I realize that this guy was never a billionaire, even in his own head; please forgive my creative license with the numbers. 🙂 — Dan

Most of us are not billionaires, and most of us would probably like to be billionaires. You can buy anything, you don’t have to worry about money at all, and … well, that’s good enough, right? What’s not to like? But let’s face it, it’s not in the cards for the vast majority of us. And if you’re a sports fan, that’s too bad, because you basically have to be a billionaire if you ever want to own a major sports team.

Unless you’re a really good liar — and even then, it’s going to be dicey.

The New York Islanders are a professional hockey team, one of 32 member teams in the National Hockey League (NHL). They’re located on Long Island, New York, about a 30-minute drive from Manhattan without traffic, which is to say, an hour or more away from the heart of the city. They’re often seen as the disfavored stepchild of the Manhattan-based New York Rangers, but that wasn’t always the case. The Islanders were founded in 1972 and by the end of the century, became a perennial favorite. The Isles won the Stanley Cup — the league championship — in the 1979-1980 season, and then in each of the subsequent three seasons. They made it to the Finals after the 1983-1984 season as well, but after that went on a decades-long slump. And for a John Pickett, that turned out to be a wild ride, and ultimately, a problem.

Pickett was a minority owner of the club since its founding and, when the team hit some financial struggles before the 1978-1979 season, bailed out the majority owners and took control himself. He is generally credited with leading some solid business moves, including landing a lucrative cable television contract, that gave the Isles the money they needed to fuel that four-year title run. But the decade after the Islanders’ dynasty proved difficult, financially and otherwise. In 1991, Picket began looking for a buyer — and found that that few people wanted to buy a downtrodden hockey team in the New York City suburbs. But in 1996, a guy named John Spano appeared.

To hear him tell it, Spano was born rich — he inherited roughly $200 million from his grandfather, Angelo. He was also a successful businessman in his own rite; he was the owner of the Bison Group, a Dallas-based leasing business which, per Sports Illustrated, he claimed “encompassed a worldwide empire of 10 companies and more than 6,000 employees.” But he dreamed of the ice. He tried to buy the Dallas Stars and then the Florida Panthers in 1995, but couldn’t come to terms with either team’s existent ownership group. The Islanders, despite being 1,500 miles away, were there for the taking.

Not wanting to put all his cash in the team, Spano did what a lot of super-rich people do: he asked a bank to give him a loan, and for them to put up the cash. Spano had to come up with $165 million to buy the team from Pickett, and the first $80 million came from a syndicate of banks and, led by Boston-based Fleet Bank, without a problem. But when Spano failed to make nearly $17 million payment toward acquiring the team’s cable TV rights, others started asking questions. According to Eye on Isles, an Islander blog, Spano tried to cover this miss by wiring $1,700 to the payee (a typo, he argued), but the gig was up.

The NHL looked more closely into Spano’s finances and realized that he wasn’t nearly as wealthy as he claimed. He lived in a large, million-dollar home, but it was mostly unfurnished. The Bison Group brought in enough money to make him a millionaire, but not by much. And he hadn’t inherited much from his late grandfather. John Spano was a fraud.

Some of the damage was already done, though. When Fleet made its payment on behalf of Spano, Spano took operational control of the team, replacing the team’s head coach. He already committed to signing some players, adding $2.5 million (that he didn’t have) to the team’s payroll. The team, now both embarrassed and worse off, reverted ownership to Pickett.

Pickett ultimately sold the team in 1997 for $195 million, according to the New York Times. Spano wasn’t as lucky. He pled guilty to bank and wire fraud and in January 2000, was sentenced to 71 months in prison and ordered to pay $11.9 million in restitution, which, to be clear, he didn’t have. And no, he didn’t learn his lesson. In 2015, he found himself in trouble with the law again: as CBS News reported, he pled guilty to 16 counts of forgery “after being accused of collecting thousands of dollars in commissions from false accounts he'd created while working as a salesman for a company that provides linens to health care facilities.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison and was released in November 2024.

The Islanders still haven’t won a Stanley Cup since.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Despite the name “National Hockey League,” the NHL has teams from two nations — 25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. But despite the US-heavy population of teams, the word “National” doesn’t refer to the Stars and Stripes. The “nation” in question is Canada; the league was originally formed by two teams in Montreal, one in Toronto, and one in Ottawa.

From the Archives: The Hockey Save that Started in the Stands: The net result (pardon the pun, I couldn’t help myself!) was a kidney.

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And thanks! — Dan