John Angelo Spano Jr. (born May 31, 1964) is an American businessman and admitted fraudster. He is best known for briefly buying control of the New York Islanders franchise of the National Hockey League (NHL) in 1996, before it emerged that he did not have nearly enough assets to buy the team. He subsequently pleaded guilty to bank and wire fraud and served a federal prison sentence. Spano was convicted of 16 counts of forgery in Ohio in 2015 and is currently incarcerated in Grafton Correctional Institution with a scheduled release date of November 2024. Early life Spano was originally from Greenwich Village (Manhattan, in New York City), but spent most of his life in Madison, Ohio, and graduated from Ashtabula St. John High School. While at St. John he was a classmate and a high school football teammate of Urban Meyer. He graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in business administration in 1986. After working several sales jobs in Pittsburgh and Dallas, he founded the Bison Group in 1990, a Dallas-based company that primarily leased aircraft. Interest in Dallas Stars In September 1995, he reached a tentative agreement to buy a 50 percent interest in the Dallas Stars, but the date for the closing was pushed back several times, during which Spano began making what owner Norman Green called unreasonable demands. Green backed out of the deal in November, eventually selling the team to Tom Hicks. Years later, Jim Lites, the Stars' president at the time, recalled visiting Spano's mansion in the Dallas suburb of University Park. Despite Spano's claimed wealth, Lites said the house was unfurnished. Among the "laughable" excuses Spano offered were that he needed a copy of a written agreement with the team's top minor league affiliate, the Kalamazoo Wings and to have his South African partners meet with Stars officials. Lites also said that Spano insisted that Lites pick up the tab for their dinners—something Lites said he had never seen in all of his years as a sports executive. Spano also made a bid for the Florida Panthers that year after his Stars bid failed, which he abandoned after then-Panthers owner Wayne Huizenga opted not to sell. Despite his failures to purchase both teams, Spano began to attract the attention of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who stated in an April 1997 interview that Spano was "the type of person we want as an