John Spano

On August 20, 2014, Spano was indicted by a grand jury in Ohio on one count of theft and 44 counts of forgery. In a scheme that took place from June 2011 until July 2013, Spano stole from his employers Image First, which rents linens to outpatient facilities in Ohio, and its sister company London Cleaners. He pleaded guilty to charges of collecting almost $70,000 in commissions on fraudulent accounts in May 2015 and was sentenced to 10 years prison on June 17, 2015. He was also ordered to pay more than $75,000 in restitution to Image First.

After several attempts at interviews and possible documentaries, an ESPN 30 for 30 film, Big Shot, directed by actor Kevin Connolly, related John Spano's time as prospective owner of the New York Islanders and Spano himself appeared in the film to explain his actions. The film was screened as part of the Sports portion of the 2013 TriBeCa Film Festival. The film subsequently premiered on television in October 2013.

Spano was released in June 2004 on five years' supervised release and moved to a Cleveland suburb. However, he was arrested again in February 2005 for defrauding numerous companies by promising to obtain loans for them and pocketing the fees without getting the loans. He was jailed for 51 months and released from prison on April 3, 2009.

These safeguards were not enough, however, to prevent John Rigas from buying the Buffalo Sabres in 1997, only to have the league take over the franchise after his 2002 arrest for fraud. In 2007 the Nashville Predators were sold to a group that included a nearly 30% share to William "Boots" Del Biaggio III, who was later revealed to have fraudulently obtained $110 million in loans from two NHL owners and eight banks in order to purchase a stake in the Predators, a crime for which he was sentenced to eight years in prison on September 8, 2009 and ordered to sell his share of the team.

On January 28, 2000, he was sentenced to 71 months in federal prison and ordered to pay restitution of $11.9 million to his victims, including the Islanders ($3.4 million), two Dallas businesses ($4.4 million), and Mario Lemieux ($1.25 million).

During 1999, his wife divorced him and sold their house, and he moved to a Philadelphia condo where he had tried to pay the rent with an expired credit card, $10,000 in bad checks and wire transfers. This led to his arrest in February, and he lost his bail.

The plea deal called for him to plead guilty to bank fraud charges in Boston a week later, but several deadlines came and went, and Spano began making noises in late November about withdrawing his plea. As a result, a Boston grand jury indicted him for bank fraud, and federal prosecutors there made plans to file a superseding indictment that could have sent him to prison for 60 years. However, Spano's new attorneys resigned out of fears they wouldn't be paid, and Spano had no choice but to accept the original offer. He pleaded guilty to bank fraud on January 13, 1998.

Pickett and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman thought that Spano would be a lifesaver for the Islanders. The once-proud franchise, best known for their meteoric rise from also-ran to four-time Stanley Cup champions, had missed the playoffs in five of the previous eight years. They had also been suffering at the gate, and rumors abounded that they were about to move to Atlanta, Nashville or Houston. Spano promised to keep the team on Long Island and either renovate, rebuild or replace the aging Nassau Coliseum. He paid for the team at signing with a loan from a syndicate of banks headed by Fleet Bank. He and Pickett agreed to a five-year installment package for the cable rights, and the league's other owners approved the sale in February 1997.

However, when the NHL's Board of Governors met in June 1997, Spano was conspicuously absent. Instead, the Islanders were represented by two men from the Pickett regime. It emerged that Spano had only paid $26,200 to Pickett for the cable rights after five attempts. On one attempt, he'd wired Pickett only $5,000 instead of the $5 million originally agreed upon. On another, a $17 million check had bounced. On another, he sent $1,700 when he was supposed to send the $17 million. Pickett asked Bettman to mediate. The commissioner ordered Spano to remove himself from day-to-day control of the Islanders and not use any team assets until the dispute could be settled.

In October 1996, Spano agreed to buy the Islanders from longtime owner John Pickett for $165 million: $80 million for Pickett's 90 percent stake in the team and $85 million for its lucrative cable television contract with SportsChannel New York, which at the time earned the Islanders $13 million a year. He later agreed to buy the remaining 10 percent of the team held by the management group that had been running the Islanders' day-to-day operations since 1989.

In September 1995, he reached a tentative agreement to buy a 50 percent interest in the Dallas Stars, but the date for the closing was pushed back several times, during which Spano began making what owner Norman Green called unreasonable demands. Green backed out of the deal in November, eventually selling the team to Tom Hicks. Years later, Jim Lites, the Stars' president at the time, recalled visiting Spano's mansion in the Dallas suburb of University Park. Despite Spano's claimed wealth, Lites said the house was unfurnished. Among the "laughable" excuses Spano offered were a written agreement with the team's top minor league affiliate, the Kalamazoo Wings and a request to have his South African partners meet with Stars officials. Lites also said that Spano insisted that Lites pick up the tab for their dinners—something Lites said he'd never seen in all of his years as a sports executive.

Prosecutors obtained evidence that Spano had forged numerous letters from bank officials in his business dealings from 1995 onward. After Spano bounced the $17 million check, Comerica reportedly sent a letter to Pickett's attorneys saying he had funds to cover the overdraft. However, the executive who purportedly signed it denied ever writing it. Moreover, the letter was written in two different fonts, one on the body and another on the signature block. A postal inspector found that the fax machine mark at the top of the page was an exact match to the one used by Spano's Bison Group. The fax machine mark on a letter purportedly from Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette that claimed Spano owned Treasury bills worth $27 million was also an exact match to the one used by Bison Group.

Spano was originally from Greenwich Village (Manhattan, in New York City), but spent most of his life in Madison, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and graduated from Ashtabula St. John High School. He graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in business administration in 1986. After working several sales jobs in Pittsburgh and Dallas, he founded the Bison Group in 1990. It was a Dallas-based company that primarily leased aircraft.

John Angelo Spano Jr. (born May 31, 1964) is an American businessman and admitted fraudster. He is best known for briefly buying control of the New York Islanders franchise of the National Hockey League (NHL) in 1996, before it emerged that he did not have nearly enough assets to buy the team. He subsequently pleaded guilty to bank and wire fraud and served a federal prison sentence.