Elections New York City

Cuomo Failed to Disclose Lobbyists Who Bundled Donations

Donors solicited by at least three undisclosed bundlers — Tonio Burgos, Jim Whelan, and Rick Ostroff — were told their gifts would be matched with public funds, despite that being barred by city elections law.

Chris Bragg and Julia Rock · March 20, 2025

Governor Andrew Cuomo's campaign failed to disclose that corporate lobbyist Tonio Burgos solicited donations on its behalf. | Photos: Kelly Campbell, Delta News Hub / flickr; Screenshot: NYC Votes

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It’s no surprise that lobbyist Tonio Burgos is fundraising for Andrew Cuomo’s campaign for New York City mayor. Burgos worked for 15 years for Andrew’s father, former Governor Mario Cuomo. He has long been loyal to the family.

But you wouldn’t know that from the mayoral candidate’s most recent campaign finance report, which failed to disclose any fundraising by Burgos or anyone else.

Records obtained by New York Focus show that on March 7, Burgos sent out a fundraising email seeking donations for Cuomo’s campaign. The email directed potential donors to a fundraising webpage set up by the Cuomo campaign which told them that their donations would be matched with taxpayer dollars — even though Burgos’s work as a New York City registered lobbyist means that any gifts he solicits are ineligible for a match under the city’s public campaign finance system.

In a campaign filing submitted Monday, Cuomo disclosed having had no “intermediaries” — also known as bundlers — that raised money for his mayoral bid. Every other major mayoral candidate has disclosed bundlers, except for City Council speaker Adrienne Adams, who had only been fundraising for one week before the filing deadline.

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New York Focus identified fundraising pages that the Cuomo campaign set up for around thirty bundlers, though it’s not clear how many of them have solicited donations yet. The pages tell donors that their gifts will be matched, even though at least five of the bundlers do work that disqualifies donations they solicit from matching funds.

The Cuomo campaign was required to report any campaign bundling activities that occurred through March 13, according to the city Campaign Finance Board.

The campaign confirmed to New York Focus that Burgos — as well as two other individuals in a database of people with business before the New York City government — successfully solicited donations for the campaign before that cutoff.

Burgos’ email pitch first yielded a donation March 7, while a pitch from Jim Whelan, president of the powerful Real Estate Board of New York, first brought in a contribution on March 10. A pitch from prominent Albany lobbyist Rick Ostroff yielded a single donation on March 8, which was raised from a donor whose contribution was not matchable anyway, according to the Cuomo campaign.

The Cuomo campaign has access to information showing who has contributed through the donation page it set up for each individual intermediary. While intermediaries also engage in other types of fundraising, the campaign could have reported at least some information about the gifts the middlemen had solicited through online fundraising.

At least according to the Cuomo campaign, that’s not how reporting of intermediaries occurs in practice. The campaign collects information about intermediaries’ activity through forms that are filled out by these bundlers, then submitted by the campaign to the Campaign Finance Board.

Do you have tips on New York City's mayoral race? Let our reporters know at cbragg@nysfocus.com and julia@nysfocus.com.

“Intermediary forms are in the process of being collected and will be filed with the New York City campaign finance board in a timely manner,” said Rachel Harding, a campaign compliance attorney for Cuomo. “As a matter of practice, the Board understands that intermediaries will likely get identified later in modifications when the campaign gets the returned forms.”

Burgos, Whelan and Ostroff did not respond to press inquiries on Thursday.

An “intermediary” is an individual or entity who either delivers contributions to a campaign — rounding up checks at a fundraiser, for instance — or solicits contributions with the campaign’s knowledge of the activity.

Records disclosing bundlers help the media and public understand which people or interest groups are playing a crucial behind-the-scenes role in electing public officials. But that’s not all that’s at stake.

Burgos, Ostroff, and Whelan are registered in the city’s “doing business” database as lobbyists. Donations collected by intermediaries in the database are not supposed to be matched with taxpayer dollars.

New York City’s publicly-funded elections program matches eligible donations up to $250 in citywide races $8-to-1, meaning that bundlers are far less valuable for campaigns if they’re in the database.

Yet the campaign told donors stemming from the lobbyists’ fundraising appeals that their gifts would be matched.

In an email to potential contributors on March 7, Burgos linked to a page where contributions to the Cuomo campaign could be made — which was created by the Cuomo campaign specifically for Burgos’s fundraising outreach.

“Your contribution up to $250 is matched 8 times,” the page told donors.

Whelan and Ostroff sent out identical pitches.

The ex-governor declared his candidacy for mayor less than three weeks ago. On Monday, his campaign reported already having raised $1.5 million and claimed $332,530 as eligible for matching funds.

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If campaigns fail to disclose bundlers, the city might match contributions that campaigns have incorrectly designated as eligible.

The New York City Campaign Finance Board, which regulates the city’s public matching funds system, includes a feature allowing candidates to fundraise through a website called “NYC Votes.” Unlike similar vehicles like ActBlue, the city site is free. This is the vehicle through which Burgos solicited donations for Cuomo.

Timothy Hunter, a spokesperson from the Campaign Finance Board, said that candidates know when fundraising is being done on their behalf by an intermediary through the system.

Campaigns can create fundraising pages for each individual intermediary, personalizing the outreach. “Only the campaign has backend access for that,” Hunter said. “You wouldn’t be able to make a specialty link on your own.”

In addition, Hunter said, candidates can amend the solicitations sent out by individual intermediaries. In other words, the Cuomo campaign has the ability to alter its fundraising pitch if an intermediary, such as Burgos, is barred from raising matchable contributions.

For the Burgos, Whelan and Ostroff pitches, the Cuomo campaign did not do so.

Harding, the Cuomo campaign attorney, said that “boilerplate language” had been used for these pitches.

“The responsibility to file donations correctly rests with the campaign and, of course, they will be,” Harding said.

John Kaehny, executive director of the government reform group Reinvent Albany, said that though the Campaign Finance Board owns the online credit card processing application used by the Cuomo campaign, it probably cannot see inside.

“If Cuomo doesn’t disclose Tonio Burgos as an intermediary and mark those contributions he solicited as coming from a ‘doing business’ intermediary, the CFB will probably not know — even though the contributions are being processed by a credit card application they provide to candidates,” Kaehny said.

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Ben Weinberg, public policy director at the good government group Citizens Union, argued that the city should strictly limit the ability of lobbyists and others on the doing business list to bundle donations, just as it limits their ability to donate themselves.

“Burgos can only donate $400 to the mayor,” Weinberg said. “The fact that we allow him to bundle potentially thousands of dollars, even if those dollars are not matched, is a strange loophole that should be eliminated.”

In the last mayoral race, the eventual winner’s failure to disclose intermediaries eventually became a major issue.

Over a two-and-a-half-year period — from 2019 through the November 2021 general election — the Campaign Finance Board repeatedly sought information from Eric Adams’ campaign about intermediaries.

The Board flagged donations totaling more than $300,000 from over 500 donors which it suspected of having been raised by intermediaries, The City reported. Adams repeatedly ignored their requests to identify the suspected bundlers. Despite raising $8.9 million in private funds, the Adams campaign reported only four intermediaries.

Despite the stonewalling, the Campaign Finance Board still granted Adams more than $10 million in 2021 through the city’s matching funds program.

In the years since, Adams’ campaign bundlers have been at the center of federal investigations into the mayor and his associates.

Adams himself was charged with bribery and campaign finance offenses last year, but the case was halted after President Donald Trump assumed office in January. Under Trump, the federal Department of Justice has sought to dismiss the charges because they “unduly restricted” Adams’s ability to address illegal immigration and violent crime.