Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Author:Jane Mayer [Mayer, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385535595
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-19T00:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER NINE
Money Is Speech: The Long Road to Citizens United
On May 17, 2010, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire loped to the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David Koch was being honored for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees. A longtime admirer of classical ballet, he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season and had given many millions before that. As Koch received a token award, he was flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, the socialite Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and the political scion Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought in 1995 and then sold eleven years later for $32 million, having found it too small.
The gala marked the official arrival of Koch as one of New York’s most prominent philanthropists. At the age of seventy, he was recognized for an impressive history of giving. In 2008, he donated $100 million to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bore his name. He had given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing was named for him. That spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he pledged at least $10 million for their renovation. He was a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and served on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than $40 million, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.
One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. In New York philanthropic circles, though, David Koch was a celebrity in his own right. With the help of a bevy of public relations advisers, he had sculpted an impressive public image. One associate said Koch had confided that he gave away approximately 40 percent of his income each year, which he estimated at about $1 billion. This of course left him with an annual income of some $600 million and considerably helped ease his tax burden, but he enjoyed the role, a family member said, in part because it bought him respectability. There was another side to his spending, however, that was then still largely secret. While David was happy to put his name on some of the country’s most esteemed and beloved cultural and scientific institutions and to take a public bow at the ballet, his family’s prodigious political spending was a much more private affair.
It would in fact take years before the faint outlines of the Kochs’ massive political machinations began to surface through required public tax filings, and the full story may never be known.
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