Spano, John - Federal prison for selling a hoax...
John Spano
After Prison, Regret From Man Who Sold a Hoax to Try to Buy the Islanders
Vic DeLucia/The New York Times - John Spano in November 1996 after he was introduced as the next owner of the Islanders.
By RICHARD SANDOMIR - October 18, 2013 - NY Times
The man in the Islanders cap and sweatshirt partying with a dozen or so fans outside Nassau Coliseum last January was a specter from the team’s weirdest and maybe darkest days. It was John Spano, the businessman-turned-felon from Dallas who had nearly bought the team 16 years earlier, even though he never had the money to pay for it.
Spano had gone to jail and vanished publicly in the intervening years, but now he was back in Uniondale, munching on snacks and swapping stories about the Islanders’ lean years and their comparatively bright future.
One of the fans had invited him through Twitter — Spano had just joined — to the home opener of the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season. Spano, who now lives in Ohio, where he works as a salesman, was, to them, a curiosity, the owner who wasn’t, the guy who had nearly pulled off an astonishing scam.
“He’s like this folklore hero no one had heard from,” said Eric Kiperwasser, who invited Spano to the game. “We treated him to some drinks and food. He was nervous. I told him no one would recognize him, but if they did, the bunch of us would have his back.”
Elliot Turner, an investment adviser, who also attended, said: “I had some mixed feelings about it all, but a couple of my friends were excited. One of them said that all along he felt that Spano had only the best intentions and some bad things happened.”
After some handshakes, Spano and the others went inside to watch the game.
“I had some good seats,” he said this week by telephone. “I was across the way from the owner’s box and could look into it.”
The whole experience, he said, was awkward. But he said he did not think any other fans noticed him. In an earlier time, that would have been unthinkable.
For about a year, Spano had been as conspicuous in Uniondale as the four Stanley Cup banners signifying the Islanders’ 1980s dynasty. But their greatest years were more than a decade past by the time he arrived on Long Island in 1996. Spano did not emit the gregariousness and bombast of a classic con man — which might have helped others believe his promises — but he also lacked something else: the $165 million he agreed to pay for the team.
So he concocted the paperwork to prove to John Pickett, the Islanders’ owner at the time, but also to the N.H.L. and several banks, that he was worth $230 million. Spano wanted to own a hockey team so badly he created a phony financial world of his own.
ESPN - Spano during a taping for a coming documentary about his financial crimes.
Now, Spano is a felon and the subject of a documentary airing next week as part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.
Spano did not want the story resurrected — “Would you want your stupid things up there on the screen?” he said in an interview — but the director, Kevin Connolly, planned to make the documentary with or without him.
“My family isn’t happy,” Spano said. “They all hoped it would stay in the past.”
The film is not the trial that Spano never had; he avoided one by pleading guilty to multiple counts of bank fraud, wire fraud and forgery, after which he was sentenced to 71 months in prison. Spano admitted his crimes but claimed that it was easier, through fraud, to get an $80 million loan to finance his purchase of the Islanders than it had been to get his first car loan of $12,000.
He also said that as he scrambled relentlessly to raise the remaining $85 million, he considered putting the team into bankruptcy to buy time.
In the film, he said he would do it all again — all he needed was another week, or another month, to get the money he needed.
But in the interview, he amended that assertion.
“I don’t want people to think I’m an arrogant schmo who, if I had more time, I could have pulled it off,” he said. “I had to believe that I could have gotten it done, but when I watched the film, I said, ‘Wow, I don’t want people to think I’d do it again.’ I thought I could do things that I couldn’t.”
Later, he added: “I don’t want anybody to think I don’t have remorse or regret. I do.”
Looking back Thursday, Pickett’s son, Brett, said that the “complete lack of public information about Spano’s leasing business,” as well as scheduled payments that arrived late or not at all, should have triggered early suspicion about his finances. John Pickett got the team back and resold it for $195 million, more than Spano offered.
Still, Brett Pickett said: “I have no sympathy for John Spano. The circumstances don’t call for it. He’s a criminal.”
One die-hard fan, Steve Ellers, disappointed as he was by Spano, said he was still amazed by Spano’s gumption.
Ellers, who once headed the Save the Islanders Coalition, said: “Among many fans, myself included, I felt: ‘Can you believe he almost pulled that off?’ It’s almost a Walter Mitty kind of thing.”