Koch, Wm

=<div></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/</a></div><div>
</div><div>the first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveals the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle-class treading water, the upper-middle-class growing, and the richest among us luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, my analysis shows.That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim that he had created the best economy ever until the pandemic.      trump policies help the prosperous and rich including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats.The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man”</a> and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”These figures come from my annual analysis of <a href="https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">IRS data known as Table 1.4</a>. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns.  I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect <a href="https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">inflation of 4.1%</a> between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year that the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017, took effect. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">High Income Households Multiply</h3>Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans, my analysis shows. And, oh, do they benefit!Trump policies help the prosperous and rich, the data reveal, including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats, a <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">separate report shows</a>.The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Who Saves on Taxes</h3>The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of one percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings, thanks to Trump and Congressional Republicans.This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for the vast majority of Americans, along with cuts in government services, its surprising that he enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000—except that none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Understating Incomes</h3>The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that it cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The <a href="https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/549/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">sharp decline in IRS auditing</a> means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump Ignores Rich Tax Cheats</h3>In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file a tax return. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported May 29</a>.Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the Inspector General wrote.One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. <a href="https://www.dcreport.org/tag/koch-papers/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">DCReport’s five-part series</a> last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Borrowing to Help the Rich</h3>Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Curious Anomaly</h3>In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half of a percent.The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.My analysis of the new tax data also shows a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks, and have other sources of income from capital.Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.<h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Infuriating Fact</h3>There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.</div><div> </div><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click1.e.alternet.org/bjdbqszvztdydqmmyjfzzyzmmjymvgcnbtzdfpsqfpp_hcqqvfmfzvccfmsfcfb.html?a=&b=300&c=21989&d=2" style="">IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office</a><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Georgia, " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-style="font-style" italic="italic" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" padding="padding"> William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s…
no lnxIRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took officewritten by David Cay Johnson June 6, 2019William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch…
David Cay JohnstonWilliam Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch even hosted a Trump campaign fundraiser at his Cape Cod vacation home in August 2016. Co-chairs were asked to donate or raise $100,000 for the event; simply attending cost $2,700.

Atop the invitation to Koch’s home? Trump Finance Chairman Steven T. Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary of the United States, whose duties include overseeing the Internal Revenue Service.
In part one of the Koch Papers, we revealed that Bill Koch has enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars of untaxed profits from his carbon-based businesses, having shifted profits earned in the United States to a subsidiary in the Bahamas. A 2016 whistleblower complaint prompted an IRS criminal investigation, but the IRS halted all communication with the whistleblower’s attorneys shortly after Trump became president.
In part two, we’ll explore how Koch’s businesses withheld critical documents, stymying IRS auditors. We’ll also publish the contents of the June 2017 email that signaled the IRS had stopped pursuing the complaint against Koch’s businesses, five months after Trump took office.
 These documents are among nearly a thousand pages obtained by DCReport@RawStory, which we refer to as the Koch Papers.==an 619Here’s how Trump neighbor and supporter William Koch avoided paying hundreds of millions in taxes Here’s how Trump neighbor and supporter William Koch avoided paying hundreds of millions in taxes William Koch image via Screengrabwritten by David Cay Johnson / Raw Story June 5, 2019Only one of the billionaire Koch brothers supported Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: William Ingraham Koch.Only one of the billionaire Koch brothers supported Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: William Ingraham Koch. Bill Koch even raised money for Trump, his nearby neighbor in Palm Beach, Fla.
That same year, IRS criminal agents began an investigation after receiving nearly 1,000 pages of documents detailing what were described as multiple tax frauds at Bill Koch’s companies. The documents, which we call the Koch Papers, came from a deeply knowledgeable source: Charles Middleton, who had been one of the companies’ top tax executives.
The IRS investigation went cold after Trump assumed office, documents obtained by DCReport show.
Michael Galdys, an IRS criminal investigation agent in West Palm Beach, gave no explanation as to why he was no longer pursuing the case when he sent a June 13, 2017 email to one of Middleton’s lawyers, William Cohan, in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.
Cohan, and Middleton’s Seattle lawyer, John Colvin, both say the IRS and Justice Department stopped acknowledging their calls, emails and letters after Trump became president.
Koch’s company, in a written statement, said Bill Koch “has not approached President Trump to discuss any significant Company business issues, tax-related or otherwise.” The company also said it discharged Middleton “for cause” and noted that the IRS closed an audit of the company’s 2011 and 2012 tax returns without making any changes.
The Koch Papers detail what Middleton and his lawyers say were multiple tax dodges over many years. The biggest involves profits from selling petroleum coke, a residue from oil refining that is among the dirtiest of all carbon fuels.
Two of Bill Koch’s better known and much richer brothers, Charles and David, are also heavily invested in carbon industries and in promoting their libertarian political philosophy. In 1983, Bill, who is David’s twin, sold his shares in the family business and set up his own operations under the Oxbow moniker. Charles and David have no involvement with Bill Koch’s company.
While his brothers are worth more than $50 billion each, according to Bloomberg magazine, Bill Koch, 79, is worth about $4.1 billion. He holds a Doctor of Science and two other chemical engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Clear and CompleteThe Koch Papers are remarkably clear and complete, raising questions about why the IRS would choose not to pursue an inquiry.  The head of the Justice Department’s tax division, which decides which IRS cases to pursue criminally, was notified of the case during the last days of the Obama Administration, the Koch Papers show.
The sham corporate tax shelters I’ve exposed over the decades were subtle, complex contracts, the legal equivalent of Rube Goldberg contraptions built on highly technical, and twisted, interpretations of tax law.
The Koch Papers, by contrast, reveal simple techniques. But recognizing those techniques would require seeing documents that were withheld from IRS auditors, Middleton wrote.
Back Taxes?
William Koch now owes our government hundreds of millions in taxes, penalties and interest, my analysis of the Koch Papers and other documents indicates, but he and his company would pay nothing if the investigation remains closed.
Federal law allows whistleblowers to collect up to 30 percent of any taxes, penalties and interest the IRS recovers as a result of the whistleblower complaint.  However, Middleton cannot collect any reward under terms of his separation agreement with Koch’s company, according to Cohan, Middleton’s main lawyer.
Cohan said that while his client may be contractually blocked from keeping any IRS reward, he and Colvin, Middleton’s other lawyer, may be able to collect. However, both Colvin and Cohan said they have no expectation that the Trump administration will pursue their client’s whistleblower complaints. They said their interest was in pushing for fair enforcement of tax laws.
Investigation Halted
Cohan said he believes “Trump made a call and that was all it took to stop the investigation.” A White House spokesman, in an email, issued a non-responsive comment that he declared was “off the record.” (Journalists, not sources, decide what is off the record.) A second request drew no reply from the White House.
Any Trump involvement would also be appropriate for Congress to investigate, both as a matter of potential criminal conduct and as a potential article of impeachment. Trump vowed to voters that he would “drain the swamp” and to “put America first” under policies that in every instance “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”
But even if Trump played no role, Congress can obtain the tax documents, question Koch and his senior staff, as well as IRS auditors and those involved in the seemingly aborted criminal inquiry.
The Petcoke Plan
Bill Koch has a well-established reputation as a serious businessman who intensely analyzes deals and watches his money closely. The Koch Papers show he was actively engaged in the tax-avoidance efforts. Middleton’s whistleblower complaints and letters by his lawyers assert that he crossed line from lawful tax minimization into tax fraud.
The biggest plan described in the Koch Papers was conceptually simple. It involved various Koch carbon companies under the umbrella of parent company Oxbow Carbon LLC that all shared the name Oxbow. For simplicity, we will refer to them as Oxbow America and Oxbow Bahamas.
Oxbow America bought petroleum coke, also known as petcoke. Various grades are mixed and then sold to different buyers. Low-quality petcoke is burned as fuel in Japan and South Korea, while the best quality helps anodize aluminum and other metals.
The petcoke profits were exceptional, in part because Oxbow America, through a real estate deal, blocked competitors at the Port of Long Beach in California.
That deal gave Oxbow America exclusive access to sell Southern California petcoke to Asian markets. Because of the costs of transporting petcoke by rail or truck, the Long Beach deal made profits per ton of petcoke there exceptionally profitable, company financial calculations show.
The Oxbow companies were organized so that tax bills flowed through to Bill Koch.
With profits of more than $100 million annually, federal taxes of $40 million to $50 million were owed each year, the internal documents show, through 2017. (The Trump/GOP tax law discounts subsequent tax bills by about 5%.)
To escape these taxes, Oxbow America created a shell company in Switzerland, which in turn operated in the tax-free Bahamas. Profits were then attributed to Oxbow Bahamas, wiping out all income taxes.
Only Legitimate Business Purposes
This brings up two important areas of tax law. When it comes to taxes, substance trumps form. Tax benefits are allowed only when there is a legitimate business purpose to transactions. Business actions designed solely to evade taxes are shams. When discovered during audits these shams are disregarded and taxes are assessed.
In the Koch Papers, reports by consultants, executives and tax advisers suggest that escaping taxes was the sole motivation for creating Oxbow Bahamas. Colvin, the lawyer for Koch’s then top tax executive, wrote to the government that the documents show “the only reason for Oxbow’s creation of the Bahamas office was to avoid U.S. tax.”
No other benefit, such as increased efficiency, was even considered, lawyer Colvin wrote. The Koch Papers show no indication of a business purpose, only escaping taxes.
Significantly, however, the Bahamas deal was evaluated on the basis of whether it would be detected in an IRS audit and what that might cost […]

=<p class="title" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">
<p class="title" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">blog William Koch, brother of company owners David and Charles, called the company an “organized crime” operation:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 3px 20px 0px 19px; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); line-height: 23.0938px; vertical-align: baseline; quotes: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Koch says that Koch Industries engaged in “(o)rganized crime. And management driven from the top down.”“It was – was my family company. I was out of it,” he says. “But that’s what appalled me so much… I did not want my family, my legacy, my father’s legacy to be based upon organized crime.”</blockquote><p class="title" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">=<p class="title" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">oxbow coal is other bro BILL:

The cynic in me hardly batted an eye when I read recently that Republican House Speaker John Boehner is <a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2011/09/13/speaker-boehner-gets-big-bucks-from-coal/">raking in coal-stained cash</a>. Nor did I spill my coffee when I noticed that one of Boehner’s big new donors is a Koch brother. My interest was piqued, however, when I saw that it wasn’t David or Charles Koch -- the infamous Tea Partier billionaires -- who were forking out for the Republican leader, but the <a class="external-link" href="http://jonathanpthompson.blogspot.com/2011/02/other-koch-brother-same-fortune.html">“other” brother, Bill.</a>

Bill Koch owns <a class="external-link" href="http://www.oxbow.com/ContentPage.asp?FN=Home&oLang=">Oxbow</a>, a global energy conglomerate that operates a big coal mine in Western Colorado’s North Fork Valley (just up the road from the High Country News HQ) and Gunnison Energy, which is drilling for natural gas in the same region. He hopes to <a class="external-link" href="http://oakmesaproject.com/tag/oxbow-mining/">move his coal mine</a> to another seam just down valley and is in the process of getting permits for the move. The billionaire's other assets also include a high country ranch in the mountains between Paonia and Aspen, and he has been buying up more real estate in the region.

Like his brothers, Bill is known for contributing to political campaigns. Unlike those of his brothers, Bill’s donations have not been constrained by ideology -- his cash has gone to politicians as varied as Richard Pombo, Ted Kennedy, Bob Dole, John McCain and, yes, Al Gore. He, his wife and employees of Oxbow donated some $70,000 to the campaign of now ex-U.S. Rep. John Salazar, a Colorado Democrat and brother of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. So the tendency by the media and activists to group Bill in with his hard-right brothers is clearly unfair. Bill may be an opportunist, but you <a class="external-link" href="http://jonathanpthompson.blogspot.com/2011/02/other-koch-brother-same-fortune.html">can’t call him an ideologue</a>, and he’s had a long history of strife with his more notorious brothers.

That’s why I was surprised to see so much cash going to Boehner, who, if not born a right-winger has become one thanks to Tea Party pressure. According to<a class="external-link" href="http://www.fec.gov/">Federal Election Commission</a> records, Bill Koch has donated no less than $80,200 to Boehner’s war chest since the beginning of 2010. He’s given another $65,400 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and just about that much to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The Oxbow PAC, according to <a class="external-link" href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cmte=C00436550&cycle=2010">figures from opensecrets.org</a>, is accumulating cash and not spending much, yet. But it has already given $3,500 to Rep. Scott Tipton, the Republican who defeated John Salazar in the home district of Oxbow’s coal mines and gas rigs, to help his 2012 effort. Aside from a small amount here and there, Koch and Oxbow’s historic support for Democrats appears to have dried up since the last election.

So what does this mean? Has Bill jumped into the same <a class="external-link" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer">political corral as his brothers</a>?

<a href="http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/bill-koch-coal-and-political-cash">http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/bill-koch-coal-and-political-cash</a>

==

The third Koch brother, William I. Koch, split from Koch Industries to set up his own energy company. Bill Koch, worth only about $2 billion, is famed for his<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE2DC1630F936A25754C0A964958260&scp=2&sq=%22culver+academy%22&st=nyt">competitive yachting</a> and being a “discerning speculator in his <a href="http://www.artbook.com/0878466959.html">world-class collections of art</a>, wine, and firearms.” His $10-million wine collection was marred by the purchase of <a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21395514-643,00.html">$500,000 in counterfeit Chateau Lafite</a> that were supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Well, at least they aren’t hypocrites.

===

Brown then dinged Warren for supporting Cape Wind, the offshore wind-power development <a href="http://grist.org/news/mitt-romney-may-have-a-few-million-reasons-to-oppose-wind-power/">loathed by William Koch</a>, of the Koch Kochs.

He summarized his argument as advocating for a “balancing role” by the government. Which is where Warren picked up.

===

William I. Koch is the younger brother of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Charles_Koch" title="Charles Koch" class="mw-redirect">Charles Koch</a> and <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Koch" title="David Koch" class="mw-redirect">David Koch</a>, but was bought out of the family business <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Industries" title="Koch Industries">Koch Industries</a> after two decades of litigation.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_note-0">[1]</a>

He is the founder and owner of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Oxbow_Corporation" title="Oxbow Corporation">Oxbow Corporation</a>, a privately-owned resources company. On its website the company states that "the Oxbow Group is made up of more than two dozen companies with yearly aggregate sales of over $3.7 billion, combined assets of over $1.7 billion and over 1200 employees worldwide. Oxbow’s primary businesses are the mining and marketing of energy and commodities such as coal, natural gas, petroleum, metallurgical and calcined coke."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_note-1">[2]</a>

After being bought out of Koch Industries he founded his own energy company, Oxbow, and turned to yachting; he spent an estimated sixty-five million dollars to win the America’s Cup, in 1992.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_note-2">[3]</a>

Mother Jones and Greenpeace report he is a major funder of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Alliance_to_Protect_Nantucket_Sound" title="Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound">Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound</a> which is fighting the Cape Wind development of offshore wind turbines.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I.Koch#cite_note-3">[4]</a><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I.Koch#cite_note-4">[5]</a>

Forbes reported in 2009 that William Koch is worth approximately $1500 million, making him the 236th richest person in America <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_note-5">[6]</a>.

<h2>Contents</h2>

[<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#" class="internal" id="togglelink">hide</a>] </div>

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<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#Articles_and_resources">1 Articles and resources</a>

<ul>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#Related_SourceWatch_articles">1.1 Related SourceWatch articles</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#References">1.2 References</a></li>

<li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#External_links">1.3 External links</a></li>

</ul>

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</ul>

</td></tr></tbody></table>

<h2>Articles and resources</h2>

<h3>Related SourceWatch articles</h3>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S._coal_politics" title="U.S. coal politics">U.S. coal politics</a></li>

</ul>

<h3>References</h3>

<li id="cite_note-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_ref-1">↑</a> Oxbow Corporation, <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.oxbow.com/ContentPage.asp?FN=AboutPhilosophy&TS=1&MS=1&oLang=">"Philosophy"</a>, Oxbow Corporation website, accessed June 2009.</li>

<li id="cite_note-4"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I._Koch#cite_ref-4">↑</a> Greenpeace.org <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/34735133/Bill-Koch-The-Dirty-Money-Behind-Cape-Wind-Opposition">Bill Koch: the Dirty Money Behind the Cape Win Opposition</a>, Report. 2010. Accessed February 28, 2010</li>

</ol>

<h3>External links</h3>

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<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I.Koch">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=William_I.Koch</a>

<h1 class="headline"><a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-08-24/news/william-bill-koch-the-other-koch-brother-tea-party/">The Other Koch Brother</a></h1>

<h3>In the shadow of his brothers' Tea Party fame, Bill Koch seems almost like a normal billionaire.</h3>

<div class="byline"> <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-08-24/news/william-bill-koch-the-other-koch-brother-tea-party/full/#livefyre">Comments</a> (0) By <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/authors/lisa-rab" class="author">Lisa Rab</a> Wednesday, Aug 24 2011</div>

</div>

Two mansions, two miles apart, spark intrigue in <a title="Palm Beach" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Palm+Beach/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Palm+Beach]">Palm Beach</a>, Florida. The first, on the northern end of the oceanfront street nicknamed Billionaire's Row, is 30,000 square feet of arched windows and red, Spanish-tile roof, a villa that includes a ballroom where flappers danced and sipped moonshine in the 1920s.

This is <a title="David Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/David+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[David+Koch]">David Koch</a>'s vacation home. The billionaire oil baron, along with his brother Charles, has gained recent notoriety as the sugar daddy of the Tea Party. In 1979, David Koch ran for vice president on the <a title="Libertarian Party" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Libertarian+Party/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Libertarian+Party]">Libertarian Party</a> ticket, and he and Charles have since given more than $100 million to right-wing causes and organizations, according to a 2010 New Yorker profile that exposed their tremendous influence in politics. David lives in New York City and winters in Palm Beach.

The second mansion is a short drive south on Billionaire's Row, a narrow strip of asphalt that buffers colossal wealth from the ocean. With an open driveway and a generous front lawn, this house bears little resemblance to its neighbor up the road. The original historic villa was leveled, replaced by a 42,000-square-foot mansion built in efficient Colonial style, with square windows, gray peaked roofs, and columns framing the front door. The pool is a long rectangle, and the backyard stretches all the way west to the <a title="Intracoastal Waterway" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Intracoastal+Waterway/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Intracoastal+Waterway]">Intracoastal Waterway</a>. Inside, prized artwork graces the walls, and millions of dollars worth of wine cools in the cellar.

For two decades, the owner of this $25.9 million mansion didn't speak to the owner of the first. He is David Koch's twin brother, William <a title="Bill Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Bill+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Bill+Koch]">"Bill" Koch</a>. A feud over the family business kept the brothers warring in court for years. Bill, 71, a rumpled and white-haired chemical engineer, was labeled in the press as the black sheep of the family. One of the <a title="Forbes Media LLC" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Forbes+Media+LLC/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Forbes+Media+LLC]">Forbes</a> 400 richest people in the world and the second-richest man in Florida, he made headlines for his salacious romantic affairs and his penchant for suing his enemies, and for burning cash on historic wine bottles and a $2 million photo of <a title="Billy the Kid" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Billy+the+Kid/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Billy+the+Kid]">Billy the Kid</a>.

He also earned the wrath of environmentalists. A mine owned by his energy company, Oxbow, was the site of two of the three coal-mining deaths in Colorado in the past 11 years. Bill Koch poured millions of dollars into fighting America's first offshore wind farm in Massachusetts, and is now angling to take over 1,800 acres of federal land in Colorado for his private ranch.

But now that Charles and David are alternately reviled and admired for their Tea Party ties, "Wild Bill" Koch has been cast in a peculiar new role: the good brother.

He donates tens of thousands of dollars to mainstream Republican candidates such as <a title="John McCain" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/John+McCain/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[John+McCain]">John McCain</a> and <a title="Mitt Romney" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Mitt+Romney/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Mitt+Romney]">Mitt Romney</a>, but doesn't publicize his opposition to <a title="Barack Obama" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Barack+Obama/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Barack+Obama]">Barack Obama</a>. Rather than fund Tea Party groups, he gives money to impoverished kids in <a title="Palm Beach County" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Palm+Beach+County/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Palm+Beach+County]">Palm Beach County</a> and to hospitals and schools in Colorado, where he has another home. In September, he will open a private high school in <a title="West Palm Beach" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/West+Palm+Beach/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[West+Palm+Beach]">West Palm Beach</a>, <a title="Oxbridge Academy" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Oxbridge+Academy/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Oxbridge+Academy]">Oxbridge Academy</a>. "Bill Koch isn't <a title="Charles Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Charles+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Charles+Koch]">Charles Koch</a> and he isn't David Koch," says his spokesman, <a title="Brad Goldstein" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Brad+Goldstein/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Brad+Goldstein]">Brad Goldstein</a>. "He's not his brother's keeper."

Even as a child, Bill Koch lived in his brothers' shadow. Of the four Koch boys—David, Bill, Charles, and the eldest, <a title="Frederick" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Frederick/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Frederick]">Frederick</a>—Bill was the "family nerd," he once told the <a title="The New York Times Magazine" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/The+New+York+Times+Magazine/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[The+New+York+Times+Magazine]">New York Times Magazine</a>, which profiled the family after their legal battle in 1986. Growing up in <a title="Wichita" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Wichita/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Wichita]">Wichita</a>, Kansas, Bill wasn't as skilled at basketball as Charles and David. Although he's six foot four, he was smaller than them. They would play together, but exclude him.

By the time Bill was six, he was so resentful of Charles that his mom said they had to send the 11-year-old Charles to boarding school. "We had to get Charles away because of the terrible jealousy that was consuming Billy," <a title="Mary Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Mary+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Mary+Koch]">Mary Koch</a> told the Times. "Billy had always been too emotional."

Emotionalism was not prized in the Koch family. The boys' father, Fred C. Koch, was a hard-nosed "monarch," a family friend told Fortune magazine. Not wanting his sons to become pampered rich kids, he put them to work on the family cattle ranches in the summers. He was a self-made man. His dad—Bill's grandfather—ran a small-town newspaper in Texas. When Fred wanted to study chemical engineering, a local businessman helped pay his tuition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Goldstein says—a gift that would later inspire Bill's own school philanthropy.

In the 1920s, <a title="Fred Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Fred+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Fred+Koch]">Fred Koch</a> launched an engineering company in Wichita, and invented a refining process that increased the amount of gasoline produced from crude oil. When competing oil companies sued him for patent infringement, he moved to the <a title="U.S.S.R." href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/U.S.S.R./" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[U.S.S.R.]">Soviet Union</a> to build oil refineries under Stalin. Watching colleagues be killed in the dictator's purges, Koch was horrified. By the time he returned to Kansas to expand his business and started a family, he was staunchly anti-Communist. Fred Koch became a founding member of the hard-right <a title="John Birch Society" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/John+Birch+Society/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[John+Birch+Society]">John Birch Society</a> and imbued all of his sons with a strong distaste for government.

Bill attended high school at <a title="Culver Military Academy" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Culver+Military+Academy/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Culver+Military+Academy]">Culver Military Academy</a> in Indiana, then joined Charles and David at M.I.T., dutifully following in their dad's footsteps. Bill eventually earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. <a title="Frederick Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Frederick+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Frederick+Koch]">Frederick Koch</a> studied English and drama at <a title="Harvard University" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Harvard+University/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Harvard+University]">Harvard</a> and <a title="Yale University" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Yale+University/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Yale+University]">Yale</a> and grew up to become a reclusive art collector who buys European castles, including estates in <a title="Monaco" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Monaco/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Monaco]">Monaco</a> and <a title="London (England)" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/London+%28England%29/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[London+(England)]">London</a>.

After their father died, in 1967, Charles took over the family business, and the strain between him and Bill increased. Bill came to work for <a title="Koch Industries Inc." href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Koch+Industries+Inc./" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Koch+Industries+Inc.]">Koch Industries</a> as a consultant in the early '70s, but Charles wasn't happy with his job performance. "He never seemed to get any self-respect out of what he was doing, and always wanted to be doing something else," Charles told the Times. (Through a spokesperson, Charles and David Koch declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Bill was angry that company money was spent on his brothers' political causes. "Why should I donate all my money to the Libertarian Party?" he said. "Pretty soon we would get the reputation that the company and the Kochs were crazy."

But under Charles Koch's leadership, Koch Industries became the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to its oil refineries, it owns Brawny paper towels, <a title="Lycra" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Lycra/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Lycra]">Lycra</a>, and <a title="Georgia-Pacific Corporation" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Georgia-Pacific+Corporation/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Georgia-Pacific+Corporation]">Georgia-Pacific</a> lumber.

In 1979, the <a title="Koch Brothers" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Koch+Brothers/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Koch+Brothers]">Koch brothers</a> celebrated their last Christmas together. The next year, Bill tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the board of Koch Industries. An epic legal battle followed. Bill sued Charles and David for corporate mismanagement. They fired back with a libel suit. In 1983, Bill and Frederick Koch sold their shares of the company to Charles and David, and Bill walked away with $470 million. But two years later, after his bankers crunched the numbers, Bill decided he'd gotten a raw deal. He sued again, demanding more money. For nearly two decades, his lawsuits against his brothers piled up. Things got ugly. At one point, Bill subpoenaed his elderly mother to testify a few months after she had a stroke. He also filed a whistle-blower suit accusing Koch Industries of stealing crude oil from Native American lands; it would drag on for years.

Bill stopped speaking to Charles and David. "I don't want to see my brothers in jail," Bill told Fortune in 1997. "But I'm at war."

Through all these spats and scandals, Bill Koch's more prosperous brothers retained a low public profile. Unless they were suing one another, the press had little interest in the oil, coal, and gas barons from Kansas.

Until last August. As the Tea Party movement gained steam, gearing up to send a wave of right-wing, anti-government candidates to Congress, a few muckraking reporters finally noticed the Kochs. The New Yorker published a scathing exposé calling Charles and David "the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama." They founded the libertarian think tank the <a title="Cato Institute" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Cato+Institute/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Cato+Institute]">Cato Institute</a> and the <a title="Americans for Prosperity" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Americans+for+Prosperity/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Americans+for+Prosperity]">Americans for Prosperity Foundation</a>, which educates and trains Tea Party activists. In Washington, D.C., their support of conservative causes is so widespread that their web of influence is known as the "Kochtopus."

Charles and David Koch were vilified by Democrats as the Big Oil moneybags behind the Tea Party. By contrast, Bill Koch's business and political activities seemed tame.

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Bill Koch bundled at least $100,000 in campaign contributions for John McCain, according to the nonpartisan <a title="Center for Responsive Politics" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Center+for+Responsive+Politics/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Center+for+Responsive+Politics]">Center for Responsive Politics</a>. Since last year, with Republicans preparing for big wins in Congress, Koch has personally given at least $165,400 to <a title="U.S. Republican Party" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/U.S.+Republican+Party/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[U.S.+Republican+Party]">GOP</a> candidates throughout the country. The largest chunks of cash—$126,200—went to the <a title="National Republican Senatorial Committee" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/National+Republican+Senatorial+Committee/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[National+Republican+Senatorial+Committee]">National Republican Senatorial Committee</a> and the <a title="National Republican Congressional Committee" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/National+Republican+Congressional+Committee/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[National+Republican+Congressional+Committee]">National Republican Congressional Committee</a>. Koch is now on the Florida fundraising team for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"He does not agree with the president's economic policies," Goldstein says of his boss. "This administration has made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate."

Specifically, Koch doesn't appreciate the way Obama officials treat coal mining, and calls the <a title="U.S. Environmental Protection Agency" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/U.S.+Environmental+Protection+Agency/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[U.S.+Environmental+Protection+Agency]">Environmental Protection Agency</a> "hyper-aggressive."

"It's far easier to get permits to mine for natural resources outside the United States than inside," Goldstein says. Not surprisingly, Goldstein adds, "He thinks Mitt Romney would be much more pro-business than Barack Obama."

Men arrived at the <a title="Four Seasons Hotels Inc." href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Four+Seasons+Hotels+Inc./" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Four+Seasons+Hotels+Inc.]">Four Seasons hotel</a> in Palm Beach wearing tuxedos, the women in long, shimmering dresses. This was not just another corporate Christmas party. Plates were piled high with filet mignon, and at least 200 guests gleefully descended on an open bar. "This was hands-down the greatest company event that I've ever been to in my life," recalls employee <a title="Ron Brosh" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Ron+Brosh/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Ron+Brosh]">Ron Brosh</a>. "You thought you'd won an award."

It was the late '90s, and Bill Koch's company could afford to lavish such extravagance on its employees. In 1983, he used the initial millions he got from selling his shares of Koch Industries to start his own energy company, <a title="Oxbow Corporation" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Oxbow+Corporation/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Oxbow+Corporation]">Oxbow Corp.</a> He founded the company in Massachusetts, but after battling the state over taxes on a stock purchase, he got fed up and moved Oxbow to West Palm Beach in 1989. Oxbow, like individuals and many other large corporations in Florida, does not have to pay state income taxes. "That's the reason I came here—it's tax-friendly," he told the <a title="St. Petersburg Times" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/St.+Petersburg+Times/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[St.+Petersburg+Times]">St. Petersburg Times</a> in 2003.

Initially, Oxbow made its mark as a more environmentally friendly energy company than Koch Industries. Oxbow built and financed geothermal power plants in the U.S., <a title="Costa Rica" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Costa+Rica/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Costa+Rica]">Costa Rica</a>, and <a title="Philippines" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Philippines/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Philippines]">the Philippines</a> in the '90s, when the federal government was providing subsidies for green power.

"He [Koch] embraced the whole green concept," says <a title="Paula Zagrecki" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Paula+Zagrecki/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Paula+Zagrecki]">Paula Zagrecki</a>, who was the finance director for international renewable-energy projects at Oxbow from 1995 to 2000.

Zagrecki remembers Koch as a detail-oriented boss, who was a "really personable, smart guy." He hired intelligent people, paid them well, relocated them to Florida, and rewarded them with bonuses. "He's really the opposite of what you expect from a billionaire," she says.

Brosh, an actor who was a financial analyst for Oxbow in the late '90s, is even more effusive. He says Koch's generosity to his employees changed the way Brosh viewed wealthy people. "With Bill Koch, I always felt that I got better than I gave," he says. "For me, that was a real life lesson."

Koch attended happy hours on Clematis Street, dancing with his underlings and listening to them sing on his birthday. Once, the billionaire hosted a work barbecue at his newly built mansion. Brosh gaped at the valuable Western art collection on the walls, the "piles and piles of the best steak," the two swimming pools, and the way Koch welcomed hundreds of guests into his home. "He was opening up his world that much to us," Brosh says.

At Oxbow, Koch installed a state-of-the-art gym and made his personal trainers available to employees for free. Several times, Zagrecki says, she'd find herself huffing and puffing on the <a title="Nautilus StairMaster" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Nautilus+StairMaster/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Nautilus+StairMaster]">StairMaster</a> next to the boss. "He was kind of very normal," she says.

Yet the boss set a high standard. Koch's car would be first in the office parking lot by 7 a.m., Brosh says. If Zagrecki had to meet with him, she knew to be prepared. "There was definitely an expectation that you better have all the ducks lined up in a row," she says, "because he would definitely question you."

Sometimes, he would lose his temper. "It's his company. If he wanted to yell at you because you screwed up a $100 million investment, I think that's his right," Zagrecki says.

Meanwhile, his personal life had a habit of upstaging his professional accomplishments. In 1992, he won the nation's most prestigious sailing competition, the America's Cup. He spent $68 million to assemble the best team and build a faster boat, and sailed with the crew as a novice. Later, he would credit his "T3 philosophy for success—talent, teamwork, and technology." However, he was criticized in the press for the tax breaks he received for contributing to the foundation that funded his win.

Then, in 1994, as his legal battle with his brothers raged on, <a title="Vanity Fair Magazine" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Vanity+Fair+Magazine/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Vanity+Fair+Magazine]">Vanity Fair</a> wrote a profile labeling him "Wild Bill," the black sheep of the family. The insults may have come from his brothers, but Bill didn't help his own cause. "I could be a really nasty shit," he said in the article. "I would go up to my secretary [and say], 'You dumb shit, why'd you make that mistake?' I was that kind of guy."

A wine lover, he started a collection of 40,000 bottles worth more than $12 million, keeping them in a climate-controlled cellar with a computer system designed to locate every vintage. He also collected fine art and Western memorabilia—Renoir, Rodin, <a title="Jesse James" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Jesse+James/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Jesse+James]">Jesse James</a>'s gun, General Custer's rifle.

His appetite for women was easily as voracious as his love of wine. In 1995—a year after he got married—he tried to evict his mistress, an elegant, blond former model named <a title="Catherine de Castelbajac" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Catherine+de+Castelbajac/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Catherine+de+Castelbajac]">Catherine de Castelbajac</a>, from a condo he owned at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. Castelbajac refused to leave, and filed a palimony suit, claiming Koch had promised to support her financially for the rest of her life. Soon, the embarrassing details of the geeky billionaire's love life emerged in a Boston courtroom. Jurors learned that Bill was seeing three other women aside from Castelbajac (including his first wife, <a title="Joan Granlund" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Joan+Granlund/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Joan+Granlund]">Joan Granlund</a>, and a girlfriend, <a title="Marie Beard" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Marie+Beard/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Marie+Beard]">Marie Beard</a>, with whom he would have a daughter). Koch and Castelbajac exchanged lurid love notes via fax, such as one Castelbajac signed, "Hot Love from Your X-rated Protestant Princess." When jurors finally ordered Castelbajac to leave the apartment, they didn't sympathize with either party. "Neither of them is a prize," mechanic <a title="William Tracia" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/William+Tracia/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[William+Tracia]">William Tracia Jr.</a> told the Boston Globe.

In 1996, Koch, then 56, married his second wife, Angela, who was nearly 18 years younger than him. That was a stormy relationship, too.

One evening in July 2000, police were called to the Kochs' summer home in <a title="Cape Cod" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Cape+Cod/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Cape+Cod]">Cape Cod</a>. Angela alleged that Bill had punched her in the stomach while she held their one-year-old daughter. The cops issued a restraining order against him, and for a few months he was banished to their beach house—a cottage that's separate from their main mansion on Palm Beach.

In the divorce fight that followed, Angela and Bill accused each other, according to court documents, of having drinking problems. She complained that he fired her favorite chef and the nanny. He hired private detectives to trail her in Palm Beach.

Eventually, they reached a settlement that gave Angela a lump sum of $16 million, in addition to child support payments. The deal, outlined in <a title="Palm Beach Circuit Court" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Palm+Beach+Circuit+Court/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Palm+Beach+Circuit+Court]">Palm Beach Circuit Court</a> documents, was to be "null and void" unless the domestic violence case against Bill in Massachusetts was dismissed. As the lawyers finalized the terms of the deal in December 2000, Angela refused to testify in the case, and the prosecutor dropped the criminal assault and battery charge against Koch.

Goldstein, the spokesman for Bill Koch, denies that the settlement was arranged to get Angela to drop the charges. Throughout the divorce proceedings, Koch maintained that he never hit his wife. "An absolute fiction of her imagination. Never happened," Goldstein says. (Angela, who is remarried and lives in West Palm Beach, did not respond to requests for comment.)

As his romantic roller-coaster ride continued, Bill Koch lost most of his lawsuits against his brothers. "He was devastated," <a title="Angela Koch" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Angela+Koch/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Angela+Koch]">Angela Koch</a> told the <a title="NYP Holdings Inc." href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/NYP+Holdings+Inc./" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[NYP+Holdings+Inc.]">New York Post</a>. "It was something he could not get over—it just ate him up." Meanwhile, his business goals began to shift.

Around 2000, Oxbow sold its geothermal power plants. Goldstein says the corporate execs sensed that the federal subsidies were going to disappear, and that the industry would no longer be stable. So the company that once prided itself on producing green energy switched its focus to fossil fuels—mining natural gas and coal, and becoming the world's largest marketer of petroleum coke, a by-product of oil refining that emits high levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide when burned.

Oxbow bought the Elk Creek Mine in <a title="Gunnison County" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Gunnison+County/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Gunnison+County]">Gunnison County</a>, Colorado, west of Aspen. It soon hired more than 300 people, most of whom climb under the earth every day, breathing in soot and methane gas, to retrieve black chunks of fuel.

Oxbow provides healthy paychecks in a rural mountain region where job options are limited. Goldstein says the company has donated money to the local hospitals, high school, <a title="Little League Baseball Inc." href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Little+League+Baseball+Inc./" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Little+League+Baseball+Inc.]">Little League</a> fields, and the library. In return, the residents tolerate the inherent perils of working for a coal company.

In the past 11 years, two of the three coal-mining deaths in Colorado occurred at Oxbow's mine. In one incident, a wire screen fell on a 26-year-old worker, pinning him to a machine. In another, a high-pressure hydraulic hose broke and went flying, hitting a 37-year-old in the head. In the past year, federal records indicate, the Elk Creek mine has been cited 66 times for "significant and substantial" safety violations—the kind that can reasonably result in serious injury or death.

Goldstein calls the deaths "a tragedy" but says the mine's safety record is "quite good" and contends that the accident rate is "lower than the national average."

This May, Oxbow announced it was expanding its coal exploration efforts in neighboring <a title="Delta County" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Delta+County/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Delta+County]">Delta County</a>. "Coal is never gonna go away," Goldstein says. "It's not in fashion these days. [But] the majority of our energy in the states comes from coal."

In July, an Oxbow subsidiary received permission to build water pits to support its gas operations in Gunnison County, despite worries from environmentalists that the wells could leak and pollute the water supply.

Koch has also angered some nearby residents by trying to gain control of a large swath of federal land that provides access to a national forest. The 1,800 contested acres sit between Koch's two ranches, and he wants to connect them. He's tired of people trespassing, parking near his ranch, and poaching the elk that roam there, Goldstein says.

Last year, Koch tried to arrange a deal, through federal legislation, that would allow him to take over the land in exchange for giving the government roughly 1,000 acres near other federal parks. <a title="John Salazar" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/John+Salazar/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[John+Salazar]">U.S. Representative John Salazar</a>, a Colorado Democrat, sponsored the land-swap legislation in Congress. But after the press revealed that Oxbow was Salazar's biggest campaign donor, and the public protested the deal, the bill stalled and Salazar lost his seat in Congress. Goldstein says Koch is currently working to revise the plan, addressing concerns about access to the forestland.

But <a title="Ed Marston" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Ed+Marston/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Ed+Marston]">Ed Marston</a>, a former newspaper publisher in the area who was a vocal opponent of the land swap, says the deal demonstrates how selfish Koch can be. "This is for the benefit of one man, and it locks out, at present, hundreds of users," says Marston.

Goldstein contends that Marston has been butting heads with Oxbow for 11 years and says the forest road he is trying to protect "gets very little use."

As his business in Colorado prospered, Koch took on a different energy battle in Massachusetts. In 2001, in Cape Cod, where Koch has a summer mansion, a private developer proposed building the nation's first offshore wind farm. One hundred and thirty wind turbines, 440 feet high, would rise in <a title="Nantucket Sound" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Nantucket+Sound/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Nantucket+Sound]">Nantucket Sound</a>. The developer claimed this clean energy source would produce 75 percent of the energy needed to power the Cape and nearby islands.

But Koch, the award-winning sailor, was loath to let windmills sully his view. Plus, he didn't think the project was financially viable. Goldstein says higher energy costs would be passed on to consumers and calls the farm "a boondoggle." Koch joined other high-profile opponents such as <a title="Edward M. Kennedy" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Edward+M.+Kennedy/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Edward+M.+Kennedy]">Ted Kennedy</a> and Mitt Romney in a contentious battle that stretched on for nine years. He spent $1.5 million funding an opposition group, the <a title="Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Alliance+to+Protect+Nantucket+Sound/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Alliance+to+Protect+Nantucket+Sound]">Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound</a>, for which he also served as chairman of the board.

Last year, <a title="Cape Wind" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Cape+Wind/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Cape+Wind]">Cape Wind</a> finally got the federal approvals needed to move forward with the project. <a title="Mark Rodgers" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Mark+Rodgers/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Mark+Rodgers]">Mark Rodgers</a>, the project spokesman, says Koch's vigorous opposition was tied to his pocketbook—namely, his business interests in coal and oil.

"I think he has made a fortune in some of the dirtiest types of energy we use," says Rodgers. "I suppose it galls him that somebody makes money with clean-energy wind turbines that he might even see occasionally from his oceanfront mansion."

In 2001, Bill Koch finally won a victory against his brothers. Koch Industries paid $25 million to the federal government in a settlement deal; in return, the feds dismissed charges that the company stole oil from Native American and federal lands. Bill Koch and his co-plaintiff shared $7.4 million, according to the <a title="The Center for Public Integrity" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/The+Center+for+Public+Integrity/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[The+Center+for+Public+Integrity]">Center for Public Integrity</a>.

That year, Bill, David, and Charles also signed an undisclosed settlement that ended the legal battles among them and helped repair their relationship. In 2005, when Bill married his third wife, <a title="Bridget Rooney" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Bridget+Rooney/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Bridget+Rooney]">Bridget Rooney</a>—her grandfather, <a title="Art Rooney" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Art+Rooney/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Art+Rooney]">Art Rooney</a>, founded the <a title="Pittsburgh Steelers" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Pittsburgh+Steelers/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Pittsburgh+Steelers]">Pittsburgh Steelers</a>, and she had had a son with <a title="Kevin Costner" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Kevin+Costner/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Kevin+Costner]">Kevin Costner</a>—David was the best man at the wedding.

Bill Koch continued his legal antics, but they shifted to his hobbies. In 2006, he sued the wine broker who sold him bottles of wine that purportedly belonged to <a title="Thomas Jefferson" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Thomas+Jefferson/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Thomas+Jefferson]">Thomas Jefferson</a>. After hiring his own investigators and speaking to Jefferson's foundation at <a title="Monticello" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Monticello/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Monticello]">Monticello</a>, Koch discovered the wine was fake. "I've bought so much art, so many guns, so many other things, that if somebody's out to cheat me, I want the son of a bitch to pay for it," Koch told the New Yorker.

The mystery of the expensive wine's origins sparked a nonfiction book, and Koch and Goldstein saw themselves as crusading heroes in a made-for-Hollywood story. "This is National Treasure," Goldstein told writer <a title="Benjamin Wallace" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Benjamin+Wallace/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Benjamin+Wallace]">Benjamin Wallace</a>, author of The Billionaire's Vinegar.

Koch eventually won a default judgment against the wine broker, although a judge dismissed a separate case against <a title="Christie's International plc" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Christie%27s+International+plc/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Christie's+International+plc]">Christie's</a> Auction House. Last year, Koch made headlines again for suing an interior designer who didn't follow his request to decorate his Colorado ranch in appropriate Western style. He and the designer settled their dispute before the case went to trial.

Meanwhile, Koch moved on to his next project: a private high school in West Palm Beach.

It's early June. As the academic chief of the Oxbridge Academy, it's Neen Hunt's job to convince the parents at this open house that a new high school, built on the grounds of a former Jewish Community Center, is worth $15,000 in annual tuition.

Hunt's voice is weathered, and she has the severe, lined faced of a veteran <a title="Upper West Side" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Upper+West+Side/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Upper+West+Side]">Upper West Side</a> New Yorker. Short, with curly brown hair and a floral print dress, she stands at a podium speaking gravely to the audience of roughly 65 parents and preteens sitting on folding chairs.

"We're looking for deep understanding, not just broad coverage of the issues," she says. "Think deeply. Probe. Don't be afraid to take risks."

Behind Hunt is an elevated stage and an enormous projector screen for <a title="Microsoft PowerPoint" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Microsoft+PowerPoint/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Microsoft+PowerPoint]">PowerPoint</a> presentations. The auditorium at the former JCC in West Palm Beach is carpeted in a sedate blue. Outside this room are empty, echoing hallways and linoleum floors. There's an outdoor pool, six tennis courts, a large indoor basketball court, a dance studio, and spacious playing fields.

According to 2009 tax documents, the <a title="Oxbridge Academy Foundation" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Oxbridge+Academy+Foundation/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Oxbridge+Academy+Foundation]">Oxbridge Academy Foundation</a>'s board is composed entirely of high-ranking employees from Oxbow. Bill Koch is the school's founder and provider of $50 million in start-up funds.

In 2008, Charles Koch gave $1.5 million to the Florida State University economics program—but it came with major strings attached. In exchange for the money, Koch got the power to screen and approve all faculty hired. FSU faced a storm of criticism for accepting that deal.

Goldstein insists things are different at Oxbridge. He says his boss's political allegiances are "hard to pin down"—he has given money to <a title="Al Gore" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Al+Gore/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Al+Gore]">Al Gore</a>, as well as to Democrats in Colorado. And politics, Goldstein says, has nothing to do with Oxbridge. The school has hired accomplished teachers with a variety of political views—including <a title="Dennis Yuzenas" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/Dennis+Yuzenas/" data-omni-track="Inform-">Click|keyword[Dennis+Yuzenas]">Dennis Yuzenas</a>, a social studies teacher who was punished elsewhere for wearing a pro-Obama T-shirt to school.

"There was no political litmus test given to any of them. We wanted the best," Goldstein says. "We're not out to start a revolution."

<a href="mailto:lisa.rab@browardpalmbeach.com">lisa.rab@browardpalmbeach.com</a>

<a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-08-24/news/william-bill-koch-the-other-koch-brother-tea-party/">http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-08-24/news/william-bill-koch-the-other-koch-brother-tea-party/</a>