They smiled for the camera, 19 men and women around a long table in the Lightkeepers restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne.
On one side of the dining table at the posh Miami resort, Republican congressmen Lloyd Smucker and Devin Nunes — in Florida for a series of meetings with colleagues and donors — sat beside each other and leaned in to get their faces in the photo. They had gathered at a pivotal moment in the GOP’s history, having just lost the White House and with memories still fresh of the deadly Capitol riot fueled by their party’s leader, former President Donald Trump.
Directly across from the two Trump allies, holding the long stem of his wine glass, sat Adam Kidan.
It was 2021, just four years after Mr. Kidan had emerged into the high-stakes arena of top-tier campaign financiers. In that short time, the convicted felon and former business partner of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff had risen from a quiet corner of Central Pennsylvania into the rarified air of well-connected political rainmakers.
As Mr. Kidan’s contributions mounted — since early 2017, donations from him and his companies add up to nearly $2 million — his star rose.
Some of those contributions, made through businesses that have little public presence beyond corporate filings and campaign records, have caught the attention of at least one watchdog group. Mr. Kidan has not been accused of skirting campaign finance law.
But the flood of donations and the access he gained to some of the country's most prominent politicians illustrates how top political donors can enter the corridors of power through doors not open to average voters. And with critical campaigns next year for president and U.S. Senate, good-government experts worry that the use of corporations to dump cash into elections is undermining laws designed to show the public who is behind the most consequential decision-makers in America.
For Mr. Kidan, the donations coincided with personal meetings with some of those very politicians. He was given a coveted role on the campaign of Mr. Smucker, a Lancaster County Republican. Just months before the Ritz-Carlton gathering, Mr. Kidan and his romantic partner attended a White House holiday party, where they mingled with the likes of Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. Mr. Kidan later attended a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida residence and gilded private club, where Mr. Kidan was a member, according to court records and photos posted on social media.
Those photos show he has met the former president several times. When Mr. Kidan and his partner held what several people have called a “wedding” celebration at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year — while his long-running divorce proceeding with another woman was still ongoing in Lancaster County court — the former president and first lady joined the party. They posed with the couple and one of their honored guests, the renowned Italian tenor Andrea Bocceli, whom Mr. Kidan has referred to as a close personal friend, court records state.
Just months later, a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign got a $250,000 windfall from Churchill Business Consultants, an obscure, Lancaster-based corporation. It’s one of the 10 largest donations the PAC has received this year and the largest to come out of Pennsylvania. (Corporations cannot legally contribute to candidates, but they can give to super PACs.)
On paper, the firm is headquartered at 27 W. Lemon St. in Lancaster, a small, century-old brick building that sits in the shadow of a parking garage near the city’s historic center. Outside, no signs advertise the business. A social media search turns up no accounts for Churchill Business Consultants. Google the company, and no website appears.
Churchill’s corporate filings in New York — it isn’t registered with the Pennsylvania Department of State — list Mr. Kidan as CEO. At the time, the small Lancaster building listed as the company’s headquarters also housed Empire Workforce Solutions, a temporary employment agency founded by Mr. Kidan.
Another business registered at the same address, Lancaster Travel and Leisure, donated $200,000 to a super PAC backing celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidate in Pennsylvania’s high-stakes 2022 U.S. Senate race. Like Churchill, Lancaster Travel has little public presence beyond corporate filings. Those filings list Mr. Kidan as president, and show the company was formed just five months before its first donation.
Lancaster Travel’s donations were scrutinized by the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based watchdog group. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision Citizens United opened the door to corporate contributions, some people have used LLCs to funnel money to politicians in a way that masks the true source of the cash, said Saurav Ghosh, the center's director of federal campaign finance reform. Monitoring federal records for signs of those donations is a key part of the group’s work.
"What we often find is an LLC that appears to exist only on paper and has no real presence, whether physical or online," Mr. Ghosh said. "We often refer to them as straw-donor schemes. That’s illegal because the Federal Election Campaign Act requires that all contributions be made in the name of the true contributor, which facilitates the kind of electoral transparency that’s a cornerstone of our democracy."
With Lancaster Travel, Campaign Legal Center researchers were “pretty quickly” able to link the company back to Mr. Kidan, and therefore decided not to take the next step when they suspect malfeasance: filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
"We are actively keeping an eye on it for if and when it crosses the line," Mr. Ghosh said.
Mr. Kidan’s attorney said it’s “categorically false” that any of his contributions were inappropriate.
“Mr. Kidan has complied with all applicable laws in making political contributions,” the lawyer, Damion Robinson, wrote in response to a list of questions from the Post-Gazette.
Mr. Kidan hasn’t been shy about attaching his name to political cash. More than $1.3 million in donations during the last six years have come directly from him. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm of which Mr. Smucker was a vice-chairman, received more than $700,000 from Mr. Kidan. More than a quarter-million went to support Mr. Smucker and political groups closely associated with him, state and federal campaign records show.
Mr. Smucker, a former vice-chairman of the NRCC, put Mr. Kidan on his campaign’s steering committee, a position typically reserved for a candidate’s wealthiest or best-connected supporters. The two have traveled outside the state together at least five times, including to Florida and California’s Napa Valley, LNP | LancasterOnline first reported.
Mr. Smucker’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment or a list of emailed questions.
Before his reemergence in Republican fundraising circles in early 2017, when he gave Mr. Smucker’s campaign the maximum amount allowed by law, Mr. Kidan had been out of the game for 16 years. A long-time Republican, Mr. Kidan had given $27,500 through the 1990s and early 2000s, but stopped donating in April 2001.
Among his last contributions were a pair of $1,000 donations to former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, in 2000 and 2001.
At the time, Mr. Kidan had partnered with Mr. Abramoff, then a powerful Washington lobbyist, in a $147-million deal to buy SunCruz Casinos. Founded by Greek-born businessman Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, the company took customers on cruises into international waters, where they could gamble outside the reach of U.S. law.
In March 2000, when negotiations over the purchase hit a rough patch, Mr. Ney entered comments into the Congressional Record criticizing Mr. Boulis by name, The Washington Post reported more than a decade ago. Mr. Ney would later plead guilty in a sprawling corruption and influence-peddling investigation that centered on Mr. Abramoff.
The prosecution became one of the biggest political scandals in a generation, ensnaring then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, congressional staffers, and two members of the George W. Bush administration.
Mr. Kidan and Mr. Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud in a separate Justice Department investigation into the SunCruz purchase — a plea deal that saddled Mr. Kidan with more than $20 million in restitution owed to the federal government.
For Mr. Boulis, the consequences were far more dire.
The deal was finalized in September 2000, but a dispute over $23 million owed to Mr. Boulis escalated into his eventual murder in a mafia hit on a South Florida street.
Mr. Kidan, afraid that Mr. Boulis might hurt him, had entered into an arrangement with two of the gangsters involved — Anthony “Big Tony” Moscatiello and Anthony “Little Tony” Ferrari, reputed members of the Gambino crime family — shortly after the September 2000 deal for SunCruz, according to a ruling by Florida Appeals Court Judge Martha Warner.
Mr. Kidan wanted the word out that he had “connections,” the judge wrote.
As months went by and the promised millions never arrived for Mr. Boulis, the dispute escalated — and the mobsters moved in.
Around 9 p.m. on Feb. 6, 2001, Mr. Boulis left his Broward County office for the last time. As he drove south on Miami Road, a car stopped in front of him. Then another behind him. A black Ford Mustang heading the opposite direction pulled up beside Mr. Boulis’ car and a gunman inside opened fire, killing the businessman.
Mr. Kidan was never charged in the assassination and later testified that he had no idea the gangsters were going to murder Mr. Boulis. Indeed, when he returned to the area after the murder, he asked Mr. Moscatiello what had happened, according to records of the mobsters’ trials.
“It was very unfortunate,” Moscatiello told him, according to court records. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.”
Moscatiello and Ferrari were charged with Mr. Boulis’ murder in 2005, the same year Mr. Kidan pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges in connection with the SunCruz deal. The following year, facing a five-year sentence at Fort Dix federal prison in New Jersey for his role in the SunCruz deal, Mr. Kidan offered to testify against them at their murder trial.
In exchange for his cooperation, Mr. Kidan saw his sentence reduced to 27 months, court records show. He was released in May 2009 and later moved to Pennsylvania with his wife at the time, Tracy Schneider-Kidan.
Two years after his sentence ended, the couple started Chartwell Staffing Solutions, a temp agency. From its humble beginnings in the basement of a sandwich shop on Centerville Road in a Lancaster suburb, their company grew into a sprawling empire with 50 branches across 32 states, according to court records from their divorce.
As the company thrived, the Kidans enjoyed the trappings of wealth, with a million-dollar home in Lititz, a quiet town of fewer than 10,000 people dotted with stone buildings emblematic of the Lancaster area’s colonial past. They had full-time housekeepers, drove luxury vehicles, and took trips to Europe, Ms. Schneider-Kidan said in court filings.
She said during their divorce that Mr. Kidan was sapping the business of crucial resources to finance their lifestyle — and that of his mistress at the time — which eventually left the company in dire financial straits when they separated in 2017. Mr. Kidan splits his time between homes in Lancaster, South Florida, and California, according to court records.
Their divorce was finalized just over a week ago, on Sept. 29, more than six years after proceedings began, but the couple’s legal battles continue. Last year, Mr. Kidan sued his then-estranged wife for defamation, accusing her of telling his banker that he was laundering money and was “about to be arrested,” his complaint states. Mr. Kidan denied that allegation and accused her of trying to scuttle his temp agency.
As their marriage went through its slow dissolution, Mr. Kidan’s role in Republican politics ramped up.
A Republican congressman in Michigan. Another from New York. A dentist-turned-politician elected in one of the most deeply conservative House districts in Georgia. Across the country, GOP politicians began reaping the benefits of Mr. Kidan’s largesse. By the end of 2017, he had donated nearly $54,000, almost twice what he’d contributed during his earlier decade of political giving.
The former College Republican and serial entrepreneur was also putting his name on an expanding constellation of businesses incorporated in Pennsylvania, Florida, and his native New York, many of them “seemingly intertwined and interconnected with Empire,” the staffing company he founded, according to Lancaster County Judge Leonard G. Brown III’s ruling in his divorce case. The businesses continue to fund a lavish existence, giving him the use of three houses, a Porsche SUV, and the resources to pay for a lifestyle that costs more than $27,000 a month, records show.
The businesses include the two that donated to the Trump and Oz super PACs, and another — Atlantic Solutions Group — that gave $50,000 in late 2021 to a PAC backing Jeff Bartos’ unsuccessful 2022 U.S. Senate race.
Mr. Bartos had been his party’s nominee for lieutenant governor in 2018. A lifelong Pennsylvania resident, Mr. Bartos’ Senate race four years later was eclipsed by the entry of three wealthy candidates — Dr. Oz; former Ambassador Carla Sands; and David McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO who is the early favorite for the Republican Senate nomination in 2024.
A Montgomery County developer and longtime Republican fundraiser, Mr. Bartos finished with less than 5% of the vote in last year’s seven-way GOP primary.
Key to the race was Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz, which came on April 9, a Saturday. The previous Tuesday, Mr. Kidan’s company, Lancaster Travel and Leisure, made the first of four contributions to support the celebrity doctor — a $50,000 super PAC donation, the same amount Atlantic Solutions Group had given to the pro-Bartos PAC.
Though Mr. Kidan shifted his financial support to Mr. Trump’s favored candidate, his connections to Mr. Bartos continued. Just this year, Mr. Bartos and Mr. Kidan were listed as directors of a newly formed company, IBUNG, Inc. The company’s address is a beachfront condominium in Highland Beach, Fla., owned by Mr. Bartos, according to its filing.
Earlier, Mr. Bartos became the registered agent for Aviator Consultants, which has the same incorporator as IBUNG: Simone Palazzolo, who also serves as legal counsel to Empire Workforce Solutions, according to Empire’s website.
In the Aviator filing, Mr. Palazzolo’s address is listed as 27 W. Lemon St., the same Lancaster address of the companies that donated to groups backing Mr. Oz, Mr. Bartos, and Mr. Trump.
Like Churchill Business Consultants and Lancaster Travel, IBUNG and Aviator Consultants appear to have no websites or social media accounts.
Mr. Bartos and Mr. Palazzolo did not respond to calls and emails.
Mr. Robinson, Mr. Kidan’s lawyer, declined to address questions about what the businesses do. “As you know,” he wrote in an email, “Mr. Kidan has founded many successful business ventures, and has been both politically active and active in the community for close to 40 years.”
It's those business ventures that have enabled Mr. Kidan's extravagant lifestyle, paying his $200,000 Mar-a-Lago initiation fee while, on paper, he draws only a $150,000 salary from Empire Workforce Solutions, according to Judge Brown’s ruling in the divorce.
"[Federal election] law is still grappling with what to do with folks who basically run their whole life out of LLCs or other companies," said Mr. Ghosh, of the Campaign Legal Center.
When that life includes prolific political giving, it can obscure the true source of a politicians' support behind the name of an unknown corporation, Mr. Ghosh said.
"They’re the ideal vehicle for undermining electoral transparency."
Mike Wereschagin: mwereschagin@post-gazette.com; Twitter @Wrschgn; Matt Bernardini is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
First Published: October 8, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: October 9, 2023, 10:14 a.m.
