tax returns and other financial information, and his login and passwords from a password management app, the criminal complaint said.
Defense attorney Ryan Pacyga told the Star Tribune soon after sentencing that his client’s crime caused no harm to the team or to Gupta.
“Law enforcement collected all of [Sarkar’s] electronic devices,” Pacyga said. “There has been no other devices that the hard drive went to. The Timberwolves’ property and the executive’s property are secure.”
Pacyga added that “at the time that Mr. Sarkar took the team-issued external hard drive, he was completely unaware that it contained an executive’s personal information. … Mr. Sarkar meant no harm to the Timberwolves organization.”
As head of the analytics department, Gupta had sensitive proprietary data in his possession that the Wolves conceal from other teams, such as information about players and decisionmaking, contracts or trade negotiations.
The team fired Sarkar, who now lives in East Brunswick, N.J., after learning of the hard drive’s disappearance and the allegation that he copied the data.