Brown brings long-time aide Steve Casey to OTB

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Steven M. Casey — Byron Brown’s former deputy mayor and top political advisor — is following his old boss to a job at Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corp.

A source close to OTB leadership confirmed Casey, 58, is now working for the publicly owned gambling corporation and is on-site at Batavia Downs. A current OTB employee also confirmed Casey’s hiring.

Casey — whose company pleaded guilty three years ago to a federal wire fraud charge — recently received from the state gaming commission a license required to take a job at OTB. 

Brown resigned on Oct. 15, with a little more than a year left in his fifth term as mayor of Buffalo, to take a $295,000-a-year job as OTB’s president and CEO. He shares the job until the end of the year with Henry Wojtaszek, who accepted a buyout. 

Brown said when he announced his resignation that he’d be taking several people with him to the new position but did not offer any names.

Casey managed Brown’s first two mayoral campaigns and served as deputy mayor for Brown’s first two terms and half a year into the third. Before following him to City Hall, Casey was a member of Brown’s state Senate staff. The two also worked together in the mid 1990s for then Erie County Executive Dennis Gorski.

Casey left the Brown administration in July 2014 to lead an ultimately fruitless effort to redevelop the former Seneca Mall property. 

A receptionist at OTB, asked Friday to connect a call to Casey, confirmed that he works there, calling him the “manager to the CEO.” The receptionist said Casey didn’t yet have a phone extension, as he’d just started the job this week.

The license Casey received is a general services harness racing license which allows him to work at Batavia Downs through Aug. 24, 2025. He will need a separate license to work in management. A source said he has applied for that license. 

Casey, reached on his cell phone Friday and asked if he’d taken a job at OTB, replied, “Okay,” then said the call was breaking up. 

“Let me try you back,” he said and the line went dead.

He did not call back, nor did he answer subsequent inquiries by phone, text, and email.

Casey during his tenure as deputy mayor had a reputation as a hard-charging manager who routinely dressed down commissioners and department heads during performance reviews. 

As a political operative, he worked closely with former Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Steve Pigeon, who also served on Brown’s state Senate staff. In 2009, Casey and Pigeon — working with Chris Grant, at the time chief of staff to then Erie County Executive Collins — split the Democratic majority on the Erie County Legislature by recruiting Democrats Tim Kennedy and Barbra Miller-Williams to caucus with Republicans.

Casey was named, along with the mayor, in a Cleveland developer’s 2011 federal civil suit accusing Brown’s administration of torpedoing a project after the developer refused to hire an East Side pastor’s organization. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2017. An appeals court the next year upheld the dismissal, but noted the developer had presented “substantial evidence” the Brown administration had “prioritized cronyism over civic responsibility” in scuttling the project.

Federal investigators in 2015 raided Casey’s East Aurora home, as well as the residences of Grant and Pigeon. In the years that followed, it was widely reported that Casey was cooperating with investigators in probes related to City Hall and Pigeon.

LSA Strategies, one of Casey’s now inactive consulting firms, in 2021 pled guilty in federal court to wire fraud — a felony. Prosecutors said Casey’s company conspired with a direct mail firm to overbill the 2012 campaign of state Senate candidate Chuck Swanick, with Casey keeping the difference between actual charges and inflated invoices presented to Swanick’s campaign.

The company, solely owned by Casey according to the plea agreement, had to pay $8,283.59 in restitution to Swanick, $400 in court costs and a $69 fine. 

After the Brown administration, Casey also worked for Big Dog Strategies, a political consulting firm run by Grant.

Casey has just shy of 24 years in the state pension system, according to the state comptroller’s office. The OTB job will add to that tally, increasing his pension when he retires.

Geoff Kelly