Growing up in New York playing pee-wee hockey, John Spano dreamed of being a professional hockey player. Unfortunately, his family's move to Ohio and the sight of real Midwestern athletes, quickly disabused Spano of his professional athletic fantasies.
After college, Spano had a wide range of jobs in the wild, pump-and-dump late-1980s economy working in auto loans, insurance and selling equipment leases. It was during this time that Spano learned a valuable lesson in America: if you want to be rich, you need to act rich. The mask, the illusion, can be more important than the reality.
Spano relocated his new bride to Texas and bolstered by his partner Benjamin Mann's "rainy day fund" of laundered cash began to travel in the circles of the "best people" in Austin society. He joined the local country club, dined with the movers and shakers, and ended up smack in the middle of Texas athletic royalty: the sports team owners.
Suddenly, his dream seemed within reach. If he couldn't be a professional athlete; he might be able to own a professional franchise. In quick succession, he flirted with buying the NHL franchises the Dallas Stars and the Anaheim Ducks, until the New York Islanders ended up dropped in his lap by the league president. Armed with an $80-million loan from Fleet Bank that Spano attained without any money down, purely by connections, he struck a deal to take the Islanders off the hands of a local consortium of owners.
And that's when the trouble started.
Spano was an overnight celebrity, the golden boy, the savior of the Islanders, whose fortunes had been in perpetual decline from their 1984 high-water mark. He was going to reinvigorate the franchise, inaugurate a new age of excellence with his unlimited money supply.
Except he didn't have any money. Even worse, the team's coach and General Manager, Mike Millbury, was a pugilistic hot-head; the players were all adrift in their own private games, unable to bond or establish an on-the-ice rhythm; and a local journalist was determined to excavate Spano's past that included substantial amounts of owed money.
In the end, everyone involved would lose—the only dividing metric being the extent of their personal ruin—and no one would learn anything from their mistakes.
Spano: How a Hockey Superfan Conned His Way Into Owning an NHL Team is a wild ride of financial chicanery, sports drama, and laugh-out loud comedy, a cross section of The Wolf of Wall Street, Catch Me if You Can, and Slap Shot.
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Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber and Scrap (NeoText). Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program.
