Sugar Daddies

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/power/sugar-daddies/



Twenty-eight years ago this summer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picked a fight with an oligarch who would come back to haunt him and, more relevantly, the country. Kennedy appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, alongside comedian Drew Carey and Republican fundraiser, cosmetics executive, and feminist self-help guru Georgette Mosbacher, who brought up the inscrutable Democratic Party scandal du jour, a campaign finance saga in which shady Chinese government–linked arms traffickers funneled money into DNC coffers, using straw donors recruited at an event inside a Buddhist temple. RFK Jr. reminded Mosbacher that her own party’s presidential campaign had chosen as its leading Florida fundraiser an unnamed foreign-national sugar baron whose family had made billions polluting the shit out of the Everglades, thereafter using campaign cash and propaganda to neutralize every proposal to force their plantations to pay for a gradual cleanup.

The sugar baron in question was Pepe Fanjul, of Palm Beach by way of Spain and Havana, whose family Town & Country pronounced in 2013 the nation’s fifth “most enduring” familial brand, behind only the Mellons, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and du Ponts. Forbes estimates the Fanjuls’ net worth at a collective $8.5 billion, though the real number is likely far greater. RFK Jr. was sore at Fanjul because a Big Sugar media blitz had just defeated a ballot initiative he and his then-employer had been campaigning for, which would have levied a one-cent tax on each pound of sugar milled in Florida to finance a cleanup of the Everglades wildlife refuge. Kennedy was apparently not sore enough to say Pepe’s name on live television, and aggravate his secrecy-obsessed nerves.

But Fanjul happened to be a close friend of Mosbacher and her husband, who had weathered a spate of nasty headlines a few years earlier over their decision to fly around in Fanjul’s private airborne vessels while serving as commerce secretary under George H.W. Bush, which is likely how the sugar baron heard about it instantaneously enough to fire off a scathing (and frankly, creepy) letter dated the following day, laying into Kennedy for what he apparently took as an unforgivable violation of plutocrat norms:

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