James Dolan is on a winning streak. Last month, his Knicks won their first championship in 50 years. And last week, with much less fanfare, he closed out a three-year fight against the state’s liquor regulators by paying $30,000 in fines.
Dolan — the executive chair of the Knicks and CEO of Madison Square Garden — has been at odds with the New York State Liquor Authority since 2022, amid reports MSG was using facial recognition technology to track and remove perceived enemies from the premises.
At the time, the liquor authority charged that Dolan was violating state rules that require liquor license holders to allow public access to their venues by barring attorneys at firms that were litigating against the Garden. Dolan sued in response, calling the liquor authority a “gangster-like governmental organization” and a “cesspool of corruption,” Gothamist reported at the time. He also went on television and held up a flyer featuring the phone number and email address of Sharif Kabir, who ran the agency at the time.
Ultimately, he lost the suit and the liquor authority was allowed to continue pursuing its charges.
However, those charges were dropped last week as part of an agreement with Madison Square Garden, as well as Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theatre, which are both operated by MSG Entertainment. Instead, each venue will pay $10,000, the maximum allowed penalty, for an “unauthorized corporate-change charge,” according to liquor authority spokesperson Jade Kraft. The New York Times reported the deal first.
The withdrawal of the access charges “should not be read as an endorsement of any exclusion policy, facial-recognition practice, or admission practice” and doesn’t prevent the agency from reviewing future complaints, Kraft said in a statement.
Kraft added that the agency is separately reviewing whether its rules should “address licensed-premises access practices.”
A Garden spokesperson said only that the penalties pertained to an administrative error and had nothing to do with the Garden’s “biometric practices.”
John Kaehny with the good-government group Reinvent Albany, criticized the resolution. The liquor authority, he said, “was in a strong position legally, or appeared to be, and they essentially capitulated.”
The Garden’s surveillance techniques, however, are hardly a settled matter. Just days ago, Madison Square Garden sued Wired over its reporting on a leaked internal database the publication said cataloged nearly 40,000 entries on prominent figures in sports, politics and entertainment. MSG says the database is a customer relations tool and not related to surveillance. Wired has said it stands by its reporting.
