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.
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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:
Last night while watching the television program Politically Incorrect, on which you were a guest, without mentioning my name, you described me as a chairman of the Dole campaign in Florida, and as a non-citizen making substantial political donations. Our families have known each other for three generations, since the time that our grandparents used to frequent each others’ homes as guests. My mother even went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Norton with one of your aunts, who visited my mother in Cuba, and I have personally met your uncles, late father and different members of your family on many occasions. Legal giving to political campaigns should be nothing new or shocking to a member of the Kennedy family, who, since the time of your great-grandfather, have given substantially to political campaigns.
RFK Jr. responded a few months later by doubling down on his criticisms of “welfare barons,” and the correspondence eventually made its way into the Palm Beach Post, whose readers mostly sided with Team Kennedy, judging from ensuing letters from residents on the receiving end of the “burning smell and dusty particulates” released by Fanjul farms. One observed that Kennedy “cleaned Mr. Fanjul’s clock,” in the epistolary sense.
“Under the current system,” RFK Jr. wrote, “individuals like yourself can pilfer America’s natural wealth and heritage, destroy publicly owned resources, garner subsidies in the form of below-cost natural resources and artificial price controls, poison our rivers and streams, mistreat workers and then protect their place at the public trough by sharing their loot in public officials with payoffs disguised as campaign contributions.”
What wouldn’t become public until the following year, when the Starr Report was published, was that while Pepe Fanjul was raising money for Bob Dole, his brother Alfy had also been talking to Bill Clinton, who even interrupted his 1996 breakup meeting with Monica Lewinsky to have a 22-minute conversation with the sugar baron. Lewinsky told Starr she didn’t recall the conversation’s contents, but the call had come literal moments after Al Gore had given a speech at the Everglades National Park pitching RFK’s penny-a-pound cleanup tax (the initiative would quickly die in Congress). The brothers were also in hot water with Clinton’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which had been forced to sue them after they’d repeatedly refused to comply with subpoenas demanding records pertaining to their family-owned investment bank.
In any event, if the idealistic environmental attorney had gotten the last word—Fanjul’s response to his retort was so pathetic as to be unworthy of rehashing here—the billionaire, as it generally goes in such showdowns, got the last laugh, twisting the 28-year-old knife to his personal satisfaction.
RFK Jr. had joined MAGA Nation on the condition that he be appointed health and human services secretary, a post from which he pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” even as his boss indiscriminately axed medical research funding, chopped nearly a trillion dollars from the Medicaid budget, forced him to pose for a Trump Force One photo op holding a 2,000-calorie meal from McDonald’s, and then, in an initiative literally inspired by a satirical social media post from some rando, cajoled him into bestowing the official MAHA seal of approval on a plan to use cane sugar in Coca-Cola’s flagship beverage, in lieu of high-fructose corn syrup.
Naturally, Pepe Fanjul was behind the plan, having been patched in six months earlier to an awkward meeting between Trump and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey, who according to the new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America had innocently arrived at Transition HQ bearing a case of official commemorative inauguration-themed Diet Cokes, only to find himself being grilled by the president-elect about why the company was using corn syrup instead of sweet, sweet sugar. (This was the first time the White House had discussed Coke’s use of cane sugar with any member of the Fanjul family, a Fanjul family spokesman told the Prospect, suggesting the initiative could have originated with the meme seven weeks earlier.)
Trump 2.0 is so relentlessly, obnoxiously, and unprecedentedly mobster that it can be difficult to reconcile with the historic and enduring lawlessness of the American capitalist class. Yet the Fanjul family history reminds us of this. For well over a century, this clan, which is typically described as “Cuban American” even though its patriarchs have over the years consistently maintained Spanish citizenship and its most prominent current member, for reasons unclear, did not even bother applying for dual American citizenship until he was in his fifties, has wielded enormous influence in our corridors of power.
Trump 2.0 is so relentlessly, obnoxiously, and unprecedentedly mobster that it can be difficult to reconcile with the historic and enduring lawlessness of the American capitalist class.
Fanjuls have advised Presidents Ford and Clinton and both Bushes on foreign policy and trade; milked the farm bill for billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies and the federal deposit insurance system; milked the CIA black ops budget to exact revenge on the government and working classes of Cuba for believing they deserved better than an existence the Biden administration, a dozen NGOs, and generations of Catholic nuns have repeatedly likened to “slavery”; and—let’s just be honest here—if not actively conspired in, at least certainly harbored zero regrets about their friends’ and fellow travelers’ successful plot to assassinate the uncle of a certain health and human services secretary.
THE FANJUL SUGAR DYNASTY IS THE DIRECT DESCENDANT and probably the wealthiest remaining heir to what a century ago was known as the “Sugar Trust.” In the late 19th century, very much in the manner of a modern-day mid-market private equity firm, the New York industrialist Henry Osborne Havemeyer launched a relentless merger spree of competing sugar refineries across the country, half of which he famously shuttered shortly after taking ownership of them. By 1892, Havemeyer controlled 95 percent of the sugar refining capacity in America through a labyrinthine corporate structure devised by powerful attorney Elihu Root, and in 1895 the Supreme Court decided, in a decision that severely limited the power of the Sherman Act, that this was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs. But the real scandal, the era’s muckrakers and sugar beet farmers were certain, was what Havemeyer controlled in secret, through shell companies, cutouts, and surrogates.
In 1898, following breathless coverage in the Hearst newspapers of the brutal methods by which Spain was attempting to put down a peasant revolt, President William McKinley declared war on the dying kingdom; after the quick military victory, the president appointed Elihu Root his secretary of war, tasked with negotiating the structural details of how the United States would govern its new postcolonial colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, Americans began popping up in Cuba looking to acquire ravaged plantations on the cheap, and on Capitol Hill lobbying legislators for a free-trade agreement with the island. Naturally, the pacifists and trustbusters and sugar beet farmers began to wonder: Had the Spanish-American War been a diabolical scheme to further enrich the Sugar Trust?
In 1902, Manuel Rionda, a Spanish sugar broker who divided his time between a brownstone in upper Manhattan, a remote (and at the time, war-ravaged) family-owned plantation about 225 miles east of Havana, and the London headquarters of the sugar brokerage that would soon be best known as Czarnikow-Rionda—at the time Rionda was still new to the firm—appeared before Congress to assure under oath that these suspicions amounted to nothing more than a silly conspiracy theory. Havemeyer was his biggest client by a mile, sure; privately, he suspected the Sugar Trust would be the primary beneficiary of a war whose conduct and cynical propaganda campaign made him “fear the Americans have lost all sense of honor,” he wrote to a colleague that year.
But the refiners and Wall Street bankers popularly believed to control the sugar trade were, Rionda insisted, far less influential than the German agribusiness lobby and code-switching multilingual middlemen like himself and the extended family he and his wife Harriet, with whom he had no children, were assiduously training to run their expanding sugar empire. By the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Rionda family empire was one of the two biggest landowners in the country. A company co-founded by Rionda’s most trusted nephew, Higinio Fanjul Rionda, was the other.
Somehow, losing that empire to Castro’s land reform initiative only seemed to make the family richer. The Rionda-Fanjul clan, which also boasted a wing known as the “Braga Brothers,” was by the time of the Cold War more deeply enmeshed in the global economic elite than even many Gilded Age clans. They were longtime friends of the ubiquitous Dulles brothers, whose law firm Sullivan & Cromwell had counted the Fanjul companies as clients for well over a half-century. Manuel Rionda had virtually founded the ritzy riverside hamlet of Alpine, New Jersey, a perennial “most expensive ZIP code in America” now known for its multiplatinum rapper residents. Manuel built a majestic estate there in 1903 after Harriet fell into ill health. His nephew Salvador Rionda’s son-in-law, Alberto Fernandez de Hechavarria, had gone to Choate with John F. Kennedy, though he didn’t think very highly of him during their teenage years, and disdain hardened into hatred after his brother-in-law Manuel, Salvador’s only son, died alongside a fellow sugar industry executive during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Following their relocation to Palm Beach, where they found the wetlands of the Everglades ideally suited to harvesting sugarcane, the extended Fanjul-Rionda-Braga clan became mainstays of the lavishly funded, top secret covert operations headquarters the CIA had opened in 1961 in a former naval station on the University of Miami campus, code-named JMWAVE. According to the late historian Joan Mellen, whose 2013 book The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, delves into many of JMWAVE’s more obscure projects, Alfonso Fanjul quickly joined a team led by David Sanchez Morales, a notorious CIA assassin who remains a key suspect in the conspiracy to kill JFK, but whose CIA files remain almost completely classified; and he allowed the family brokerage Czarnikow-Rionda to be used as a CIA funding conduit, and Czarnikow executive Jack Malone, a close friend of the agency’s clandestine agent David Atlee Phillips, to operate almost full-time as a CIA asset. (Phillips would later gain notoriety as an agency handler of Lee Harvey Oswald.)
After initially agreeing to work as a sugar industry tax collector for Castro in the early days of the revolution, Hechavarria also signed on as a full-time CIA asset, running guns to Cuba in a former Navy submarine chaser purchased with funds from Czarnikow-Rionda called the Tejana whose captain Lawrence Laborde called the CIA in a panic and offered to leave the country to avoid a subpoena after his son told New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison about his work for the CIA. According to Mellen, Alfonso Fanjul’s sons Alfy and Pepe joined AMFAST, a secret group of 100 men tapped by the CIA to constitute the intelligence agency of an interim government following the overthrow of Castro, and AMCHEER, another secret group of 100 older businessmen recruited for a similar project. The Fanjul family spokesman said that while the family was “very familiar” with Mellen’s book, they were “curious about the CIA claim because they hadn’t heard it before” and did not elaborate. But their names make many appearances in CIA documents declassified in various assassination investigations, as do those of various family associates and friends. Their business partner Alberto Recio, a director or agent for a dozen or so Fanjul business entities incorporated in the 1960s and 1970s, worked full-time as a covert agent for JMWAVE following the revolution, including on something called PROJECT BRAZIL for which the agency apparently agreed to wire him 3,000 pounds (but only deposited half that amount, according to an October 1961 cable he sent JMWAVE).
The whole clique of affluent Miami Cubans was so spooked out in those days that they adopted their own code words in correspondence. During the summer of 1963, Malone wrote to Alfonso Fanjul to say, “I still believe the clouds are going to clear away before Little Boy Blue stands for reelection.” He was of course talking about the president who was about to be murdered in Dealey Plaza.
Less covertly, the Fanjul sugar men also presided over and held regular luncheons for AREC, a group of right-wing anti-Castro businessmen who raised funds to bankroll and engender solidarity among other exile groups. According to one CIA memo, Fanjul and other AREC members donated funds to a group led by the terrorist Orlando Bosch, who before he was charged with plotting the successful 1976 murder of 73 innocent civilians on a Cuban airliner, detailed a staggering array of industrial sabotage and terror plots to his CIA handlers. At a meeting discussed in one CIA memo, the group announced a fundraising goal of $200 million, estimating that the sum only amounted to a mere one-tenth the net worth of its membership.
The businessmen of AREC were flush with cash in spite of Castro’s land reform for a lot of reasons, but the most legal one was likely sugar subsidies. The revolution and ensuing blockade had deprived the United States of an annual three million tons of sugar, and the Cuban exiles had little trouble convincing Congress to give preferential treatment in the highly regulated sugar quota system to the suddenly exploding domestic industry. Cuban exiles, many of them AREC members, helped launch a half-dozen or so Florida sugar plantation-mills in the early 1960s with backing from such illustrious figures as Henry Ford. Sugar prices tripled and then quadrupled in the early 1960s, then fell back to earth before surging to unprecedented heights during the post–Yom Kippur War commodities surge, rising more than 500 percent in a single year. By the summer of 1974, the business press was reporting that certain soft drink bottlers had begun to experiment with sweetening Fanta and Mr. Pibb with new offerings from A.E. Staley Manufacturing Co. and its biggest competitor, Archer Daniels Midland, that industry execs called “high-fructose corn syrup.” (Coca Cola itself would not make the switch until the 1980s.)
SUBSIDIZING THE SUGAR INDUSTRY MIGHT SEEM perverse today, but in the 19th century a deep reserve of emergency empty calories was viewed as a requirement of proper sovereignty. Germany started the trend by throwing money, water, and agriculture research funding at its sugar beet industry, which in turn led much of Europe and North America to invest commensurately. Much later, during the sugar surge of 1974, it was reported that cash-flush Arab nations were hoarding sugar for strategic purposes, though market manipulation was also likely a similar draw. But sugarcane grows so readily in tropical wetlands, particularly the Everglades wetlands west of Palm Beach, that libertarian think tanks have wondered how the sugar beet hasn’t gone the way of the 8-track for nearly as long as farmers have grown them.
But the Fanjuls make much, much more money selling sugar than what the global market will bear, thanks to the resiliency of late-19th-century sugar subsidies, along with a powerful cocktail of market dominance and old-fashioned price-fixing. First, there’s the sugar program, whereby producers can use inventory to collateralize loans at a value set by Congress slightly in excess of spot market prices, and simply default on the loan without penalty if prices for whatever reason fall below that floor. Many countries have similar programs to support the prices of vital commodities, the reserves of which they then release to the market during periods of commodity inflation. But in America, the USDA can restrict sugar imports if the prices go too low so as to avoid “loan forfeitures” that would leave them with large warehouses of sugar.
Thus it is, according to the Fanjul spokesman, that the sugar program has operated “at no cost to taxpayers” in 23 out of the past 24 years—until you factor in the higher prices those taxpayers pay for cakes and caramel macchiatos than their global counterparts thanks to domestic sugar prices critics say generally amount to double global spot prices. (The Fanjul spokesman says it is “misleading” to compare domestic sugar prices with global spot prices in part because the global market “is supplied with excess sugar dumped on the world market from countries that subsidize their sugar industries.”)
In any event, it is unclear and possibly unquantifiable how much the Fanjuls make directly from these subsidies, but estimates generally suggest the program costs consumers between $2.5 billion and $4 billion per year, and the Fanjul empire supplies roughly 30 percent of the sugar consumed in America annually. (The sugar program costs jobs as well, as American candy factories that once employed tens of thousands of workers relocate to countries where sugar costs are lower.)
The Fanjul empire and their two major rivals share proprietary price information and conspire to drive prices even higher, a revelation antitrust enforcers stumbled upon during a routine investigation of a proposed merger involving the Fanjuls’ biggest competitor.
It gets scummier, though, because the Fanjul empire and its two major rivals spend all day sharing proprietary price information and conspiring with one another to drive prices even higher, a revelation antitrust enforcers stumbled upon during a routine investigation of a proposed merger involving the Fanjuls’ biggest competitor, U.S. Sugar. Justice Department attorneys discovered that a man named Richard Wistisen of Provo, Utah, was constantly inquiring of institutional sales representatives about the prices they were quoting and gossip they were hearing, then immediately copy-pasting that information into emails to their competitors’ representatives. Wistisen did this under the supposed auspices of Commodity Information, Inc., an entity founded in the 1970s by a Brigham Young University economics professor who also specialized in sugar prices and was frequently quoted about their wild price fluctuations during the boom-and-bust years of the late Cold War.
Wistisen’s name hasn’t been in the news since a 2000 dispatch on coffee bean prices, and Commodity Information, Inc., has no website, newsletter, or database to which seekers of the referenced “information” can subscribe. Its only product was Wistisen’s emails, and those were only available to representatives of the largest sugar producers, who agreed to truthfully answer his constant barrage of inquiries. Since he started sending them in 2019, sugar prices have risen nearly three times as fast as the Consumer Price Index, according to a class action complaint filed earlier this year by the small supermarket chain King Kullen and about a dozen bakeries, coffee shops, and small restaurant groups. The Fanjul spokesman points out that the merger challenge that unearthed Wistisen’s emails was rejected by both a Trump-appointed federal judge and a bipartisan panel of appellate judges who presided over the appeal, but declined comment on the substance of the allegations.
Over the years, the Fanjul brothers have gotten involved in other government-subsidized business. In the early 1980s, they founded First Atlantic International Corp Securities, which immediately got into the then-booming and, prior to savings and loan deregulation, illegal business of brokered deposits, whereby obscure regional banks would try to attract large deposits by offering interest rates of 8 and 9 percent. The iconic deposit broker of the era was Mario Renda, a Mafia-connected former dancer who brokered some $6 billion to 3,500 S&Ls, hundreds of which collapsed after blowing all their deposits on real estate projects that ranged from hysterically overvalued to completely fake, ultimately costing taxpayers billions. But whereas Renda ended up in prison, FAIC sued the Federal Home Loan Bank when it tried to shut down their deposit brokerage and won, then pivoted into municipal bond issuance when the boom went bust.
During the 1990s, FAIC underwrote bonds for the Dade County airport authority and the Florida Housing and Finance Authority, raising red flags because the Fanjuls were such ubiquitous and prolific Palm Beach political fundraisers. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board had adopted stringent conflict-of-interest rules, but when the agency requested and then subpoenaed documents from the brothers and their respective businesses for communications with various relevant elected officials and financial counterparties, their attorney handed over all of six pages, according to the 1995 complaint. The family ultimately chose to shut down FAIC, pay the agency a $439,000 settlement to avoid further scrutiny, and focus on what it knows best: staggering feats of worker exploitation.
IN 1984, THE FAMILY BECAME THE BIGGEST LANDOWNER in the Dominican Republic for a mere $200 million when what was then Paramount Pictures’ parent company, the conglomerate Gulf and Western, decided to offload a sugar plantation that had been a constant source of negative headlines. Three years earlier, a group of Maryknoll nuns had decided to raise a media shitstorm about the “subhuman” squalor in which the plantation housed its workforce. Most houses had no electricity or drinkable water or even mattresses for sleeping on, latrines were “appalling,” disease and child malnutrition were rampant, and laborers, they said, made on average around $2.50 a day.
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which would become one of the most effective anti-apartheid organizers, had begun staging protests at shareholder meetings; a lawyer dispatched by Gulf and Western’s late founder to inspect the conditions of the labor camps described them to Vanity Fair as “one degree short of Dachau.” Fearing the bad press might sully Paramount’s television shows and movies, the conglomerate decided to offload its sugar interests; the Fanjuls, having no glamorous products to boycott or shareholder meetings to crash, were in Wall Street terms the perfect owners for such an enterprise.
In the four decades since they purchased the plantation, virtually nothing has changed, and that includes the pay, which Reveal News reported in 2021 amounted to “as little as $3 a day” and reportedly tops out at $6 or $7 a day for young, strong men capable of cutting two or three tons a day, according to a Jacobin report from that same year. While the company withholds funds for taxes and retirement from workers’ checks, virtually none of them have an immigration status that would enable them to collect such benefits; nearly all are migrants from Haiti who are forced to cut cane essentially until they die. “Since the acquisition, Central Romana has significantly improved working conditions, benefits, and living conditions of its workers,” the family spokesman said in an emailed statement.
But Catholic refugee organizations, labor unions, environmental NGOs, documentary filmmakers, and ProPublica reporters return to the plantations every few years to document the horrors of everyday life in the sugar fields, and each time they find new ones. There are the masked men with guns who periodically show up to abduct and evict workers who have grown too old to be productive; the massive debts they all owe to their local convenience stores; the gruesome maladies they suffer from massive overexposure to herbicides and other harsh chemicals.
“Just from a human being perspective, the number of workers you see who are well over the age of 60, cutting cane because they can’t afford to retire, with a bulge from a colostomy bag or catheter underneath their clothes because they have kidney disease or some other disorder almost certainly caused by chronic dehydration they suffer from not having access to potable water … that is the thing that is most difficult to get over,” says Avery Kelly, a senior staff attorney with the Chicago-based NGO Corporate Accountability Lab, who has made four trips to the Dominican Republic to interview workers and local officials. The family spokesman said Fanjul Corp. operations are “independently certified under the ProTerra Sustainability Standard, which among other things, requires responsible labor practices, including workplace safety, fair wages, and respect for human rights and local community relations.” (An NGO lawyer counters that ProTerra and other organizations offering such forms of “certification” are, no matter how well-meaning, compromised by the fact that large multinationals—not their workers or residents of the land they are polluting—are their clients.)
But the plantation, Central Romana, is uniquely unfettered by oversight, thanks to its location in a semi-autonomous special economic zone with its own airport and deepwater port within the Dominican Republic, the first such zone created in the country in a 1969 arrangement with Gulf and Western. The Fanjuls supply the services, infrastructure, and law enforcement—or lack thereof—and enjoy broad exemptions from most national and local taxes, though a Central Romana spokesman told the Prospect that the company, which is the country’s largest landholder, is nevertheless “one of the country’s largest tax contributors.”
The Fanjuls’ domestic cane-cutting workforce is mostly a thing of the past, having been mechanized away in the mid-’90s after a handful of public-interest attorneys filed class action wage theft lawsuits on behalf of mostly Jamaican guest workers; while lawyers uncovered detailed timesheets conclusively proving the workers had been systematically shorted each day by as much as 50 percent, the Fanjuls used an obscure provision of colonial-era state law requiring foreigners to cough up substantial bond payments to access Florida courts, shutting down the litigation altogether, as the lawyers recounted in a recent podcast.
In 2004, a State Department cable detailed an aggressive propaganda war replete with “absurd … conspiracy theories” about the Bush administration being deployed by the Fanjul family to undermine that country’s participation in the Dominican Republican–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). Two years later, another dispatch from the same embassy detailed the dramatic ouster from the country of two outspoken priests who had ministered to Haitian workers in the sugarcane plantations, and the barrage of “offensive and racist” online comments maligning Fr. Christopher Hartley, who had been threatened at gunpoint by a paramilitary officer in a plantation owned by a Fanjul rival, as an “enemy of the Dominican people.”
Hartley, it turned out, had read the text of CAFTA-DR, and seen in its generally weak labor provisions a pretty unambiguous commitment to the “bilateral … elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor,” which he knew was not shared by the sugarcane plantation owners, as he later spelled out in a formal submission to the Department of Labor in 2011. In 2013, the Labor Department published the results of their investigation into Hartley’s claims, along with a list of recommendations to the Dominican government. But the issue mostly languished after that, until Congress in 2016 quietly closed a loophole in tariff law that had been used to block enforcement of existing import bans on the products of slave or slave-adjacent labor. Customs and Border Protection began hearing from NGOs and labor rights organizations around the world urging the agency to block the import of rubber gloves, frozen shrimp, cocoa powder, and other goods frequently associated with bait-and-switch human trafficking schemes and seven-day workweeks.
But the forced labor loophole’s closure was no deterrent to the sugar barons. In late January, as the bill was being hashed out in conference committee, masked paramilitary forces forcibly evicted 60 families living in shantytowns on Fanjul land in the dead of night in what many took as a show of force. New exposés and investigations followed, along with a revitalized human rights campaign to impose an export ban on Fanjul sugar from the Central Romana plantation, where investigators from a consortium of human rights groups found 9 of the 11 internationally recognized “hallmarks” of forced labor, according to a letter to the Biden administration. Just weeks after they sent the letter, Biden’s Labor Department formally issued a “withhold release order” blocking Central Romana’s sugar products from entering the country, noting that a preliminary survey had found 5 of the 11 hallmarks; a subsequent report found more.
It was a shocking affront to one of the nation’s most powerful families, if not necessarily a costly one. After all, the Fanjuls grow and sell billions of dollars of state-subsidized domestic sugar in America each year, and likely export less than $100 million stateside from their Dominican plantations. (A human rights attorney told the Prospect the NGOs had little way of determining whether the Fanjuls were circumventing the bans by selling sugar to competing plantations for resale to the United States or exporting it from their European processing facilities.)
The Fanjuls had donated mostly token amounts to Democratic campaigns since the 2000 election, during which longtime Fanjul general counsel attack dog Joseph Klock represented Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris before the Supreme Court, but former Hillary Clinton fundraiser Alfy Fanjul attempted to enlist former Sen. Chris Dodd, a Biden administration “special envoy,” to overturn the import ban with a long letter referencing Alfy’s escape from Castro’s Cuba “in search of the American dream.” At the same time, Pepe, who had given $250,000 to the Pam Bondi–led “Make America Great Again, Again!” super PAC at the absolute nadir of Trump’s stock price in 2021, doubled down on his Republican friends, ultimately donating more than a million dollars to Trump and the party he controls.
Within weeks of his inauguration, Trump repealed the ban on Central Romana sugar without explanation or, human rights advocates say, anything resembling a “process.” Two NGO attorneys said that when the ban was first lifted, the head of the forced labor division within CBP’s Trade Remedy Law Enforcement Directorate had initially and inaccurately told worker advocates it was a mere “modification” of the order, not an all-out repeal, and was “clearly shocked” during a meeting when he learned otherwise. Kelly, who last visited Central Romana shortly after the repeal in May, says she has seen virtually no improvement in workers’ conditions since the ban was passed outside a single Potemkin village the company allows outsiders to visit, though she added that many workers had been given company-branded thermoses, which would be far more useful if they had access to potable water. It’s all pretty on-brand for the Fanjuls. A 2004 Miami New Times deep dive juxtaposes the family’s long history of labor degradation with the author’s laborious efforts to get basic compensation for a worker who has just lost his arm to one of the family sugar mills.
THE FANJULS ARE WILLING TO SPEND QUITE EXTRAVAGANTLY in the service of maintaining the Batista-ish status quo. Their fleet of lobbyists, advocates, and surrogates “could fill a stadium,” in the words of one industry lobbyist; an analysis conducted a decade ago by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times found that during the two decades between 1994 and 2016, the Fanjuls, their employees, industry trade associations, and representatives of their now semi-defunct biggest competitor spent nearly $60 million on campaign contributions in Florida state races alone. The Fanjuls’ companies have spent millions more defending their insistence on burning their sugarcane fields before the harvest, instead of transitioning to the green harvesting methods adopted by such woke enclaves as Brazil.
And then there is the bizarre 2013 saga of former senator and current inmate Bob Menendez, who was the subject of an apparently mendacious plot to “frame” him by sending underage prostitutes to his room at Casa de Campo, the ultra-luxurious Kardashian-frequented resort on the coastline of the Fanjul’s sugar plantation, who in turn gave interviews they later retracted to The Daily Caller. The FBI questioned both Alfy and Pepe Fanjul about their knowledge of the plot against Menendez—perhaps it was part of an alleged revenge plot over his vote to repeal the sugar program?—after which Alfy called the then-senator to assure him the family knew nothing about anything, and the anonymous tipster who had planted the story, reportedly from a Santo Domingo internet cafe, vanished and was never heard from again. (Menendez later changed his story to suggest that Cuban intelligence agents had set up the sting out of spite toward Menendez’s hard-line anti-Castro politics, which makes about as much sense as the “single bullet theory.”) But the ordeal highlights the sense of fear and borderline paranoia the Fanjul family instills in its closest frenemies, especially in south Florida.
Mysterious forces have successfully silenced and sidelined plenty of the family’s critics over the years. During the Bush administration, an Erin Brockovich-esque movie about the Fanjuls slated to star Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster was unceremoniously shelved. A documentary about Central Romana was mysteriously pulled last-minute from the Miami Film Festival. Fr. Hartley was abruptly ejected from the Dominican Republic, and a documentary featuring him had its distribution deal pulled amid a defamation lawsuit filed by the Dominican Republic’s second-biggest sugar baron family, who lost the case but arguably won the war.
It won’t shock you to learn that Pepe Fanjul was close enough to the late Jeffrey Epstein to have three numbers of his listed in the infamous “black book.”
It probably won’t shock you to learn that Pepe Fanjul was also close enough to the late Jeffrey Epstein to have three numbers of his listed in the infamous “black book,” and his sister-in-law Nicole is the aunt of Story Cowles, an elusive figure who visited Epstein a staggering 159 times during his brief stint in county jail and according to a filing from Epstein lawyers, dated Sarah Kellen, a longtime Epstein employee who has been described as “a knowing participant in the criminal conspiracy” surrounding Epstein by a federal judge, but was never indicted for reasons no one has even tried to explain. (The family spokesman said the Fanjul brothers “never had any kind of relationship with Epstein.”) It probably means nothing, but the Fanjuls are also famously secretive, and everyone from Haitian plantation workers to a former family friend in Palm Beach who found himself “dropped” by the family over what he thinks was criticism of Trump has voiced a fear of getting on their bad side. When Nicole’s drug addict son Nico beat his girlfriend Tinsley Mortimer so badly she wound up in the hospital in 2013, she emphatically told the police she had no interest in pressing charges and, according to the police report, “made several references to how powerful the family is and did not want to start anything.”
The Fanjul dynasty still has yet to scale new heights of political and economic power. But after more than a half-century of fundraising and check-writing, psyops and black ops, back-scratching and letter-writing, they’ve finally cultivated a political terrain as hospitable to their dreams and desires as Cuba under Fulgencio Batista.