For decades, New Hampshire businessman and Republican activist Jay Lucas cultivated an image as New Hampshire’s eternal optimist. A wunderkind from Newport who rose to Harvard and success on Wall Street, he returned home to champion small-town revitalization through his “Sunshine Initiative,” preaching that a positive outlook could turn around struggling communities.
As recently as 2020, Lucas was being mentioned as a potential U.S. Senate candidate.
On Thursday, the sunshine story turned dark.
Lucas, 71, was arrested, charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with running a $50 million Ponzi-like scheme through his private equity firm, Lucas Brand Equity.
“As alleged, Jay Lucas promised investors he would use their hard-earned money to grow wellness businesses, with everyone sharing in the profits,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. “Instead, Lucas allegedly lied, frittered away investor money on personal vanity projects, and betrayed his obligations to his investors. With the assistance of our dedicated law enforcement partners, our office will continue to aggressively prosecute fraud in our public and private markets.”
The charges—including securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering—mark a stunning downfall for a man who once aspired to the corner office in Concord.
A political prodigy, Lucas was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1974 at just 19, while still studying at Yale. He served two terms in the state House while continuing his education and later at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. In 1976, he also served as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention.
He returned to New Hampshire politics in 1998, spending nearly $1 million of his own money to win a bruising Republican primary for governor. He ultimately lost the general election in a landslide to incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Though he never held elected office again, he remained a significant donor and served as the state GOP’s treasurer.
In recent years, Lucas rebranded himself as a philanthropic leader. His weekly “Sunshine Report” newsletter landed in thousands of inboxes across the state, offering inspirational quotes and stories of local resilience. His “Sunshine Initiative” focused on revitalizing his hometown of Newport, promising economic development to a region that had struggled with the loss of manufacturing.
According to the federal indictment, while Lucas was publicly promoting community revitalization, he was privately defrauding investors.
“The charges in the indictment arise from an alleged scheme by Lucas to raise more than $50 million from investors by falsely representing that their money would be invested in early-stage health and wellness companies, when in fact it was diverted to cover personal expenses, promote unrelated ventures, and make Ponzi-like payments to earlier investors,” according to the U.S Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors allege that between 2017 and 2025, Lucas solicited roughly $50 million for his private equity funds, promising to invest in early-stage health, wellness, and beauty companies. Instead, authorities say, Lucas operated a classic Ponzi scheme, using capital from new investors to pay returns to earlier ones to maintain an illusion of success.
Two Granite State residents told NHJournal on background that Lucas had solicited them to invest in this project within the last month.
A GOP lawmaker provided NHJournal access to an email received from Lucas within the last two months, making a pitch for “a $500K seed round via convertible note at a $5M cap, with a 20% discount (i.e 4M cap) for the first $150K in. Funds go to inventory, AI v1, and legacy customer reactivation.” (emphasis in original.)
“Please let me know if you’d like to know a bit more,” Lucas added. “Will be first come, first served.”
Crucially, the indictment alleges Lucas diverted millions to fund a lavish personal lifestyle in Portsmouth, pay alimony, and prop up failing personal projects.
One of those projects, according to prosecutors, was what the U.S. Attorney’s Office referred to as a “vanity newspaper project, the Eagle Times in Claremont. Lucas promised to save the struggling local daily, but the venture ended abruptly in June when he shut down the paper after failing to make payroll, leaving staff unpaid and a community without its paper.
The indictment further alleges that significant sums of investor money were funneled into Immunocologie, a luxury skincare business run by Lucas’s wife, covering costs for luxury travel and promotional parties rather than legitimate business development.
“As alleged, Jay Lucas promised investors sunshine but delivered only smoke and mirrors,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “He abused the trust placed in him to fund his own lifestyle and his family’s businesses, leaving investors with significant losses.”
Lucas is expected to be presented in federal court in the District of New Hampshire later today before facing proceedings in New York. If convicted on all charges, he faces decades in federal prison.
