Why Should Delaware Care?
Campaign donations are one of the most direct and legal ways that special interests can curry favor with elected officials, particularly through political action committees (PACs). This year’s contentious gubernatorial race has drawn a record sum of outside campaign funding in PACs, raising questions about what influence donors hope to gain for the significant support.
Last month, political action committees supporting Delaware’s candidates for governor revealed they had raised a hefty $3 million dollars in 2024. They added hundreds of thousands of dollars more in the weeks since, according to campaign finance reports made public on Tuesday.
The money has largely funded a tit-for-tat volley of increasingly vitriolic TV ads and political mailers sent in recent weeks by PACs supporting two of three Democratic candidates for governor – New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long.
Most of the cash paying for the PAC messaging has come from expected sources, including prominent developers, trade unions, and the CEO of a New York translation company whose $1 million pledge to oppose Hall-Long’s campaign led all other contributors.
New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer has benefitted from the spending of the Change Can’t Wait PAC, which has seen two six-figure donations from relatively quiet donors in Delaware. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
But, there also were a handful of high-dollar donations to Delaware political organizations that were not expected.
Spotlight Delaware dug deeper into those contributions to find that the donors include an LLC linked to a developer who spent two years in prison, a woman whose husband’s nonprofit was partnering with the lieutenant governor’s office, and a former chair of Delaware’s pension system.
Those individuals were reluctant to provide many details about why they are spending significant sums in seeking to influence Delaware’s election for governor.
Here are their stories.
A banker & a checkered developer
A PAC that published ads celebrating Matt Meyer received its two biggest donations of $100,000 each in June and in August, according to campaign finance filings released last month.
One of the big checks to the Change Can’t Wait PAC came from Philip Reese, a retired banker who previously served as the chair of the Delaware Pension Board. Reese did not reply to repeated messages left on his voicemail or with a man who identified himself as his brother.
As such, it is not immediately apparent why Reese donated such a substantial amount.
The other $100,000 contribution came from a company listed on campaign finance reports only as 847 Cranbrook LLC.
While the owners of such limited liability companies in Delaware are not always apparent, a review of business and property records show that this contribution is linked to Michael Stortini, a Delaware developer who appears to have been using 847 Cranbrook LLC to rebuild his finances following his exit from prison in 2016.
Twenty years ago, Stortini was among a group of prominent developers in Delaware. As a managing partner at the Frank Robino Company, he was the public face behind many big development ventures, including a high-profile court fight with Donald Trump over the rights to an Atlantic City property where a bankrupt casino sat.
But, as the Great Recession hit Delaware, Stortini’s fortune’s faded. The downturn placed a freeze on commercial real estate development in the state, causing builders and financiers to scramble to keep their investments afloat.
In the aftermath, federal prosecutors began to scrutinize the industry’s activities – including those of the Frank Robino Company.
By 2013, Delaware’s U.S. attorney indicted Stortini on charges that he diverted more than $600,000 from his employees’ 401(k) accounts to pay company expenses. Prosecutors also said he failed to pay hundreds of thousands in payroll taxes, and stole an additional $900,000 from the company itself. He spent about $500,000 of the stolen cash at casinos, prosecutors said.
The following year, Stortini pleaded guilty to theft, and was sentenced to two years in prison.
After his release in 2016, Stortini continued to face financial struggles. The following year, the IRS placed a lien on a property he owned at 847 Cranbrook Drive in North Wilmington. By early 2019, New Castle County sold the property in a sheriff sale to any entity called Midnight Moon Trading Co. LLC.
Immediately after the sale, Midnight Moon Trading Co. transferred the property to a company that Stortini’s son, Paul, had just formed the previous month.
That company was called 847 Cranbrook Drive LLC.
From then on, the Stortinis used the newly created LLC as a vehicle to control properties and receive loans.
At the same time, Michael Stortini’s fortunes appeared to improve in rapid succession, particularly as Apennine Development – then a newly created development company he partnered in – began to embark on several projects along the Delaware beaches.
Paul Stortini did not reply to requests for comment. When reached by phone, Michael Stortini said he didn’t have time to speak and asked to be called back. He didn’t respond to subsequent calls.
In a phone call, an associate of Paul Stortini asserted that the $100,000 contribution to the Change Can’t Wait PAC was fully legal. The associate, Ricardo McKendrick, has worked with Paul Stortini at another of his companies, called HS Capital.
McKendrick also appears to own small scale development companies. Like Michael Stortini, he started those ventures after leaving prison within the past decade.
A partnership, then a donation
The second curious contribution flowed to a People for a Healthy Delaware PAC, which supports Hall-Long.
In April, Hall-Long’s office announced that it was partnering with an organization called the STAR Scholarship Foundation to launch a program that offered cash grants to students of color who participated in an essay contest.
“The initiative is funded solely through private dollars by the STAR Scholarship Foundation and philanthropist Paul Peck, which has supported student aspirations in other states like Montgomery County, Maryland,” a press release from the lieutenant governor’s office said at the time.
Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long appeared alongside philanthropist Paul Peck in announcing the Essay-Based Merit Awards Initiative in April. | PHOTO COURTESY OF DE.TV
Two weeks after the announcement, Peck’s wife, Suzanne, donated $30,000 to a PAC that supports Hall-Long candidacy for governor.
The two events marked the first time the Pecks’ names had been in Delaware news since Jack Markell served as governor. And, their close timing prompts the question of whether they were coordinated, or whether the foundation’s partnership served as a de facto campaign contribution.
The lieutenant governor’s announcement also appears to be the first public mention of Peck’s foundation since 2014 when the IRS revoked its nonprofit status. Even the press release’s embedded link to the foundation goes to a document from 2013.
After several attempts to reach the Pecks over several weeks, Suzanne Peck sent Spotlight Delaware a response by email. She did not address the close timing of her contribution to her husband’s partnership with Hall-Long’s office.
Instead, she said she contributed to Hall-Long’s PAC because she believes the lieutenant governor has the “the broadest, practical governing, fiscal, educational, and health delivery experience to lead Delaware successfully.”
She also pointed to her Delaware roots despite living for decades in Virginia, noting that she had grown up in Wilmington, had “supported President Biden financially for decades,” and had worked in Markell’s administration in what she described as a part-time, “pro bono” consultancy role.
“The results of this single-year Review resulted in $750 (million) in hard savings,” she said in an apparent reference to Delaware government’s budget deficit in 2009.
Newspaper archives confirm that Peck had worked for the Markell administration in 2009 while she also served as the chief technology officer for the city of Washington, D.C.
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