Articles for Geoff Kelly

Dec 16

2025

Transcript: Buffalo Mayor-elect Sean Ryan interview

Buffalo Mayor-elect Sean Ryan sat for an interview on Dec. 12 with Investigative Post’s Jim Heaney and Geoff Kelly before a live audience at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. In the course of the 85-minute interview, Ryan responded to questions about a host of issues: Balancing the city’s finances in the short and long term. Shaking up the culture of the city’s police department. Investing in quality, affordable housing, especially in East Side neighborhoods. Revitalizing downtown through event programming and infrastructure improvements. Improving educational outcomes by lifting kids out of poverty. Taking a lead role in the Kensington and[...]

Posted 4 days ago

Dec 16

2025

Q&A: Buffalo’s incoming Mayor Sean Ryan

Sean Ryan, Buffalo’s mayor-elect, said in an interview Friday evening that he’s inheriting a City Hall that’s been “hollowed out” by poor management, with a “demoralized” workforce. Before a live audience at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Ryan described vacant offices, a lack of communication within and between departments, unspent state grant money, and deferred maintenance of city infrastructure. And, naturally, the incoming mayor talked about the city’s dire financial straits: a structural budget imbalance of at least $50 million, no savings left to cover shortfalls, and escalating costs — especially overtime — exacerbated by stagnant revenues. “We’ve sort of[...]

Posted 4 days ago

Dec 10

2025

Interview: Drew Warshaw, candidate for state comptroller

Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State comptroller. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has been the state’s chief financial officer for 18 years. That’s long enough, according to Drew Warshaw, who hopes to compete the first contested primary election DiNapoli has faced in his long tenure. It’s “one of the most powerful offices in government,” Warshaw said in an interview with Investigative Post this week. And yet “virtually no one has ever heard” of it, many “can barely pronounce” it, and even fewer could name the man who’d held the office since 2007. The office’s power, Warshaw said, derives[...]

Posted 1 week ago

Dec 9

2025

Local police who cooperate with ICE

The Cheektowaga Police Department heads the list of a half-dozen local law enforcement agencies that are cooperating with federal agencies to detain and deport migrants. So far this year, police in the Buffalo suburb have turned over at least 21 people to federal immigration agents after detaining them for low-level offenses like shoplifting. Sheriff offices in Erie and Niagara counties are also working with U.S. Border Patrol and ICE. So are police in Lewiston, North Tonawanda and Amherst, though to a lesser extent. Buffalo police do not appear to collaborate with immigration authorities. Mayor-elect Sean Ryan said it’s not the[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Dec 4

2025

Lack of medical care led to prison deaths

Jason “Poppy” Phillips’ family protest outside Greene Correctional Facility where Phillips died in December 2023. Video by by Angus Mordant for The Marshall Project. Ashley Dolcy heard panic in her husband’s voice. On most evenings, they would talk after she returned home from her job as an assistant principal at a school in the Bronx. Jason “Poppy” Phillips would call on a prison-issued tablet from his cell at Greene Correctional Facility near Albany. On Dec. 14, 2023, he told her that, since lunch, he’d increasingly had trouble breathing and swallowing. Alarmed that Phillips was struggling to breathe while locked[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Nov 26

2025

City to pay $3.3 million to settle Molly’s Pub lawsuits

Defense attorney Joel Daniels and Jeffrey Basil. Photo courtesy of WKBW 7 News. It’s been more than 11 years since Jeffrey Basil, bar manager of the now-defunct Molly’s Pub on Main Street, pushed William Sager down a flight of stairs, then enlisted off-duty Buffalo police officers working security for the bar to try to cover up what he’d done. Sager, 28, suffered a traumatic brain injury and died on July 31, 2014, after two-and-a-half months in a coma. Basil was sentenced to 18 years in prison for manslaughter in 2015. The following year, Robert Eloff, one of the off-duty cops,[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Nov 21

2025

Lawyer puts up $800k to deny party boss a Senate seat

Attorney Peter Reese, a relentless pot-stirrer in Western New York politics for decades, is hell-bent on preventing Erie County Democratic Chair Jeremy Zellner from becoming a state senator. On Tuesday Reese filed paperwork with the state elections board to create an independent expenditure committee dedicated to derailing Zellner’s efforts to succeed Sean Ryan, Buffalo’s mayor-elect, in representing the 61st State Senate District. He’s seeding the committee’s bank account with $800,000 of his own money. “I figured a million would be too gaudy,” Reese told Investigative Post. The committee is called ATAT, short for “Ainsi toujours aux tyrans,” Reese said. That’s[...]

Posted 4 weeks ago

Nov 20

2025

Niagara Falls mayor admits ‘ignoring’ media requests for info

Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino. In his latest update from inside Niagara Falls City Hall, Mayor Robert Restaino once again donned his newspaper publisher’s cap to tell the Niagara Gazette what stories it should be printing and to tell residents his administration is not refusing the local news outlet’s requests for public information but is rather just ignoring them. Restaino, a former city court judge removed from the bench for misconduct, justified this flouting of state Freedom of Information law by citing his frustration with the newspaper’s choice of stories. In a message published on his office’s YouTube channel, Restaino accused[...]

Posted 1 month ago