A Congressman Had an Affair. Then He Put His Lover on the Payroll.
Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican, gave part-time jobs to both his lover and his fiancée’s daughter, in possible violation of House ethics rules.
A Congressman Had an Affair. Then He Put His Lover on the Payroll.
Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican, gave part-time jobs to both his lover and his fiancée’s daughter, in possible violation of House ethics rules.
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Representative Anthony D’Esposito is subject to the House code of conduct, which prohibits members from employing spouses or relatives, including stepchildren.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
By Nicholas Fandos
Reporting from the South Shore of Long Island in New York
Sept. 23, 2024
As a proud son of Nassau County’s vaunted Republican machine, Representative Anthony D’Esposito of New York knows well the power of political patronage. Every member of his immediate family has held a town or county job, and as a local official, he routinely helped friends find spots on the government payroll.
Yet even by those standards, Mr. D’Esposito’s hiring decisions since he won a seat in Congress in 2022 have been audacious — and in two cases may have transgressed ethics rules designed to combat nepotism and corruption.
Shortly after taking the oath of office, the first-term congressman hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, eventually bumping her salary to about $3,800 a month, payroll records show.
In April, Mr. D’Esposito added someone even closer to him to his payroll: a woman with whom he was having an affair, according to four people familiar with the relationship. The woman, Devin Faas, collected $2,000 a month for a part-time job in the same district office.
Payments to both women stopped abruptly several months later, in July 2023, records show, around the time that Mr. D’Esposito’s fiancée found out about his relationship with Ms. Faas and briefly broke up with him, according to the four people.
Mr. D’Esposito has not been publicly accused of wrongdoing, but his employment of the two women, which resulted in the payment of about $29,000 in taxpayer funds, could expose him to discipline in the House of Representatives.
The House code of conduct prohibits members of Congress from employing spouses or relatives, including stepchildren. Though Mr. D’Esposito has never married, congressional ethics experts said that employing a woman akin to his stepdaughter, who shared a home with him, could breach the requirement that members of Congress “adhere to the spirit and the letter of the rules.”
A separate provision adopted in the wake of the #MeToo movement explicitly states that lawmakers “may not engage in a sexual relationship with any employee of the House who works under the supervision of the member.”
The experts said the circumstances could also prompt an investigation into whether either position had broken a ban on no-show or low-show jobs, potentially exposing Mr. D’Esposito, a former police detective, to additional scrutiny by the House and law enforcement officials.
“There are lots of shades of gray in ethics stuff. This is something that is obvious,” said Donald Sherman, a former lawyer for the House Ethics Committee who serves as chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
“The House is trying to prevent members from using government funds to enrich their family or close associates,” he added.
Matt Capp, a spokesman for Mr. D’Esposito, did not deny that the congressman had a relationship with Ms. Faas and declined to comment on his employment of either woman.
“We do not comment on personnel matters,” Mr. Capp said. “Congressman D’Esposito remains focused on fighting for real issues that impact Long Islanders, like securing our borders and ending the affordability crisis.”
Asked to speak about the relationship by phone on Monday, Ms. Faas said “no thank you” and hung up.
Knowledge of Mr. D’Esposito’s tangled personal and professional lives passed through Republican circles on Long Island for years, though none of it has ever been reported.
The New York Times confirmed his affair with Ms. Faas with three people who had detailed knowledge of it but requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. A reporter also corroborated this account with Ms. Faas’s ex-husband, Derek W. Ciaschi, who said the extramarital affair ended his marriage.
The Times reviewed text messages from summer 2022 that appear to show Mr. D’Esposito and Ms. Faas exchanging love notes and coordinating meet-ups while Mr. D’Esposito was running for Congress.
“Love you till Monday,” Ms. Faas wrote in one characteristic text, adding a “
.”“So much,” Mr. D’Esposito replied. “SO SO.”
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The district represented by Mr. D’Esposito, center, is one of three on Long Island that are held by Republicans.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Making Government a Family Business
Members of Congress have a long history of making nepotism hires, providing no-show jobs and getting involved in romantic entanglements. But a series of reforms have made the practices increasingly rare.
Mr. D’Esposito, who is facing off against the Democrat Laura Gillen this November, is one of the most politically vulnerable Republicans in the country. Voters in his district, which stretches from the border of Queens east along Long Island’s South Shore, supported President Biden by a 14-point margin in 2020 but swung rightward to elect Mr. D’Esposito in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans have made defending it a top priority. Former President Donald J. Trump even rallied in the district last week.
Mr. D’Esposito, 42, has built his government career with the help of Nassau County’s Republican power brokers, famous for stocking town, village and county offices with friends, supporters and relatives.
His father, a close ally of former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, served as chief of staff to the supervisor of the 790,000-person Town of Hempstead and president of the local Republican club. His mother worked as secretary to the town highway commissioner. His brother serves as a high ranking conservation official, and his sister-in-law works in the town tax receiver’s office.
Mr. D’Esposito, who spent more than a decade in the New York Police Department, took office for the first time in 2016 when party leaders picked him to fill a vacancy on the Hempstead town council. He added a second title with a $100,000 salary when he became an administrative assistant for the Nassau County Board of Elections in 2018.
He used his council office to benefit family, voting in 2017 to amend the town’s labor contract to protect employees, including three relatives, from termination after Ms. Gillen became the first Democrat to be elected supervisor in more than a century. A state judge said Mr. D’Esposito should have recused himself, and not doing so violated the “spirit and intent” of the town ethics code. He faced no punishment.
His willingness to help was not limited to blood relatives. Around 2017, Mr. D’Esposito pushed his connections to secure a position for his longtime fiancée, Cynthia Lark, in one of the town’s villages, East Rockaway, according to an associate of Mr. D’Esposito with direct knowledge of the matter. He also helped Ms. Lark’s son get a job with the East Rockaway sanitation department.
Mr. D’Esposito and Ms. Lark, a divorced mother of three, had been dating since around 2010. Though they never married, associates said Mr. D’Esposito introduced Ms. Lark, 61, as his fiancée, spent vacations and holidays with her and moved into her Tudor-style home in East Rockaway.
Yet beginning around 2021, Mr. D’Esposito also secretly began a relationship with Ms. Faas, 38, a secretary for the Town of Hempstead who ran in local Republican circles. The relationship was serious and protracted enough that it broke up Ms. Faas’s marriage when Mr. Ciaschi discovered it.
Divorce and child custody proceedings played out during the closing months of Mr. D’Esposito’s House campaign, according to court records and Mr. Ciaschi. But he and the other people familiar with the relationship said it continued for nearly another year, into the congressman’s term.
After verifying details of the affair presented by The Times, Mr. Ciaschi declined to comment further.
Reached by phone Monday morning, Ms. Lark described the affair as “a very hurtful time in my life” but said that her relationship with Mr. D’Esposito was “a family matter.” She said she had “no information” to share about his relationship with Ms. Faas.
“It’s no one’s business,” she said.
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Two women tied to Mr. D’Esposito’s personal life were given part-time jobs at his district office in Garden City, N.Y.Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times
A Pair of Questionable Hires
When he took office in January 2023, Mr. D’Esposito largely turned to familiar faces, not seasoned policy hands, to build out his team. Only two, though, appear to have tested the limits of House ethics rules: Ms. Lark’s daughter Tessa Lark and Ms. Faas.
Tessa Lark began as a part-time employee in January, not long after Mr. D’Esposito took the oath of office. She had just graduated from art school, and records show she was registered to vote at the East Rockaway home shared by the congressman. Payroll sheets indicate she was paid $21,181.94 over about six months.
House rules bar members of Congress from employing family members, a prohibition designed to prevent them from exploiting government service to enrich themselves or their families.
Ethics experts interviewed by The Times were split on whether the fact of Tessa Lark’s employment alone had violated House rules.
Mr. Sherman said that he believed her employment ran afoul of Mr. D’Esposito’s sworn oath to uphold the spirit of the House code of conduct. But Dan A. Schwager, the House’s former top ethics counsel, said that Mr. D’Esposito could argue that Tessa Lark was not affected by the rule because he was never married to her mother and only legal stepchildren are included in the enumerated list of prohibited hires.
Lawmakers on the Ethics Committee would have the final word if a case against Mr. D’Esposito was brought.
Several former House employees said Tessa Lark worked on graphic design and photography in her role, and also helped constituents with immigration issues a few days a week. Matthew Paccione, who leads Mr. D’Esposito’s district office, said that characterization was accurate but declined to discuss the circumstances of her hiring.
Tessa Lark declined to be quoted. Cynthia Lark said she was confident her daughter’s hiring would pass muster. “There are no ethical questions regarding her employment,” she said.
The case of Ms. Faas tests several ethics rules related to nepotism, sexual relationships with staff members and no- and low-show jobs. She first appeared on the House payroll just weeks after her divorce from Mr. Ciaschi was finalized in March 2023. She collected $7,400 in total, despite continuing to work full time for the Town of Hempstead.
The people familiar with her relationship with Mr. D’Esposito described it as romantic and said they believed it to be sexual in nature, but The Times could not independently verify that claim. Mr. D’Esposito, through his spokesman Mr. Capp, did not dispute that the relationship was sexual in nature.
Mr. Paccione said Ms. Faas had worked as a “liaison to the office” and helped him track down contact information for local schools and libraries; he would not discuss her hiring. Four former House employees familiar with the office said they never encountered Ms. Faas working for the congressman.
“Ghost employment, true ghost employment, is probably an eight or nine out of 10 on the scale of public corruption and ethical violations,” Mr. Schwager said.
Even the way the affair unraveled underscored the pervasiveness of patronage on Nassau County.
Mr. Ciaschi worked in the same small East Rockaway sanitation department where Mr. D’Esposito had helped place Ms. Lark’s son. In July 2023, the two men pieced together what happened, and Mr. Ciaschi shared what he knew with Ms. Lark.
Congressional records show Ms. Faas was off the payroll within days. Ms. Lark, in turn, briefly broke up with Mr. D’Esposito, but they have since reconciled.