For a Yonkers Political Dynasty, a Succession of Blurred Lines

The Spanos are more than just a political family. They are a modern-day dynasty that has shaped local politics for decades. According to Mike Spano’s 2023 financial disclosure, 22 of his relatives held city jobs, including three brothers, a sister, 11 nephews, four nieces, and a cousin. That includes another brother, Vincent, Yonkers’s city clerk. The family wields influence over nearly every corner of city government.

Empire Strategic Planning, a three-lobbyist firm headquartered in Albany, is likewise a family affair. Nick, a once-powerful state senator turned lobbyist, is the founder; his brother John is the longtime managing partner.

These fraternal overlaps faced scrutiny two years ago, when the New York Post reported that 23 of the lobbying clients had business before Yonkers during Mike Spano’s tenure. In response, a Yonkers spokesperson told the Post that Empire Strategic Planning did not lobby the City of Yonkers, “per the request of Mayor Spano at the start of his administration.”

The mayor has repeatedly sworn, in financial disclosure forms, that he does not believe Nick lobbies his city.

However, records show that Empire Strategic Planning did report lobbying the City of Yonkers a dozen times for four clients in 2012, during Mike Spano’s first year in office. For example, the firm reported lobbying the city for its client Cablevision over the company’s franchise agreement to sell cable TV services to Yonkers residents. Nick Spano was in prison for the latter half of that year, but John Spano was actively working for the firm throughout. Empire Strategic Planning has not reported lobbying the City of Yonkers since 2012.

But a New York Focus investigation found that the lobbying firm has continued to interact with Spano’s administration.

Nick Spano has interacted with a top city official and sat in on meetings with Mike Spano. A lobbyist at Nick’s firm requested a sit-down between a client and his own wife, a senior city official, to secure a tax break. After such meetings, Mayor Spano’s administration has taken action that directly benefited both Nick’s lobbying clients and the real estate brokerage where Nick holds a side job as a salesperson.

These findings “suggest a high level of conflict of interest and corruption risk,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the government reform group Reinvent Albany, and “should be investigated by the State Attorney General’s office of public integrity as soon as possible.”

In addition, the state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government regulates lobbying reporting. Both offices declined to comment. No government entity has accused Nick Spano or Mike Spano of any wrongdoing related to the lobbying overlaps.

Back home, the Spanos face little resistance. The Yonkers ethics board is quiet. The local inspector general, Liam McLaughlin, called allegations over the many Spanos on city payroll “political silly-season accusations.” The Yonkers City Council is stacked with Spano allies. And the local news media has faced deep cuts.

While the records obtained by New York Focus offer a glimpse into the relationship between Nick’s lobbying firm and his brother’s administration, they leave many open questions. Mayor Spano declined to answer nearly all of them for this story.

“Mayor Spano and the Administration have adhered to all applicable laws and statutes and will continue to do so,” said his communications director, Christina Gilmartin. “There is no further comment at this time.”

Gilmartin did not restate her claim from two years ago that the firm never lobbies the administration.

Nick Spano, in an email, denied wrongdoing. “It sounds like this story is an attempt to smear me and my reputation,” he wrote. “I am not an elected official, I am a licensed real estate salesperson as well as a registered lobbyist. This story has been recycled several times in the past and my family has become used to it.”

“We have seen this before,” he said.

The family had created an “empire” reaching into all levels of local government, then-Assemblymember Richard Brodsky told the Times.

“You take on a Spano in a ward in Yonkers and all of a sudden, maybe you’ve got trouble moving a bill in Albany,” he said.

The family patriarch was Leonard N. Spano, then the Westchester county clerk. Nick, the eldest of Leonard’s 16 children, was a high-ranking Republican state senator who doubled as leader of the county Republican party. Mike, the ninth child, was a Republican state assemblyman.

In 2006, Nick lost a close reelection campaign to a Democrat, and began his post-politics life by starting a highly successful lobbying firm. The next year, Mike switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.

In heavily Democratic Yonkers, the Spano name has outlasted its Republican roots. Mike Spano was elected mayor in 2011. Term limits prohibited him from serving more than eight years, but the Yonkers City Council twice granted him four-year extensions. He’s now in his fourteenth year and is Yonkers’s longest-serving mayor. He is being floated as a potential lieutenant governor running mate to Governor Kathy Hochul.

While people largely describe the Spano brothers as affable, local officials who’ve crossed the clan have faced political consequences.

In 2021, then-Yonkers City Council President Mike Khader voted against a Spano-backed rezoning plan. Khader claimed that the mayor had failed to disclose that a Spano family property might increase in value due to a curiously redrawn boundary.

Khader alleged in a lawsuit that immediately after the vote, Mike Spano and his allies targeted him with a “malicious and intentional campaign to sully his reputation and to oust him from office.” The Spano-nominated Yonkers inspector general, McLaughlin, launched an investigation into whether Khader engaged in quid pro quo by allegedly accepting free office space from an attorney to whom he’d given a contract. Khader lost his reelection bid that year.

Spano’s opponent in the 2023 mayoral race, a Yonkers City Council member, charged that Mike Spano used his position “to enrich his friends and family.” She is running for reelection this year against a Democratic primary challenger — and without the support of the Spano-controlled Yonkers Democratic Party.

After the November 2013 tour, Nick requested — and received — a memo from Kimball concerning two of the development sites. About five months later, Spano’s firm began lobbying state government officials for a limited liability company, Gateway Kensington LLC, that is owned by Fareri.

In 2014, the director of government relations at SUNY Purchase pitched several partnership ideas to Kimball, including placing a satellite education program in downtown Yonkers. Kimball responded to the proposal, then forwarded a copy of her response to the registered lobbyist for SUNY Purchase’s foundation — Nick.

A portion of the plan apparently came to fruition a year later, when SUNY Purchase opened a satellite space in downtown Yonkers.

As part of the deal, Yonkers reportedly gave SUNY Purchase $300,000 in federal block grant funds, which were used to cover rent on its satellite campus facility. A SUNY official did not respond to questions.

This was only the start of the overlap between Empire and Yonkers government.

Cavanaugh set up a joint meeting between Ferncliff Manor, the Yonkers Planning Department (led by his wife), and the Yonkers IDA, which had the power to grant tax benefits to development projects — and was chaired by Mike Spano.

Ferncliff was pitching a $23.4 million plan to renovate a school campus and wanted to “explore potential tax-exempt financing, as well as get an idea of what land use issues, if any, may arise,” Cavanaugh wrote to his wife and Carter.

In his email, Cavanaugh also pitched the merits of the proposal to the two top Yonkers officials, writing that this was “an opportunity to retain 250 jobs in Yonkers, as well as maintain a use that the neighborhood supports.” Kimball’s office scheduled a meeting, to include Kimball herself, for the next month. Two months later, the Yonkers IDA passed a resolution granting initial approval of a $707,000 sales-tax exemption for Ferncliff Manor.

Mayor Spano’s spokesperson would not answer questions about the interactions detailed in the emails.

In legally required disclosures, Empire Strategic Planning reported lobbying myriad state and local government agencies on behalf of Ferncliff during the period covering October 2013, including on “funding for a new campus.”

The firm reported lobbying the Yonkers City Council, but did not report lobbying the Yonkers IDA or planning department, despite Cavanaugh’s October 2013 email setting up the meeting and pitching Ferncliff’s proposal to two top Yonkers officials.

At the time, state law defined lobbying as “any attempt to influence” state or local public officials on certain policy matters, including a paid lobbyist seeking passage of a resolution before an Industrial Development Agency.

Kimball is now the president and CEO of the Municipal Housing Authority for the City of Yonkers. Cavanaugh left Nick Spano’s lobbying firm in 2017 and became Mike Spano’s deputy mayor. Four years later, he was named president and CEO of the Yonkers IDA, an entity that has since approved tax breaks sought by at least four developers who are Empire Strategic Planning lobbying clients. And in 2023, the mayor appointed Cavanaugh to simultaneously hold his wife’s old job as planning commissioner.

Leonard and the CLSA officials present also declined to comment on the meeting.

Records confirm that following the dinner, Leonard was involved in contract negotiations between the Yonkers PBA and his brother’s administration. In 2021 and 2022, he sat in on at least four meetings between the mayor and PBA president. The topic of one of those meetings in September 2022, records show, was “PBA Contract.”

Two months later, Mayor Spano’s administration struck a new contract agreement with the PBA, which included a three percent raise and retroactive pay increases. In March 2023, the Spano administration reached a similar deal with the CLSA.

Emails show that four years ago, at a dinner meeting in the Village of Fishkill, Mayor Spano was to dine with his brothers Nick and Leonard. This time, their dinner was with Cotter.

An Empire lobbyist arranged the meeting through Mayor Spano’s government email. Gilmartin told New York Focus that this event, too, was “social or non-governmental in nature.”

One week later, the Yonkers IDA approved a tax benefit for Cotter’s $500 million project: Lionsgate Studios Yonkers. Mayor Spano as IDA chair voted in favor of the tax break. Cotter also attended the meeting.

The Spano lobbying firm has often reported lobbying state officials for Cotter’s Yonkers development projects. But it has never reported lobbying Yonkers.

When Cotter’s company went on to develop another film production project in Yonkers, Nick got involved in yet another capacity: as a real estate broker.

Nick has held a side job for years as a real estate salesman at Rand Commercial, a major commercial real estate brokerage in the Tri-State area. Rand’s chief strategy officer, Paul Adler, is a former Democratic Party official in Rockland County who once faced his own legal troubles. Nick’s son also works as a salesperson at the firm, according to its website.

Nick has been among Rand’s top salespeople, and the interests of his lobbying clients and Rand’s have intersected repeatedly, records show. In multiple instances, Mayor Spano took actions that benefited those interests.

Several months after the Fishkill dinner, Cotter created another I.Park LLC and then purchased a property on North Broadway in Yonkers for $10.5 million. According to an email, the two brokers representing Cotter in the deal were Nick and Adler. Put simply, Rand reaped a broker fee for facilitating a land purchase for Nick’s lobbying client.

Less than a year later, Mayor Spano said in an interview that the city was reviewing Cotter’s plans to build a third film project in the city, at the North Broadway site. The Yonkers Planning Board approved the project, and it broke ground in November 2023.

Cotter passed away last fall, but New York Focus asked Adler, Nick, and Mike Spano whether, before the November 2021 land purchase, the Yonkers government had privately indicated it would later approve Cottter’s movie project at the location. None responded.

A similar pattern of events is repeating today: Yonkers government is moving to approve yet another major I.Park film studio project in the city’s Ludlow Park neighborhood near the waterfront. In December, the Yonkers Planning Board recommended approval of a zoning change allowing a 90,000-square-foot movie studio in a largely residential area.

I.Park purchased the land for $53 million in 2022. Once again, the company made the investment years before Yonkers government moved to grant the necessary approvals.

At the lunch, the mayor would “meet with potential tenants, brokers and local business leaders on the importance of a vibrant downtown,” Adler wrote to the mayor, adding that the event would include a “quick tour of the 6th floor” and that AMS’s principal, Michael Mitnick, would be present.

Adler later sent the mayor a proposed agenda for the meeting, where he suggested the mayor highlight 86 Main Street as “the crown jewel of the downtown office market.”

After the mayor committed to attending, Rand Commercial sent out a flyer to prospective tenants, promoting the presence of “Special Guest Mayor Mike Spano.”