Some cases start with a tip. Some start with a hunch. This one started with an opponent who seemingly came out of nowhere.
A mayoral race in a major Florida city. The incumbent had held the seat for over a decade — a known quantity, popular enough, the kind of mayor who wins reelection by comfortable margins. Then this guy shows up. A Republican challenger. An Army veteran and homebuilder who had amassed a war chest in the neighborhood of $200,000 to $300,000 — real money for a municipal race. He had the polish. He had the narrative. Veteran. Businessman. Philanthropist. Founder of multiple charities dedicated to helping wounded veterans and fighting breast cancer. On paper, this was a credible candidate with a compelling story.
The client wanted us to vet him before the race heated up. Standard engagement. Run the background. Check the claims. See if anything's there.
Something was there.
The first thing I did — the thing I always do — is pull the financials. When a candidate's biography is built on charitable work, the IRS Form 990 is your best friend. It's the annual tax filing that every registered nonprofit is required to submit. It tells you where the money came from, where the money went, who got paid, and what the organization actually spent on its stated mission. Most people never look at them. That's a mistake.
This candidate's primary organization claimed to provide funding for veterans' medical care, operate a suicide prevention program for veterans, offer therapeutic family retreats for veterans recuperating from the stress of war, and provide assistance to veterans fighting breast cancer. Noble causes. The kind of mission statement that makes donors reach for their checkbooks without asking questions.
So I started asking questions.
IRS 990 analysis is one of the most powerful tools in political research, and one of the most underutilized. A 990 filing will tell you things a candidate will never tell you voluntarily: how much they paid themselves, how much actually went to programs, who their vendors were, and whether the organization's stated mission has any relationship to reality. Most researchers stop at the summary page. We read every schedule, every attachment, every footnote. The devil isn't in the details — the devil is the details.
The organization had collected more than $20 million in donations over just a few years of operation. Twenty million dollars. For an organization most people had never heard of. That's a lot of money flowing through a charity that was supposedly funding medical care and suicide prevention for veterans.
So where did it go?
I traced the expenditures line by line. The vast majority of the money — and I mean the vast majority — went to for-profit telemarketing firms. Professional fundraising operations that were keeping the lion's share of every dollar they brought in. When I finished the math, I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen. Ninety-five percent. Ninety-five percent of every donation was consumed by fundraising costs, administrative expenses, and the candidate's own salary and benefits. Five cents on the dollar was making it anywhere near a veteran.
But that wasn't even the worst of it. See, when a nonprofit reports to the IRS, it has to break down what it actually spent on "program services" — the activities that supposedly further its charitable mission. That's the number that's supposed to justify the organization's tax-exempt status. It's the whole point. So I pulled the program services breakdown expecting to find grants to veterans, medical funding, retreat costs — something.
What I found was a line item describing access to personal training, saunas, spa services, exercise facilities, yoga classes. On paper, it looked like the organization was providing veterans with some kind of comprehensive wellness program. There was a phone number attached to the program services. So I called it.
It was a national gym chain.
I asked to speak with the manager. I explained who I was and what I was looking into. I told him this phone number was listed on a veterans charity's IRS filing under program services. And the manager — without hesitation — told me he recognized the candidate's name. Recognized the charity. Said the candidate comes in every couple of months and asks for free gym passes.
My jaw hit the floor.
Free gym passes. That was the entire program. The organization that had raised twenty million dollars on the promise of helping wounded veterans and preventing suicide — its primary reported program expenditure was free gym passes from a commercial gym. The candidate was listing the gym's amenities — the personal training, the saunas, the yoga — as his charity's "program services," as though handing a veteran a guest pass to a gym constituted the medical care and therapeutic retreats he'd promised donors.
He was listing a commercial gym's amenities — personal training, saunas, yoga — as his charity's "program services." Twenty million dollars in donations, and the program was free gym passes he picked up every couple of months.
— Evan FrancoI've been doing this work for a long time, and that was a new one. I actually laughed out loud. Not because it was funny, but because of the sheer audacity of it. The brazenness. You almost have to respect it — almost — the way you respect a pickpocket who steals your watch while shaking your hand.
Then I looked at the suicide prevention program. The organization claimed to operate a suicide prevention hotline for veterans — a cause that resonates deeply with anyone who's followed the crisis of veteran suicide in this country. Donors gave money believing their contributions were funding a lifeline for veterans in crisis.
So I traced the hotline number. Verified the registration. Checked the operational structure.
The "suicide prevention hotline" was the candidate's personal cell phone.
Let that sink in. A veteran in crisis, on the worst night of his life, calls what he believes is a staffed prevention hotline — and it rings through to the personal cell phone of a guy who's out raising money for his mayoral campaign. No trained counselors. No 24/7 coverage. No clinical infrastructure. Just a cell phone number listed on a tax form so the organization could claim it operated a suicide prevention program.
The charity wasn't operating under just one name. It was a constellation of fictitious business names — each one designed to tug a different heartstring. Wounded veterans. Military families. Breast cancer. Emergency blood banks. Each name funneled donations to the same place. And that place was a network of for-profit telemarketing operations that kept almost everything they touched. I had to track down and get in contact with the telemarketers themselves to trace where the money actually went. This is what nonprofit fraud looks like at scale: it doesn't look like fraud. It looks like patriotism.
I called the client and explained what I had. The 990 analysis. The vendor tracing. The gym passes. The suicide hotline. The network of fictitious names. All of it. Then I put together a deployment plan — a strategy for getting the truth about this candidate into the hands of the press in a way that would actually land.
The centerpiece of that plan was what we call "the handhold."
In political research, a handhold is a custom document built specifically for a journalist. It's not a raw data dump. It's not a stack of filings with a sticky note that says "good luck." A handhold takes everything the researcher has found — the 990 breakdowns, the vendor connections, the program service fraud, the sourcing — and draws the connections from Point A to Point B to Point C so the journalist can understand the wrongdoing immediately. You annotate the filings. You explain what each box on the form means. You lay out the narrative so clearly that the journalist doesn't have to do a lot of work — and in some cases, any work whatsoever — to see the story. A good handhold turns a complex financial fraud into something a reporter can process, verify, and broadcast. That's the difference between research that sits in a filing cabinet and research that changes an election.
We built the handhold. Annotated the 990 forms box by box. Laid out the fundraising costs — what the telemarketing firms were keeping, what the candidate was taking from what was left. The gym passes. The suicide hotline number. Everything sourced, everything connected, everything a journalist would need to walk on air and tell this story with confidence.
And then I had one more idea. I suggested that the journalist try calling the suicide prevention hotline number — live, on air. Just dial it. See what happens. See if anyone picks up at the lifeline that this candidate told donors was saving veterans' lives.
The journalist did exactly that. Called the number. Live. On air. The hotline that was supposed to be saving veterans' lives.
Nobody answered.
The candidate lost. Got about a third of the vote against the incumbent. Not even close. But the real fallout came later.
The Federal Trade Commission came knocking. So did the attorneys general of six states — Florida, California, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, and Oregon. In 2018, the FTC and all six states filed actions against the candidate and his organization as part of a coordinated enforcement initiative. The complaint laid it all out: the misleading solicitations, the for-profit telemarketing firms, the negligible program spending, the fictitious business names. Everything we had found — and then some.
The settlement was a $20.4 million judgment — the total amount donors had given between 2014 and 2017. The candidate was required to pay $1.75 million to legitimate veterans' charities. He was permanently banned from soliciting charitable contributions, banned from managing any charity, and banned from overseeing charitable assets. Every donor list the organization had accumulated had to be destroyed.
Permanently banned. Think about that. This is a man who stood on a stage and asked a city of nearly 300,000 people to elect him mayor. A man who built his entire public identity on service to veterans. And behind the curtain, he was running one of the most brazen charity frauds the FTC had seen in years.
I think about this case a lot. Not because it was technically difficult — the 990s were right there, waiting for someone to actually read them. Not because the candidate was some criminal mastermind — he wasn't. He was just a guy who figured out that most people don't check. Most donors don't pull the filings. Most voters don't trace the money. Most campaigns don't vet the opposition's charitable claims. He was betting on the fact that patriotism is a shield — that nobody questions the guy who says he helps veterans.
That's exactly why we exist. Somebody has to check.