floods New York City<\/a> with thousands of inebriated young people in red and white Santa costumes every holiday season was true to its name: a con, federal authorities said as they arrested its organizer.<\/p>\nStefan Pildes, 50, of Hewitt, New Jersey, was arrested on Wednesday and awaited an appearance in Manhattan federal court, where an indictment charging him with wire fraud was unsealed.<\/p>\n
Federal authorities said he donated only a small fraction of the $2.7 million he raised through SantaCon charity events from 2019 to 2024. The tradition featured a ticketed bar crawl through city streets each December that has attracted over 25,000 people dressed as holiday-themed characters.<\/p>\n
A message seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Pildes. The defendant was to make an initial appearance before a magistrate judge Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Authorities said he siphoned more than half of the proceeds raised each year to an entity he controlled so that he could finance personal needs, including renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, concert tickets, luxury vacations in Hawaii and Las Vegas, extravagant meals and a luxury vehicle.<\/p>\n
According to an indictment, Pildes spent much of the money on himself even though he claimed he received no compensation from the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo producer received income from this event, this is a charity event,\u201d the indictment alleges he wrote in a March 2023 email to a potential venue.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of donating the millions of dollars he raised, he ran his own con game,\u201d U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a news release.<\/p>\n
Pildes was president and controlled Participatory Safety Inc., the nonprofit entity that organized SantaCon, authorities said.<\/p>\n
The SantaCon Website described the event as a \u201ccharitable, non-political, nonsensical Santa Claus convention,\u201d according to the indictment, which said Pildes solicited bars and restaurants to participate and donate 10% to 25% of their food and beverage sales to his charity organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By LARRY NEUMEISTER NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A popular SantaCon charity fundraiser that floods New York City with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64,21905,79029,79028],"class_list":{"0":"post-198371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-ny","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-nyc-headlines","12":"tag-nyc-news","13":"tag-santacon","14":"tag-santacon-controversy","15":"tag-santacon-fraud"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}