He was also the head of a family with an “empire” of media and sports properties that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is a part of AMC.

In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for nearly $18bn (£14.3bn).

By then Dolan’s son James was running what the New York Times called the family’s empire.

And the Dolans had become “the family that New Yorkers often loved to hate”, according to the New York Times, over frustration over the Knicks’ performance and fights with networks over their programming that had threatened to keep customers from watching the Academy Awards and the World Series.