Over the past month, New York Focus has published a series of articles about how the Bronx Democratic Party has skirted campaign finance law and enriched a political ally and close friend of the party chair.
We encourage you to read the articles here, here, here, and here. But we also wanted to collect our key findings in one place.
Here are the top three things we learned:
1. The Bronx Democratic Party failed to file campaign finance reports for years — and only fixed the error after we wrote about it.
Our reporting began from a simple observation: The Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, a PAC that supports Democratic candidates for state Assembly, donated nearly $700,000 to the Bronx Democratic Party since 2020 — but the Bronx party only reported receiving about $300,000.
Campaigns and political parties are legally required to report all of the money they receive and spend, so the Bronx Democrats’ failure to report these donations appeared to violate the law.
We were especially curious because it seemed odd for the campaign committee to spend so much money in the Bronx, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than ten to one. The committee hasn’t given substantial sums to any other county’s Democratic party. We wondered if it had to do with the fact that top Assembly Democrats — including Speaker Carl Heastie — are from the Bronx.
We asked the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, the Bronx Democratic Party, and the Bronx Party’s chair, state Senator Jamaal Bailey, what had happened to the $400,000 that had vanished from the reports.
None responded, so we published our first story about the missing cash.
But more details soon emerged.
The following week, the Bronx Democrats submitted multiple reports that they had previously failed to file with the Board of Elections. They also filled in gaps in reports that they had filed.
These showed that the Bronx party had indeed received the $400,000, along with five figure sums from other groups like the New York Yankees and the pharmaceutical lobby.
What those reports contained also led us to our next story.
2. The party has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political firm owned by a close ally of Jamaal Bailey, the party’s chair. What that money bought is unclear.
Before it filed the missing reports, the Bronx Democratic Party had reported less than $100,000 in total expenses over the past few years.
The new reports showed that, in fact, the party has spent nearly $2 million over that time span — spending that was almost entirely undisclosed before our reporting.
One set of expenses caught our attention: Since 2020, the Bronx Democratic Party has sent nearly $300,000 to London House, a political consulting firm founded and run by Jason Laidley.
Laidley, it turns out, is a close friend and the former top staffer of Bronx party chair Jamaal Bailey.
We were once again curious why the money was necessary in a county that sees competitive general elections about as often as the Yankees miss the playoffs.
When we asked Bailey about the payments, he said that they were for “administrative and operational services” and voter outreach. He declined to provide further details or explain why the party needed to hire an outside vendor for these tasks.
Since Laidley left Bailey’s staff in 2021 to run London House, the firm has raked in nearly $1 million in payments from campaigns, and another million in lobbying fees. The Bronx Democratic Party is the firm’s biggest campaign client by far.
The party routed funds to other people with ties to its head honchos, too. It paid $24,000 to Dominique Maddox — a former Bailey staffer who has lived at Speaker Carl Heastie’s home — for services that Maddox would only describe as “media stuff.”
Publishing this story prompted new tips from sources, who suggested that we look at the relationship between London House and nominations for judgeships in the Bronx. So we did, and found something interesting.
3. Almost every successful candidate for Bronx civil court in the last four elections has paid London House.
We realized that over the past four years, nearly every person who became a civil court judge in the Bronx used their campaign funds to hire London House or a related consulting firm run by Ariana Collado, an employee of London House who is also the executive director of the Bronx Democratic Party.
In five out of 13 cases, the payments amounted to more than 60 percent of the candidates’ total spending.
Civil court judges hear cases related to housing disputes and debts, and are often appointed to higher courts, including ones that hear criminal cases. They serve 10-year terms with annual salaries of $214,000.
London House and Collado Consultants have raked in over $172,000 from winning Bronx civil court candidates since 2021 — nearly half of all spending by those candidates.
No other advisors to the winning civil court judicial
campaigns have been paid even a tenth of what London House has made in
recent years, and only one candidate who hired London House has failed
to win the Democratic nomination.
The New York City Bar Association, which independently evaluates judicial candidates, gave “not approved” ratings to two of the candidates
who paid London House and later became judges. But that didn’t stop
them from winning the Bronx Democratic Party’s endorsement, or their
elections in November. Both are currently serving on the bench.
We are continuing to gather information about the Bronx
Democratic political machine. Do you have information we should know?
Contact us at sam@nysfocus.com or cbragg@nysfocus.com. You can remain anonymous, and your identity will not be published without your permission.