Here’s an NYC sampler of the new political sugar daddies
A new donor class is rising. In the five years since the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited political donations to Super PACs, some very rich Americans have contributed millions to bolster the candidates they like. But who are these people shaping our politics? Here’s a glimpse into the New York City corner of their private planet: a half a dozen big donors connected to the city, and the candidates they help to float.
Name: John M. Angelo
Age: 74
Occupation: CEO, Angelo, Gordon & Co.
Lives in: New York, N.Y.
Supports: Chris Christie
Donation: $250,000 to America Leads Super PAC
Bio: John M. Angelo is co-founder and CEO of Angelo, Gordon & Co., “a privately-held registered investment advisor dedicated to alternative investing.” He established the company in 1988 with Michael Gordon. Angelo oversees the management, growth, and direction of the firm, while Gordon acts as Chief Investment Officer. Gordon was previously employed as an oil industry expert by L.F. Rothschild, a firm that collapsed in the 1987 stock market crash.
Angelo’s finance career started in 1966 on the New York Stock Exchange’s bond floor. Originally from New York, he received his B.A. degree from St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, where he met his wife, Judy Hart, an Emmy-nominated singer and Broadway show writer. They have three children. Angelo served in the military, and was stationed in South Korea for two years. Since 2007, he has been on the board of Sotheby’s, the auction house. Angelo’s publicly disclosed compensation from Sotheby’s totals $193,734 in 2014, and his total reported holdings were valued at approximately $6 million, according to the Bloomberg terminal.
Angelo, Gordon & Co. has large stakes in the U.S. television industry, and its top holdings are Tribune Media Co., Fairpoint Communications Inc. and DIRECTV. Tribune and Fairpoint filed for “reorganization” bankruptcy in the late 2000s after the global financial crisis.
According to NYS Department of State, Angelo Gordon & Co. LP is registered in New York as a Foreign Limited Partnership, though the jurisdiction is listed as Delaware, which is a renowned corporate tax haven and many businesses register there to avoid regulations.
Patterns of Giving: Angelo donates predominantly to Republicans. Based on FEC-reported donations of $5,000 or more, he has donated $122,700 to the Republican National Committee from 2004-2013. He donated $25,000 to the 2008 McCain presidential campaign, and $30,000 to the 2012 Romney presidential campaign. Angelo has also donated to a few Democrats. He donated $2,000 to Joe Lieberman’s presidential campaign in 2003 and $4,200 in 2005. He has also donated to lesser known Democratic politicians: $4,000 to Richard H. Moore’s 2004 campaign for Treasurer of North Carolina; $1,000 to Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet’s Senate campaign, and $2000 to Montana Democrat Max Baucus’ Senate campaign. At the state level, Angelo’s most significant contribution, according to the NY State Board of Elections, is $20,000 for Republican Jeanine Pirro’s run for Attorney General in 2006. During the campaign, Pirro—who ultimately lost the election to current Governor Andrew Cuomo—was investigated by federal prosecutors regarding whether she and a former New York City police commissioner “illegally taped conversations of Ms. Pirro’s husband last year to determine if he was having an affair.” According to FollowTheMoney.org, Angelo also gave $85,000 to Republican Bill Simon’s 2002 unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in California.
Notable Facts:
- Chris Christie’s wife, Mary Pat Christie, used to be a managing director at Angelo, Gordon & Co. According to Bloomberg, she resigned from this position April 2015.
- In December 2014, the IBTimes reported that in 2011, New Jersey’s pension system terminated its five-year $150 million investment in Angelo, Gordon & Co., but despite the termination, the firm continued receiving money for another three years. The article cites a conflict of interest because Christie’s wife served as managing director at Angelo, Gordon & Co. during this time.
- At a commencement address in 2015 at his alma mater (St. Lawrence University), Angelo said, “In order to be successful you need an accommodating U.S. government and an administration that believes in capitalism.”
Name: Louis M. Bacon
Age: 59
Lives in: Oyster Bay
Occupation: Moore Capital Management, Founder
Net worth: $1.81 billion
Supports: Jeb Bush
Donation: $1 million donation to Right to Rise USA
Bio: Louis M. Bacon was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 25, 1956. He is married with seven children. In September, Forbes reported that Bacon was the 1,118th richest man in the world and the 390th in the U.S. He has a BA/BS from Middlebury College in Vermont and an MBA from Columbia University.
Donation Patterns: Bacon is an environmental philanthropist who supports gun control; a major Republican donor who also donates to Democrats and Independents. Between 2010 and 2015, 70 percent of Bacon’s direct federal political contributions went to Republican candidates: Bacon donated $52,900 to Republicans, $9,800 to Democrats, and $11,000 to Independents. He gave $48,600 to Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 reelection campaign, which has been linked to his $325,000 donation to New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, a pro-charter school organization bankrolled by billionaires to help elect a Republican majority in the New York Senate in the 2014 election. He has also supported the campaigns of U.S. Senator Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) and former U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado), two congressmen who have championed the environment.
Bacon has donated millions of dollars to environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy, Riverkeeper, the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Waterkeeper Alliance, which Bacon helped found in 1999 to serve as an umbrella organization for hundreds of environmental groups worldwide.
Bacon’s donations do favor Republicans. In 2014, Bacon contributed $32,0400 to the Republican National Committee and in 2015 he contributed $19,600 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Bacon gave $500,000 to a SuperPAC supporting Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website, which tracks campaign disclosures. In April 2015, Bacon donated $8,100 to House Speaker John Boehner through his company Moore Capital Management.
Bacon, who lives in Oyster Bay, Long Island, donated $1 million to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Notably, in 2014 Bacon contributed $100,00 to Americans for Responsible Solutions, the nonprofit founded by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelley to prevent gun violence.
Notable Facts: A noted conservationist, Bacon has protected how over 200,000 acres of land in New York, North Carolina, and Colorado through conservation easements donated to the U.S. government. Bacon is also an avid skier. (In 2013, he bought a ski resort in New Mexico.)
Bacon is embroiled in a long-running feud with billionaire Peter Nygård, who lives next door to Bacon’s vacation home in the Bahamas. In 2014, Bacon sued Nygård for illegally expanding his beachfront property. A year later, Bacon filed a $50 million defamation suit against Nygård in federal court, alleging that Nygård orchestrated a worldwide smear campaign against him. The allegations are the stuff of movies: Bacon claims that Nygård’s conspiracy spread lies that Bacon is, to name a few, a member of the KKK, a murderer, a narcotics smuggler, a terrorist, and an arsonist. Nygård’s countersuit alleges that Bacon harassed him by blasting military-grade speakers from his Bahamas home. In March, Bacon filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit against Nygård in New York state court.
Name: S. Donald Sussman
Age: 69
Occupation: Founder of Paloma Partners and New China Capital Management LLC
Home: North Haven, Maine
Supports: Hillary Clinton
Donation: $1,000,000
Bio: Donald Sussman, 69, is one of Hillary Clinton’s top donors with New York connections. A wealthy hedge fund manager and philanthropist who generally avoids the spotlight, Sussman has given more than $10 million to political candidates and grassroots organizations since 1992. He recently gave $1,000,000 to Priorities USA Action, a Super PAC which supports Clinton, according to OpenSecrets.com.
Born in Miami, Sussman earned his MBA from Columbia University. He married Laurie Tisch, daughter of Loews Corporation co-founder Robert Tisch, in 1981. Sussman founded Paloma Partners the same year. Tisch and Sussman divorced in 1992. After spending holidays in Maine for many years, Sussman bought the historic Turner Farm, on North Haven Island, in 2008. He married Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree in 2011.
In September, Sussman and Pingree announced that they would seek a divorce. The announcement came after Pingree missed a financial disclosure deadline, according to the Portland Press Herald, a newspaper formerly owned by Sussman. Now that the couple is separated, Pingree doesn’t have to report her soon-to-be ex-husband’s assets. The hedge fund manager had been the largest donor to Democratic candidates in Maine.
Sussman is chairman of the Board of Trust Asset Management, founder of the hedge fund Paloma Partners and New China Capital Management LLC.
Donation Patterns: Sussman’s munificence has been consistent: He’s given mostly to Democrats or liberal-leaning groups. Sussman supported Bill Clinton in both of his races and he supported Hillary Clinton in 2008. In the soft money days (pre-2002), he gave millions to the Democratic National Committee.
On the local level, nearly all of Sussman’s donations—up until the second quarter of 2014—have been to Democrats. In the past, he donated $25,300 to Democratic Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey and $21,400 to his then-wife Chellie Pingree, a Democratic Congresswoman in Maine.
Before Citizens United v. FEC, which lifted caps on individual campaign donations to PACs, several publications noted that people around Sussman tended to donate to democratic campaigns—sometimes in amounts seemingly beyond their means. Employees who identified themselves as pilots, housekeepers, chefs, and chauffeurs donated large sums of money to Pingree’s campaigns, the Sunlight Foundation reported.
In the 2014 cycle, he’s given $500,000 to Women Vote!, $100,000 to the Senate Majority PAC, and $25,000 to the League of Conservation Voters, according to OpenSecrets.
In addition to political donations, Sussman has focused his philanthropy on environmental and educational causes, especially in Maine. In a 2012 interview he claimed, “I consider politics to be philanthropy because I don’t have an agenda. It’s a very small part of what I do.”
Notable Facts: After the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, Sussman donated the use of his private jet to transport medical supplies to Port-au-Prince. The same jet was also used to rescue a dying man in Haiti by bringing him back to Miami.
The giving didn’t stop in 2010. In the same year, Sussman donated $12 million to Skidmore College, where he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees until 2012. His donation was part of a larger attempt to build co-ed housing. Sussman has also donated $1 million toward the construction of a 10,000-square-foot hospice in Rockport, Maine in 2013.
Name: Kenneth Mario Garschina
Age: 65+ (no data available for exact age)
Occupation: Co-founder and Principal of Mason Capital Management
Net Worth: No personal net worth data is available; however, Mason Capital Management assets under management as of March 2014 were $13.63 billion.
Residency: New York, N.Y. and Center Point, Texas
Supports: Rand Paul
Donation: $500,000 to America’s Liberty PAC, and $10,300 directly to Rand Paul.
Bio: Kenneth Mario Garschina is a 1993 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics. He lives in New York City and is married to interior designer Sara Story, with whom he has three children: Duke, Edward, and Dagny. Garschina is the Co-Founder and Principal of Mason Capital Management, LLC, a privately owned hedge fund. The fund, which he founded in 2000, has a portfolio market value of $5.6 billion, according to its SEC 13F filings as of the first quarter of 2015. Before founding Mason Capital with partner Michael Emil Martino, Garschina worked as director of research and portfolio manager at KS Capital Partners, a New York-based investment firm. He also served as a research analyst at Cursitor-Alliance Capital Management firm. Garschina is politically active, leaning Republican. Since 2013, Garschina has been a Rand Paul supporter, donating $510,300 to PACs such as Reinventing a New Direction and America’s Liberty PAC. He is also an emerging philanthropist. Garschina and Story established the Story Garschina Foundation in 2012, which is a tax exempt private nonprofit organization with $20 million in assets and a reported income of nearly $10 million in the 2012 tax year according to NonprofitLocator.org and the nonprofit documents filed with the IRS. Garschina and Story also donated $2 million to the Cleveland Clinic to endow a Chair in Colorectal Surgery at the Digestive Disease Institute.
Donation Patterns: Garschina spreads his donations to many Republican candidates, while putting his big bucks on the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which raises money to support Republican candidates running for the U.S Senate. In 2011 he gave $20,000 to Our Destiny PAC, which supported Jon Huntsman, a businessman who supported tax cuts, and also same-sex unions, though not same-sex marriage. In 2012, Garschina donated $7,500 to Ted Cruz, according to opensecrets.org.
Notable Facts: Garschina donated to and served on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for the slashing of public defined benefits with proposals that include raising the retirement age and raising the amount that employees need to contribute to their pension. This led to the blacklisting of his hedge fund, Mason Capital, by the American Federation of Teachers, which urged pension funds to stay away from using Mason Capital. Mason Capital also scored a low “F” in the 2015 Hedge Fund Report Card by Institutional Investor Alpha, who asked clients of the hedge fund to rank their performance under eight categories which includes their fund performance, risk management, and transparency.
Mason Capital was one of several hedge funds that cashed in on the controversial Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011. The Act allocated portions of the public pension funds to be managed by hedge funds. The funds under-performed compared to peers despite a $64 million paycheck. Matt Taibbi wrote a story called “Looting the pension funds,” in 2013 for Rolling Stone magazine.
Elle Decor magazine named Sara Story one of the “Top 10,” according to her website. Sara Story also has a flare for unusual sports, including playing on a championship elephant polo team each year in Thailand.
Name: Robert Wood Johnson IV
Age: 68
Occupation: Businessman and Philanthropist
Net Worth: $3.5 billion
Homes: Bedminster, N.J. and New York, N.Y.
Supports: Jeb Bush
Donation Amount: $500,000 to Right to Rise USA
Bio: Known as “Woody,” Johnson is the great-grandson of Robert Wood Johnson I—the co-founder of Johnson & Johnson. The heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, he grew up in New Jersey and graduated from the University of Arizona. Johnson is also the chairman and chief executive of the Johnson Company, Inc., a private investment firm. As for philanthropy, Johnson is active in raising funds to prevent, treat, and cure lupus and juvenile diabetes. His family has been affected by both diseases.
Donation Patterns: Woody has remained loyal to the Republican Party in the past. On a local level, Johnson has made relatively small donations to more than 55 candidates, including $4,000 to Rudolph W. Giuliani’s 1989 mayoral campaign, $10,000 to George Pataki’s 1994 gubernatorial race, and $22,583 to George W. Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial race.
Since 1988, Johnson has made five separate $100,000 donations to various Republican campaign committees and since 1996, he has annually donated $25,000 to join Team 100, an exclusive group of businessmen/donors.
In May 2008, he coordinated a fundraiser that raised $7 million for Senator John McCain’s presidential bid and in 2011, he endorsed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. What’s more, when the 2008 Republican National Committee (RNC) had a $10,000,000 shortfall in funds, Johnson contributed to erase the deficit. He later hosted a fundraiser for the RNC in his home in 2013.
Currently, Woody Johnson is the National Finance Chairman for Jeb Bush’s 2016 Presidential campaign and has donated $500,000 for his benefit to the Right to Rise USA Super PAC. Johnson supported Chris Christie when he ran for governor but opted for Bush for the presidential election.
Notable Facts: Johnson owns the New York Jets football team, which he purchased in 2000 for $635 million. In 2006, Johnson was one of several billionaires accused of partaking in a tax shelter scheme that cost the U.S. Treasury $300 million. The matter was settled after Johnson agree to pay the tax plus interest.
Name: Robert “Bob” Mercer
Age: 69
Profession: CEO of Renaissance Technologies
Supports: Ted Cruz
Donation Amount: $11,000,000
Bio: Robert Mercer is originally from New Mexico. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois.
He began his career as a coder at IBM before moving to Renaissance Technologies, the eighth-largest hedge fund in the world, renowned for its use of quantitative computer algorithms to work the stock market. In April 2015, the Times reported that Renaissance was under IRS investigation for an alleged $6 billion tax fraud. As CEO of the company, Mercer is responsible for managing its $25 billion in assets. He personally made $340 million between 2011 and 2013. He and his wife, Diana, have three daughters. They live in East Setauket, New York.
Donation Patterns: The New York Times reports that Mercer is “the main donor behind a network of four Super PACs supporting Mr. [Ted] Cruz that reported raising $31 million just a few weeks into his campaign.” He has donated over $6 million to 30 other Republican political causes, including the Media Research Centre, a body devoted to exposing “liberal bias” in the press, and a scientific research institute dedicated to investigating alternative narratives on climate change. He gave $2.5 million to the Koch brothers’ lobby group, the Freedom Partners Action Fund, this year, making him their largest donor. Mercer has donated to other Republicans in the past, including Carly Fiorina as wekk as Tom McClintock,and Christopher Lawrence Hackett, Congressmen from, respectively, California and Pennsylvania. He has also given to several other Super PACS, including the Ending Spending Action Fund, which aims to eliminate excessive government spending; the Restore Our Future Fund, tied to Republican Mitt Romney; and the American Crossroads Fund, tied to Republican heavyweight Karl Rove.
Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, controls a substantial proportion of the family’s donations. The money is channeled through The Mercer Family Foundation, which harbors $37 million in assets.
Notable Facts: Mercer is famously reclusive. He is rumored to have been a codebreaker during the Cold War, and has himself admitted that his conservative beliefs and disdain for bureaucracy crystallized while fixing computers on a military base in New Mexico.
He is member of the National Rifle Association, and an avid high stakes poker player. He also collects model trains: He spent $700,000 building an enormous train set in the basement of his home in Long Island, and in the process became embroiled in a lawsuit with Rail Dreams—a model parts supplier he accused of overcharging him $2 million.
The entire Mercer family has repeatedly been involved in political attacks on Congressman Peter De Fazio, Democrat of Oregon, who supported raising taxes for hedge funds. In 2000 Mercer gave $52,250 to an anti-de Fazio ad campaign. His wife Diana also gave $52,250, and his three daughters gave $50,000 each.
Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, has spent $28 million buying six adjoining apartments in NYC. She runs a bakery, Ruby et Violette, in midtown. In 2013, Mercer was sued by a group of his household employees for not paying overtime. The matter was resolved “amicably,” lawyers later stated.
Best Quotes:
“I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.”
“I loved the air conditioned smell of [computer labs]. I loved the sound of the disks whirring and the printers clacking.”
Header Credit: Illustration by Grete Suarez; Photos by Wikimedia Commons, ToonariPost/Flickr, Pixabay