Posted on Sat, Sep. 13, 2008

Harry Sargeant III had a $10 million problem.

With his company mired in a costly three-year contract dispute with the Pentagon, the Boca Raton businessman and Republican fundraiser dispatched a well-known lobbyist to a senator's office to plead his case. Then Sargeant dispatched his lawyers to sue the federal government -- and eventually clinched a $3.2 million settlement.

The episode offers a telling glimpse into the power wielded by a political and business heavyweight who does his heaviest lifting behind the scenes.

Harry Sargeant may be the most influential South Florida figure no one outside the corridors of power has ever heard of.

He owns a waterfront mansion in Delray Beach, shares his corporate jet with Florida Gov. Charlie Crist -- his college buddy -- and maintains business interests ranging from an international asphalt company to $1 billion in Pentagon contracts to ship fuel to the military in Iraq.

DONATES MONEY

And he donates money, lots of it -- among himself, family and companies almost $2 million to committees and candidates from Florida to California, The Miami Herald found, most given in the past two years and most, but not all, to GOP causes.

John McCain tapped Sargeant as co-finance chairman in Florida, and in March, Sargeant hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his $8 million Intracoastal Waterway home.

Sargeant, 50, declined interview requests. His attorney agreed to answer limited questions regarding his defense contracts.

Yet from interviews and records, a profile emerges of a corporate alpha male, a former Marine pilot who pulls blue marlin from the Gulf Stream, who takes Scotch over beer and who doesn't shrink from a fight, whether it's with the Pentagon, foreign governments or Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

''I'd call Harry Sargeant a man's man,'' said Jim Greer, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, who named Sargeant the party's finance chairman. ``He's not somebody who has to be in the limelight.''

But recently, the limelight found Sargeant.

Last month, McCain's campaign returned some $50,000 in donations after The Washington Post and New York Times questioned the validity of several checks sent from Arab Americans in California -- donations solicited by Sargeant's longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a, a Jordanian citizen. The campaign warned Sargeant donors that they can't be repaid for contributions and that only U.S. citizens can donate.

In Washington, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., head of a congressional oversight committee, has launched an inquiry of possible overcharging involving a Sargeant company in Jordan.

''We have nothing to hide,'' Sargeant wrote in a letter to The Washington Post on Aug. 12, saying he is cooperating with the committee and that his fundraising is unrelated to the Pentagon contracts.

As a fundraiser, Sargeant has thrived by any measure. He has collected more than $500,000 in donations for McCain by tapping a network of relatives, friends, employees and business associates. Donors can give no more than $2,300 to a candidate for each primary or general-election race, forcing candidates to rely on ''bundlers'' like Sargeant to gather as many donations as possible.

BEYOND TOP RACE

Sargeant's fundraising extends beyond the presidential race, including $38,000 to Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler, and $36,000 to Miami GOP Congressmen Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart from Sargeant and his relatives.

Sargeant's employees also have donated. In 2002, seven employees gave to U.S. Senate candidate John Cornyn of Texas on the same days Sargeant and his family gave $7,000. Such fundraising is legal -- so long as employees are not reimbursed.

Crist, a fraternity brother of Sargeant's at Florida State University, has received $29,800 from Sargeant and his family in 12 years. Sargeant's Trigeant Air also donated $100,000 to Crist's inauguration -- money the governor returned when he canceled the gala. The governor did not respond to interview requests.

Sargeant's family and companies have also delivered more than $1 million to the Florida GOP in the past two years, records show.

Apart from fundraising, Sargeant has spent more than $518,000 on Washington lobbyists to represent his companies, whose reach spans from the Middle East to Europe and the Caribbean.

SOME OVERLAP

At times, Sargeant's business and fundraising overlap.

In 2006, Sargeant hired lobbyist Otto Reich, a former ambassador and State Department official, to help gain congressional support for one company, Trigeant Ltd., then in a dispute with the Defense Department over a $48 million fuel contract.

Trigeant said it was owed $10.1 million in damages after the Pentagon let the 2004 contract expire.

Trigeant lawyer Ronald Uscher said Reich lobbied Sen. Mel Martinez, a member of the Armed Services Committee and, like Reich, once a Bush administration official.

Reich approached Florida's Republican senator in September 2006 ''to explain why a prompt resolution of the claim was in the best interest of both the company and the United States government,'' Uscher said.

The lobbyist, who received $60,000 in fees from Sargeant's company over several months of work on Capitol Hill, did not return calls seeking comment.

After the meeting, a Martinez staffer called the Defense Department at least once on the company's behalf. Martinez said he was only helping the company gather information from a stonewalling bureaucracy. He said this was the ''routine'' assistance he often gives Florida businesses, and he didn't try to sway the Pentagon's stance.

`FOR HUNDREDS'

''I do this for hundreds of people throughout the state of Florida,'' Martinez said.

Trigeant filed a suit in April 2007 saying the Defense Department violated the contract and drove up costs. Three months later, Sargeant and his wife gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee -- then led by Martinez.

In September 2007, the federal government agreed to pay Trigeant a $3.2 million settlement. Uscher said the company did not profit on the contract.

Martinez said he was unaware of the settlement, and that the RNC donations were ''completely independent'' from his office's actions on Trigeant's behalf. Martinez, who first met Sargeant during his 2004 campaign, said the RNC donations were to be expected in Sargeant's role as state GOP finance chairman.

The dispute with the Pentagon didn't hurt Sargeant's business with the military. In 2004, he and Abu Naba'a founded International Oil Trading Co. (IOTC), which now has defense contracts worth about $1 billion.

The company has established a massive operation, with some 300 tankers shipping oil from Saudia Arabia to Jordan, where the fuel is trucked in convoys into Ramadi, Iraq, using drivers from Jordan, India, Sudan and the Dominican Republic, according to a Defense Department newsletter.

Sargeant's defense contracts remain controversial. A former partner, Mohammad Anwar Farid Al-Saleh -- the brother-in-law of Jordan's king -- filed a $13 million suit in April claiming he was fraudulently cut out of the IOTC contract by Sargeant and Abu Naba'a after helping them win the Jordanian government's approval.

Abu Naba'a could not be reached for comment.

In June, Waxman's staff demanded records from Sargeant and the Pentagon as part of a probe of possible overcharging by IOTC, which Sargeant denies.

ASPHALT MAGNATE

With his brother, Daniel, Sargeant controls one of the biggest asphalt operations in the world, with separate companies to handle the marketing, trading and refinement of asphalt from petroleum.

The business has been good to him. In addition to his waterfront home, Sargeant also trolls the waters off the Bahamas for blue marlin in a 65-foot sportfishing boat called Black Gold.

Sometimes the business gets rough: Sargeant's companies have been pulled into disputes with the government of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela's state-owned oil company and Cowboys owner Jones.

Jones accused Sargeant's Trigeant Holdings Ltd. of conspiracy and fraud in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit stemming from the 2001 sale of a Corpus Christi asphalt refinery. Jones alleged that a former partner, Sanford Brass, sold the refinery to Sargeant for $17.7 million without paying Jones more than $10 million he was due.

In a deposition, Sargeant denied wrongdoing and said he remembered little about the negotiations with the prospective partners.

''I think I was drinking Scotch, and they were drinking Coors Light. But I can't remember any more details other than that,'' he recalled.

Jones' lawyer, Kenneth T. ''Tommy'' Fibich, remembers Sargeant with distaste. ''He was a name dropper, a place dropper, talking about all the country clubs he belonged to,'' Fibich said.

The lawsuit was ultimately settled for an undisclosed sum.

Trigeant has also been involved in a long-running dispute with Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., a chief supplier of the crude oil Trigeant uses to refine asphalt.

In a suit filed in March, the company was accused of unfair trade practices for convincing Trigeant to buy its Alabama refinery before cutting off oil sales -- essentially starving Trigeant's operation.

Two years ago, the Venezuelan company won a $12.2 million arbitration award against Trigeant over unpaid invoices. In court papers, Trigeant said it was being unfairly targeted because of rumors that ``the Sargeant family was opposed to President [Hugo] Chávez.''

Before the dispute, Sargeant's company was ''effectively the sole transporter of Venezuelan asphalt,'' selling to several Caribbean and Central American countries.

DOMINICAN ISSUES

One of those countries was the Dominican Republic, the current home of Abu Naba'a, Sargeant's partner. Dominican press reports say that country canceled a contract with Sargeant Petroleum earlier this year -- prompting U.S. Ambassador P. Robert Fannin to intervene on the company's behalf in a letter to Dominican President Leonel Fernández.

The U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo would not release the letter to The Herald.

Miami Herald staff writer Frances Robles, researcher Monika Leal and translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.