On the Sunday before Christmas a youngish teenager stood outside the Stop and Shop in East Hampton, asking for donations for an organization called the Long Island Youth Club. He shifted back and forth in the cold, holding a laminated piece of paper with information. As shoppers entered he held up the placard and asked if they would help, and as they left he wished them a good day.
A girl, around the same young age, stood outside the CVS on Pantigo Road, holding a matching placard and addressing patrons as they entered and exited with the same plea. The “club” did not have a website, they told a reporter, but donations could be made in cash, either directly to them or through mobile payment services like Venmo.
Young members of the group have been canvassing around East Hampton for years, generally around school holidays. It came under scrutiny on Labor Day weekend of 2020, after Springs residents voiced safety concerns for a 13-year-old who’d been going door to door, alone and unsupervised, selling candy. The minor was carrying a cellphone but had not been able to call a supervisor due to the lack of reception in the area, a resident told The Star at the time, and had asked neighbors to use their bathroom and for a cup of water.
Since then, the teens have stood near the entrances of businesses in the village — Stop and Shop, and both CVS locations — selling candy or asking for donations, while online forums of residents across Suffolk County asking questions about them have increased. Some people relate individual experiences with “club members” that left them unsettled.
The group was approved as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization by the Internal Revenue Service in 2016, and has retained that status since. Tax returns identify its director as Jule Huston, the only listed employee, who has had a complicated legal history with similarly structured organizations across the country over the past two decades.
Mr. Huston, now 41, was arrested by Nassau County police in 2010 while working as a supervisor for the similarly structured New York Youth Club, a position he had held for nine years, according to reporting by Newsday at the time. He was charged with 11 counts of endangering the welfare of a child after an officer saw two children, ages 12 and 13, selling candy on a corner in Franklin Square at around 6 p.m. on a February night, in temperatures around 19 degrees Fahrenheit.
He pleaded not guilty, and told Newsday that the police were “harassing” the program, which, he claimed, had helped him personally when he was a teenager, because “they don’t want minority kids in some of these neighborhoods.” He made sure the children he supervised were dressed properly for the weather, he added; kept in touch with them by cellphone, and was “never more than five minutes away.”
The charges were eventually dropped, but legal troubles persisted. In addition to leading the Long Island Youth Club, Mr. Huston was listed on I.R.S. forms as the director of the Virginia Youth Club, the Carolina Youth Club, and the Maryland Youth Club, established in 2014, 2015, and 2016, respectively, all of which list the same primary purpose: “to rescue teens from challenging environments before they become statistics.”
The activity of the Carolina club was suspended in 2018 after Mark Hammond, South Carolina’s Secretary of State, charged it with failing to file a financial report required under the state’s Solicitation of Charitable Funds Act. Without the financial disclosures, he said, the state had “no way of knowing whether the children who are ‘club members’ are benefiting from this organization’s charitable purpose, and neither does the donor.”
His office had received multiple complaints about the organization’s solicitation methods over the previous year, Mr. Hammond added, and had been cited and fined by the state’s Department of Labor for violating child labor laws.
In 2021, Mr. Huston was one of 14 defendants indicted by a grand jury in Georgia for his involvement in the “Georgia Peach Youth Club,” which he had presided over from 2016 to 2018. The indictment outlined familiar practices — supervisors recruiting teens from economically disadvantaged areas, dropping them off in different neighborhoods, and leaving them unsupervised for hours to sell candy and solicit donations — but also alleged that the defendants were members of a gang called the Nine Trey Bloods, and were using the funds raised to finance gang activity.
The charges against Mr. Huston, which included racketeering, human trafficking, money laundering, and charity fraud, carried a maximum penalty of 126 years upon conviction, according to a press release issued by Georgia’s Secretary of State in August 2021. That office has not provided an update on the case since then, and the charges remain allegations.
Both the Virginia and Maryland clubs were voluntarily terminated toward the end of 2022, according to their tax returns. In 2023, the Georgia club’s tax-exempt status was automatically revoked after it failed to file returns for three consecutive years.
The Long Island Youth Club, which remains active and tax-exempt, has been posting updates about the organization’s activity to a Facebook page since 2019. One of the earliest posts was a graphic advertising “fundraising opportunities” for teens 13 to 15 years old. “Free transportation, earn cash every week, free trips, activities and cool prizes,” it read. “Call if interested.”
The same graphic was re-posted in May 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, when public schools across Suffolk County had shut down. This time, it advertised a “part-time job for teens,” described as a “great way to keep busy during this time and earn cash.”
Since then, the page has published a few updates each year, featuring group photos of club members on various trips — to a paintball center, Six Flags, water parks, movie nights, and an annual visit to Manhattan around Christmas — each accompanied by messages thanking supporters for making the events possible. Another post each January announces the winner of a “teenager of the year” award, paired with a photo of the recipient holding a big check for $1,000.
The page offers no breakdown, however, of how the funds raised are distributed. Its official website, linked in the Facebook description, no longer exists; it was last documented on the Internet Archive database in early 2019. The official email address listed no longer exists, either, and multiple attempts to contact the account through Facebook Messenger were unsuccessful, suggesting that the organization has imposed a restriction on the messages it accepts.
In the absence of any criminal conviction or explicit statement, it remains unclear how much of any cash donations made outside CVS or Stop and Shop might go back to the young solicitors, either in their capacities as employees or beneficiaries of the charity. Neither is it known how much goes back to the “supervisors” who have been accused of placing the teens in vulnerable situations, potentially for their own gain.