Billionaire Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan, together with his relatives and business associates, pumped more than $60,000 into Mayor Adams’ legal and political coffers this summer — even as his company had key business interests before the city and lobbied top City Hall officials about them, according to a Daily News review of public records.
Those issues include the heavily-debated question of how long MSG’s critical special permit — which allows it to operate atop Penn Station – should be renewed for.
But the donations were permissible. While the MSG business entity is not allowed to make such contributions, Dolan and the other individuals who gave are. Nearly all the Dolan-connected contributions to Adams’ legal defense trust and reelection campaign came on July 10, July 15 and July 26, records show.
For the trust, the donations, all of which were in the legal maximum amount of $5,000, totaled $45,000 — just under half of the $92,500 Adams’ fund raised over the last disclosure period, from July 1 to Sept. 30. The flurry of contributions came from James Dolan, his three adult sons, his father, a director of his Madison Square Garden Co., the same’s company vice chairman, a longtime entertainment business partner to Dolan and an ex-president of his MSG Network, The News’ review found.
James Dolan, his three sons, his dad and the same business associates also gave another $16,800 to Adams’ 2025 campaign in July, each contributing the legal max of $2,100, each on the same day they also made their trust donations. Additionally, two more MSG Co. directors, including James Dolan’s sister, each gave $2,100 to Adams’ 2025 campaign on the same dates in July.
It’s unclear if the Dolan family business donations to Adams — which totaled $66,000 — were made as part of any fundraising events.
MSG spokespeople didn’t return requests for comment Thursday, and neither did Dolan, who’s also a major Donald Trump donor.
City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy referred all questions to Vito Pitta, a lawyer for Adams’ defense trust and reelection campaign, who didn’t respond to messages.
MSG Entertainment, a company James Dolan serves as the CEO of, is in the city’s Doing Business database, which lists entities engaged in financial dealings with the municipal government. Individuals in that database are legally barred from giving any cash to city legal defense trusts and can’t contribute more than $400 to mayoral campaigns, a rule designed to prevent pay-to-play corruption in city government.
However, Dolan and his executives aren’t restricted by those rules, as they aren’t personally listed in the database.
Government watchdogs have long lamented the fact that top executives of companies in the database aren’t automatically included. In a letter to the Campaign Finance Board last year, the heads of five New York government watchdog groups, including Reinvent Albany, Citizens Union and Common Cause, called it “a giant loophole.”
The Dolans’ financial support for Adams came on the heels of the MSG companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying his administration and the City Council on various business issues, public records show.
Last year, MSG had its in-house government relations team and consultants from the Greenberg Traurig and Kramer Levin law firms lobby city officials on securing a special permit the Madison Square Garden arena needs to operate in its longtime home on top of Penn Station.
Targets of that lobbying included Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Adams’ chief adviser, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi and various Departments of Transportation and City Planning officials, records show. The lobbying also targeted Council members.
The Council eventually granted MSG a five-year permit. Adams, who had the power to veto the permit decision, allowed it to lapse into law.
Dolan, who also owns the sports teams that call MSG home, the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, expressed disappointment in the five-year term, having long argued the arena deserves a permit without an expiration date. The permit is a matter of existential survival for the iconic arena. Council members have said they gave MSG a five-year renewal, in part, to pressure Dolan to do more to help in the long-term redesign of Penn Station.
Council members have argued Dolan’s company needs to do more to help revitalize the train hub, with there at one point even being discussions about kicking the Garden entirely out of its home to make way for a new station. Those discussions have fizzled, and Paul Macchia, MSG’s government affairs executive, is on the 55-member working group discussing next steps about the future of Penn Station.
Besides the special permit issue, MSG also lobbied Adams’ administration and the Council last year on a bill that’d prohibit venues like MSG from using facial recognition technology to identify patrons. That bill was introduced after Dolan drew intense criticism for using such tech to identify lawyers for companies suing him and then have them booted from the arena during sports games and concerts.
After MSG’s lobbying, the bill stalled and never passed the Council in 2023.
But Brooklyn Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, a Democrat who penned the bill, re-introduced it this year. She told The News on Thursday it has gotten 27 co-sponsors, surpassing the majority threshold required for passage.
“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to endure dystopian biometric scans to cheer for the Knicks,” Hanif said.
With Téa Kvetenadze
