Shortly after taking office in 2023, Long Island MAGA Congressman Anthony D’Esposito put on his House office’s official payroll two women who were gutsy hires even by the grimy standards of Nassau County GOP machine politics, the New York Times reports. The first hire, Tessa Lark, is not actually his stepdaughter but the live-in adult child of the 42 year-old Republican former NYPD cop’s 61 year-old on-and-off fiancee, Cynthia Lark, and thus Tessa’s hiring was more of a violation of the spirit than the actual letter of House ethics rules against employing children or stepchildren.

Tessa, then a recent art school grad, collected $21,181.94 in federal taxpayer funds for her part-time position at D’Esposito’s local district office. It’s unclear what, if anything, she actually did to serve his constituents, though aides based in the Long Island office told the Times Tessa worked on graphic design and photography, and helped constituents with immigration issues a few days a week.

The second hire, Devin Faas, was definitely a violation of the letter of House ethics rules as she was (and maybe still is) in a sexual relationship with D’Esposito – which ended her marriage to another man, Derek Ciaschi, and temporarily broke D’Esposito’s engagement with Cynthia Lark. Also unlike Tessa’s “job,” it doesn’t appear that Faas even pretended to show up to work at the district office to collect a total of $7,400 while on the payroll in 2023, even as she remained employed full-time by the Town of Hempstead, the local jurisdiction in which D’Esposito got his start as a councilman.

“Ghost employment, true ghost employment, is probably an eight or nine out of 10 on the scale of public corruption and ethical violations,” said the House’s former top ethics counsel Dan Schwager.