O'Shea Jackson Sr., aka Ice Cube, at a screening for the film "Ride Along" in Chicago, Illinois. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Big3, a three-on-three basketball league featuring former NBA stars and co-owned by rapper and actor Ice Cube, is suing Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan for allegedly putting its lucrative relationship with the Republic of Qatar ahead of its far-less remunerative arrangement with the fledgling sports project.

In a state court complaint filed in Manhattan on Thursday, Big3 contends that Quinn Emanuel inserted itself into litigation between the league and former commissioner Roger Mason, whom the league believed had aligned himself with Qatari agents seeking to gain control of the asset.

Attorneys with Beys Liston & Mobargha in New York and Freedman + Taitelman in Los Angeles wrote that the law firm ignored "inescapable" conflicts of interest when offering to represent the league in a lawsuit brought by Mason, and used its involvement to shift the defense strategy away from a focus on Qatar's conduct.

"Any rational person would question why a law firm would undertake the representation of a fledgling basketball league that might generate a few hundred thousand dollars in fees when the league was adverse to its existing Qatari clients who generate tens of millions of dollars in fees annually," the league said in its complaint. "The only logical answer is that Qatar wanted Quinn to undertake the representation."

"In effect, Quinn would become a spy for Qatar, a nation known for supporting terrorism and aligned with Iran," the complaint asserts.

The events leading up to Thursday's lawsuit came to a head in March 2018, when Mason was fired as commissioner. According to the complaint, he and other Big3 employees had been corrupted by agents of the Qatari government who had promised the previous year to make a multimillion-dollar investment in the league. This was part of the same push for international respectability that informed the country's successful bid for the 2022 World Cup, which, according to the complaint, also depended on bribery and involved the same principals.

The Qatari agents allegedly fell $4 million short on their commitment to put $11.5 million into the league and instead began working to seize control of the league from Ice Cube and co-owner Jeff Kwatinetz, a Harvard Law graduate and longtime entertainment industry executive. They next tried to set up a rival three-on-three league, and turned to Mason for help, according to the complaint.

Mason filed for an arbitration proceeding against the league after he was fired. Around that same time, according to the complaint, Big3 stakeholder and prominent Los Angeles trial attorney Mark Geragos was being represented by Quinn Emanuel on an unrelated matter, and Robert Raskopf of the firm's New York office reached out to offer assistance the day after news of the arbitration became public.

According to the complaint, the firm bypassed Kwatinetz and Ice Cube and sent the engagement letter to Geragos & Geragos attorney Ben Meiselas, who signed it as "lawyer." Just as importantly, Quinn Emanuel allegedly did not touch on any of its relationships with the state of Qatar, its royal family and numerous state-owned enterprises. The firm received a license to open its first Middle East office in the country in 2017, but has yet to formalize a presence there. But the complaint said the firm receives tens of millions of dollars in legal fees yearly from the country and its royal family.

As a consequence of Quinn Emanuel's work on Mason's case against Big3, the league has been hobbled in its goal of highlighting the relationships between Qatar and Mason, the complaint alleges.

"With Quinn on the Big3 defense team, Qatar had an agent that it could use to deflect attention away from Qatar's involvement in corrupting Mason and to gather information about Big3," the complaint said.

The league said it was billed $1.3 million for less than five months of work and that Quinn Emanuel is now seeking to force it into an arbitration proceeding over unpaid fees to be handled by arbitrators at JAMS, which has overseen over 550 disputes involving the firm in the last five years.

It is seeking a declaration releasing it from arbitration, along with unspecified damages for fraud and breach of fiduciary responsibility.

"Cube and I are just not willing to be taken advantage of by the American justice system, which is stacked in the favor of the very rich and powerful," Kwatinetz said Thursday.

Quinn Emanuel aimed to recast the matter as a simple fee dispute.

"No firm fights harder for its clients than Quinn Emanuel, and we fought hard for Big3. Unfortunately, Big3 doesn't want to pay us for the work we did," the firm said in a statement. "After the firm pursued them to collect fees, Big3 waited until a week before the collection arbitration to file this fantasy-laden lawsuit. Big3 was fully advised about the firm's other various representations and is simply trying to avoid paying its bills."