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 had barely a fraction of the assets to buy the team; he used fraud to borrow enough money to initiate the purchase, believing he could use the fraudulently purchased team itself as the asset to then get the rest of the tens of millions of dollars needed to cover his fraud.
Spano was born in New York City but spent most of his life in Madison, Ohio, and graduated from Ashtabula St. John High School.
After working several sales jobs in Pittsburgh and Dallas, he founded the Bison Group in 1990, a Dallas-based company that primarily leased aircraft.
[1] 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.
Years later, Jim Lites, the Stars' president at the time, recalled visiting Spano's mansion in the Dallas suburb of University Park.
[2] Among the "laughable" excuses Spano offered were that he needed a copy of a written agreement with the team's top minor league affiliate, the Kalamazoo Wings and to have his South African partners meet with Stars officials.
The Islanders had fallen on hard times after their four consecutive Stanley Cup championships, having missed the playoffs in five of the previous eight years; furthermore, the team was suffering at the gate, and rumors abounded that they were about to move to Atlanta, Nashville or Houston.
[1] At the request of Pickett, Bettman 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.
[4] In early July, Newsday, acting on tips from anonymous Islanders executives that their new boss was worth significantly less than advertised, began investigating Spano's background.
[2] On July 9, Newsday published a story that exposed Spano as a fraud who was not worth even a fraction of the money required to complete the Islanders deal.
Among other things, the Newsday investigation revealed: Under the terms of a mediation brokered by Bettman, Spano relinquished control of the Islanders back to Pickett on July 11.
Spano later told Sports Illustrated that a "significant" capital call and a payment on a note blew apart his plans to pay Pickett.
After Spano bounced the $17 million check, Comerica reportedly sent a letter to Pickett's attorneys saying he had funds to cover the overdraft.
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.
[2] 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.
In 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.
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.
[11] The Spano fiasco was highly embarrassing to the NHL, which was still reeling from revelations that former NHLPA head Alan Eagleson had lied to his clients and enriched himself by skimming off the union's pension fund.
Second, 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.