Nick Spano faced potential ruin when he was sentenced to prison in 2012. Clients fled his scandal-scarred, Albany-based lobbying firm.

But 120 miles down the Hudson River, his younger brother, Mike, had just been elected mayor of New York’s third-largest city.

In the years since, as Mike Spano has overseen Yonkers’s revival, Nick’s lobbying firm has been resurrected, too. His client list has swelled with nearly two dozen companies and interest groups that have business before his brother’s administration.

A New York Focus investigation has found that 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.”

A health insurance company founded by a man convicted of insurance-related felonies doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.

But since its founding in 2010, insurer Leading Edge Administrators has flourished despite the checkered past of its founder, Jerry Weissman, who in 1997 was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, then the nation’s largest medical insurer, where he served as CFO.

On May 1, Leading Edge will begin offering two bare-bones insurance plans to hundreds of thousands of low-wage home health aides in New York. As New York Focus previously reported, one of these plans will fail to cover many basic health needs — like doctor’s visits, maternal care, and hospitalization — for the workers who provide state-funded care to elderly and disabled people across the state.

Home health aides might have difficulty getting Leading Edge to pay for even the services it claims to cover. A New York Focus review of lawsuits against Leading Edge show it has a record of backing out of paying for covered health procedures — using tactics that experts say went far beyond standard industry practices — and trying to leave patients with the bill.

As President Donald Trump’s administration rounds up hundreds of immigrants it claims are gang members and expels them to a notorious Salvadoran prison, New York state is quietly feeding federal authorities gang intelligence that could fuel the deportation machine.

The New York State Police maintain a database of more than 5,100 people they’ve designated as members of criminal gangs — and funnel the information into a federal database used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a New York Focus investigation has found.

The statewide gang database has been in operation for 20 years, though it has garnered almost no outside attention or scrutiny. State Police staff designate people as gang members — including people who may never have been charged with a crime — using highly speculative criteria like where they spend their time, whom they talk to, what clothing they wear, and what tattoos they have.

Thousands of New Yorkers around the state are sitting on waitlists for two state-funded mental health treatment and support programs, according to data obtained by the Legal Aid Society and reviewed by New York Focus. Some applicants wait years for voluntary long-term mental health support, even as the state has increased funding for such programs in recent years, the records show.

The state and mental health advocates have embraced the programs — supportive housing and Assertive Community Treatment — as effective ways to help people with serious mental illnesses. Supportive housing programs offer people subsidized apartments or community residences staffed with service providers. ACT teams provide around-the-clock services and recovery programs, allowing people to live in their communities rather than in hospitals.

While the state has boosted funding for the programs in recent years, there are more people seeking treatment than can receive it, and mental health advocates have said more is needed to meet that demand.