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Someone set Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht adrift on Lake Erie

US education secretary Betsy DeVos’s 163-foot-yacht, the “Seaquest” was untied from its moorings and set adrift in the Huron Boat Basin in northern Ohio on Saturday night by an unknown person.

No one was hurt, but the yacht’s paint job sustained $5,000 to $10,000 in large scratches and scrapes, the Toledo Blade reports , citing a police report. The boat’s captain “called police at about 6 a.m. Sunday, telling them that he and the crew realized at sunrise that someone had untied Seaquest from the dock, setting it adrift,” the paper reports. Police are looking for surveillance video to figure out who was responsible.

The Seaquest, built in 2008, is a “luxury motor yacht” worth $40 million, with room for 12 guests in cabins and 12 crew, and a maximum speed of 24 knots, according to yachtharbour.com . DeVos and her husband’s assets include “no less than 10 yachts and reportedly an interest in the shipyard that built them,” the yachting news website reports. The boat has teak decks and room for 12 crew, yachtcharterfleet.com says .

The DeVos family’s other yachts include “WindQuest,” “SunQuest,” “Kitsune,” and “Godspeed,” according to superyachtfan.com .

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Betsy DeVos' $40 Million Luxury Yacht Suddenly in Need of Repairs

Sad news yesterday out of Huron, Ohio, a tiny town nestled on the shores of beautiful Lake Erie: A $40 million yacht owned by the family of Betsy DeVos , who believes that public education is a ridesharing app , was vandalized by an unknown person or persons last weekend. The Toledo Blade reports that police were summoned to the docks on Sunday morning after crew members discovered that the 163-foot craft had been untied from its mooring overnight. Unfortunately, the hull suffered "large scratches and scrapes" during the subsequent re-docking effort. There are no suspects.

The boat, christened SeaQuest , is often spotted in Florida or the Caribbean, according to something called SuperYachtFan.com , and can comfortably accommodate a dozen passengers in six cabins. It is one of at least ten family yachts to which DeVos, a woman who has accused Americans victimized by for-profit colleges' predatory lending practices of just wanting "free money," can retire for a few days of leisure whenever the partisan rancor in Washington becomes too unpleasant for her to bear.

At this time, it is unclear how the SeaQuest 's temporary unavailability will affect the multiple DeVos family employees who are responsible for scheduling their various nautical excursions and ensuring that each onboard meal adheres to "proper table etiquette, service, and entertaining protocol." However, should she require the immediate services of a seaworthy vessel, rest assured that the United States Secretary of Education—who in the name of eliminating waste has dismissed pending civil rights cases, disposed of guidelines that safeguard the rights of disabled students, gutted regulations that protect sexual assault survivors, and dismantled programs that help borrowers manage debt and avoid delinquency—will be able to avail herself of one of her family's dozen private planes in order to reach the relevant port of call.

The damage will require between $5,000 and $10,000 to repair, says the Blade . The DeVos fortune is estimated at $5.3 billion; according to the most recent data published by the Census Bureau, the median household net worth in this country is a shade over $80,000. This means that for Betsy DeVos, paying to restore this luxury yacht will be the equivalent of the average American family spending fifteen cents—roughly the cost of a single dry erase marker that she would really prefer teachers to pay for out of their own pockets.

Secretary of Education Betsy Devos' $40 million yacht set adrift on Lake Huron

The SeaQuest, a 164-foot luxury yacht, was untied at a marina in Ohio.

A $40 million yacht belonging to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was untied from its mooring at a Lake Huron marina, police said.

The SeaQuest, a 164-foot luxury yacht, registered under a Cayman Islands flag, was set adrift at the Huron Boat Basin, where it was docked.

"Around sunrise the crew woke to find the boat had been untied from the dock and was adrift," according to a vandalism report filed Sunday by the Huron Police Department.

The crew was able to regain control, but not before the ship struck the dock, suffering several scratches and scrapes, the report said.

The captain estimated that the collision caused between $5,000-$10,000 in damages.

MORE: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos under fire for saying schools can report undocumented students

Investigators hope that nearby surveillance cameras may help them identify the person who untied the yacht.

The SeaQuest is one of a fleet of at least 10 boats owned by the DeVos family. The SeaQuest is staffed by a crew of twelve and, additionally, accommodates as many as twelve guests at a time.

DeVos has previously been criticized for her family’s wealth and holdings. She and her husband have a combined net worth of over $5 billion. Devos’ brother, Erik Prince, is the founder of Blackwater, a private military company that has faced scrutiny for its activities as a mercenary subcontractor for U.S. combat operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

MORE: Amid Mueller probe, Blackwater founder pitches mercenary takeover of Afghan War

DeVos’ press office did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

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Someone set Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht adrift on Lake Erie

US education secretary Betsy DeVos’s 163-foot-yacht, the “Seaquest” was untied from its moorings and set adrift in the Huron Boat Basin in northern Ohio on Saturday night by an unknown person.

No one was hurt, but the yacht’s paint job sustained $5,000 to $10,000 in large scratches and scrapes, the Toledo Blade reports , citing a police report. The boat’s captain “called police at about 6 a.m. Sunday, telling them that he and the crew realized at sunrise that someone had untied Seaquest from the dock, setting it adrift,” the paper reports. Police are looking for surveillance video to figure out who was responsible.

Robert Mueller is investigating Trump’s Twitter. These 22 tweets might raise an eyebrow

The Seaquest, built in 2008, is a “luxury motor yacht” worth $40 million, with room for 12 guests in cabins and 12 crew, and a maximum speed of 24 knots, according to yachtharbour.com . DeVos and her husband’s assets include “no less than 10 yachts and reportedly an interest in the shipyard that built them,” the yachting news website reports. The boat has teak decks and room for 12 crew, yachtcharterfleet.com says .

Seaquest, the DeVos yacht.

The DeVos family’s other yachts include “WindQuest,” “SunQuest,” “Kitsune,” and “Godspeed,” according to superyachtfan.com .

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Betsy DeVos's $40 Million Yacht Was Set Adrift in Ohio

A $40 million yacht belonging to the family of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was untied and set adrift from its dock in Huron, Ohio, sometime last weekend, according to The Blade , a Toledo-based outlet.

The captain of the supersized boat first reported the incident to police at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 22, The Blade reported.

Handlers were able to wrangle the yacht, named Seaquest, but not before it suffered an estimated $5,000 to $10,000 in damage in the form of large scratches and scrapes after colliding with the dock at the Huron Boat Basin in Huron, The Blade reported, citing a police report.

The 163-foot boat has a capacity of 12-24 passengers and 12 crew members. It was delivered to the DeVos family in 2008, according to SuperYachtFan . The Blade reported that, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the boat is registered to RDV International Marine LTD; a company that shares a location with the RDV Corporation, which manages the DeVos family’s wealth.

DeVos and her husband, former Amway CEO Richard DeVos Jr., have an estimated combined net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Business Insider .

According to CBS News , DeVos is the richest member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and as Forbes has stated, “appears to be the richest in modern U.S. history.” The Seaquest is just one of 10 boats owned by DeVos, according to The Blade , which cites family profiles in national publications. The family also owns two helicopters and four airplanes, according to Newsweek .

Police are looking for surveillance footage to determine who could have untied the yacht. The Blade reported it was unclear why the boat was in Ohio waters, although the education secretary and “school choice” advocate had visited the state earlier in the month. DeVos also has strong ties to Michigan , as Politico has reported. The Huron dock where the boat was tied up is on Lake Erie, which touches both Ohio and Michigan.

DeVos’s tenure as secretary of education has included rescinding Obama-era guidelines on college campus sexual assault and removing 72 policies that helped students with disabilities because they were "outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective." Her perceived inaction on gun safety in schools has prompted international protests .

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Want more from Teen Vogue ? Check this out: Activists in Switzerland Explain Why They Protested Betsy DeVos's Visit

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Betsy devos' $40 million yacht set adrift in ohio, police believe vandals set the yacht adift in lake erie this week. the boat collided with a nearby dock, causing about $10,000 in damages..

Chris Mosby , Patch Staff

SANDUSKY, OH — Vandals untied U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' family yacht and set it adrift in Lake Erie. The boat ended up colliding with a dock in Huron, causing between $5,000 and $10,000 in damages.

The $40 million yacht was moored at the Huron Boat Basin, the Toledo Blade initially reported. The captain of the boat contacted police on Sunday morning when he realized someone had cut the boat free, sending it drifting into the lake.

The yacht's crew were able to get control of the boat, but not before it crashed into a dock. Most of the damage was said to be large scrapes on the surface of the yacht.

Find out what's happening in Cleveland with free, real-time updates from Patch.

Police are hoping surveillance footage of the incident will reveal who set the yacht adrift.

The 163-foot yacht in Huron, called the "Seaquest," is one of 10 large boats owned by the DeVos family, the Hill noted. It is not yet clear why the yacht was in Northern Ohio.

The MarineTraffic website, which tracks vessels from around the world, indicates the yacht has returned to a Michigan harbor since the incident. The boat is owned by DeVos and her billionaire husband, Dick DeVos. Its home port is in the Cayman Islands .

The yacht, which has been owned by the DeVoses since 2008, has 12 cabins, and can accommodate 12 guests and a crew of 12.

Betsy DeVos is taking part in a pair of meetings Thursday, the Congressional Intern Lecture Series and the Federal Commission on School Safety Meeting.

Devos has been a figure of controversy within the Trump administration since her confirmation. Her hearing and confirmation resulted in a 50-50 split, with Vice President Mike Pence having to cast the deciding vote in her favor.

(For more news like this, find your local Patch here . If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app ; download the free Patch Android app here. And like Patch on Facebook!)

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Someone untied Betsy DeVos’s yacht in Ohio. Damage ensued.

A yacht owned by the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suffered damage when someone untied it early Sunday in Ohio, sending it adrift on Lake Erie with the crew on board.

A crew member on the SeaQuest called police to report that he and other members awoke to find the yacht floating away from the dock. The crew managed to gain control of the vessel, but not before it scraped the dock. The yacht suffered $5,000 to $10,000 of damage, according to a Huron Police Department report.

Bob Lippert, chief of the Huron Police Department, said it is unclear whether the vandal knew the yacht belonged to the family of DeVos, whose controversial positions on education have made her the target of ire.

DeVos assailed by protesters at college campuses in Boston, Washington

“If you had just walked by it, you wouldn’t know that,” Lippert said.

But, he noted, the yacht’s arrival made headlines in Huron: “SeaQuest Yacht docks in Huron,” an article in the Sandusky Register read last week.

“The SeaQuest Yacht, famously owned by Betsy DeVos, the U.S. Secretary of Education, docked in Huron Friday,” the article began.

Lippert said it is possible the untying of the yacht happened without a target in mind. Tourists flock to bars nearby during summer.

“It’s quite possible that it was a random act by some late-night revelers,” the police chief said.

The Education Department did not respond immediately Thursday to a request for comment.

Before she became education secretary, DeVos, who has a residence in Michigan, spent three decades advocating for charter and private schools. The daughter of an auto parts manufacturer, she married Richard DeVos, an heir to the Amway fortune. DeVos flies on her own plane when on official travel.

Her positions have inspired protests at many of her engagements. Teachers unions have roundly rebuked her, and civil rights groups, disappointed in her moves to roll back protections for students, have assailed her.

At her first school visit, to a middle school in the District, protesters blocked her from entering the building and one appeared to lay a hand on her. Shortly thereafter, U.S. marshals began guarding the secretary rather than officers employed by the department.

Betsy DeVos being guarded by U.S. Marshals Service

The Huron police chief said that although nobody was injured Sunday, untying the boat could have caused far more damage if conditions had been different.

“Had the winds been different or more boat traffic, we could have had a bad situation with a collision or something of the sort,” Lippert said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated where the yacht was set adrift. This story has been updated.

Betsy DeVos' $40 million yacht vandalized in Ohio

One of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ yachts was vandalized over the weekend, according to Ohio police.

The $40 million, 163-foot boat, which is usually docked at the Huron Boat Basin in Huron, Ohio, was found undocked 6 a.m. Sunday by Captain Quintynn Botha and his crew.

Huron police were called and the crew eventually got hold of the boat but Botha told police that the boat suffered as much as $10,000 in damages.

Botha also told police that neither he nor his crew had observed anything suspicious the night before. Huron police are waiting for surveillance footage to see if anyone can be spotted at the time the boat was untied.

DeVos, who is one of the wealthiest members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, with her family’s approximate net worth of $5.3 billion , owns nine other luxury boats along with her husband’s billionaire family.

It unclear if DeVos was in Ohio at the time of the incident.

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One of Betsy DeVos' yachts, a $40 million vessel, was vandalized in Ohio

A $40 million yacht owned by the family of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was vandalized in Ohio, reportedly causing somewhere from $5,000 to $10,000 worth of damage.

The Toledo Blade reports the vessel — one of 10 owned by the DeVos family — was docked in Huron, which sits along Lake Erie, when someone untied it, allowing it to drift off.

The ship's captain called police early Sunday and reported what happened. The crew found the vessel, named Seaquest, had several scratches but were able to wrangle it back to the dock.

The police report, obtained by the Blade, notes the 163-foot boat struck a dock and had somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 of damage.

No arrests have been made.

DeVos was in Ohio earlier this month to tour a career center and a correctional treatment program. It's unclear why the yacht was in Huron.

Officers were reportedly searching for surveillance video that may show who untied the yacht.

The Huron Police Department did not immediately respond to requests from USA TODAY.

Contributing: Associated Press

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Betsy DeVos' $40M family yacht untied, causing $10,000 in damages

By Rebecca Bratek

Updated on: July 26, 2018 / 2:32 PM EDT / CBS News

A yacht owned by the family of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was untied from its dock in Ohio last weekend, police say. This unmooring caused the yacht to strike the dock, causing up to $10,000 in damages. The 163-foot yacht is worth a reported $40 million , according to Toledo's The Blade newspaper.

The vessel, named the SeaQuest, was moored at a basin in Huron, Ohio, when the captain reported it became untied and sent adrift around 6 a.m. Sunday, The Blade reports. The yacht received large scrapes as it struck the dock before the crew was able to gain control of it, according to a police report. 

The damage is estimated at $5,000 to $10,000, according to The Blade.

Officers are searching for surveillance video of the incident, the newspaper reports. It's unclear why the boat was docked in Huron, the Blade notes, but DeVos visited Ohio earlier this month to tour a career center and a correctional treatment program.

The SeaQuest is one of at least 10 boats owned by the DeVos family, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the family's wealth. It can accommodate 12 guests and 12 crew members, according to the SuperYachtFan website .

The DeVos clan also owns at least four planes and two helicopters, the Journal reports. 

Among those serving on President Trump's Cabinet, DeVos is the richest : she grew up wealthy and married even wealthier. She disclosed her family's wealth -- more than $580 million across her assets, according to the Journal's analysis -- when she was tapped for the education secretary post in 2016.

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A Prankster Caused $5,000 in Damage by Untying One of Betsy DeVos’ 10 Boats From Its Dock

In what was either an act of radical political sabotage or radical teenager-ness (or both), a big old yacht belonging to the family of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was surreptitiously untied from its dock in Lake Erie last weekend, causing thousands of dollars in damage. From the Toledo Blade’s report on the incident in Huron, Ohio:

The Seaquest was moored at the Huron Boat Basin, 330 Main St., according to a police report. The captain of the 163-foot yacht, worth a reported $40 million, called police at about 6 a.m. Sunday, telling them that he and the crew realized at sunrise that someone had untied Seaquest from the dock, setting it adrift. The crew eventually got control of the yacht, but not before it struck the dock, causing an estimated $5,000 to $10,000 in damage from large scratches and scrapes, according to the police report.

The Seaquest is among “at least” 10 boats owned by the DeVos family, the Wall Street Journal has reported . (DeVos is heir to an auto-parts fortune and married into the family that co-founded Amway .) The DeVoses also own “at least four planes and two helicopters” and maintain a company, RDV Corp. , to manage family affairs; job listings at the company have included a “Household Administrative Assistant” position whose duties included “Assist teen with identifying list of clothing and personal items to pack for travel.”

It’s not clear what the DeVos yacht was doing in Huron, a small town between Toledo and Cleveland, but I’m guessing it was not related to a reservation at the Quality Inn:

Free breakfast! And yes, that includes eggs, sausages, and pancakes, not just rolls and stuff. (I called to check.)

Huron, it’s worth noting, is only 10 miles from the Cedar Point amusement park , a Midwestern institution so beloved that one Slate staffer attested this morning that her family named their dog “Mil” after its Millennium Force roller coaster . Cedar Point—fun place.

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“I’m Tired of America Wasting Our Blood and Treasure”: The Strange Ascent of Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince

On Friday, September 30, 2016, Republican nominee Donald Trump made his fifth campaign visit to Michigan, a battleground state where he was closing the gap with Hillary Clinton. He was scheduled to speak at five P.M. in Novi, a suburb northwest of Detroit. But instead of landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, his plane continued another 150 miles west to the city of Grand Rapids. The sun was peeking through the clouds over the skyline, one of the Midwest’s finest, a harmonious blend of steel-and-glass high-rises and lovingly restored old stone and red-brick buildings, when Trump’s motorcade drove through, at 12:30, and pulled up to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, named for the longtime Michigan congressman improbably catapulted into the Oval Office by the crimes of Watergate. Visitors were startled when a familiar figure—in a dark suit and unmistakable orange crown—emerged from his vehicle and placed a bouquet of roses, red and white, at the graves of Ford and his wife, Betty. Schoolchildren came racing across the lawn. A local banker called out, “Make America great again!”

By the time the motorcade reached the J. W. Marriott hotel, a cylindrical glass tower on the banks of the Grand River, the press, scrambling to catch up, had figured out what was going on. Donald Trump was in town to meet privately with donors—the cream of the city’s business class, manufacturers (Keeler Brass Company) and retailers (Cole’s Quality Foods)—gathered in the Marriott ballroom. Journalists, in the corridor outside, wondered: would the DeVoses be there?

In the solar system of elite Republican contributors, Richard DeVos Sr., who died Thursday at age 92—one of the two founders of Amway, the direct-sale colossus—occupied an exalted place, and his offspring did too. Since the 1970s, members of the DeVos family had given as much as $200 million to the G.O.P. and been tireless promoters of the modern conservative movement—its ideas, its policies, and its crusades combining free-market economics, a push for privatization of many government functions, and Christian social values. While other far-right mega-donors may have become better known over the years (the Coorses and the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers), Michigan’s DeVos dynasty stands apart—for the duration, range, and depth of its influence.

Start with the think tanks, advocacy organizations, and colleges. In the Grand Rapids area alone there are three conservative academic bastions: Grand Valley State University; Calvin College, attended by several generations of DeVoses, including Rich’s daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos, 60, who is now Trump’s secretary of education; and Northwood University, her husband Dick’s alma mater. The DeVoses are also major backers of Hillsdale, the libertarian-plus-Christian liberal-arts college in southern Michigan. One celebrated alum: Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, 49, the swashbuckling military contractor who has come to the serious attention of investigators looking into the Trump team’s alleged dealings with Russia. Other recipients of DeVos largesse: the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and the American Enterprise Institute—the list goes on.

Top, DeVos and President Trump at the White House, April 2017. Bottom, Prince in Afghanistan, 2009.

The DeVoses don’t limit their activism to ideas. They have been enthusiastic supporters of Republican presidential nominees—from Gerald Ford to Mitt Romney, who also has deep Michigan roots. But 2016 changed everything. Betsy, the most visible member of the clan, had been close to former Florida governor Jeb Bush; the two shared a passion for remaking public-school education. When Bush dropped out of the race, she switched over to Florida senator Marco Rubio. She also wrote checks for Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal—everyone, anyone , but Donald Trump. “I’m hopeful we are going to hear something from our nominee to convince me that I should support him,” she declared at the time.

The DeVoses’ preference for “values-oriented” candidates reflect the teachings of the Christian Reformed Church. A small breakaway denomination of its Dutch forerunner, it has some 300,000 adherents in North America, many living in the same western-Michigan towns where their immigrant ancestors settled in the 1840s to pursue a faith that combines Calvinist devotion to the work ethic, prayer, a dedication to family and community—and philanthropy. The DeVoses take this seriously. Quite apart from their political donations, they have lavished millions on worthy charitable projects in and around town and far beyond. They have done all this, however, with a flamboyance unusual for Grand Rapids, stamping the family name, or Amway’s, on many of the city’s most visible surfaces.

And now Donald J. Trump, himself a stranger to charity but not to branding, was in DeVos country. When the Marriott meeting ended, and the doors opened, “the one lasting image for me,” one Grand Rapids journalist would later recall, “was seeing Rich DeVos wheeled out of the ballroom to the elevator.” Trump had gotten his audience with the patriarch.

Some five weeks later, on November 7, Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, came back yet again for the campaign’s last rally—at the DeVos Place Convention Center. Trump, it turned out, would squeak through, by fewer than 11,000 votes. While the bellwether suburbs outside Detroit certainly helped, Michiganders knew the critical votes that formed Trump’s base had come from the western part of the state. The point was clinched 12 days later, when Betsy DeVos, in a stylish gray jacket and practiced smile, stood with Trump at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. She had agreed to be Trump’s education chief. The announcement brought “Western Michigan royalty into the Trump fold,” observed The New York Times . (Indeed, when the Senate was split on confirming her, her pal Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote.) In retrospect, it seemed an early token of surrenders to come, as G.O.P. leaders would make their bargain with the interloper Donald Trump.

That was one way of looking at it. Another was that Trump was a useful vehicle for advancing nationally the revolution the DeVoses had already enacted in Michigan. There was, for instance, Betsy DeVos’s campaign to undo the state’s public-education system and replace it with for-profit and charter schools that, as she had put it two decades earlier, shared her mission of “defending the Judeo-Christian values that made us what we are, but which are under attack from the liberal elite.” There was also the campaign she and her husband had waged to weaken Michigan’s unions. And there was the DeVos-family-funded gentrification of Grand Rapids, which had erased the haunting images of a once struggling Rust Belt city, though one beset by racial tensions.

Those are some of the lessons to be learned in western Michigan— West Michigan, as locals call it, as if to designate a separate state, or at least a state of mind. Other lessons can be found in the pulp-fiction career of Betsy DeVos’s younger brother, Erik Prince, the former navy SEAL who started Blackwater—the mammoth security company, some of whose “civilian soldiers” had gone rogue in Iraq. Prince recently turned over his computer and phones to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has no doubt looked closely at his possible involvement in helping establish back-channel communications with Russia for the Trump administration. (Prince denies any wrongdoing.)

Behind all this is the story of a family dynasty that has been a driving force on the far right—the Michigan Medicis of Donald Trump’s America.

When people in West Michigan speak of the DeVoses, they mean not one great family but two, joined as the great European noble houses once were—Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hanover and Windsor. The story actually begins 30 miles west of Grand Rapids, in Holland, a town of some 34,000 on Lake Macatawa that is as reliable a Republican stronghold as any in America. The last time the county voted Democratic in a presidential election? In 1864— against Abraham Lincoln.

Betsy and Erik’s father, Edgar Prince, was a Chrysler-Plymouth salesman and then machine engineer who started a die-cast business and also had a tinkerer’s gift for inventions. One, the lighted vanity mirror on the flip-up sun visor (introduced in 1972), helped Prince become one of the wealthiest men in Michigan. Edgar and his wife, Elsa, were members of the charity-minded Christian Reformed Church (C.R.C.). As he got richer, the elder Prince rewarded his hometown handsomely; Prince money has done much to preserve downtown Holland, which remains a 1950s time capsule of Candy Land façades.

Elisabeth “Betsy” Prince, the eldest of four (there are two other daughters, Emilie and Eileen), attended Holland Christian, a Reformed high school, and then, like her mother, went to Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, “a kind of finishing school for that system,” says Doug Koopman, who teaches political science at Calvin and has served on the staff of several Republican legislators. Betsy was a freshman in the spring of 1976 when Ronald Reagan challenged the incumbent Jerry Ford in Republican primaries. Reformed Christians have a history of political activism, and Betsy eagerly joined the Ford youth brigade. The C.R.C.’s greatest figure, Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and prime minister who died almost a century ago, had declared, in words the faithful know by heart: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” The political message was open to interpretation. Some Calvin grads (including filmmaker Paul Schrader, class of 1968) had protested the Vietnam War. But many others veered right. And when Betsy DeVos later declared that her ambitions with “school choice” were to “advance God’s Kingdom,” she was echoing Kuyper’s teachings.

After the 1976 election, religion entered the bloodstream of American politics. The born-again Jimmy Carter was one reason. Another was the rise of the Republican right under Ronald Reagan. Among his most avid supporters were evangelicals who combined free-market gospel with a counteroffensive against what seemed dangerous secularism: abortion, affirmative action, busing, and “the liberalization” of school curriculums.

The Princes—parents and children alike—were in the vanguard of the Christian right. Edgar Prince had survived a heart attack in 1972, when he was 42, and the experience awakened him to a more observant religious life at a time when churches were beginning to embrace the culture wars. The enemy was everywhere, and growing: the Equal Rights Amendment, the pro-choice movement, and gay rights. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation would become major donors to two mighty organizations: Focus on the Family, founded by the psychologist and evangelist James Dobson, and the Family Research Council, led for more than a decade by Gary Bauer, the Christian Zionist who, in 2000, made a stab at the presidency. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God,” Bauer wrote about the man he referred to as his “mentor.”

Betsy and Dick’s home in Holland, Michigan, 2010.

The Princes and DeVoses—with neighboring homes in Holland—had effected a merger thanks to the 1979 marriage of their firstborn, Betsy Prince and Dick DeVos, then in their 20s. “Bible-reading jet-setter” was the description in a Detroit Free Press profile of Betsy published once she emerged as a kingmaker in the state Republican Party. She invited friends over to read Scripture; she also enjoyed road trips to watch the Orlando Magic, the N.B.A. franchise her father-in-law had purchased for $85 million, appointing Dick president. (Betsy DeVos has not responded for comment despite repeated requests to her office.)

To be a DeVos was to live large. Betsy and Dick own a 22,000-square-foot mansion on Lake Macatawa, with a large infinity pool. (Betsy was a competitive swimmer in her teens.) They also have a place in Vero Beach, Florida. The scale of the DeVos clan’s wealth became a source of national wonderment this summer, and a punch line for Stephen Colbert, after news accounts described how vandals had set adrift their $40 million, 163-foot yacht, the SeaQuest , which had been docked on Lake Erie. (It turns out the family, reportedly, owns 10 boats .)

Seen from the snobbish heights of Grand Rapids, the young auto-parts heiress, by becoming a DeVos, had made a brilliant leap into the gilded lap of the super-rich. The facts are more complicated. Prince Corporation, with its die-casting machines, was a classic Rust Belt factory. But the DeVos family business, Amway (short for American Way)—which recruited people to sell soap and household cleaning products—was very different, a kind of high-pressure cult, replete with tent-style rallies, as disillusioned ex-Amway sellers began to say.

The Federal Trade Commission had spent four years investigating Amway. Its “multi-level marketing” approach—in which descending tiers of home-operating “distributors” purchased Amway products and made money selling them, as well as by recruiting new members—appeared very similar to an illegal pyramid scheme. In the end, the F.T.C. ruled that Amway was legal, because its entry requirements were modest, and distributors were not compelled to buy unnecessary inventory. But Rich DeVos and Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel were also told to stop fixing prices and to clean up their sales pitch, which exaggerated the potential riches.

And yet the company kept growing. As DeVos would later note with satisfaction in his Trumpishly titled memoir, Simply Rich , “Just four years after the F.T.C. brought the suit, our reported sales at retail more than tripled—to $800 million.” (In 1983, however, DeVos and Van Andel pleaded guilty to criminal tax fraud in Canada. They paid fines of $25 million; the charges were dropped.) Today the company’s biggest market is China, with its legions of go-getters, though authorities there are now giving Amway and other multi-level marketing firms a hard look.

There was more to this than slick salesmanship. DeVos and Van Andel were students of Dale Carnegie, the business and self-improvement pitchman, and, especially, of Norman Vincent Peale, the charismatic pastor at Marble Collegiate, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. (He was also a trustee at Hope College, a Reformed school in Holland.) Peale’s radio sermons reached millions in the 1950s and early 60s, when the Soviet Union appeared to be winning the Cold War. The confident declarations in Peale’s best-seller The Power of Positive Thinking —”attitudes are more important than facts”; “never doubt the reality of the mental image”—infuse Amway’s own liturgy. Peale’s politics were congenial too. He extolled Republican candidates and shrewdly made himself into a media brand with his books, magazine, and radio and TV shows. DeVos and Van Andel created a similar empire. In 1977 they purchased the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network, paid Bob Hope to do promos, and hired Norman Rockwell to render their portraits in ads in The Saturday Evening Post .

Behind all this was an ideology neatly suited to the moment. Just as American manufacturing began a decline, Amway offered the promise of self-sufficiency. Instead of going off with your lunch pail or briefcase to be bossed around by someone no smarter or better than yourself, you were in charge—with your inventory and customers. “Selling America,” Rich DeVos’s signature motivational speech, included a tirade against softheaded college grads conned by liberal do-gooding dogma to “work for the welfare of others.” Nonsense, DeVos sneered. “We provided more welfare than anybody else. We provide employment for 72 million.” Seventy-two million? It was pure fiction. But it was also true that within a few years Michigan’s Big Three auto companies began to slip, while Amway profits were soaring.

A fellow pitchman, for General Electric, had been speaking Rich DeVos’s language: the actor turned California governor Ronald Reagan. He, too, had delivered silken odes to free enterprise mixed with warnings about the evils of big government. When Reagan got the presidential nomination in 1980, DeVos and Van Andel were two of the biggest donors to the Republican Party and conservative organizations. DeVos became finance chair of the Republican National Committee, though he didn’t help the G.O.P.’s image when he called the 1982 recession a “beneficial” and “cleansing process” and later said, of calls to increase the minimum wage, “If it’s too small, I have a suggestion for you. Get two eight-hour jobs.”

By this time, some began to notice how much of Reaganism was coming not just from California but also from West Michigan. In addition to DeVos and Van Andel, there was the conservative author Russell Kirk, the “sage of Mecosta,” who lived an hour north of Grand Rapids. He had been arguing since the 50s that federal programs, including school lunches, were a “vehicle for totalitarianism.” Kirk’s wife, Annette, served on Reagan’s education commission and helped slip language into its famous report, A Nation at Risk, that created an opening for vouchers and tuition credits. Reagan failed in his true objective, to eliminate the Department of Education, but Annette Kirk, who became an adviser to the DeVoses, persevered. Today, about 80 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are privately operated.

Another target was labor unions. Amway and the Prince Corporation had no use for them. Now the family waged a public fight. After Dick DeVos was routed when he ran for governor of Michigan in 2006, he blamed his defeat, in part, on Michigan’s unions and began to push for a right-to-work law (weakening the unions’ economic power and political clout, a pillar of the state’s Democratic Party). In 2012, the bill got through, and Michigan—headquarters to the United Automobile Workers, no less—became yet another of the country’s right-to-work states.

Betsy was waging a parallel battle against the public-school system and its unionized teachers. Her weapon was “school choice.” A state law rewarded so-called educational management organizations, which grabbed up public money to start private, for-profit schools. According to a year-long investigation by the Detroit Free Press , rampant abuses followed. (Some educators point to charter-school success stories in other states, where there has been more strict regulation and accountability.)

In her present job, DeVos has raised school choice to a national cause. She has effectively shut down Obama-sanctioned investigations of fraudulent for-profit colleges even as she has gone about hiring staffers from that world, including a former associate dean at one such school that settled a $100 million F.T.C. lawsuit for offering its students hollow promises of post-grad success—à la Amway and Trump U. During her 20 months in office, DeVos has pursued the unrealized quest of the Reagan years—championing charter and religious schools, and, in effect, dismantling the Department of Education from within.

Through it all, DeVos has maintained the composure of “West Michigan nice,” though many Michiganders are not surprised when the mask drops and something harder shows through—entitlement commingled with Calvinist certitude. Briskly touring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, after the horrific shootings there, DeVos avoided giving specific answers to questions, even from student journalists. In June, she told Congress that firearms would not be a topic studied by her own school-safety committee, created post-Parkland. “So you’re studying gun violence,” remarked Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, incredulously, “but not considering the roles of guns.”

DeVos is too busy fighting her own war. “[Among] her big ‘accomplishments,’” says Diane Ravitch, the N.Y.U. professor and respected education historian, “have been reversing civil-rights enforcement for kids with disabilities, putting administrators from for-profit colleges in charge of monitoring for-profit colleges . . . stabbing in the back young people with heavy debt for their college education, and being a constant critic of public schools.” One saving grace, Ravitch contends, is that DeVos has gotten very few of her budget proposals through Congress. There is a method here—or, more precisely, a mission. Samuel Abrams, director of Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, says that DeVos has used her position as a “bully pulpit” to advance the belief that “society doesn’t exist; only individuals and families. We accordingly should not be surprised that she has pushed for minimum standards at public school and cut funds for everything from career and technical education to teenage pregnancy prevention. For libertarians, she’s a godsend. For the rest of us, she’s a wrecking ball.”

Betsy and Dick in Michigan, 1992.

The election of Donald Trump has given us a new Gilded Age of privatization, profiteering—and self-dealing. Witness the administration personnel feeding greedily at the public trough: among them, Health and Human Services czar Tom Price and E.P.A. administrator Scott Pruitt (both now gone), not to mention Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—who last year made at least $82 million in outside income while serving as White House senior advisers. But the most ambitious privatizer in Trumpworld—with the largest vision—has been Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince.

Strong-featured and blond, like his sister, Erik was devoted to his father, who doted on him. He played four sports at Holland Christian and was the proudly straitlaced kid who, without being asked, put away the soccer balls after practice. Prince enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 but was shocked by the frat-house atmosphere—too much for a junior culture warrior who’d been an intern at the Family Research Council. After three semesters, he transferred to Michigan’s Hillsdale College.

Today Hillsdale, under its president, Larry P. Arnn (former head of the Claremont Institute, a citadel of far-right ideology), is known as a feeder school for the Trump administration, including Betsy DeVos’s chief of staff, Josh Venable. In May, the week Vice President Pence gave the commencement address there, Politico called it “the college that wants to take over Washington”—citing many alums who are now D.C. power players. (The school has received a great deal of DeVos and Van Andel money.) “We’re rolling in dough,” says Mickey Craig, a political-science professor at the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship.

In the early 90s, Craig taught Erik Prince, and came to know him well. “He had that seriousness,” Craig says. “It was clear that he just worshipped his father.” At the time, father and son, like so many dedicated conservatives, were losing faith in President George H. W. Bush, a moderate. In 1989, Erik had been invited to a “youth” inaugural ball for Bush—and there had met Joan Keating, the woman who would become his first wife. Prince even worked as a Bush White House intern. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with,” he later said. “Homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.” He left that job for another, in the office of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who has often been called Vladimir Putin’s top Capitol Hill asset, so valued, the Times has reported, that he was given a Kremlin code name.

Then, in 1991, after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Prince, at 21, joined a group of prominent conservatives who traveled through the Baltic states. One member of the tour was Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter and right-wing commentator, who was eyeing the presidency. “I was very impressed by Pat’s convictions and knowledge,” Prince says in an e-mail. “I was drawn to his campaign for a wide range of issues from . . . trade to taxes (seeing Bush cave on ‘Read my lips’ [rescinding his vow not to introduce new taxes] was appalling).”

In 1992, Buchanan challenged Bush for the nomination on a platform combining ethno-nationalism with cultural conservatism. His slogan, MAKE AMERICA FIRST AGAIN, was an early taste of Trump. Both Edgar and Erik Prince were on board. “I volunteered for the Buchanan campaign,” Erik Prince recalls, adding that he was a “district chair as well.” Buchanan now remembers him as “one of the most impressive young guys I have ever met. He drove me around Indiana, spoke at my rallies, seemed a principled and tough-minded conservative. That he became a navy SEAL did not surprise me.”

Prince spent four years with the SEALs in the early 90s but moved on after his wife was diagnosed with cancer and his father, aged 63, died of a heart attack. The elder Prince left behind a business with 4,500 employees. The family sold it for $1.3 billion, and Erik, at 25, now had a sizable inheritance.

A short time later, Prince had a big idea: a new spin on the private-contracting business. “I saw how bureaucratic the entire D.O.D. was,” he recalls of the Department of Defense, “and wanted to provide a better capability for units that needed it.” One of Prince’s instructors in the SEALs, Al Clark, was also looking to set up a security-and-defense training company. Prince had money to invest. Out of this came Blackwater, which began as an instruction facility for law enforcement, the military, and special-ops squads in Moyock, North Carolina. In its first years customers were scarce. “This was the time of the peace dividend,” Prince explains. “Soviet Communism had collapsed, and all was supposedly right in the world.”

And then, in 2000, a navy destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole , was attacked in a Yemeni harbor, and 17 Americans died. Members of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, were blamed. Soon Blackwater got its first serious long-term contract, teaching American sailors how to fire M14 rifles. Next came September 11, 2001. The Bush administration drew up plans to strike back, but on the cheap, with some operations outsourced to private companies. In the process, Blackwater secured lucrative government contracts (ultimately, about $2 billion in total), promising to train and send teams and supplies to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. At around the same time, as Vanity Fair would report, Prince was “working as a C.I.A. asset,” hiring ex-spooks in a clandestine program to “find, fix, and finish [off] al-Qaeda members.”

At its peak, Blackwater processed some 30,000 trainees a year, a special, swaggering breed, some acting like vigilantes. “I had a lot of friends who were P.M.C.’s”—private military contractors—one former Prince business associate says, “and they would come back from Iraq, and they’d tell me, `My God, we know Erik’s your friend, but Blackwater is so fucked up over there.’” In 2004, four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. In 2007, a Blackwater contingent opened fire on unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, in Baghdad, killing 17. Three Blackwater operatives were convicted of manslaughter and a fourth of murder; after appeal, the three had their lengthy sentences voided (they are set to be re-sentenced), while the fourth is being re-tried. (A mistrial was declared in September.)

The Bush administration had begun to see Blackwater as a liability: Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, singled out the firm for special monitoring. Prince rebranded the company under different names and finally sold it off, relocating to the United Arab Emirates, where he got close to the ruling family and began a new venture, Frontier Services Group, which marketed its security services to foreign states. For a time, he even pondered a run for the Senate, from Wyoming, where his family has a vast ranch.

A new era was beginning—and for the Prince-DeVos circle it would eventually open up fresh vistas. The Great Recession of 2008 had left millions without jobs or savings. A tycoon and TV pitchman, Donald Trump, introduced his newest venture, the Trump Network. He called it a “rescue and recovery program.” To the Associated Press, it seemed more like “the Apprentice meets Amway.” The resemblances were hard to miss. You could buy into Trump’s scheme for only $48—which got you a handy marketing guide and access to a Web site to promote products. “For $497,” according to the AP, “you could get the kit, products, CDs, sales tips and coupons.” Trump’s pitch: “[It’s] an opportunity to help rebuild a country. . . . A chance for you to promote wellness and entrepreneurialism. Even more, a better way of life.” He was also busy promoting his fledgling real-estate “college,” Trump University. Its recruitment drives in Michigan included two at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel.

Trump, like Rich DeVos, was a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale. His parents, Fred and Mary Trump, had been parishioners at Marble Collegiate. Trump’s mother, in fact, had won the Peale Award for Positive Thinking, in 2000—seven years ahead of DeVos. Donald adored Peale. “You could listen to him all day long,” Trump told religious conservatives at the beginning of the presidential campaign. And Peale had liked him back. “You [are] going to be America’s greatest builder,” he’d predicted. “He thought I was his greatest student of all time,” Trump once remarked.

Orlando Magic owners Rich and Helen DeVos at the N.B.A.’s Rising Stars Challenge exhibition game in Orlando, Florida, 2012.

Erik Prince, as he had with Pat Buchanan, found a new disrupter in Trump—and once again made himself available. In a Breitbart radio broadcast in 2016, Prince joined the fringe of anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracists, at one point accusing her, wildly, of joining her husband on sprees to an island where “under-age sex” occurred. And today, Prince’s influence has been on the rise. His proposal to hire private contractors to run security training for Afghan forces—”something that would come from a bad soldier-of-fortune novel,” Republican senator Lindsey Graham has scoffed—has won a hearing from the two new hawks in Trump’s Cabinet, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, according to Forbes . (Defense Secretary James Mattis, however, recently nixed the concept.) And the Prince effect is rippling into other areas, too. Earlier this year, Johnson Ko Chun Shun, Prince’s business partner and the deputy chairman of Prince’s Frontier Services Group, joined the board of a new data firm—alongside heavyweights from Cambridge Analytica—the political data-mining company funded by Steve Bannon’s old patrons, the Mercer family, who some credit as having been pivotal in Trump’s victory.

Prince’s most conspicuous moment in the Trump orbit, however, came soon after the election. In January 2017, Prince traveled to the Seychelles and met with a Russian confidant of Putin’s. One area that investigators have likely explored is the substance of Prince’s appearance before Congress last year. “I could testify to at least three or four lies in that House testimony,” the former Prince business associate confided to me recently. He pointed to Prince’s business relationship with a Russian arms dealer and said that, contrary to Prince’s statements, he met with senior executives of the Moscow-based investment firm Renaissance Capital on 10 occasions.

Prince, in an e-mail, called the criticism “categorically false,” saying he had “a brief previous contact with a Ukrainian-born arms dealer but any contact had ended before the window of [the committee’s] inquiry.” As for RenCap, Prince said, “I disclosed all that contact to Congress in the pages of emails I provided them.”

Guessing at the identity of Vanity Fair ’s source, Prince characterized him as a disgruntled executive “who was fired for under-performance.” The source says he resigned after he discovered that Prince had approved plans to illegally weaponize aircraft and “actively train former Chinese Red Army personnel that are now being deployed into Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Uighur region in China”—actions he perceived as supporting foreign interests above America’s. (Other Prince associates reportedly resigned for similar reasons.) Prince firmly denied the allegations. “At no stage has FSG ever trained any Chinese official of any capacity—police military, or other,” he maintained. “I have never done anything contrary to American interests and never will. Period. When the D.C. beltway pundits and bitter former employees question my patriotism, I almost take it as a badge of honor. . . . I bleed Red White and Blue. Unlike 98% of Americans, including most of my critics, I served proudly in the military as shortly will two of my sons. I love my country. I got involved in the Afghanistan debate because I’m tired of America wasting our blood and treasure when there is another way, a better way.

“The real traitors,” he concluded, “are those doing everything possible . . . to block and undermine our democratically elected President and in so doing undermine our national interests. Those accusers should look in the mirror first before throwing lies at me.”

The tone—angry, even truculent—can also be heard in Prince’s congressional testimony. The transcript rawly captures the ideological right in our current moment, straight from the Michigan heartland. Prince, while testifying, makes no attempt to hide his contempt for his questioners, even as he claims they are persecuting him, a blameless patriot and defenseless “citizen-voter that cares about the wrong direction the country was heading in.”

It is the same mix of arrogance and piety one can discern in Betsy DeVos as she defies the long-established principles of public education. Whatever differences separated her worldview from Trump’s evaporated in December 2016 when she stood beside him at a rally in Grand Rapids and dismissed the controversy over her nomination as “false news.” (Ex-White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has claimed that Trump has since voiced real reservations, calling DeVos “ditzy” behind her back and supposedly saying at one point he intended on letting her go.) For the time being, she has been in the forefront of Trump’s campaign to strip down federal agencies—a program now enforced across the executive branch, from the Departments of State and the Interior to the E.P.A., from the Post Office to the Bureau of Prisons. There is even a supposed proposal to merge the Labor and Education Departments. These are not experiments or improvisations. They are the advanced stages of a plan of privatization that reaches back decades. The DeVoses’ ideal, “selling America,” today can often mean selling it out—and selling it off, piece by piece.

In Donald Trump, the Medicis of West Michigan have found someone they can do business with. The partnership has helped usher in our brutish times, and each day the slogan MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN feels less like a promise than a threat.

Sam Tanenhaus

• Foreign Policy

Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince’s $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine

O n the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

As the party got seated inside a private karaoke room on the second floor, Igor Novikov, who was then a top adviser to Ukraine’s President, remembers feeling a little nervous. He had done some reading about Blackwater, the private military company Prince had founded in 1997, and he knew about the massacre its troops had perpetrated during the U.S. war in Iraq. Coming face to face that night with the world’s most prominent soldier of fortune, Novikov remembers thinking: “What does this guy want from us?”

It soon became clear that Prince wanted a lot from Ukraine. According to interviews with close associates and confidential documents detailing his ambitions, Prince hoped to hire Ukraine’s combat veterans into a private military company. Prince also wanted a big piece of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, including factories that make engines for fighter jets and helicopters. His full plan, dated June 2020 and obtained exclusively by TIME this spring, includes a “roadmap” for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment.

The audacity of the proposal fit with Prince’s record as a businessman. For nearly a quarter century, the former Navy SEAL has been a pioneer in the private military industry, raising armies in the Middle East and Africa, training commandos at his base in North Carolina and deploying security forces around the world for the State Department and the CIA. Under the Trump Administration, Prince’s family—a powerful clan of right-wing Republican donors from Michigan—saw their influence rise. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education, while Prince himself leveraged contacts in the White House to chase major deals around the world.

The ones he pursued in Ukraine were among the most ambitious of his long career. But with Trump out of office, the Ukrainian government has slowed the process and invited more competition for the assets Prince coveted. “Had it been another four years of Trump, Erik would probably be closing the deal,” says Novikov, one of its lead Ukrainian negotiators.

This account of Prince’s ambitions in Ukraine is based on interviews with seven sources, including current and former U.S. and Ukrainian officials as well as people who worked directly with Prince to try to realize his aspirations in Ukraine. Those business plans, which have not been previously reported, were confirmed by four of the sources on both sides of the negotiations, all of whom recalled meeting in person with Prince last year to discuss them. The documents describe a series of ventures that would give Prince a pivotal role in Ukraine’s military industry and its ongoing conflict with Russia, which has taken more than 14,000 lives since it began seven years ago.

The documents detail several previously unreported ventures that Prince and his partners wanted the Ukrainian government to approve . One proposal would create a new private military company that would draw personnel from among the veterans of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Another deal would build a new munitions factory in Ukraine, while a third would consolidate Ukraine’s leading aviation and aerospace firms into a consortium that could compete with “the likes of Boeing and Airbus.”

At least one of Prince’s offers to Ukraine appeared to be in line with U.S. geopolitical interests. As the Wall Street Journal first reported in Nov. 2019, Prince has been competing against a Chinese firm to buy a Ukrainian factory called Motor Sich, which produces advanced aircraft engines. China sought those engines to develop its air force. The U.S., concerned about the rapid growth of the Chinese military, has long urged Ukraine not to complete the sale. Prince emerged as the American alternative, offering to save the factory from China’s clutches.

But the Ukrainians had serious concerns about working with Prince, according to three people involved in the negotiations. Prince’s choice of allies in Kyiv—two men with ties to Russia—raised particular alarm. His Ukrainian business partner is Andriy Artemenko, who made headlines in 2017 by offering the Trump Administration a “peace plan” for the war in Ukraine that envisioned ways for the U.S. to lift sanctions against Russia. Another Prince ally in Kyiv was Andriy Derkach , a Ukrainian legislator whom the U.S. has accused of being an “active Russian agent.” Both Artemenko and Derkach worked to advance Prince’s business ventures in Ukraine last year.

“We had to wonder: Is this the best sort of partnership we can get from the Americans? This group of shady characters working for a close ally of Trump?” says Novikov, the former aide to Ukraine’s president. “It felt like the worst America had to offer.” Those concerns only heightened when, at a pivotal moment in negotiations, one of Prince’s associates proferred in writing a “participation offer” that Novikov considered an attempted bribe.

As the deals ran into resistance from the government in Ukraine, Prince’s allies faced bigger problems in New York City, where both Artemenko and Derkach are now under criminal investigation. The U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the investigation, which is reportedly focused on whether the two men were involved in a suspected Russian plot to sway the 2020 presidential election.

Prince does not appear to be a focus of that investigation. But Artemenko tells TIME that federal investigators have questioned him about his relationship with Prince. In interviews with TIME in April and May, both Derkach and Artemenko denied wrongdoing and described the investigation as part of a political witch hunt against Trump’s allies. Prince did not respond to numerous requests for comment, including a detailed list of questions about the documents outlining his proposals for Ukraine.

Among the guests at the Vodka Grill was Prince’s business partner, Artemenko, a tall, clean-shaven lobbyist in his early 50s. Artemenko says he has worked with Prince in the air-cargo industry for at least six years, transporting everything from weapons to vaccines around the world. Born and raised in Kyiv, he now resides mostly in the Washington area. In text messages obtained by TIME, he refers to Prince as “the boss.”

Their relationship began not long after Prince emerged from the Blackwater scandal of 2007. That fall, a group of Prince’s soldiers-for-hire shot up a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 civilians and wounding 20 others. Several of the gunmen were sentenced to decades in U.S. prisons for their roles in the massacre. (Trump pardoned four of them in his final weeks in office.) Prince’s testimony in Congress about the incident drove a national debate about the privatization of war, turning him, at the age of 38, into the defiant face of the modern-day mercenary.

In the wake of those killings, Blackwater lost a $1 billion contract to guard U.S. diplomats and officials in Iraq. But the company rebranded and continued to thrive. The Obama Administration granted major contracts to Prince’s firm to provide security in conflict zones. Prince’s interests expanded well beyond the military sector. He traded oil and minerals in Africa. He assembled a private army for his friend, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He prepared a force in Somalia to combat pirates in the Gulf of Aden. He helped train a hit squad for the CIA. When Trump took office, Prince called on the new Administration to privatize the war effort in Afghanistan, publicly pitching a plan that would let contractors handle many of the U.S. military’s functions.

Over the years, one of Prince’s most reliable lines of business has been wartime logistics: moving people and supplies into areas of conflict. Starting in 2006, the aviation arm of Blackwater air-dropped food and weapons for U.S. troops on the front lines in Afghanistan. “If you need to transport stuff in and out of a war zone, you’re not going to call UPS,” says a person familiar with Prince’s business operations. “His company does that.”

After working as a cargo broker in the 2000s, Artemenko had founded his own transport company in 2010, AirTrans LLC, which frequently flew cargo for Prince’s operation, he tells TIME. In 2015, Artemenko says, AirTrans officially became a part of Prince’s company, Frontier Resource Group.

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Around that time, Artemenko says, the partners began discussing a venture in Ukraine’s weapons industry. Russia and Ukraine had been at war since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, leading the one-time allies to stop selling weapons to each other. The hardware Russia needed most were engines for its helicopters and fighter jets, many of which are still produced at Soviet-era plants in eastern Ukraine.

Apart from the potential to earn billions of dollars in profit, Artemenko says he saw these factories as a way to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. “The Russians need the full complex of aviation technology, starting with the engines,” he says. “This is a reason to force them to the negotiating table and make a peace deal. We can say: ‘OK, you need these spare parts, engines and everything else from Ukraine? Fine, but we want a deal for [eastern Ukraine], and then we want an agreement on Crimea.'”

The idea did not get much traction. Ukrainian officials recoiled at the notion of lifting their arms embargo against Russia in the middle of a war. Another one of Artemenko’s peace plans gained notoriety in 2017, when a draft of it reportedly landed on the desk of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser. That plan, like the first, went nowhere.

Around the same time, Prince held a meeting on an island in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian official. The Washington Post reported their aim was to create a “back channel” from the Kremlin to the White House, an allegation both men denied. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report published in April 2019 devoted a few pages to the Seychelles meeting. According to the report, Prince told his Russian interlocutor that he was “looking forward to a new era of cooperation and conflict resolution.”

By the time Prince set his sights on the Ukrainian military industry, the nation’s conflict with Russia had settled into a kind of stalemate, with sporadic shelling and sniper fire along the front lines. Peace talks had stalled, and Ukraine’s government was increasingly desperate for a way out of the impasse.

The Trump Administration did little to help. Trump’s priority in Ukraine was not to make peace; it was to advance his own political fortunes. Amid his campaign for re-election, Trump asked Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Joe Biden, and held up military aid to Ukraine as a means of pressure. The campaign of coercion caused a breakdown in U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

Some advisers to President Volodymyr Zelensky saw Prince as a way to repair the damage. They wanted him to help arrange a meeting with someone in Trump’s inner circle, ideally Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, says Novikov, who was Ukraine’s liaison to the Americans at the time.

Prince was unwilling to make that connection, says a person familiar with his thinking on the matter. “Erik made it very clear that he didn’t have the keys to Trump’s White House, and that he didn’t want to play that game.”

As an alternative, Prince’s team offered to line up an American lobbyist for Ukraine named Joseph Schmitz. A former Blackwater executive, Schmitz had been a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016 and had contacts in the Administration. He was ready to represent Ukraine for a fee of $500,000 plus expenses, according to a proposed lobbying agreement obtained by TIME. (Schmitz did not respond to emails seeking comment.) Ukrainian officials received that agreement early last year from Artemenko’s lobbying firm but did not sign it.

Prince had sought some local assistance of his own. Among the people he met with in Kyiv was Derkach, the Ukrainian member of parliament whom the U.S. later accused of being a Russian agent .

Derkach, who confirmed to TIME that the meeting took place, was well positioned to help Prince understand the terrain. He had worked in Ukraine’s aviation sector after graduating from an elite university for spies in Moscow, the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. In the early 2010s, when Derkach served as an adviser to Ukraine’s prime minister, one of his tasks had been to develop the aviation and machine-building sectors of the nation’s economy.

Derkach says he was intrigued by Prince’s vision for these industries. One major advantage Prince brought to the table was his list of contacts in the developing world. He had worked for many years in the Middle East and Africa, dealing with warlords and autocrats who could become new clients for Ukrainian weapons and aircraft. The main flaw in the plan, Derkach says, was the cooperation it required from Ukraine’s local factory bosses and oligarchs , who control much of the military-industrial complex.

“That’s not so much an issue with Erik,” he says. “It’s a problem of corruption in Ukraine, where you have the factory directors who do not want to sign documents and give up power.” Derkach recalled telling Prince: “‘You’ve worked everywhere. But Ukraine is special. It’s very hard to get any traction here. You have to gather a serious team of people who will move the process along.'”

Derkach says he did not join this team, and declines to say whether he was ever paid for the advice he gave Prince. But after their meeting in Kyiv, Derkach began urging Ukrainian authorities to support the deal Prince wanted. In March 2020, he invited Novikov, the presidential adviser, to a meeting to discuss the plans. “Derkach said, ‘We already have everyone on board, and still the deal is stalling,'” Novikov recalls. Derkach wanted to know who in the President’s administration was standing in Prince’s way. “That was the only thing he wanted to discuss with me,” Novikov says.

In the early summer of 2020 , Ukraine moved to cement its partnership with Prince, whose intentions had become far more detailed and ambitious. In one message to Ukrainian officials, Artemenko provided Prince’s passport information along with a summary of their agenda for an upcoming trip. In a follow-up message, he noted Prince would be in Kyiv for several days during the week of June 15, 2020, and requested meetings with senior officials in the defense and intelligence agencies, adding cryptically: “There will be no official calls to government officials, as this visit is strictly private and apolitical.”

Arriving in Kyiv on a chartered flight from Minsk, Prince held a meeting that week with Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, according to messages obtained by TIME between the people who arranged Prince’s travels. (Yermak confirmed to TIME that the meeting took place but declined to discuss it in detail.)

Things appeared to move quickly from there. The President’s office put Prince in touch with a law firm in Kyiv that frequently works for the Ukrainian government. The firm prepared a legal framework for completing the deal Prince wanted. The work was complex, especially when it came to acquiring Motor Sich, says the person familiar with Prince’s thinking.

The factory had been privatized in the 1990s, during Ukraine’s chaotic transition to capitalism. In 2016 and 2017, Chinese investors bought up shares in the factory from its private owners, paying an estimated $700 million for control of Motor Sich. They were not expected to give it up without a fight in the courts. So the lawyers had to find legal grounds for Ukraine to take control of the asset before re-selling it to a new investor. Their plan relied on a regulatory snag: Ukraine’s anti-trust agency had not granted approval to the Chinese investment. “It’s this weird situation where the Chinese bought the asset, never received approval for it, and it’s basically standing still,” says the person familiar with Prince’s thinking. That could allow the Ukrainian government to say: “‘We’re going to take control of the asset because it’s basically not being properly managed,’” the person says. “In a nutshell, that’s the argument.”

In the weeks after Prince’s visit, his associates prepared two versions of a detailed business plan and sent them to officials in Zelensky’s office. The first, dated June 23, 2020, stated that the acquisition of Motor Sich would require $50 million to purchase a minority stake, and another $950 million to buy 76% of the factory . The money was meant to come from Windward Capital, an investment vehicle that Prince has reportedly used in the past.

Another business plan for Ukraine’s military industry, dated June 29, 2020, provided new details and incentives for the government to participate. It described a planned takeover of Antonov, the state-owned airplane manufacturer, by replacing its CEO with an executive from Artemenko’s company. The proposal also called for an “ultimatum” to be issued to the Chinese investors in Motor Sich, who would be forced to either accept an “immediate sale” or face the “loss of value,” the plan stated. “If Chinese remain uncooperative,” the Ukrainian government should take over the factory and transfer control to new investors, the document says.

Another element of the business plan described a partnership between Ukraine’s main intelligence service and Lancaster 6, a private military company that has previously been involved with Prince’s deals in Africa and the Middle East. This partnership, which required approval from Ukraine’s parliament, would build a “state-of-the-art training center” and a “specialized services enterprise”—industry jargon for a private military operation—that would be involved in Ukraine’s “strategic planning, logistics, risk management, security forces training and consulting concerning security risks,” according to the plan. (The head of Lancaster 6, a longtime Prince associate named Christiaan Durrant, told TIME he was not aware of any such documents and asked for a copy; after being sent one, he stopped responding.)

Three of the projects described in the documents also include a “participation offer,” or a cut of the yearly profits. The participation offers listed in the document would be worth a total of around $35 million per year if the plan were to be executed. (The documents do not make clear who would get this money or why.) Novikov, who negotiated with Prince and studied the plan closely while serving as a presidential adviser, says he understood this as a proposal for kickbacks to government officials. “It looked like a bribe,” he says.

Paul Pelletier, a former U.S. federal prosecutor, agreed that the reference to “participation offers” looks suspicious. It would be likely to cause “alarm bells,” he says, at the Justice Department, where Pelletier served for years as a senior official overseeing foreign bribery cases. “On its face, the terms suggest some sort of kickback payments to government contracting officials—a definite no-no,” says Pelletier, who reviewed the document at TIME’s request. “No money or offers of money can flow to government officials, period.”

Artemenko insists that he and Prince never acted corruptly in their dealings, in Ukraine or elsewhere. “We never paid a bribe at the table,” he tells TIME. “We don’t want to do anything wrong. Only the transparent and legal way.” (Asked directly about the purpose of the participation offers, Artemenko’s lawyer, Anthony Capozzolo, declined to comment.)

Prince’s lawyer, Matthew Schwartz, did not respond to a detailed list of questions from TIME, including specific questions about the participation offers and the allegation that they referred to kickbacks.

As Trump’s chances in the presidential race began to look less certain in the fall of 2020, so did the prospects for Prince and his contacts in Ukraine.

In September, the U.S. imposed sanctions against Derkach, accusing him of being an “active Russian agent” involved in a plot to help Trump win a second term . About a month later, four FBI agents showed up at Artemenko’s home in the Washington area, Artemenko recalls. They wanted to know about his work in Ukraine, and his relationships with Prince, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others. “They asked me about my relationship with Erik, how we met, where we met,” Artemenko says. “Normal questions.”

Meanwhile, the dilemma with Motor Sich has only gotten more complex. The Chinese investors in the factory filed a $3.5 billion claim in December 2020 at an international court of arbitration, claiming that Ukraine’s decision to block the sale was illegal. The Ukrainian government responded by imposing sanctions against the Chinese investors, one of whom called the move “an abuse of state power and the suppression of normal business activity.”

Under the Biden Administration, the U.S. does not seem likely to throw its weight behind Prince’s projects in Ukraine. “The U.S. has not been very pro-Erik,” says the person familiar with his thinking. In a statement to TIME, a State Department spokesperson said the U.S. supports Ukraine’s efforts to block the sale of Motor Sich to the Chinese firm, but avoided taking a position on who should own the factory or saying anything about Prince.

That leaves the status of Prince’s plans for Ukraine unclear. Yermak, the presidential chief of staff, says the government intends to nationalize Motor Sich and keep it under state control. Private investors, including Prince and his partners, would be welcome to bid on a stake in the factory through a competitive tender, Yermak told TIME in an interview in April. “We are interested in working with all our partners,” he says. “We are interested in there being fairness.”

At that time, Prince’s business partner said the two were still interested in bidding for the factory. “We are ready to show the money and explain the plan,” Artemenko says.

With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Madeline Roache

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