James Dolan
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The owner of Madison Square Garden has filed a new legal action demanding access to the phone records of a New York state liquor investigator — the same state official who the company reportedly hired a private detective to tail.
In a petition filed Monday, attorneys for MSG Entertainment (MSGE) asked a New York judge to force Verizon to hand over cellphone records from Charles Stravalle, an investigator for the State Liquor Authority (SLA). The filing says the records will prove MSGE’s allegations that the SLA has unfairly targeted the company with a “sham” investigation over its controversial move to use facial-recognition technology to ban opposing lawyers from its venues.
“The SLA is misusing its enforcement powers at the behest of politically influential lawyers,” MSGE’s attorneys wrote. “Angered and motivated, those lawyers prevailed on the SLA to conduct an inherently compromised investigation of MSG.”
According to MSGE’s filing, already-revealed texts between those same lawyers and Stravalle “show that the investigation was compromised from the start” — and MSGE now wants access to the rest of them.
“MSG needs the phone records it subpoenaed from respondent Verizon to be able to more fully understand how deep this collusion and corruption goes, and how high the deck was stacked against MSG from the start,” the company wrote.
In a statement to Billboard, MSGE’s attorney Jim Walden said: “We believe the incriminating evidence revealed by the communications between the SLA and the plaintiff’s attorneys is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what our motion and subsequent subpoenas will uncover. We look forward to exposing the SLA’s abuses and bringing the facts to light.”
A rep for the SLA did not return a request for comment from the agency and Stravalle. A rep for Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, including whether or not it would comply with the subpoena.
The new filing comes two months after the New York Times reported that MSGE and Dolan had hired a private detective to track Stravalle after he was assigned to work on the SLA’s probe into the company.
It also comes amid an increasingly sprawling legal battle facing MSGE and Dolan, who also own Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater and other live music venues throughout New York City.
The fight began last year when MSGE enacted new rules to ban attorneys who are suing the company from attending events at Madison Square Garden and other MSGE venues. When MSGE began enforcing those rules using facial recognition technology, it drew public scrutiny and backlash from lawmakers like State Senator Liz Kruger, who expressed concern that MSGE’s rules were “discriminatory and retaliatory.”
In November, the SLA began investigating whether the lawyer ban violates state alcohol laws, which require businesses to be “open to the public” — a probe that could result in the revocation of MSGE’s liquor licenses. In January, New York Attorney General Letitia James requested information about the ban, warning that it might violate local, state and federal human rights laws. And in March, state lawmakers threatened to revoke Madison Square Garden’s property tax exemption which is valued at roughly $43 million a year.
Through it all, MSGE and Dolan have remained defiant. In a January television interview in which he threatened to stop serving alcohol at Madison Square Garden, Dolan defended his company’s actions: “If you’re suing us, we’re just asking you please don’t come until you’re done with your argument with us, and yes we’re using facial recognition to enforce that.”
Monday’s new petition is Dolan’s latest legal effort to fight back against the SLA investigation. He previously sued to challenge the validity of the investigation itself, but the case was tossed out in April after a judge ruled that MSGE could not bring such a case until the SLA had actually issued a decision. MSGE is currently appealing that ruling to a state appeals court.
Read the entire petition from MSGE here:
Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan remains defiant in the face of an existential crisis at 4 Pennsylvania Plaza, where a lawsuit filed by two dozen ticket scalpers has mushroomed into a multi-pronged fight with some of New York state’s most powerful political forces — ostensibly at the worst time possible for the World’s Most Famous Arena.
Dolan is currently facing the revocation of Madison Square Garden’s alcohol license from the State Liquor Authority (SLA), a push by New York state Senate Democrats to revoke a $42 million tax break granted to the Garden four decades ago and an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
It all stems from a lawsuit filed against MSG in October, after more than two dozen longtime season ticket holders identified by Madison Square Garden as scalpers were told that their Knicks tickets were not being renewed for the 2023/2024 season. The brokers sued, arguing that team officials were booting them out of their seats just as the Knicks were finally getting good (the team is expected to make the NBA playoff this season).
Dolan responded to the lawsuit by barring the broker’s attorney, Larry Hutcher, and all lawyers from his firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, from entering venues owned and operated by MSG. Soon, the policy was expanded to all law firms suing MSG, leading to a lawsuit from Hutcher and outrage from city and state officials.
The policy affects about 90 law firms and is being enforced using facial recognition software at all MSG properties, including Radio City Music Hall, where a mother chaperoning a Girl Scout troupe to see the annual Christmas Spectacular was pulled aside by security and forced to leave the venue after being identified as an attorney working at a firm with pending litigation against MSG. In that instance, the attorney was forced to wait outside while her daughter and friends attended the show.
The lawyer ban is unfolding just months ahead of a key hearing in July when MSG officials plan to ask city lawmakers to renew a special permit required for all 2,500-plus capacity venues to operate in the city — an ask complicated by a current disagreement over whether to relocate MSG’s namesake venue.
Madison Square Garden sits atop Penn Station, a long-in-decline rail station used by passengers coming in from Long Island and New Jersey. MSG bought the original Penn Station in 1960, demolished the above-ground structure and relocated the station below street level. Today, more than 600,000 passengers use the station each day. That’s led to calls from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and state officials, including multiple past governors, to move Madison Square Garden and fix Penn Station. As a result, city and state leaders are facing increasing pressure to deny MSG’s request for a permanent permit — and Dolan’s ongoing antics aren’t helping.
In the state Senate, Democrats led by Sen. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan) have put Madison Square Garden’s $42 million property tax break on the chopping block over the facial recognition brouhaha. Hoylman wants any revenue created by stripping away the tax break sent to the MTA, an overtly symbolic gesture referencing the MTA’s battle with MSG over the future of Penn Station.
In response, MSG released a statement that read, “It’s interesting that Senator Hoylman is rallying to end governmental subsidies for corporations when just last year he voted in favor of legislation that extends a $420M governmental subsidy for the film industry and currently sponsors legislation to create new subsidies for the musical and theatrical production industry. Madison Square Garden is a significant job creator and an economic leader within both our community and the city. Our tax abatement is no different than the government subsidies that every single stadium and arena in New York City and state receive and in fact, is hundreds of millions of dollars less than most other venues.”
Next came a letter from an SLA investigator notifying MSG that it was considering revoking the liquor license of all MSG-owned and operated venues for violating a city rule that licensed establishments be “open to the public.”
“As a condition of your license your premises must remain open to the public, i.e., groups or individuals cannot be excluded on the basis of criteria that are not directly related to your duties under your SLA license, and that you must exercise a high degree of care and supervision to prevent any violations of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law and the Rules and Regulations of the State Liquor Authority,” said the SLA in the letter.
Days later, the SLA demanded Dolan stand before the liquor authority and explain why MSG’s license should not be stripped away.
Dolan responded with a press release calling the SLA a “gangster-like governmental organization has finally run up against an entity that won’t cower in the face of their outrageous abuses.”
Dolan’s attorney, Randy Maestro, proceeded to file a Rule 78 petition against SLA — a measure used in New York State court to challenge a ruling or determination by a state agency. In a 47-page filing in New York Supreme Court, Dolan accused the SLA of a long history of corruption and even attacked one the SLA’s investigators, accusing him of racial bias and corruption while serving in the NYPD for 19 years.
The lawyer ban, Maestro wrote, is meant to stop lawyers seeking to “improperly leverage their access to MSG’s venues to craft and develop discovery strategy by engaging in improper communication with MSG employees during pending litigation.” He also argued that the policy “temporarily limits the admission of less than 0.8% percent of New York lawyers, less than 0.03% of the five million visitors to MSG’s venues every year, and less than 0.01% of all New Yorkers.”
A hearing on the SLA article 78 motion is preliminarily scheduled for March, while a decision on the tax break is due April 1 in Albany.
Irving Azoff teed off on scalpers, Stubhub and the federal government in a no-holds-barred panel Wednesday during the Pollstar Live conference at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. Azoff, along with artist Garth Brooks, MSG Entertainment chairman James Dolan and former top Department of Justice antitrust official Makan Delrahim, took the federal government to task for the way it handled last month’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ticketing. Despite evidence that the problems linked to the ticket sale were the result of a massive bot attack, most senators at the hearing blamed Ticketmaster for service disruptions and tried to link customer dissatisfaction with the ticket sale to antitrust allegations that the company is operating as a monopoly.
Delrahim, who investigated Live Nation and Ticketmaster on behalf of the Department of Justice in 2019, told his fellow panelists that Congress was convoluting two separate issues and “were well intentioned, but didn’t understand the issues” facing the primary ticketing business. Azoff was more aggressive in his comments. He said most problems in ticketing were “likely perpetrated by scalpers” who “steal massive amounts of tickets” and pay lobbyists to “to demonize Ticketmaster, and actually make laws to support and protect scalpers instead of artists or fans.”
The panel was a call for unity within the music business after the senate hearing left many in live entertainment feeling rattled, including many of Live Nation’s own competitors.
The touring community has stayed silent through most of the sector’s controversies in the post-pandemic period – including consumer frustration over high prices for Adele, Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 tickets – leaving Ticketmaster to take most of the incoming barrage. And the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed — to many people’s surprise — how angry and often misinformed politicians are with Ticketmaster, and by extension, the concert industry writ large.
The panel was held during an annual conference sponsored by Pollstar, a long-running trade publication now owned by Azoff, Tim Leiweke and the Oak View Group. Wednesday’s panel was the concert businesses’ first attempt to create a unified voice between buildings, artists, promoters and ticketing companies and to launch a new offensive targeting scalpers who, as Brooks pointed out, are becoming increasingly effective at using bots to “slow the system down so people get frustrated and immediately head to the secondary markets.” Dolan noted scalpers have made it very difficult to get tickets into the hands of people “who don’t have seven figure incomes.”
No artist “wants their fans to have to pay for a ticket that is exponentially higher than face value,” Azoff said. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Washington isn’t focused on the real issue — screwing artists and their fans. Our government has a long history of screwing artists.” Add in the explosion of fraudulent and misleading ticketing sites and the scourge of speculative ticket listings, and it’s easy to see why Azoff, Dolan and the other panelists are alarmed about the growth of the secondary ticketing business.
They’re not wrong, but the situation may also not be as dire as Azoff and his compatriots want to make it seem. Unlike sports ticketing where nearly all non-season-ticket sales are handled by a small cadre of elite brokers, the concert business has been highly effective at delegitimizing the secondary ticketing industry and preventing sites like StubHub from gaining direct access to ticketing inventory. Brokers have further been stymied by initiatives like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan and SafeTix, which have proven effective at reducing the number of tickets sold on the primary market. In fact, the primary ticketing business’ success at stopping the secondary industry less than a decade ago is why most scalpers are now resorting to such extreme measures to procure tickets.
This is mostly good news for Azoff. His worst fears about the growth of the secondary ticketing market have not materialized, and today the industry has been marginalized and to the point that some actors have resorted to illegal acts to procure tickets.
As Delrahim explained, there are already existing laws on the books and “all sorts of limits” the government can place on scalpers. Existing securities law regulating the short selling of stocks could be applied to speculative ticket listings, noting that prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have “already brought a number of prosecutions” for what he calls “naked short selling.” There are also Federal Trade Commission laws banning “deceptive and unfair practices” that could be better enforced.
“The FTC should open an investigation against speculative ticket sellers who go online and try to sell tickets way before they have been sold – that’s a clear violation of the artist rights,” he added.
Compelling the government to enforce its own laws is difficult, though, and Live Nation and Ticketmaster are not equipped to slow down the bad behavior of the secondary ticketing industry on its own. Instead, Azoff made a rare plea to the audience of touring business professionals for help.
“If you agree with us,” he said, “you all have work to do because there’s a lot of weird bills being proposed out there and the people in this room have a chance to go out and let fans be heard. Ultimately, this is going to be decided at the local and municipal level and that’s where all of us need to bring the fight.”
It’s a banner day for New York attorney Kurt Dominic Robertson, who is no longer persona non grata at the world’s most famous arena.
The same goes for the attorneys at Los Angeles law firm Wilshire Law Group, New York lawyer Laura Rosenberg and non-lawyer Ryan Kenneth Randall, a Las Vegas resident representing himself in a lawsuit filed against Tao Group, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the “guy who punched me at 10:30 pm on a Saturday Memorial Day Weekend the police took into custody.”
Robertson and those others are all involved in litigation against Madison Square Garden-owned Tao Group and were barred from entering the Manhattan arena or any other MSG property under a controversial policy enacted by chairman James Dolan last year. But that all changed today when the company announced it was selling Tao Group and lifting “the adverse attorney policy for any litigation currently pending with Tao entities.” MSG paid $181 million for a 62.5% interest in the hospitality group in 2017.
“This is great news,” says attorney Kurt Robertson, who was banned from MSG properties for representing a client in a personal injury lawsuit filed against a Tao venue in Manhattan.
“When I first got the letter about the ban, I thought it was a prank,” Robertson continues. After calling MSG’s lawyers and learning that the ban was being enforced via facial recognition software, he says, “I decided I wasn’t going to test the policy” and allow himself to be made an example of by MSG security staff.
Robertson and other attorneys suing Tao are no longer barred from entering any MSG-owned property, including the Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater, the Chicago Theatre and the soon-to-open Sphere in Las Vegas.
Attorneys suing other MSGE entities, along with all employees at their law firms, are still banned from entering all MSGE-owned facilities and risk being escorted off the premises by MSG staff if they are recognized by MSG’s facial recognition software.
The controversial rule, affecting an estimated 90 law firms, is currently being challenged by a number of private law firms along with Attorney General Letitia James, who voiced concern in a Jan. 24 letter that any attempts by MSG “to dissuade individuals from filing discrimination complaints or encouraging those in active litigation to drop their lawsuits so they may access popular entertainment events at the Company’s venues may violate state and city laws prohibiting retaliation.”
James also warned that “research suggests that the Company’s use of facial recognition software may be plagued with biases and false positives against people of color and women.”
MSGE stock was up about 2% in after-market trading on the news.
Madison Square Garden Entertainment chief executive James Dolan defended the use of facial recognition technology to bar entry to his company’s namesake venue to a handful of individuals on Thursday. In a televised interview on FOX 5 New York, Dolan also said he’s considering shutting down alcohol sales for a night at the Garden in response to lawmakers’ calls for the venue’s liquor license.
“Instead (of serving alcohol), where we serve liquor, we are going to put one of these up, which says, ‘If you would like to drink again, please call Sharif Kabir, chief executive officer’ … and tell him to stick to his knitting,” Dolan said, holding up a poster with the picture of the head of New York’s state liquor authority.
In defense of the Garden’s policy barring entry to a group of lawyers who work for a firm currently engaged in legal matters against Dolan’s company, he said, “If you’re suing us, we’re just asking you please don’t come until you’re done with your argument with us, and yes we’re using facial recognition to enforce that.”
MSG has been under scrutiny for blocking entry to the lawyers, and in recent weeks, some New York legislators have called for an investigation into whether the policy is in violation of its liquor license. On Wednesday, the New York State Attorney General Letitia James requested the company disclose how they are using the technology, citing media reports that about 90 law firms and thousands of lawyers are affected by the policy.
Lawmakers including New York State Senator Liz Kruger expressed concerns that MSG appears to be using the technology in “discriminatory and retaliatory” ways, and New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal introduced a bill this week that would ammend an existing state law to add “sporting events” to the list of public entertainment places that cannot bar entry to people with valid tickets.
Dolan was steadfast in his defense of the ban and the use of facial recognition technology at his venues, which also include Radio City Music Hall and The Sphere, currently under construction in Las Vegas.
Dolan called the proposed bill illegal, and when asked if his company would back down in enforcing these policies, he said, “Not at all.”
“The Garden has to defend itself,” he said.
In a letter sent yesterday, NY AG James urged MSG Entertainment to reverse the policy.
“MSG Entertainment cannot fight their legal battles in their own arenas,” James said in a statement included in a press release from her office on the matter. “Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall are world-renowned venues and should treat all patrons who purchased tickets with fairness and respect. Anyone with a ticket to an event should not be concerned that they may be wrongfully denied entry based on their appearance.”
While use of facial recognition technology is legal in the state of New York, and MSG discloses it uses the technology on notices posted outside its venues, individuals suing MSGE argue the venues’ use goes beyond what is legally allowed. The New York AG’s office requested a response justifying the policy and detailing attempts to abide by the laws outlawing discrimination and retaliation by Feb. 13.
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For more than a decade, James Dolan has been one of the most loathed men in New York City for the manner in which he’s run the New York Knicks amongst other things. But his most recent douche move, allegedly, puts him in a whole new villainous light.
The New York Post is reporting that Long Island attorney Alexis Majano was booted from a Knicks game after James Dolan’s team used facial recognition technology to identify him in the crowd in Madison Square Garden. The news comes days after it was revealed that Dolan used the same technology to kick another lawyer, Kelly Conlon, from a Rockettes Radio City Christmas Spectacular just last month.
Majano is part of law firm that has a pending lawsuit against Madison Square Garden Entertainment and apparently James Dolan was well aware of that fact. Because of Majano’s association with the firm, he was denied a fun night at MSG on Nov. 5 when the Knicks took on the Boston Celtics.
“A gentleman in a suit stopped me and said, “Are you Alexis Majano? The manager wants to speak with you,” he said. “I noticed security had blocked off the exit.”
One of the workers, who was decked out with a body cam, informed him that the conversation “was being recorded” — then began to grill him, he said.
Majano said the employee asked if he works for the law firm Sahn Ward Braff Koblenz — which recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a fan who fell from a Skybox at Madison Square Garden during a Billy Joel concert.
James Dolan lowkey acting real Trumpish as Majano revealed that the worker had a list of lawyers who were banned from Dolan’s playground, and it was more than a handful.
“He handed me a list of 20 to 30 pages of random names and firms. He asked me … ’Do you work for Sahn Ward? Are you an attorney?’ I said yes,” Majano said.
“They explained very briefly: Any firms with litigation against MSG are banned,” he continued. “I was shocked.”
When Majano asked the worker how the venue had identified him, “He said, ‘We caught you on facial recognition.’”
Majano was then forced to leave the premises.
Dolan is using next level technology to punish anyone he feels is wronging him, basically. Because of these unusual business tactics, both Majano and Kelly Conlon are considering legal action against James Dolan and even with that looming threat, MSG Entertainment told the NY Post that the policy still stands.
What do y’all think of the situation? Is James Dolan being OD petty with his businesses or does he have the right to punish anyone he wants using facial recognition technology? Let us know in the comments section below.