The man who runs an infamous Christmas-time bar crawl used that annual New York City event to line his pockets with money that he told yuletide drinkers was going to charity, authorities said Wednesday.
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 by federal prosecutors.
Pildes sold tickets for the annual event in which inebriated revelers stumble through participating Manhattan bars on a predetermined Saturday in December.
The Santa Claus-clad patrons paid for tickets and were told their money was going to various New York charity efforts. The 2025 beneficiaries allegedly included City Harvest, the City Parks Foundation and the Children's Heart Foundation, according to the SantaCon website.
But in reality, Pildes was pocketing much of the money between November 2019 and this past April, federal prosecutors said.
He took more than half of $2.7 million raised in the past 6 1/2 years for a "slush fund to finance various personal ventures and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars" of proceeds for "among other things, concert tickets, fine dining, 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 lease a luxury Manhattan apartment, the indictment said.
“Pildes allegedly stole Christmas from tens of thousands of victims and deprived local charities of more than one million dollars," FBI Assistant Director James Barnacle Jr. said in a statement.
"The FBI continues to root out scrooges that greedily exploit the goodwill of New Yorkers.”
Pildes could not be immediately reached for comment in an email through the SantaCon website.
The New York tradition has become a popular event among young holiday drinkers — but largely reviled by Big Apple locals who have to dodge the inebriated, Santa-dressed revelers as they stumble through Manhattan streets.
