We Investigated the Bronx Democratic Party. Here’s What We Learned.

We are continuing to gather information about the Bronx Democratic political machine. Do you have information we should know? Contact us at sam@nysfocus.com or cbragg@nysfocus.com. You can remain anonymous, and your identity will not be published without your permission.

Over the past month, New York Focus has published a series of articles about how the Bronx Democratic Party has skirted campaign finance law and enriched a political ally and close friend of the party chair.

We encourage you to read the articles. But we also wanted to collect our key findings in one place.

1. The Bronx Democratic Party failed to file campaign finance reports for years — and only fixed the error after we wrote about it.

Our reporting began with an observation: The Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, a political action committee that supports Democratic candidates for state Assembly, has donated nearly $700,000 to the Bronx Democratic Party since 2020 — but the Bronx party only reported receiving about $300,000.

Campaigns and political parties are legally required to report all of the money they receive and spend, so the Bronx Democrats’ failure to report these donations appeared to violate the law.

The missing cash made us especially curious because it seemed odd for the campaign committee to spend so much money in the Bronx, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 10 to one. The committee hasn’t given substantial sums to any other county’s Democratic party. We wondered if the spending had to do with the fact that top Assembly Democrats, including Speaker Carl Heastie, are from the Bronx.

We asked the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, the Bronx Democratic Party, and the Bronx party’s chair, state Senator Jamaal Bailey, what had happened to the $400,000 that had vanished from the reports.

None responded, so we published our first story about the missing cash.

More details soon emerged.

The following week, the Bronx Democrats submitted multiple reports that they had previously failed to file with the state Board of Elections. They also filled gaps in reports that they had already filed.

The new filings showed that the Bronx party had indeed received the $400,000, along with five-figure sums from other groups like the New York Yankees and the pharmaceutical lobby.

Those reports led us to our next story.

2. The party has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political firm, London House, owned by a close ally of Jamaal Bailey, the party’s chair. What that money bought is unclear.

Before it filed the missing reports, the Bronx Democratic Party had reported less than $100,000 in total expenses over the past few years.

The new reports showed that, in fact, the party has spent nearly $2 million over that time span — spending that was almost entirely undisclosed before our reporting.

One set of expenses caught our attention: Since 2020, the Bronx Democratic Party has sent nearly $300,000 to London House, a political consulting firm founded and run by Jason Laidley.

Laidley, it turns out, is a close friend and the former top staffer of Bronx party chair Jamaal Bailey.

We were once again curious why the spending was necessary in a county that sees competitive general elections about as often as the Yankees miss the playoffs.

When we asked Bailey about the payments, he said that they were for “administrative and operational services” and voter outreach. He declined to provide further details or explain why the party needed to hire an outside vendor for these tasks.

Since Laidley left Bailey’s staff in 2021 to run London House, the firm has raked in nearly $1 million in payments from campaigns, and another million in lobbying fees. The Bronx Democratic Party is the firm’s biggest campaign client by far.

The party routed funds to other people with ties to its head honchos, too. It paid $24,000 to Dominique Maddox — a former Bailey staffer who has lived at Speaker Carl Heastie’s home — for services that Maddox would only describe as “media stuff.”

Publishing this second story prompted new tips from sources, who suggested that we look at the relationship between London House and nominations for judgeships in the Bronx. So we did, and found something interesting.

3. Almost every successful candidate for Bronx Civil Court in the last four elections has paid London House.

We realized that over the past four years, nearly every person who became a civil court judge in the Bronx used their campaign funds to hire London House or a related consulting firm run by Ariana Collado, an employee of London House who is also the executive director of the Bronx Democratic Party.

In five out of 13 cases, the payments amounted to more than 60 percent of the candidates’ total spending.

Civil court judges hear cases related to housing disputes and debts and are often appointed to higher courts, including those that hear criminal cases. They serve 10-year terms with annual salaries of $214,000.

London House and Collado Consultants have raked in over $172,000 from winning Bronx Civil Court candidates since 2021 — nearly half of all spending by those candidates.