‘SantaCon’ organizer accused of pocketing more then $1 million earmarked to charities
The man who organizes an infamous Christmas bar crawl used the annual event in New York to line his pockets with money that he told Christmas drinkers was going to charity, authorities said Wednesday.
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Stefan Pildes, a 50-year-old resident of Hewitt, New Jersey, was arrested in Manhattan and charged with one count of wire fraud, according to a statement from federal prosecutors.
Pildes sold tickets to the annual event in which inebriated revelers descend on participating Manhattan bars on a predetermined Saturday in December.
Customers dressed as Santa Claus paid for their tickets and were told their money was going to various New York charities. The 2025 beneficiaries would have included City Harvest, the City Parks Foundation and the Children’s Heart Foundation, according to the SantaCon website.
But in reality, Pildes pocketed much of the money between November 2019 and last April, federal prosecutors said.
He took more than half of the $2.7 million raised over the past six and a half years for a “slush fund to fund various personal businesses and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars” in proceeds on “among other things, concert tickets, gourmet meals, luxury vacations and home renovations,” according to a federal indictment.
He spent $365,000 of SantaCon money “to renovate a lakefront property in New Jersey” and used $124,000 of those funds to rent a luxury apartment in Manhattan, the indictment says.
“Pildes allegedly stole Christmas from tens of thousands of victims and deprived local charities of more than $1 million,” FBI Deputy Director James Barnacle Jr. said in a statement.
“The FBI continues to hunt down scrooges who greedily exploit the goodwill of New Yorkers.”
Pildes could not immediately be reached for comment in an email through the SantaCon website.
The New York tradition has become a popular event among young Christmas drinkers – but widely reviled by Big Apple residents who must avoid drunken revelers dressed as Santa Claus as they stumble through the streets of Manhattan.
