The schools continued to receive poor marks from state regulators. From 2009 to 2014, individual schools received “ ‘declining’ ratings three times and one F.”195
The graduation rates also did not really improve over time. In 2019, the Miami Herald reported continued basement-level performance. Mavericks High of North Miami Dade had a 9 percent graduation rate; Mavericks High of South Miami Dade was 13 percent.196
Mavericks was also accused by state auditors in Florida of inflating their enrollment numbers. As the South Florida Sun Sentinel noted, “In South Florida, three probes released by the state Auditor General’s office in 2013 and 2014 found Mavericks schools in Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Palm Springs and Homestead were collecting dollars for students who did not attend the school and not teaching enough hours to meet state requirements.”197 Why inflate the enrollment numbers? The more students enrolled, the more taxpayer funding collected.
The key to understanding Frank Biden’s business is that the real money was not in the operation of the schools themselves—but in the underlying real estate for charter schools. “It’s all about the buildings we buy,” he explained in another interview. “Certainly the operation of the schools isn’t profitable.”198
In addition to Mavericks in Education, Frank also became a partner in School Property Development, which provided “building services” to charter schools and owned buildings connected to Mavericks. They were soon building charter schools in West Palm Beach, Royal Palm Beach, Glen Ridge, Pembroke Pines, and elsewhere in Florida.199 He also lists himself as a partner in DelMarva LLC, based in Washington, D.C. “These entities are responsible for over 12 billion dollars in school financing placed with over 200 schools built and operated in Florida,” reads his account. “His companies provide a turnkey, single source of responsibility to acquire, finance, design, build and lease K-12 public schools.”200
The strategy was charging the schools high enough rent to pay off the mortgage on the property. In Homestead, Florida, for example, Mavericks’ school building had a market value of just $1.2 million. The school was scheduled to pay $1.75 million in rent over just five years.201 In short, the schools were a vehicle for School Property Development LLC to profit from buying or leasing real estate for rental by Mavericks in Education LLC. Because the schools were using taxpayer money and receiving grants to pay for the buildings, they were probably less concerned with the cost of rent.
By 2014, the Mavericks schools had received more than $70 million in state money. Nine million of that went to the management company.202 As we will see, the Obama administration also lavished the failing Mavericks schools with federal grants.
During this time, Frank enjoyed access to the highest levels of the White House. Indeed, on May 1, 2014, he attended an education event at the White House with top education officials from the National Education Association. That day he was also in a small meeting of just ten people with President Barack Obama in the White House to talk about charter schools. Other participants included Stephen Bittel, a Florida real estate developer who would later become the chairman of the Florida Democratic Party.203
Getting a charter school approved can be a tricky political feat. There is clearly going to be opposition from local teachers’ unions, and some politicians are going to be suspicious of who is actually going to be running the school. Frank Biden had an advantage that other competitors did not have: a powerful and famous brother whose name he could leverage.
Frank dropped his brother’s name and position to vouch for his honesty. When he appeared before the city commission of Sunrise, Florida, in 2015 to pitch a school, he casually explained who he was. According to the official minutes of the meeting, the recorder tells of Frank’s testimony, saying, “Whatever he [Frank] does, because of the honor of being the Vice President’s brother, he has to watch himself. Whomever he was involved with was fully vetted.”204 He never explained exactly how his business activities were vetted and by whom. Was he simply making it up? It is impossible to know. Regardless of what explanation he might provide, he was capitalizing on his relationship as the vice president’s brother to confer integrity to his company. In an instance several years earlier, he told skeptical local politicians that his school would work by “invoking his family’s political power.” “I give you my word of honor, on my family name, that this system is sustainable,” Frank said. “This school will be sustainable.” Local officials approved the deal.205
During the Obama presidency, Frank Biden’s charter schools received millions of dollars in federal grants. These were “discretionary grants” given through the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) State Educational Agencies (SEA) grant program.206 Applications were filed with Education Department headquarters in Washington.207 As of 2012, the department was sending each Mavericks school approximately $250,000 a year in taxpayer money.208 In 2015, Mavericks schools received just under $2.7 million in grants from the DOE—an average of almost $300,000 per school.209
Shortly after he announced his 2020 campaign for president, Joe Biden was on the campaign trail in Texas. He told a crowd, “I do not support any federal money . . . for for-profit charter schools—period,” Biden said to the crowd’s approval. “The bottom line is it siphons off money from public schools, which are already in enough trouble.”210 He never mentioned Frank’s profitable charter school businesses and, ironically, the legitimacy that his own name gave them.
* * *
On June 4, 2019, presidential candidate Joe Biden released a campaign video announcing his views on how to deal with climate change. Joe explained that his plan provided for “an enormous opportunity to hold polluters accountable for the damage they’ve caused, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color.”211
On the same day, about 1,600 miles from Joe, who was campaigning in New Hampshire, brother Frank stood before the assembled media in South Florida with a similar message. He, too, was making an announcement concerning pollution and “communities of color.” But Frank was part of a legal team that was suing twelve sugar growers in a class-action lawsuit.212 The tenor was remarkably similar to what his brother had spoken about in his campaign video.
The Berman Law Group in South Florida hired Frank in 2018 to serve as a “Senior Advisor.” “He brings a prestigious combination of accomplishments and experience,” the firm noted in a press release. They said of Frank, he is “highly regarded in the business and government sectors” and boasts “one of the most respected names in the U.S. and abroad.”213
The Berman Law Group features as its director of government relations former Democratic Florida state senator Joseph Abruzzo, who had worked with then–vice president Joe Biden on legislation.214
Frank had never filed a legal case before. On that day, the Berman firm filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States Sugar Corporation and eleven other defendants on behalf of poor minority residents in Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay, Florida, who claimed that they had suffered health problems related to the burning of sugarcane fields.215 To help make their case, the law firm released a six-and-a-half-minute video/infomercial about the lawsuit. Frank figured prominently throughout and finished it off by walking with the group in slow motion, wearing black sunglasses, through a ring of fire while dramatic music played.216
Biden’s campaign video appeared to be perfectly synchronized with his brother’s lawsuit.
When asked by a reporter at his press conference whether he had coordinated his announcement with that of his brother, Frank explained, “There was absolutely no coordination. It was serendipitous that Joe’s environmental policy came out today. . . . Our thoughts are the same, but there was no coordination.”217
The environmental plan that Joe Biden unfurled in his campaign video had policy nuggets that would help Frank’s businesses in very specific ways. Joe Biden’s plan calls for strengthening international collaboration and investment in clean energy infrastructure in the Americas, and supplying
clean energy across the entire Central American energy grid and in the Caribbean, which is of course what Frank was doing in the region.218
Coordinated in this case or not, the overall pattern here is that the Biden family members see that Joe’s vested public power is convenient for the creation of business opportunities for personal wealth.
It would be easier to dismiss these entanglements if they only involved one of the Bidens. The fact that it involves five family members indicates that there is a culture within the Biden family that trades off Joe’s power. And Joe appears willing to act on their behalf whenever he can.
The Bidens leverage Joe’s power to their financial benefit. But as we will see in the next chapter, others are also prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to leverage their power in creative and destructive ways.
4
Cory Booker
Cory Booker is a rock star senator with a cultivated persona, heroic mystique, and a crowd of celebrity friends. He hangs out with Oprah Winfrey and Spike Lee, and does big financial deals with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google. On camera, he performs fits of derring-do, including saving people from burning buildings and rescuing puppies.1 To his admirers, he is a sensei of sorts. “He’s a vegan and a Rhodes Scholar, and he never touches alcohol or tobacco,” notes one admiring journalist. “He meditates daily, and Tweets quotes from Jewish scholars and Buddhist priests.”2
As a senator, Booker has demonstrated a penchant for rhetorical flourish. When U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was up for Senate confirmation, Senator Booker famously threatened to break ethics rules by releasing confidential records about him. “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” he declared. The disclosure was far less dramatic than Booker would claim; he knew in advance that the documents had been cleared for release.3
While on the national stage, Booker has consistently identified himself as a progressive, a reformer, a hero for the people. As he told one reporter back in 2013, “There’s nothing in that realm of progressive politics where you won’t find me.”4
Yet his meteoric rise, first to Newark city council member, then to Newark mayor, and now to U.S. senator, has left a trail of enriched friends. Booker’s public persona may be virtuous, but a look at his political climb reveals a politician who has leveraged his power for the benefit of his friends and supporters.
Booker himself is knit together as a tapestry of American history. Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. once tested Booker’s DNA for an episode of his PBS show Finding Your Roots. Gates discovered that Booker was 47 percent African, 45 percent European, and 7 percent Native American. Booker himself researched his ancestors and found a remarkable lineage, which seems to inform his pronouncements about national “unity.” As Booker writes in his book United, “I am descended from slaves and slave owners. I have Native American blood and am also the great-great-great-grandson of a white man who fought in the Creek War of 1836, in which Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land. I am the great-great-grandson of many slaves, and I am also the great-great-grandson of a corporal who fought in the Confederate Army. . . .”5
Booker grew up in the white, upper-class New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park, less than an hour outside of Newark. Booker’s father poetically described his family in their neighborhood as “four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream.”6 He excelled in high school as both a student and as an athlete and was named Gatorade New Jersey Football Player of the Year. His athletic prowess and academic skills meant a scholarship to attend Stanford University, where he graduated in 1991. Later he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied United States history before going on to Yale Law School.7
At Oxford, his religious views expanded in an unusual manner. Amid the graceful spires, he struck up a close friendship with Hasidic rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who founded the L’Chaim Society, an organization for Orthodox Jewish students. Boteach is a member of a unique branch of Judaic teaching that embraces the spiritual teachings of the Lubavitchers. Much of the spiritual guidance came from the work of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who died in 1994. Lubavitchers are part of Chabad, a Hasidic sect known for its “celebratory approach to the Jewish faith.” Booker, although raised Baptist, embraced (at least for a while) the Lubavitchers. When he returned to the United States, he maintained a close relationship with Rabbi Boteach. At Yale Law School, he cofounded a Jewish society with a rabbi. Booker visited Schneerson’s grave site, where he reportedly prayed three times. It is not clear if there were multiple visits or multiple prayers on one. When scholar Robert Curvin asked him about the gravesite visit(s) later, Booker oddly deflected his answer and avoided the subject.8
After he graduated from Yale Law School in 1997, the super law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom offered Booker a two-year fellowship to practice public interest law in Newark. For a $37,000 annual salary, he would be filing complaints against slumlords. Booker won some legal victories.9 It was during this time that the young lawyer would claim to experience a crucial turning point in his life. As he explained it later, he encountered a powerful woman named Virginia D. Jones, who was the head of the tenants’ association at Brick Towers, one of the worst housing projects in Newark. Jones explained to him the realities of urban life in Newark, showing him “drug dealers, a crack house, and rundown projects.” When Booker asked how he could help, she retorted, “Well, you can’t help me.” His takeaway was that he could help if he was prepared to stay there and make a real change. According to Booker, she and other tenant leaders eventually challenged him to seek political office, spurring his interest in running. Jones, however, offered a different version of events. She claims Booker asked her to support his candidacy for city council after he had been collecting signatures to get on the ballot.10
In 1998, Booker threw his hat in the ring and was on the ballot for Newark Municipal Council as the representative from the Central Ward. It would be a tough race. In the general election with three candidates, a rival named George Branch was ahead by more than 300 votes in the first round of voting, but since no one held a majority, there was a runoff. Booker struck a deal with local political boss “Big Steve” Adubato Sr., who “poured all of his troops behind Booker.”11 Adubato was the rough-talking, legendary boss of Newark’s North Ward. A fixture in Newark since 1962, Adubato served as Democratic Party chairman of the North Ward and sat on the executive board of the Newark Teachers Union. Big Steve also ran a collection of nonprofits and schools, operating out of the Clark Mansion, an imposing twenty-eight-room Queen Anne–style house.12
In the second round of voting, Booker won by 659 votes. Adubato would help Booker win reelection four years later, as well as become elected mayor. Adubato and his machine were an important component of Booker’s political rise culminating, so far, in his election to the U.S. Senate. Adubato would prove to be critical for Booker’s hold on power. As Professor Robert Curvin of Rutgers University puts it, “the Booker/Adubato relationship has been the most critical factor in building a path for Booker’s future victories in Newark. Adubato may, in fact, be Booker’s most important horse.”13
Over the years, Booker would return favors to Adubato. When the Oprah Winfrey Foundation sent $1.5 million to Cory Booker for distribution by his Newark Now nonprofit, $500,000 went to Adubato’s charter school. As Professor Curvin observes, when connecting Adubato’s support for Booker and the flow of money in return, “The timing was exquisite.”14
Although never personally accused, Adubato would be caught up in a swirl of ethics scandals. In 2009 and 2010, eleven people who were part of his political machine “were convicted of voting fraud and related crimes.” Booker aides were charged, too, “for improper handling and voting of several hundred messenger ballots.” Then a test cheating scandal broke out at a charter school that Adubato founded, the one that had received half a million do
llars from Booker’s nonprofit. Sixth-grade students’ standardized tests answers were changed to improve the school’s test scores.15
On the one hand, Booker’s early tenure as a member of the Newark Municipal Council was marred by his general absence at meetings. He often spent time attending meetings of the Stanford University Board of Trustees, where he was a member, and giving speeches on college campuses around the country.16 Councilman Booker also excelled at publicity events that gave him national media attention. In 1999, he dramatically announced that he was going to set up a tent and live in a crime-ridden area in Newark until the city cleaned up the area. The media presented it as an act of sacrifice; Booker was prepared to put himself on the line to help his community. The New York Times and New York magazine described the scene with drug dealers throwing feces at the tent along with nighttime “catcalls and threats” that reportedly kept Booker awake.17 In actuality, Booker was not exactly roughing it. The tent was “ballroom size.” Two people who participated in the event later revealed, “Booker seldom stayed in the tent overnight but would often leave after dark and return early the next morning. The press was led to believe that he camped at the site overnight.”18
* * *
By 2002, Booker was ready to aim higher, putting his sights on the mayor’s office. His main impediment was a powerful and corrupt incumbent who had been in office for more than a decade and a half.
Newark mayor Sharpe James was straight out of central casting. As one journalist put it, he was “a gap-toothed, gold-chain-wearing caricature of a corrupt, urban New Jersey politician”—a smart talker who had ruled over Newark for sixteen years.19 James actually held two political positions at the same time: He was both mayor and a New Jersey state senator, so he was drawing two salaries. Even the $250,000 he earned, though, could never fully explain how the public servant was able to buy properties in Newark and Florida, as well as a Rolls-Royce and a yacht.20
Profiles in Corruption Page 9