Timothy Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, has reached the stratosphere of American political influence as the top supporter of Donald J. Trump, doling out millions to try to elect the former president and his allies.
But to his neighbors in a Rhode Island beachfront enclave, he is better known as the prime suspect in the Narragansett Runestone Affair.
A hulking boulder once positioned just offshore in Narragansett Bay, the runestone bears inscriptions that some believe were left by Viking explorers. It was the stuff of local lore and attracted visitors at low tide — to the consternation of Mr. Mellon, the pedigreed businessman whose home looked out on the rock.
And then one day it was gone.
A criminal investigation yielded a witness who had heard sounds of heavy machinery at night. Mr. Mellon refused to talk and hired a former state attorney general as his lawyer. Nearly a year later, the matter was resolved quietly: Mr. Mellon agreed to return the stone, and prosecutors agreed not to bring charges.
The episode was a rare glimpse into the private life and the public dealings of Mr. Mellon, 81, a reclusive heir and railroad magnate who has recently turned himself into a political force. He has surprised even political insiders with the size of his contributions this year, throwing $75 million behind Mr. Trump’s attempt to return to the White House and an additional $25 million toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential run, making him both candidates’ single largest benefactor.
All told, he has given $227 million in contributions to federal candidates and political committees since 2020, nearly all to Republicans — a sum that puts him in the top echelon of the party’s donors, alongside far better-known megadonors like Miriam Adelson and her husband, Sheldon, who died in 2021, and Liz and Dick Uihlein.
Yet for all his financial influence, Mr. Mellon and his interests — and what exactly is motivating his largess — have remained largely a mystery.
Interviews with his associates, along with a review of court documents and other public records, reveal an ideologically driven conservative with a combative streak. Mr. Mellon spent most of his life leveraging his family fortune to create his own. His freight railroad, a regional line that repeatedly ran afoul of worker and environmental protections, was recently sold for $600 million.
Over time, Mr. Mellon’s politics shifted far to the right.
In the 1970s, his charitable giving supported feminist and ecological causes and Native Americans. By 2014, he was posting comments in an online chat room comparing climate-change scientists to ISIS and worrying that terrorists could attack America using “donkeys coming over our Southern border.”
Most recently, he became a significant donor to Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense. In an interview, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Mellon’s contribution had come during the height of the Covid pandemic and appeared to be motivated by a shared concern over government lockdowns and “suppressing constitutional rights.”
Mr. Kennedy, who said he had met Mr. Mellon only twice, described him as “intensely curious, skeptical towards orthodoxies and passionate about personal freedoms.” (He added that Mr. Mellon takes long cross-country drives alone “to talk to ordinary Americans” and has a fascination with Scandinavia.)
Mr. Trump’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Mr. Mellon rarely engages with the news media and did not respond to interview requests. Even some of the candidates who accept his checks have little contact with him. The most detailed accounting of his life comes largely from two sources: an autobiography Mr. Mellon first published in 2014 and the paper trail he has left in court.
He has frequently become mired in disputes, some of them oddly small-bore and some just odd. In May — the same month he made a $50 million donation to support Mr. Trump — he filed a lawsuit against a family-owned car dealership in Connecticut, complaining that he had spent $7,300 on a failed engine replacement for a 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Years ago, he sued a group of explorers he had helped finance, claiming they had deliberately overlooked the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane so they could keep raising money for their expeditions. Mr. Mellon was convinced he had seen Earhart’s head on the seafloor in a cellophane bag.
He lost the case, appealed, and lost again.
Testifying in a 2014 civil case, he estimated he had undergone depositions “15 to 20” times in his life and could not recall how many lawsuits he was involved in.
“Once they finish,” he said, “I try to put them out of my mind and get on with the next one.”
Leveraging a fortune
Mellons have long converted wealth into political power. At the turn of the last century, Mr. Mellon’s paternal grandfather, Andrew Mellon, parlayed his vast industrial empire into more than a decade atop the Treasury Department, where he pushed for tax cuts for the rich and later became reviled for resisting government intervention to stave off the Great Depression. (He resigned amid the initiation of impeachment proceedings on corruption charges.)
Andrew Mellon died before Timothy was born. But his grandson was raised in a cocoon of wealth: brought up in a Virginia mansion, with evenings spent in a “Jeffersonian-style garden with serpentine brick walls,” a family chauffeur, a rotation of international governesses and a private plane that shuttled him to boarding school in Massachusetts, according to his memoir.
A Times article in 1970 described Mr. Mellon, whose inheritance at one point was estimated by Forbes to be worth around $100 million, as the most “un Mellon‐like” of the family, “a quiet Yale graduate with two college degrees who has applied computer techniques to city planning.”
(Looking back, Mr. Mellon trashed his Yale education as “a mish-mash of pseudo-scientific sociological clap-trap, largely based on Progressive dogma related to the redistribution of wealth.”)
He ultimately followed his grandfather into industry, founding a company that made railroad ties and then cobbling together a regional railroad by combining smaller freight lines from Maine to New York. And he scooped up the remains of Pan Am, the defunct airline, for about $28 million, acquiring the name, the stylized globe logo and a few planes.
Under his control, the railroad cut costs and rejiggered operations, battling with unions and regulators over wage cuts, layoffs, worker deaths and safety concerns. In the 1980s, strikes stretched on for months, disrupting service and, in at least one case, prompting congressional intervention.
The company “was considered to be strongly anti-union, almost in a 19th-century sense,” said Anthony Hatch, a longtime railroad industry analyst.
His companies were repeatedly accused of violating environmental and safety standards. In 2006, they were convicted by a jury and fined $500,000 in Massachusetts for covering up an oil spill. (Mr. Mellon was not charged.) In 2008, federal regulators revoked certification for the airline company he had tried to rebuild after finding the company was falsifying financial records and operating in poor financial condition, forcing it to shut down. And in 2014, a jury awarded a worker $400,000 after finding he had been fired for reporting environmental concerns to the authorities.
An audit completed last year by the Federal Railroad Administration into two fatal employee accidents that occurred during Mr. Mellon’s ownership cited “critical safety concerns” and attributed them to the “apparent failure of Pan Am’s leadership” to develop a “positive safety culture.”
In 2020, Mr. Mellon announced that he was selling Pan Am to CSX, one of the nation’s largest railroads. In a 2022 hearing, CSX officials said they had acquired a railway long in neglect.
“It was so overgrown with trees and weeds you don’t even know there’s a railroad there,” James Foote, then the chief executive of CSX, testified.
Donations skyrocket
By his own account, Mr. Mellon’s personal politics shifted from youthful liberalism to small-government conservatism. One of his earliest recorded federal contributions was to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat.
But in the 1980s, Mr. Mellon wrote in his memoir, he came to resent “citizens dependent upon government largess,” whom he called “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”
“Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,” he wrote.
In a statement, the book’s publisher, Tony Lyons, defended Mr. Mellon’s view, saying that he had used “words that some readers might now consider harsh” but that “it is not racist to report that reality and truth.”
There were other signs of Mr. Mellon’s transformation. In an online forum for Amelia Earhart researchers, when he was not describing things he had seen on the seabed, Mr. Mellon went off topic with right-wing commentary, voicing distrust of the Internal Revenue Service and the intelligence community. When another forum member took exception to Mr. Mellon’s comparing climate-change scientists to terrorists, he did not back down.
“Not when people use phony science as a pretext to take political action to ruin the world economy and unilaterally relinquish our sovereignty in order to control human behavior,” he wrote. “Join their phalanx, if you wish, but not I.”
As his political views hardened, his donations became intermittent and relatively modest — until recently. He donated just a couple thousand dollars to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain. But in 2010, he gave $1.5 million for a fund Gov. Janet Brewer of Arizona set up to defend the state’s harsh immigration enforcement law in court.
Mr. Mellon’s contributions rose dramatically around 2018: He gave millions to support congressional races. He poured about $20 million into Mr. Trump’s failed 2020 re-election bid without ever having met him. And he has donated millions to the political committee of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has become an engine of Trumpism.
Often, the money arrived after little courtship or warning. When Mr. Mellon donated more than $50 million in securities to help Texas build a border wall, Gov. Greg Abbott’s political aides were surprised by the gift, according to a person briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. (Mr. Mellon wrote that he liked to donate to government entities in part because the gifts are tax-deductible.)
One day in 2018, a staff member for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that supports Republican House candidates, received a phone call from Mr. Mellon, who said he was interested in contributing. Twenty-four hours later, the group received a check for $10 million, an unheard-of sum to come in without a formal proposal, according to a person briefed on the contribution who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Others told similar stories of checks arriving with little discussion and little or no interaction with the candidates involved. When Mr. Mellon gave $5.5 million to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia for his 2022 re-election effort, making him the campaign’s biggest donor, the two had never met.
A quixotic pursuit
The email in March 2012 from a stranger asking about “funding opportunities” to search for Earhart’s plane caught Ric Gillespie by surprise. The inquirer was Mr. Mellon, a licensed pilot and aviation history buff who had seen a newspaper story about a planned expedition to the Pacific, where Earhart disappeared in 1937.
Mr. Mellon offered $1 million if he could go along. During the trip, he mostly kept to himself reading books, Mr. Gillespie said. He was pleasant enough to talk to as long as the subject was not politics, Mr. Gillespie said, adding, “His views were somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”
The expedition failed to find Earhart’s plane. But in subsequent online discussions, where members of Mr. Gillespie’s forum shared theories about the Earhart mystery, Mr. Mellon became increasingly fixated on video taken during an earlier underwater search.
He wrote hundreds of posts over many months, some with annotated screenshots of the ocean floor, where he claimed to see airplane wreckage, personal effects and, eventually, bodies. Others tried to explain that he was only seeing rocks and coral, but Mr. Mellon insisted he could discern items they had missed: a banjo, a severed hand, even 75-year-old rolls of toilet paper.
It was apparent, he said, that the heads of Earhart and her navigator were encased in cellophane bags connected by a hose to a nitrogen tank, and that they had committed suicide.
Mr. Gillespie, fielding complaints from members about Mr. Mellon’s “outlandish ideas,” eventually limited his forum privileges. Mr. Mellon sued, claiming his $1 million gift had been unnecessary because the expedition team already had video evidence of Earhart’s plane but did not act on it.
He spent at least $150,000 on his own forensic experts trying to prove his assertions and pursued the case all the way to an unsuccessful appeal.
While a judge dismissed Mr. Mellon’s claims as “no more than theories and opinions,” the case dragged on for two years, imperiling the group’s finances.
“Tim gets pissed off at somebody, and he uses his wealth and the legal system to punish them,” Mr. Gillespie said.
The Earhart matter was not the only legal imbroglio to occupy Mr. Mellon during that time. In late 2012, he was squabbling over the disposition of the Narragansett Runestone in Pojac Point, where Mr. Mellon had a waterfront estate.
The rock, which occupied state land below the high-tide line, had been featured in a History Channel documentary, and amateur archaeologists were pushing for it to be moved where it could be easily viewed. At a meeting with neighbors, Mr. Mellon angrily insisted the rock was on his property. According to a state report, he confronted people walking along the shore to look at it and told them to leave.
Within a few months, someone noticed that the seven-foot-long stone was gone. Detectives canvassed warehouses and interviewed neighbors. The investigation led to Mr. Mellon, who eventually agreed to turn over the stone with no charges filed, according to a non-prosecution agreement obtained by The Times.
William Goodhue, who grew up nearby and continued to visit his mother there, said the episode had only confirmed his dim view of Mr. Mellon.
“He did everything you shouldn’t do as a neighbor,” Mr. Goodhue said. “It was always like, how did this guy just waltz away from this?”
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