Five years ago, a manager for a Virginia gasoline distributor opened an invoice for more than 200,000 phantom gallons of gas they had no record of selling. Truckers on contract with a chain of gas stations that had recently terminated its contract had been filling up their tanks using an emergency PIN that the distributor, Petroleum Marketing Group, Inc. (PMG), had designated for one-time out-of-contract gas purchases, effectively stealing $667,517 worth in just over a week.
Upon subpoenaing the gas station chain CEO’s bank records, PMG ultimately discovered he had no fewer than 28 other credit agreements he hadn’t disclosed on behalf of three or four alter-ego companies whose businesses he’d never listed on his application. The CEO and his brother/partner—two central New Jersey men in their thirties named Syed and Shamikh Kazmi, respectively—had outstanding default judgments against them in Wisconsin and Michigan, a business in Florida they had never disclosed, and legal disputes with landlords and franchisors from Circle K to Phillips 66 to 7-Eleven, the latter of which accused the brothers in a lawsuit of allowing a store they were operating to fall into such an alarming state of squalor it was forced to “disown” it, then exploiting a provision in the franchise agreement to order hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cigarettes in its last weeks of operation that they allegedly neither returned to corporate nor paid for. Another landlord was suing them for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent. The lawsuits would drag on and multiply while the Kazmi brothers bid on new assets under slightly altered names, then failed over and over again to wire over the required deposits.
Enter the high-flying Wall Street money manager Blue Owl, the reluctant owner of a vast portfolio of hundreds of gas stations across the country for which it had vastly overpaid. Prior to 2023, the gas stations and adjoining convenience stores had been run by an outfit called Mountain Express, which was forced into liquidation that spring after the founder sucked $130 million in ostensibly illegal fake dividends out of the stores and retired, leaving a trail of broken soda machines, failing refrigerators, disemboweled cash registers, and unpaid bills across the land. Blue Owl ended up paying $15 million to the bankruptcy estate for having enabled the grift.
You might assume that Blue Owl, a private credit behemoth founded by Wall Street’s titular best and brightest with $315 billion in assets under management, would attempt to find squeaky-clean, meticulous types to take over the leases at its service stations and start anew. LOL, no: For at least 17 of its stations in New Jersey, they chose the lawsuit-embroiled Kazmi brothers, a transaction formally announced last fall shortly after the trustee in another bankruptcy filed an amusing legal brief detailing Shamikh Kazmi’s effort to hire a locksmith to access a former Rite Aid store in Maryland on whose lease he had bid but never actually wired over the required $71,000 earnest money deposit. (A few months later, Kazmi placed an audacious $75 million all-cash bid on an iconic brutalist Philadelphia skyscraper complex, touting a plan to convert the 1.8 million-square-foot office complex into a Hard Rock Hotel, but he again failed to make the deposit.)
Earlier this year, the Kazmi brothers unveiled the latest makeover of their struggling gas station chain: a fast-food empire called Yum Grills, whose “$60 million expansion” Shamikh purported to be “self-funding” in a February Philadelphia Business Journal story that promised a breakneck rollout of 15 locations in 120 days. They appear to have successfully opened just one, not counting a related concept called Cousin’s Burger that boasts two others.
But by summer, the Kazmi crew had stumbled onto a business model: the Freedom Fuel Network, where gas costs just $3.47—or at least it used to until the Iran war ramped up again and oil prices shot up—in honor of the 47th president. The pop-up chain of gas stations was unveiled in Philadelphia and its suburbs with a slickly produced video on the official YouTube channel of the White House itself, in which a handful of people (including one Black gentleman wearing an enormous white shirt evocative of Allen Iverson’s ’90s heyday) fill up their cars while thanking President Trump for the 50-cent-a-gallon discount to the average Pennsylvania price.
For some reason, the media went wild over Freedom Fuel. CNN, The New York Times, and pretty much every major local and national news outlet descended upon Greater Philadelphia to assess the extent to which the stations were real and, to that end, whether they truly had any gas to sell. A disarmingly professional parody website, freedomfuelnetwork.lol, appeared seemingly from nowhere to “expose” Trump’s gas station chain as a fraud, only to later update the text to concede that, yes, OK, the 25 gas stations are real, and expand its mission to interrogate what the entire lamestream media held out to be the actual fraud at play, which was some Trump administration crony’s insidious manipulation of the immutable laws of supply and demand, the only two variables that have ever been permitted to affect the price of anything under real American capitalist freedom. A characteristically brain-dead USA Today columnist blathered under the headline: “Trump Knows His Freedom Fuel Is Kind of Socialism, Right?”
For a week after the announcement, mainstream media sleuths continued to puzzle over what they seemed to view as a mystifying question: How it was even physically possible to sell gasoline in Pennsylvania for $3.50 a gallon—especially if, as one popular commentator noted, so many of the Freedom Fuel stations seemed to lack even a mini-mart where the operator might make back the loss with enough purchases of flavored nicotine pouches. The parody website expressed the most succinct distillation of the enigma:
REGULAR $3.47
ACTUAL COST $3.47+*
PA AVERAGE $3.99
WHO COVERS THE GAP [REDACTED]
And yet for all their probing and sleuthing, none of the journalists assigned to the Freedom Fuel beat bothered to point out that the gas stations were run by a group of serial grifters who, every time they get caught trying another scheme, lawyer up, move on to the next grift, and never face any measure of accountability. As Mountain Express’s exponentially bigger gas station bust-out, which borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from both Blue Owl and the $85 billion regional bank First Horizon, illustrates so vividly, industrial-scale looting is completely normalized in literally every sector of American capitalism. And this was true even before Trump abolished the fraud police and set about crafting policy primarily as a means of manipulating prediction markets.
IF FREEDOM FUEL REPRESENTS some sort of public relations quid for a past or future Trump administration quo, the surest sign is the name Yonatan “Yoni” Gontownik, an energy trader and prolific political donor who is named on the company’s articles of incorporation (along with the special teams coach of the Baltimore Ravens, for some insane reason). Gontownik has been referenced as a “former” trader with the low-key Swiss commodities trading firm Mercuria, though the affiliation was current as of a $500 donation he made in March 2026 to Josh Gottheimer’s (by then abandoned) gubernatorial campaign. (Gontownik also donated to Bob Menendez in January, fully a year after he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.) Inquiries to Mercuria’s U.S. headquarters in Houston as to the dates of Gontownik’s employment went unreturned.
But for a firm that never hired a lobbyist before 2025, Mercuria has made itself something of a ubiquitous presence in Trumpworld shady deals. Last November, its co-founder convened a “charm offensive” of Swiss firms, in which he and a handful of other CEOs arrived at the White House armed with gold bars, a custom-made Rolex desktop clock, and other lavish gifts as part of a successful ploy to convince the administration to roll back its 32 percent tariffs on Swiss goods. The following month, Trump International Development Finance Corporation CEO Ben Black, the son of billionaire accused rapist and longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Leon Black, announced that Mercuria would be its private-sector partner in a joint venture to import copper from the state-owned mining conglomerate of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then when Venezuela’s new leader Delcy Rodríguez gave a speech in May praising Trump, hailing the repeal of the 1999 law that had forced Venezuela’s oil industry to finance social services and passage of a new one sweetening the deal for foreign countries to develop its surfeit of neglected mines, Mercuria was again on the scene, announcing it had “secured a series of strategic offtake agreements” to buy gold and other minerals from the sanction-ravaged country in volumes that would “unlock approximately $2.2 billion in annual mineral export value.”
But I’m burying the lede here, because neither of those deals has likely yet yielded fruit, while Trump’s defining policy decision and the whole premise of Freedom Fuel—going to war with Iran and sending the price of oil soaring—has been an absolute windfall for Mercuria, which last month reported it had booked more than $1 billion net profit during the first six months of 2026, a near-doubling of its prior-year results. But that is not all, because it is suing to collect much more. In April, the company controversially filed suit against the Singapore-owned exchange that calculates a commonly used benchmark called the TD3C index, which represents the daily cost of transporting 270,000 metric tons of crude oil from Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, to Ningbo, China. When the Strait of Hormuz closed for business in March, the Baltic Exchange, rather than attempting to calculate a benchmark to reflect a route no one was attempting to sail, simply left the index unchanged, thwarting Mercuria’s attempt to collect on a massive derivatives bet traders had made that the benchmark would soar and depriving the poor trading firm of “hundreds of millions of dollars” in profits.
Might Mercuria have made that bet on the basis of inside information? The fact that the trading firm would risk exposing the sordid details of such a trade in a lawsuit against a neutral party just shows how consequence-free insider trading has become. Maybe they’ll be one of the firms paying for faster access to Trump’s Truth Social posts.
Until we figure out how to end this klepto-crapitalist system, all we get are crumbs like “Freedom Fuel” gas at $3.47 a gallon.
It’s worth discussing Gontownik’s relationship with the Israel lobby that everyone from Tucker Carlson to Marco Rubio to Joy Reid to the producers of the AI Lego videos to my eight-year-old son understands to be the architects of the war that begat our surging gas prices. He is the son of Jerry Gontownik, a New Jersey real estate developer and son of a survivor of the Stutthof concentration camp, who has been active in politics since at least the 1980s, when he served as a vice president of a group that organized a 1988 lobbying visit to Washington to meet with 20 senators and a cadre of senior White House foreign-policy staffers along with then-Education Department official Bill Kristol. In the early 1990s, amid a falling-out with George H.W. Bush over his withholding of $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel as a ploy to secure an agreement to halt the expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land, Jerry Gontownik helped found NORPAC, a kind of grassroots New Jersey–based satellite to AIPAC that hosts an annual D.C. lobbying trip, focuses its campaign giving on pro-Israel stalwarts like Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, and in which the whole family remains deeply involved to this day. After supporting Clinton and Gore, Jerry Gontownik worked with Jack Abramoff to build a coalition of emphatic George W. Bush loyalists in northern North Jersey.
Yoni Gontownik’s brothers Ezra and Ari are also deeply entrenched in right-wing Zionist politics: Ezra serves on the board of a foundation that funds the hard-right East Jerusalem settlement Ateret Cohanim and was referenced in media reports as serving as an official representative of the “Adelson Family” at a 2024 meeting convened in Sun Valley to introduce finance bigwigs to Argentine President Javier Milei, and Ari co-founded a constellation of nonprofits dedicated to “combin[ing] research, education and technology innovation to counter antisemitism and hate online and offline” and subsidizing summer camp for at-risk Jewish Israeli youth. Yoni has served on the boards of NORPAC and a related outfit that lobbies for school vouchers for religious education.
No one would argue that the commitment to a maximally brutal, expansionist Jewish state in Israel is not deeply personal, born of tradition and generational trauma, and like the war itself not altogether rational. But it’s equally important to remember that the Israel lobby is also just like any other lobby, a coalition of individuals with their own agendas and business interests and proprietary bets on the trajectory of the prices of various commodities. The billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump donor Paul Singer, for example, has donated millions of dollars to tanking the political careers of Thomas Massie and Graham Platner alone, but the oil refining giant his hedge fund controls, Phillips 66, is shutting down a 140,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery in Los Angeles as we speak, in the midst of a completely unprecedented and apparently indefinite supply squeeze, because $8-a-gallon gas is fucking awesome when you own the biggest portfolio of oil refineries in the United States.
Gontownik is one of thousands of anonymous rich guys who don’t have the juice to single-handedly ratfuck a Senate campaign, but who dutifully max out to Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Josh Gottheimer each cycle during tedious cocktail hours and fundraising dinners at which they exhort our public officials to “finish off” the Axis of Evil and “make the economy scream” because they just plowed a quarter of their retirement fund into out-of-the-money oil futures. It is people like that who determine what we pay for gas—and ground beef, and health insurance, and especially for the privilege of keeping a roof over our heads. And until we figure out how to end this klepto-crapitalist system, all we get are crumbs like “Freedom Fuel” gas at $3.47 a gallon, or $3.57, or $3.67, depending on how many bombs we lobbed at Iranian schools the night before.
