In Today's Debut Installment, "Grift Watch" Exposes the Weird Financial Shenanigans of Mar-a-Lago "Panhandler” Sergio Gor

A former top aide to Senator Rand Paul, Gor is currently directing Right for America , a Super PAC financed by demented pro-Israeli billionaires. Right for Sergio Gor might be a more accurate name.

Image of greatly anticipated new door stop “Save America,” the latest tasteful cash play from Winning Team Publishing, a company whose key players include Sergio Gor, the subject of today’s inaugural “Grift Watch” series, and Donald Trump Jr., the son of former President Donald Trump.

With the November 5 presidential election just 77 days aways, I’m going to be running a semi-regular feature between now and then called Grift Watch, with today’s story on Trump campaign fundraiser Sergio Gor marking the inaugural installment. It’s a great way to kick off the series because Gor, who’s well known in Washington political circles but almost entirely unfamiliar beyond the city’s borders, has thrived so spectacularly, and in equally brazen fashion, that even many top Republicans deem him to be one of the capital’s preeminent hucksters. 

Gor was once known as “the Mayor of Mar-a-Lago,” but now is widely mocked as “the Patio Panhandler,” The Daily Beast reported in a story it published in March of this year, which quoted one unnamed source as saying he’s always looking “to find a new way to line his pockets.” That matches the type of comments I’ve heard regularly about Gor since I first heard about him two years ago, when I co-authored a story for Agencia Publica of Brazil that showed he was seeking to forge ties between the far right in that country and the US. Gor was working closely with then-President Jair Bolsonaro and his closest allies, and covering his political and financial tracks by operating through three linked anonymously owned Delaware shell companies he controlled.

Grift Watch will alternate between covering Republican and Democratic fraudsters, because moral paragons abound in both parties. Indeed, I could write a story a day on the general topic of political grift and never run short on material, particularly during a presidential election year when the amount of money ripe for the picking is so enormous that political operatives – who aren’t known to have the highest standards to begin with – routinely look for opportunities to make megaprofits by skirting legal and ethical rules or evading them entirely. 

During the first six months of this year, the Joe Biden-turned-Kamala Harris campaign committee raised $284.1 million while Donald Trump’s main political treasury brought in $217.2 million, Forbes reported on August 7, citing Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. Based on initial figures, Forbes estimated Harris raised a staggering $310 million in July, which left it with cash on hand of about $377 million, which included money in the bank accounts of the Democratic National Committee and affiliated groups, while the Trump campaign brought in only $138 million last month but had $327 million available to spend during the rest of the campaign. 

If those numbers are correct, the combined haul of the two candidates from January through July came to about $950,000, and there’s plenty of other cash sloshing around Washington in bank accounts controlled by Democratic and Republican groups that aren’t directly tied to Harris or Trump, but are separated by a very thin line. All of which makes Grift Watch an excellent regular feature for a publication named Washington Babylon. 

Gor with his political-financial mentor, as seen on his profile page at Classmates.com.

A long time aide to Republican Senator Rand Paul, Gor resigned in mid-2020 to become chief of staff for the Trump Victory Finance Committee, one of the former president’s main fundraising vehicles during his failed reelection bid that year. In 2021, he and Donald Trump Jr. became partners in Winning Team Publishing, which is one of the trio of Delaware firms Gor utilizes along with  Winning Team LLC and Gold Standard Publishing, all that were established by a shell company incorporator called Harvard Business Services.

Winning Team LLC is ostensibly the corporate structure for an all but invisible similarly named political consulting firm, which Gor claimed to be representing when he was in Brazil in 2022, and works for clients in the US as well, among them Senators Paul and Mike Lee, and House members Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, as well as Make America Great Again Action, a major pro-Trump Super PAC. Winning Team had at least a dozen other clients, but payments for much if not all of its work are routed through Gold Standard Publishing, FEC records show.

The first release of Winning Team Publishing, the Gor-Trump Jr. joint venture, was Our Journey Together, a vanity coffee table book of photos of the former president and captions written by none other than MAGA’s spiritual and religious leader himself. In 2022, when I co-wrote the story for Agencia Publica, Our Journey Together, which was marketed as "a must-have for all Patriots," was selling for $75. A copy signed by Trump Jr. went for $199 and a special edition autographed by the former president – along with a "bundle pack" of gifts, including priceless memorabilia such as a red "Make America Great Again" cap and Eric Trump's book Liberal Privilege, which retailed for $30 – could be had for $999 for those with deeper pockets. 

The latter group no doubt included MAGA-friendly politicians and political committees which, as is invariably the case when this time-honored scam is run by top Democrats as well as Republicans, buy it in bulk to offer as a perk to their donors, and to ensure that the author and affiliated publishing house make a fortune and simultaneously turn a book that otherwise would go straight to remainder tables becomes a bestseller. Since Gor signed up with the Trump campaign in 2020, about $1.5 million in payments from political campaigns and committees had flowed to Winning Team Publishing and Gold Standard Publishing, The Daily Beast reported in its March 2024 story.

That story focused on Gor’s latest political-financial venture, a new Trump Super PAC called “Right for America,” which was established in late January of this year, about six weeks before The Daily Beast ran its story. The Super PAC, which one source said was “almost laughable” in terms of crude money grubbing, planned to spend “tens of millions of dollars” to bolster Trump’s re-election effort, the publication reported.

The Daily Beast story ran before Right for America had filed any significant disclosure reports to the FEC, but the Super PAC’s  receipts and expenditures between January and June 30 are now available, which a campaign finance specialist brought to my attention, and there are some eyebrow raising entries. Right for America received $38.6 million through the end of June, and more than 55 percent of that came in during the last 31 days of the reporting period so the total has surely soared since the close of the second quarter ended.

Slightly north of $20 million of the $38.6 million in total receipts came from Isaac Perlmutter, an Israeli-American billionaire, and his wife Laura. Perlmutter was born in the so-called “British Mandate of Palestine” six years before Israel was founded. He served in the Israel Defense Forces during the June War of 1967 and, as expected, his views on the Middle East are what the New York Times would describe as “pro-Israel,” but I feel strongly are better captured in the words “pro-war crimes as long as the victims are Palestinians.”

Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter was the chairman of Marvel Entertainment until last year when the company’s parent firm, the Walt Disney Company, fired him because based on what I’ve read he was a complete pain in the ass. The image above was created for a discussion on YouTube regarding Perlmutter’s humiliating dismissal from Marvel by Midnight's Edge.

The Perlmutters are regulars at Mar-a-Lago, which if you’re a cynical person such as myself could possibly explain why Isaac, or Ike as he’s known by friends, was one of three club members the ex-president “informally authorized...to direct policy” at the Department of Veterans Affairs as “spoils” for their lavish financial support of Trump, as ProPublica reported in 2018. Career officials at the VA “expressed deep frustrations over having to entertain ‘ridiculous’ policy recommendations” from Perlmutter and the other two arrogant, dimwitted bozos, according to a rough description drawn by CNN after one of its reporters reviewed documents obtained the following year by the Washington watchdog group CREW. 

Robert Book, chairman of Book Capital Enterprises, “a family office focused on direct investments across the entire private investment spectrum including direct debt and equity investments as well as private equity and venture capital fund investments,” in the words of a business bio – or in plain English, “a leech on the bowels of humanity” – tossed in another $4.1 million. Book is the patriarch of one of three American families who have heavily bankrolled the political career of Israeli Prime Minister and Génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, The Independent reported in 2015. 

Additional funding for Right for America came from:

• Two of the Super PAC’s board members, Anthony and Lee Rizzuto Jr., who are both reportedly close friends of Trump and Mar-a-Lago fixtures. The two collectively tossed in $4.25 million, of which $3.25 million came from Lomangino, a New York City trash magnate who now lives in Florida. Rizzuto, who’s also the treasurer of Right for America, threw in the other $1 million. In 2016, he posted a variety of “conspiracy theories about Trump’s Republican primary rivals, which came back two years later to help tank his nomination as ambassador to Bermuda,” but thankfully Trump held firm and appointed Rizzuto as consul general to Bermuda, which didn’t require Senate confirmation but sparked “days of protests on the island and a petition protesting his appointment reportedly 35,000 names long,” according to The Daily Beast’s story five months ago.

• Other notable financial sustenance for Gor’s Super PAC came from Doug Leone, the morally grotesque – in my assessment anyway – billionaire venture capitalist formerly with Silicon Valley-headquartered Sequoia Capital ($2 million); and Nevadan Toby SCAM-mell – I’ve tried for hours to remove the capitalization, bold font, and hyphen separating the two parts of his last name but due to some bizarre glitch I’m unable to and am giving up so I can finally have dinner and a few drinks this evening –  the founder of a firm called “Womply,” which is exactly as detrimental to the public good and human soul as it sounds. 

  If you need proof of that, which I can’t imagine anyone reading this story is dumb enough to require, but in the event someone feels they still need it after seeing the name the brainless dipshit gave to his preposterously moronic joke of a company, consider that four months ago the Federal Trade Commission ordered Womply and the aforementioned SCAM-mell to pay $26 million to settle charges “they preyed on small businesses in desperate need” of Covid-19 relief funding.”

Returning to the matter of Gor’s Right for America Super PAC, where, you’re probably wondering, did all of its $38.6 million go? Well, Gor got $15,412 for unspecified travel; about the same amount went to Mar-a-Lago to pay for use as an event space and catering; and a slightly larger sum went to expenditures for trekking across the country that weren’t itemized in the Super PAC’s FEC filings.

What’s most striking of all in terms of how Right for America spent the money, is that it basically didn’t spend it. During the first half of the year, it only dispensed a paltry $169,919.69 in total disbursements, which is quite a bit less than the “tens of millions of dollars” it pledge to spend to help get Trump re-elected, as it said it intended to do, according to The Daily Beast story.  

I guess we’ll find out in Right for America’s FEC filings before or after the election, how it spent the other $38.4 million it took in between January and June of 2024, and whatever it spends later this year. For now, though, it’s apparently sitting at the PAC’s bank account at Chain Bridge Bank in McLean, Virginia, aka the Bank of the CIA, whose headquarters sits right down the road.

I’m being tongue-in-cheek there, as I doubt the bank, which really has long been referred to by the moniker I just used, is using Right America’s money for anything nefarious, or at least anything more nefarious than electing Trump, because the CIA can certainly come up with the money to pay for that sort of thing. But in the absence of hard evidence, let me make two wild guesses.

First, thus far there’s no record of Gor having been paid for his work as the Super PAC’s CEO in the group’s FEC filings. Gor isn’t known to have a heart of gold, so one way or another some chunk of  Right for America’s cash reserves are paying for him to be compensated at a respectable rate.

Second, I seriously doubt Right for America’s financial reserves are accruing 0.5 percent interest at Chain Bridge Bank. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts, CEO Gor has the money invested somewhere and it’s generating a decent return that will be used for whatever he, the Super PAC’s board, and funders decide to spend it on, which with less than three months before Election Day probably won’t all go to support Trump’s return to the White House.

I emailed Gor a request for comment earlier today. He’s never responded to attempts I’ve made when I wrote about him on earlier occasions, and thus far he hasn’t done so this time either. If he does break with past precedent, I’ll promptyl update this story.