Brooklyn Cyclones concessions workers have been getting stiffed on some of their paychecks this season, as tips disappeared under new management, according to interviews and records obtained by The City Reporter.
Summer frequently draws long lines of spectators buying hot dogs and beers to the city-owned Coney Island stadium, where customers are automatically prompted to tip after every purchase. Yet employees have not received any tips on some paychecks, according to 15 pay stubs obtained from a half dozen workers between May and August. Many of the workers, youths in their late teens and early 20s, said the missing tips have made it more difficult to cover their living expenses.
“I had to get a second job just to pay for my tuition because I was counting on this job,” said one cashier. “With our pay being so low and not getting tips, it wasn’t going to be enough to get me through my semester.”
Employees began noticing the missing tips after the team’s owner, Diamond Baseball Holdings, took over managing the concessions from a contractor at the start of the 2026 season. In previous years, workers could earn as much as $200 or more on a busy night. The stadium does not accept cash, so all tips are made via credit or debit cards. Some workers have put out tip jars in a mostly futile attempt to make up some of the difference, they said.
Failing to pay employees their tips violates state labor laws. Credit card tips must be paid out by the end of the same pay period. Employers who illegally retain tips can be prosecuted for wage theft and charged with grand larceny under the state’s penal code. Workers agreed to speak with the City Reporter on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
“The law, especially in New York, makes it very clear that tips are the property of employees,” said Mel Gonzalez, director of the Employment Law Project at the New York Legal Assistance Fund. “If I give someone some money and somebody else comes and takes it, that’s just stealing.”
In an interview, Elbert Sanders, the Cyclones’ food and beverage director, said that he learned of the issue after workers showed him that their pay stubs did not include tips. He gave conflicting information about when he learned about the withheld tips, and suggested that a recently-terminated manager was responsible.
That manager was fired for allegedly adding tips to other people’s paychecks as well as their own, emails obtained by The City Reporter show.
“I can’t tell you my level of disappointment that you would have a person leading people who wasn’t paying attention to the tips being paid out,” Sanders told The City Reporter. “It’s inexcusable.”
Sanders said he reported the problem to the Cyclones’ owner and fixed the issue himself. “I made sure each one of those people got tipped out for the time that they were there,” he said.
Still, pay stubs reviewed following the termination of the manager show that as recently as August 7, some employees have not received tips. In interviews, workers said they’ve heard nothing about back pay for lost gratuities from earlier in the season. Others received tips inconsistently — on some pay checks their wages included tips while others did not, records show.
“Even if we’re getting our tips now, what about all of the other weeks?” one employee said, as she reviewed a pay stub on a recent afternoon in Coney Island.
The Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league team affiliated with the New York Mets, was purchased in 2024 by Diamond Baseball Holdings as part of an acquisition spree that saw the conglomerate snap up almost 50 minor league teams nationwide. The team’s home base is at Coney Island’s Maimonides Park. The company manages all aspects of the franchise, including ticketing and concessions.
“We take employee matters very seriously and have taken necessary steps to ensure employees have received their appropriate compensation in the wake of the transition between service providers,” said Lauren Flemming, a vice president of communications for Diamond Baseball Holdings. The company took over the concessions operation from a contractor in 2026.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has prioritized enforcing labor laws after campaigning on affordability issues. Last month, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reported that 70,000 delivery drivers have made an additional $104 million in tips this year after the city began enforcing a law that required delivery companies to present tip options at checkout.
Minor League Spending Spree
Maimonides Park first opened in 2001 as part of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s pledge to bring professional baseball back to Brooklyn. After the park was built with $20 million in public funds, the Mets moved an affiliated minor league team from Massachusetts to Coney Island, renaming it the Cyclones after the famous rollercoaster nearby. The team has won six division titles and produced more than 30 MLB players.
A longtime part of Mets owner and billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen’s New York City empire, the team’s ownership changed hands in late 2024, when private equity firm Diamond Baseball Holdings acquired the Cyclones from Cohen Private Ventures.
Established in 2021, the little-known firm has invested at least $2 billion in acquisitions and upgrades in the last five years, according to the Sports Business Journal. The company has picked up teams across the country including in San Jose, California; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Memphis, Tennessee. Diamond Baseball Holdings is in turn owned by Silver Lake Partners, a firm with a vast portfolio of technology and entertainment investments, including a share of Madison Square Garden and the WWE franchise.
The company’s strategy has included appealing to local governments to support renovations and new stadium constructions. Gov. Kathy Hochul allocated $6 million to Diamond Baseball Holdings in this year’s state budget to help rehabilitate the upstate stadium of another New York team, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies.
The City Reporter reviewed public employment postings of the 49 teams acquired by Diamond Baseball Holdings. In many of its stadiums, the company still contracts with vendors to staff its concession stands, according to job posts. But in at least 15 of its stadiums, the company employs concession workers directly, the postings show. That includes Maimonides Park.
Until last year, the park’s concession stands were operated by global food services company Aramark. Current workers said that while working for Aramark, they each had a unique login that allowed them to track the credit card tips earned during each shift. At the end of each week, employees knew exactly how much they had earned.
Tips make up a significant part of concessions workers’ earnings. Distributed weekly, one employee averaged more than $150 per week in additional tips under Aramark over a five-week period last year, worker bank statements show. The amount of tips the worker received last year was equal to more than 12 hours of hourly pay after taxes, or two to three shifts.
Employees who worked at the stadium both last year and this year said that during a packed weekend game, their tips could sometimes reach hundreds of dollars in one night. A weeknight game may be sparsely attended but promotional nights — like Seinfeld night on August 1 that included a bobblehead giveaway and an Elaine Benes dance competition — can draw capacity crowds to the 7,000-seat stadium.
Before the start of the 2026 season, Diamond Baseball Holdings emailed staff explaining that they would need to be rehired, since it was no longer contracting with Aramark. Returning workers described a cursory hiring process. Upon accepting the job, each worker signed an employment agreement that contained no mention of tips as well as an arbitration agreement, according to documents reviewed by the City Reporter.
By signing the arbitration agreement, employees waived their right to a trial for any disputes over their employment, including their wages, the document shows. Instead, employees must settle any disputes individually and class action suits are prohibited.
Labor advocates have repeatedly criticized these agreements as frequently exploitative of low-wage workers.
“Arbitration is never a worker-friendly forum,” said Carmela Huang, a senior attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. “It’s a way of really keeping workers from accessing their rights once they’ve been established.”
Under Diamond Baseball Holdings, managers told employees, rather than earning tips individually, gratuities would be pooled and distributed between the employees of each concession stand, according to interviews and emails. But cashiers can’t track the amount of tips their stand earns because everyone uses the same login.
Still, for weeks, cashiers earned no tips on their paychecks at all, paystubs show. Under New York labor laws, when tips are paid to employees on a credit card, they must be paid out by the next paycheck.
Even with the shift to pooled tips, the company must be able to clearly account for how they are divided between staff, said Richard Blum, an employment attorney with the Legal Aid Society.
“They should be indicating to people what the total amount of tips was, and then each person should know how much they’re getting,” he said.
As frustration grew among employees, some workers resorted to putting out empty soda cups to earn some extra cash, the City Reporter observed at several games. Occasionally, employees have warned customers not to bother tipping on their credit card, since the money wasn’t going to concessions staff.
But more often, amid the fast pace of the concessions counters, employees didn’t have the opportunity to say anything.
“People just usually tap their card and hit the tip button real fast,” said one worker. “I don’t want to tell them that we’re not getting it after they’ve paid.”
While tips have begun appearing on some paychecks, the payments have been inconsistent, workers said. The City Reporter reviewed pay stubs from throughout the season that did not include any notation for tips at all. Even when tips began appearing on some employees’ pay stubs, on some occasions they totaled as little as $30 after several shifts.
Manager Fired
In early July, Diamond Baseball Holdings accused a manager of misappropriating employee tips and terminated her, according to emails obtained by the City Reporter.
“We conducted a thorough investigation and found evidence that you distributed tips to employees who were not clocked in during the relevant shifts and added tips to your own paychecks,” wrote Tara Tillman, a human resources director at Diamond Baseball Holdings. The July 6 email continued that “this constitutes theft and a serious breach of fiduciary responsibility incompatible with continued employment.”
The employee disputed the outcome of the investigation in a follow-up email, offering documentation to support her account. Tillman did not respond to additional questions from the manager about her termination, according to the emails.
Diamond Baseball Holdings did not respond to detailed questions from the City Reporter about whether the company conducted any wider investigation into how the tips are distributed among stadium workers. It said it did not comment on individual personnel matters when asked about the termination of the manager.
After the manager was fired, employees continued to question whether their tips were correct. On July 17, a cashier wrote to Sanders, the Cyclones’ director of food and beverage, to inquire about how the tips were distributed, emails show. She discovered her tips were significantly lower than one of her friends working at the same stand, according to pay stubs and interviews.
The director responded that the tips were pooled daily among the workers at each concession stand and did not include managers. He encouraged the employee to offer better service.
“The stands with the least amount of drama and conflict tend to have higher tip pools,” he wrote.
In an interview with the City Reporter, Sanders reiterated that all tips have been paid out. “I know that I did what was right,” he said. “Once I got there, I made sure that that was no longer an issue.”
Still, not all employees are receiving tips as part of their wages. Two workers shared copies of their most recent pay stubs with the City Reporter, dated August 7. Although both employees had worked multiple shifts during that pay period, neither received any tips, records show.
“If workers have not been getting their tips, that’s clearly illegal under the New York Labor Law,” said Louis Pechman, a labor attorney who teaches a course on wage theft at Fordham Law School.
Even though tips have been included on some employees’ pay checks, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is in compliance with the law, Pechman said. “The obvious concern is whether the workers receive back pay for tips that were misappropriated by management,” he said.
In a second interview, on Wednesday evening, Sanders insisted that all eligible employees had received their tips.
The Cyclones’ season ends on September 6, with a home game at Maimonides Park. Concessions employees said they were already applying to better paying stadium gigs. The base pay for a cashier working at the U.S. Open is about $23 per hour.
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The post Brooklyn Cyclones Withheld Tips From Concessions Workers, Records Show appeared first on The City Reporter.
