By the spring of 2022, Ed Aldag was fed up. The 61-year-old CEO of a multibillion-dollar real estate company called Medical Properties Trust, Aldag is a high-society fixture in the company’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where MPT has donated millions to local nonprofits and where he’s regularly listed as one of the city’s most influential businessmen. But for years, Aldag had watched as MPT faced tough questions from the federal government, investors, and, most recently, a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.  MPT makes money by acting as a landlord: It buys hospitals and then rents the facilities back to providers. Over the previous year, the Journal had published several stories that focused on the company’s finances, including reporting that dug into MPT’s biggest tenant—Steward Health Care, then one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the nation—and the unusually close financial relationship between the two companies. The Journal’s pieces raised concerns about whether Steward was struggling—and whether MPT was engaging in secret transactions to keep it afloat. Mother Jones and others would later report how Steward’s financial mismanagement harmed hundreds of people: We found 83 deaths across its 39 hospitals, hundreds of malpractice lawsuits, and more than 700 patient care problems documented in federal hospital inspections. The Journal, meanwhile, was the first to notice this mismanagement at work, revealing that Steward hospitals owed nearly $1 billion to medical supply companies and other vendors. > In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We > cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”  That reporting was the beginning of years of intense scrutiny of MPT in the world of finance that hurt the company’s stock price and eventually led, earlier this month, to a trio of Democratic US senators proposing the “Stop Medical Profiteering and Theft (MPT) Act” to impose limits on the company’s business. But it was also the apparent start of an aggressive, previously unreported campaign by Steward, MPT, and other still-unknown actors to silence their critics. Internal documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and shared with Mother Jones show that MPT amassed an army of crisis management professionals to protect its reputation, eventually working alongside three different crisis public relations firms, five law firms, and two private intelligence firms. The documents, along with information from sources close to this effort, show a major effort to control the narrative: In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”  As part of a social media push that used anonymous accounts to discredit and intimidate the growing chorus of journalists, investment analysts, and short sellers who questioned the company, an intelligence firm baited MPT’s detractors online. And while the Boston Globe and OCCRP reported last year that Steward paid the British firm Audere International to surveil one particularly provocative MPT critic, new documents show a much broader tracking campaign, funded in part by Steward and other shadowy actors but focused on MPT, targeting a half dozen of the company’s skeptics. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “They were always looking for something explosive that would make things go away,” a source close to Audere wrote in messages reviewed by Mother Jones that were confirmed with the source directly. “Although Steward was the customer, it was clear that MPT was what Audere was protecting.”  An MPT spokesperson did not respond to a detailed list of questions but made clear in an emailed statement that the company disagrees with the many critics questioning its business practices. The company, the spokesperson said, “has unfailingly disclosed each of its transactions as and when required under applicable securities laws.” The spokesperson also said that as criticism of MPT has mounted, its executives and their families have been harassed, including receiving death threats: “As any responsible company in that position would do, we have periodically engaged advisors to help navigate this situation.” The spokesperson added: “It is critical to note that MPT has never directly or indirectly engaged with detractors on social media, nor have we paid any third-party to do so.”  The company’s damage control started in earnest with the lead reporter behind the Journal’s stories, Brian Spegele. His reporting on MPT began in 2021, when a number of its tenant hospitals across the country—a Steward hospital in Pennsylvania, and ones owned by other for-profit operators in Wyoming and Rhode Island—all seemed to be running into financial issues. While these facilities struggled, MPT was hitting its highest stock price ever.   > MPT leaders asked their PR firm to suss out the angle of Spegele’s upcoming > article and questioned whether the Journal was working to short their stock. Spegele emailed MPT with questions about how it was running its business—and how it might be affecting hospitals. He’d heard from insiders that MPT was overpaying for hospitals because higher sale values meant they could charge higher rents. Did the company want to comment? Why had one of their hospitals in Ohio shut down not long after it started renting from MPT? Did the company really have three corporate jets?  In dozens of leaked emails, Aldag strategized with other leaders over how to respond. They brought in the crisis PR firm Joele Frank to help, as well as a law firm that specializes in filing defamation cases against journalists, Clare Locke. They asked their PR firm to speak with Spegele and suss out the angle of his upcoming article and questioned whether the Journal was working to short their stock. Was the paper hinting to investors that MPT was going to fail?     In December 2021, Clare Locke sent a letter to the Journal’s legal team and top editors, threatening to sue the paper before Spegele had even published his next story and demanding that he reveal his sources. The following month, MPT’s stock hit a new high: about $24 per share. Not long after, the paper’s lawyer sent an email to Clare Locke, noting that Spegele had experienced “some security concerns,” and he wanted to discuss them on the phone. (Spegele declined to comment; a Wall Street Journal spokesperson did not answer specific questions but noted, “The safety and security of our reporters is of paramount importance. While we won’t discuss the details of the protective measures we take, we stand by the Journal’s in-depth and consequential reporting on Medical Properties Trust.” Clare Locke and Joele Frank also did not respond to questions.)  The Journal published Spegele’s piece in February 2022. It claimed that MPT was quietly infusing hundreds of millions into Steward through complex loans and other means, enabling its hospitals to continue to pay rent. This meant that MPT’s largest tenant was actually struggling, which boded poorly for MPT, as well. Yet the article also pointed out executives’ excessive spending on things like Aldag’s multimillion-dollar salary and the regular use of the company’s private jets. Investors started emailing and calling MPT, and its stock price began to slide.  > “We already know what he is going to say and I refuse to let him tell the > story…” Aldag wrote. “We need to devise a plan to be proactive in our > storytelling.” Spegele soon started working on another story, about an MPT-owned hospital in California. His continued requests for comment angered Aldag.  “I’m tired of this guy,” Aldag wrote, adding that the former employees Spegele had cited anonymously were “absolutely fake.” Then he called his team to action: “We already know what he is going to say and I refuse to let him tell the story…We need to devise a plan to be proactive in our storytelling outside of the WSJ.” He told his PR advisers that if this wasn’t a project they could take on, he imagined they could find other companies to help.  “Ladies,” he wrote, “it’s time we go on the offensive.” Investment analyst Rob Simone thought there was something to the Journal’s stories. He worked at a research firm called Hedgeye, and soon he started digging into whatever public information he could find about MPT.  He was struck by the fact that MPT seemed to be at the root of Steward’s financial issues—and its hospitals’ increasing problems paying their bills. According to our own analysis, by 2022, at least four health care companies that had lease agreements with MPT had gone bankrupt, shutting down hospitals or throwing them into uncertainty. Simone told Hedgeye’s paid subscribers in April 2022 that MPT was sinking hospitals instead of helping them, by saddling their operations with leases they couldn’t afford. He claimed that beneath its veneer of success, Steward “appears to be insolvent” and that its dwindling finances likely meant future trouble for MPT, which he suggested was quietly infusing money into Steward to help it pay rent. And he wondered about the compensation that MPT’s board of directors (which includes Aldag and the company’s CFO) had green-lit for executives, while Steward and some of their other tenants were financially struggling. He recommended shorting the stock. “I just started doing work on this and became fascinated and thought it was a real problem—and that problem kept getting worse, and so I kept writing about it,” Simone told us when we spoke last year. “It never, never, ever improved.” MPT leadership pilloried Simone’s research on the company’s next earnings call. But Simone’s reports about MPT continued to gain traction on Twitter and investing websites, especially as the company’s stock price started to dip, from around $20 to $15 in the summer of 2022.  > But as more investors began to short MPT and drag down its stock price, > Audere’s work increasingly focused on those critical of the publicly traded > landlord. And Simone wasn’t alone. A writer who called himself @BigRiverCapita1 was making similar claims on social media and Wall Street blogs. The account was anonymous but clearly well versed in finance, pointing out past bankruptcies of MPT’s tenants and questioning whether these hospitals were struggling, shutting down, or cutting back patient care due to their pricey leases with MPT.  Around then is when Audere, the British private intelligence firm, got involved. According to OCCRP and the Boston Globe, Steward had already been paying to surveil its critics for a few years—eventually spending more than $7 million on these operations. But as Big River’s posts and Simone’s research spread, and more investors began to short MPT and drag down its stock price, Audere’s work increasingly focused on those critical of the publicly traded landlord, even as its tenant Steward remained Audere’s client, according to leaked documents and sources close to Audere. (An Audere spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company cannot answer questions about its confidential work, but that Audere “takes its legal and regulatory compliance obligations seriously and acts in accordance with the same.”) In June 2022, Audere hired a contractor to start looking into these critics, leaked emails show. They named the operation “Project Morden.” They told the contractor they had two main goals: Dig into why Rob Simone was writing about MPW (they referred to MPT by its stock ticker symbol), and identify the person behind @BigRiverCapita1: Leaked email regarding Project Morden A strategy memo noted that “multiple financial professionals believe that RS [Rob Simone] does not have the capacity to drive MPW downward.” Still, the firm demanded an aggressive approach to Big River and Simone, whom they deemed Target 1 and Target 2. “Uncover the subjects (sic) vulnerabilities and pressure points,” the memo urged, suggesting the contractor unearth details about “career, integrity, personal life and identify any potential misconduct.”  > Anonymous Twitter accounts started to follow and harass Simone, asking if he > had security and even tweeting, “his life [was] in danger.” And that, Simone said, is when the trouble started.  Anonymous Twitter accounts started to follow and harass him, asking if he had security and even tweeting that “his life [was] in danger.” Simone’s company, Hedgeye, grew concerned about this safety and provided him with enhanced security, but neither they nor Simone ever figured out who was behind the accounts. One tweet even warned that if he didn’t stop reporting and tweeting about MPT, “he could end up like Daphne,” an allusion to the murder of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed after reporting on a Steward hospital deal in Malta in 2017.  MPT’s leaders also began to meticulously track their detractors. By October 2022, they were keeping tabs on all the skeptics dialing in to their public earnings calls and even discussed not taking their questions: “Please make us a list of all the bad actors that listened in,” Aldag wrote to top executives in an email. They sent back a lengthy list that included nearly 20 professional financial analysts, including Simone. Related WALL STREET GUTTED STEWARD HEALTH CARE. PATIENTS PAID THE PRICE. The following month, MPT received Audere’s intelligence reports over email. And soon, Audere further ramped up its campaign against Simone, even hiring a contractor to create a fake blog written from the perspective of a woman trying to hold investment analysts to account. But its true goal was to criticize just one player: Hedgeye. It was called “Hedge Spy.” (After Mother Jones and Reveal mentioned this contractor’s work in previous reporting, the blog was taken down from the internet.) Initially the blog was populated with stories that cast doubt on a variety of firms, as the contract writer explained to Audere in emails reviewed by Mother Jones. “The more general content will disguise the blog’s objective,” wrote the contractor. The contractor also launched a Reddit account, Loud-Peanut-7716, whose goal was “to actively engage in discussions and facilitate the conversations concerning Hedgeye.” In an email to Audere, the contractor listed some of the Reddit posts trying to discredit Simone’s firm: “Can you recommend any research platforms? I tried Hedgeye but I don’t trust them after their recent dirty tricks stalking and intimidating their competitors” “They don’t care about making us rich, they want to make THEMSELVES rich! DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!” At the start of 2023, a new critic took on MPT, publishing a series of reports with cheeky titles and provocative tweets that alleged MPT was committing a brazen financial fraud. That voice was a British investor named Fraser Perring. Perring runs a short-selling firm called Viceroy Research that makes big financial bets on companies it thinks will fail, digging deep into their financials to see if they might be hiding something. He has tens of thousands of followers on social media, where he often posts his findings and claims of corporate wrongdoing. > Management soon would help fuel a conspiracy theory that was already growing > at MPT: that their critics were working together to short their stock. In January of that year, Viceroy published the first of what would be several reports on MPT. Titled “Medical Properties (dis)Trust,” the report arrived at many of the same conclusions that had been swirling around Wall Street: Steward was going belly up, and MPT seemed to be secretly funneling it money to stave off bankruptcy. And perhaps more clearly than anyone before, Viceroy accused MPT of “round-tripping”: Not only was it loaning money to help Steward pay rent, but it was then recording this rent as new earnings and not disclosing it, all to maintain the illusion that it was a healthy landlord. Viceroy’s report sent MPT executives into a tizzy. Leaked documents show the company was scrutinizing Perring’s tweets alleging round-tripping, with executives furiously sharing them with one another and one of their PR firms compiling them all. Management soon would help fuel a conspiracy theory that was already growing at MPT: that their critics—from Simone to the Wall Street Journal—were working together to short their stock and bring them down. Around that time, social media trolling of Simone and Perring ramped up. On top of that, reporting from the Boston Globe and OCCRP shows that a security firm contracted by Audere videotaped Perring at his home and watched him around his neighborhood—even following him and his daughter on their way back from school. When MPT sued Viceroy the following month for defamation, it denied all of Perring’s findings, writing that they were “malicious fiction” and had “caused serious harm to MPT.” But during litigation, according to court documents, Viceroy’s lawyers said an impostor had called Perring’s bank in the weeks leading up to MPT’s suit and pretended to be him. It’s unclear who was behind the impostor, who was able to gain access to Perring’s financial transactions; soon those details were included in a report sent to Audere. No money was stolen, but in reports to Audere the impersonator tried to figure out what Perring was spending his money on. (MPT, which agreed to settle the defamation case last December, said in a statement that it hired Audere in late 2022 for work unrelated to Perring.)  > They wondered if anyone in their “army of advisors” had an in with regulators. > Included on that email chain was exactly that kind of connection: Mick > Mulvaney. A few months later, when JP Morgan recommended that investors view the company’s stock with caution, emails show that MPT’s top executives circulated a lengthy list of analysts they believed were somehow connected to each other. They named five different investment funds and investors, and the many possible ways they were “connected”—to each other, to a Journal reporter, to Hedgeye, to Viceroy, even to liberal megadonor George Soros. And they wondered if anyone in their “army of advisors” had an in with regulators. Included on that email chain was exactly that kind of connection, someone who used to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney, who also had been President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, was helping to run a consulting firm called Actum. Leaked emails show that MPT brought Actum on to help it “combat” what they saw as people conspiring to target the company. To counter their criticisms, Actum drafted a white paper praising MPT, calling it a company “investing in the future of health care and communities.” (Actum did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.) Reputation management is common among publicly traded companies, notes Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of business at Santa Clara University who studies corporate conduct and ethics. But the scale and expense of the effort to manage MPT’s PR crises is “unequivocally not normal,” she says.  > After years of high rents to MPT, hospitals had failed to pay on-call doctors, > nurse staffing agencies, repairmen, and suppliers of everything from blood to > hospital beds. “The fact that these folks were so willing to waste company resources—spend significant amounts of money that could have been diverted to more productive uses—to investigate journalists, to investigate investment analysts, it suggests to me that they are spying, and think that everybody else is doing the same,” Pozner said.  While MPT focused on its value and reputation, patient care issues at its Steward hospitals began to reach crisis levels. Under the weight of years of high rents to MPT, these facilities had failed to pay on-call doctors, nurse staffing agencies, repairmen, and suppliers of everything from blood to hospital beds. Eventually, some Steward hospitals couldn’t afford to keep paying MPT rent and closed.  These troubles further drove MPT’s stock price down. In October 2023, when it dipped below $5, Aldag recorded a message to shareholders, telling them he remained confident in “MPT’s proven business model” for investing in and improving hospitals.  At one of them, St. Elizabeth’s in Massachusetts, a crisis had begun to unfold. The hospital owed more than $500,000 to a company that made devices used to stem internal bleeding called embolism coils; the supplier recently had come to repossess the coils.  Two weeks after Aldag posted the video reassuring shareholders, a first-time mom named Sungida Rashid delivered a baby girl at St. Elizabeth’s. Hours later, Rashid began to bleed severely, doctors discovered they didn’t have the embolism coil needed to treat her, and she died. Her family’s tragedy would set in motion articles and hearings and subpoenas trying to understand the financial dealings of MPT and Steward. It had taken years—and a mother’s life—for the story to finally come to light.  Video WATCH: INSIDE ONE OF THE LARGEST HOSPITAL SCANDALS IN US HISTORY 

Sungida Rashid had no intention of taking an Uber to the birth of her first child. She’d never been one to take the easy route, and besides, she wanted to get things moving—and walking seemed the best way to do it. So on an overcast Sunday in October 2023, Sungida and her husband, Nabil Haque, set out from their Boston apartment to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the local hospital where ­Sungida, nine months pregnant, was scheduled to be induced. Sungida and Nabil had met 12 years earlier while working at a consulting firm in their native Bangladesh. Over lunches, they began strategizing about PhD applications, eventually spending years in a long-distance relationship as they fell in love and pursued their doctoral degrees in the United States. Then there was a tiny pandemic wedding, a move to Bangkok for work (she was an economics professor, he a climate researcher), a heartbreaking miscarriage, the cautious joy of another pregnancy, and finally, when Sungida was seven months along, a job opportunity for Nabil at Boston University. Sungida had waved off her husband’s suggestion that they delay his start date so she could stick with her doctors in ­Bangkok. She’d long dreamed of teaching at an American university, and the pandemic had upended several job prospects. Living in Boston would give her the chance to pursue a professorship again and, more importantly, to raise their little girl far from Bangladesh, in a country that offered greater opportunities, cleaner air, and better medical care. In their first days in Boston, Nabil set up appointments at two prospective hospitals: Brigham and Women’s, a world-­renowned nonprofit medical center, and St. Elizabeth’s, a humbler facility owned by a national for-profit hospital chain called Steward Health Care. The appointment at St. Elizabeth’s came first, and Sungida liked the midwife, so they canceled the other appointment. A few weeks later, they walked in and got ready for her induction. Her labor moved slowly, but at around 1 a.m. on October 17, Sungida gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She and Nabil named her Otindria—Bangladeshi for “extra sensory”—and snapped a smiling selfie as a new family of three, Otindria snuggled in a hospital swaddle. Nabil takes a selfie with Sungida and Otindria. Nabil Haque In the hours after, Sungida experienced some excess bleeding that doctors resolved, and soon she and Nabil moved to the recovery floor. With Otindria in her bassinet and Sungida in bed, Nabil coordinated video calls with family. He kept trying, and failing, to swaddle the baby in her ­blanket—he and Sungida laughed at how easy the nurses made it look. She reassured him they would get the hang of it. In the afternoon, Nabil made a quick trip back to their apartment. When he returned, he told Sungida he already missed his newborn daughter. “Oh, you don’t miss me now?” she joked. She was having some back pain, and nurses brought in ice packs and heating pads for relief. But as the couple settled in to watch The ­Avengers—Sungida was a huge Marvel fan—her pain worsened. After about 10 minutes, staff came in to check her vitals. Her blood pressure had dropped dangerously low. Alarms began to sound: “Code red on the recovery floor!” a voice blared over the loudspeaker. What felt to Nabil like 20 people rushed into their room. They wheeled Sungida out and took Otindria to the nursery. Nabil sat in the recovery room alone—no bed, no baby. Every so often, someone came by with an update. A CT scan showed Sungida’s abdomen had filled with blood; she needed surgery. In the OR, doctors discovered the bleed was coming from her liver. They told Nabil they would insert an embolism coil—a small device that can be placed in blood vessels to stem internal bleeding. About half an hour later, hospital staff informed Nabil they needed to transfer his wife to Boston Medical Center, 20 minutes away, because it was better equipped to do the procedure, they said. What no one told him was that St. Elizabeth’s supply of embolism coils had been repossessed by the vendor a month earlier. According to a complaint later filed with the state health department, the hospital owed more than $500,000 for these devices; the vendor claimed in a lawsuit that, nationally, Steward facilities owed it nearly $5 million. A group of St. Elizabeth’s nurses had confronted Steward management about this at a tense union meeting three weeks prior: What if a patient needed a coil? The irritated chief nursing officer responded that the hospital simply wouldn’t accept transfer patients with internal bleeding. But what if something happened in-house? The CNO didn’t answer the question. Now that exact scenario was unfolding, and staff had little choice but to transfer a woman in the midst of surgery. A nurse whisked Nabil upstairs to watch as Sungida, lying on a stretcher, her face pale, tubes up her nose, was wheeled down a hallway and out to a waiting ambulance. It would be the last time he saw her alive. St. Elizabeth’s was just a sliver of Steward’s empire. At its peak, the company boasted 41 hospitals in 10 states, medical facilities in four foreign countries, and roughly $8 billion in annual revenue. It distinguished itself to investors by promising a way to tackle a thorny problem for the industry: how to run hospitals in low-income communities while still turning a profit. Industry dominance was always the dream of Steward’s CEO, Ralph de la Torre. When he took the helm of a struggling Massachusetts-based Catholic hospital chain called Caritas Christi in 2008, de la Torre—a child of Cuban immigrants and famously ambitious cardiac surgeon—was so sure of succeeding that he let his medical license expire. Two years later, he convinced the powerful private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management to buy ­Caritas, which it renamed Steward. His timing was perfect: Private equity firms, which focus on generating a big, quick payday for their investors, had just begun ramping up their positions in health care. De la Torre hoped that teaming up with Wall Street would catapult him to national prominence, kicking off what the Boston Globe called “a royal conquest.” His reign came to an end when Steward filed for bankruptcy in May 2024, a spectacular downfall helped along by Cerberus and Medical Properties Trust (MPT), a mysterious Alabama-based real estate investment trust that became heavily involved in the company over the last decade. Steward has since been the subject of news reports and Senate hearings trying to grasp the astonishing scale of its unpaid bills—$9 billion owed to more than 100,000 creditors—and the extent to which patients suffered as executives enriched themselves. De la Torre, for instance, bought himself a $40 million yacht and an $8 million apartment in Madrid, made hundreds of trips on Steward’s private plane, and gave $10 million to his children’s elite prep school in Dallas, a donation financed partially from Steward’s coffers, according to leaked documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Cerberus made $800 million, more than tripling its investment. The CEO of MPT earned nearly $18 million last year, making him the highest-paid executive in Alabama. (De la Torre did not respond to a request for comment. Cerberus and MPT declined to answer questions from Mother Jones. In public documents, both companies have denied that their actions contributed to Steward’s financial distress.) Dadu Shin It was Sungida’s death that first connected this excess to its human costs. A January 2024 Globe story lit a fire under Massachusetts officials and regulators, who expressed outrage that profit motive had trumped patient care in a city that prides itself on world-class hospitals. Sen. Ed Markey convened a hearing that opened with a reference to Sungida, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who for years has fought to rein in Wall Street, warned that Steward was no outlier. “I will say it bluntly,” she said. “Turning private equity loose in our health care system kills people.” I’ve heard this repeatedly while writing about private equity over the last five years. One study found that private equity–owned nursing homes had a mortality rate 10 percent higher than their non-PE counterparts; another noted that patients at PE-owned hospitals are 25 percent more likely to suffer an unrelated injury while admitted, whether a fall or an infection. But such studies only provide a glimpse of the problem. As savvy executives squeeze returns out of facilities that determine whether patients live or die, there is no systematic data tracking how their acquisitions affect care. Before its downfall, Steward was among private equity’s biggest health care conquests. I wanted to know how many more Sungidas were out there. > “The reason that there are more cases with Steward is not because they have > worse doctors. It’s that they didn’t give the doctors and nurses and all the > staff the resources they need to do their job the right way.” Over the course of our yearlong investigation, Mother Jones reviewed every malpractice, personal injury, and wrongful death case filed in state and federal courts involving Steward hospitals. We found 469 lawsuits involving 83 patient deaths; many have settled or have been thwarted by Steward’s bankruptcy, while some were dismissed or resolved in the company’s favor. These numbers may understate the extent of the problem, given that the company’s hospitals served primarily low-income communities, where most patients and their families lack the resources to mount a case. We also combed through Steward’s federal inspection reports, finding 708 “deficiencies” in patient care, including 35 classified as “immediate jeopardy”—situations that led or could lead to serious harm or injury. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the degree to which Steward’s business choices contributed to poor treatment, academic research has shown that systemic issues, not individual errors, typically lie at the root of malpractice. Steward’s bankruptcy paused many of the malpractice suits, making it difficult or impossible for attorneys to depose medical staff or obtain company records—information that could link their allegations of malpractice to cost-cutting decisions. But what is clear, experts say, is that a pattern of substandard care arose as Steward and its partners prioritized their bottom lines. (Steward declined to answer detailed questions from Mother Jones.) “Steward made a decision somewhere along the line that in order to keep making the money they wanted to make, there were going to have to be cuts,” says Rob Higgins, a partner at the Boston malpractice firm Lubin & Meyer who has litigated dozens of cases against Steward hospitals. “The reason that there are more cases with Steward is not because they have worse doctors. It’s that they didn’t give the doctors and nurses and all the staff the resources they need to do their job the right way.” Our reporting builds on the work of other journalists and legislators who have investigated Steward’s activities. The Globe’s Spotlight team found at least 15 patients who died at Steward facilities after receiving subpar care. A Senate report from September found that heart-failure death rates at some hospitals increased by up to 40 percent on Steward’s watch, even as the national average declined. Wait times in Steward ERs were also far above the national average. Our investigation also dug up allegations of sexual assault by medical staff, lawsuits by whistleblowers who alleged they were fired for calling out Steward management, and a troubling pattern of problems in labor and delivery: We found 12 additional instances of moms and newborns who died at Steward hospitals over the last 14 years, and 21 more who suffered severe injuries. From skipped ultrasounds to inexplicable delays in emergency care, the court filings recount gutting details. One Florida woman lost her baby after waiting almost three hours for someone to perform a C-section, despite a placental abruption, excessive bleeding, and dramatic drops in the fetal heart rate; it was her ninth pregnancy and the first she’d carried to term after years of IVF. At another Steward hospital in Florida, doctors wanted to prescribe a steroid drug to treat a woman’s postpartum blood disorder, but no administrators were reachable over Labor Day weekend to approve the order, and she died. At St. Elizabeth’s, where Sungida went, another patient bled so much after giving birth that she suffered a stroke and needed brain surgery—in part because an ultrasound to assess the hemorrhage was done too late. At a Steward facility in Texas, a baby was born with severe brain injuries after staff waited almost a day to perform a C-section, despite clear signs of fetal distress. There are more cases like these: 49 of Steward’s federal deficiency reports involve maternal care. The labor and delivery problems at ­Steward hospitals are consistent with an industry cost-cutting trend: When private equity firms and other financiers buy hospitals, they tend to target obstetrics units. “There is a mismatch between how much obstetrics costs and how much revenue it generates,” explains Katy Kozhimannil, a health policy professor at the University of Minnesota who studies maternal unit closures. Insurance reimbursement rates for maternal services are notoriously low, and the costs of running a fully staffed unit—with specialized doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and birthing equipment—can quickly outpace returns. > As the allegations of deadly neglect swirl around Steward, its investors, > executives, and partners have faced little accountability. Many hospitals eat the loss, Kozhimannil says, because maternity services fulfill a community need and align with their public mission. But investor-owned hospitals, unwilling to make that trade-off, have been closing maternity wards for years. Ascension, a Catholic hospital chain that partnered with the private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners, has closed more than a quarter of the labor and delivery units at its 140-plus hospitals over the last decade. Prospect Medical Holdings shuttered one of the few obstetrics units in its 16-hospital system after it was taken over by the private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. Steward closed at least six labor units and two neonatal units, as well as three hospitals that provided obstetric services—eliminating a third of the labor units in its portfolio. As the allegations of deadly neglect swirl around Steward, its investors, executives, and partners have faced little accountability. Senators held de la Torre in criminal contempt after he refused to testify at a hearing in September, yet officials from Cerberus and MPT, the real estate investment trust, weren’t even summoned, despite their involvement in Steward’s unraveling. A number of financial analysts have published evidence showing how MPT, which still owns the real estate of dozens of Steward hospitals, used those properties in its own enrichment scheme. MPT has gone to extremes to quash the findings, paying millions of dollars to private intelligence firms to target Steward’s critics, filing a defamation lawsuit, and subpoenaing those who dare speak to the press. The broader Steward saga is stunning in its complexity, brazenness, and scale, laying bare the extent to which profit-­seeking and patient care are incompatible, and the lengths to which corporate titans have gone to hide that reality. “All of a sudden, somewhere, there’s a switch that turns that says, maybe we can make a boatload of money,” Higgins says. “They were living a lifestyle of NBA basketball players that have hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s scary to think that for a long period of time, they were running these hospitals the way they were.” Nabil got to Boston Medical around midnight. He was ushered into an empty waiting room and told to make himself comfortable: His wife’s surgery would be long. He called his parents and made plans for them to fly to Boston to help during what surely would be a difficult recovery. Barely an hour later, a surgeon appeared. They had tried everything, but the bleeding was too severe. There was just too much damage to her liver. Sungida was dead. “How?” Nabil asked in disbelief. “We don’t know,” the doctor said. He told Nabil he could request an autopsy. > “I will say it bluntly. Turning private equity loose in our health care system > kills people.” Nabil sat in the waiting room, stunned. Just hours ago, he and Sungida had been talking about watching a movie together. Now he was texting relatives with the unspeakable news. He was eventually led through a maze of hallways and into a basement room where a staffer pulled back a curtain and revealed his wife’s body, covered with a sheet. “It was so scary seeing her lifeless,” he says. “I couldn’t stand there for more than five minutes.” Someone called him an Uber. When he got back to his apartment at 4 a.m., Nabil saw Sungida everywhere: in her beloved saris and half-used perfume bottles and the suitcase of pre-pregnancy clothes she hadn’t yet unpacked because none of them fit. He opened the fridge to find the food she’d prepared for their first days as a family of three. “I was still in shock,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what to do.” His mind turned to his daughter, and to their unfathomable future: “She was so tiny and so fragile—how is she going to survive this?” When Nabil called the nursery to check on Otindria, the nurses said she was doing fine. They asked after Sungida—they hadn’t yet heard. After the call ended, the nurses texted him photos of the baby. He couldn’t believe how much she already looked like her mother. For the rest of his life, he realized, it would be his job to convince ­Otindria that what happened wasn’t her fault. He climbed into the shower and, for the first time, allowed himself to cry. Later, he sat down and wrote a Facebook post: “Yesterday, I welcomed my daughter to this world,” it began. “Today, I am in grief losing the mother of my daughter due to unexplained medical circumstances.” He asked their friends to reminisce about Sungida and to refrain from asking medical questions. Her doctors were “bewildered,” he wrote. After a few hours of sleep, he headed back to St. Elizabeth’s to check on Otindria and attend a briefing with hospital staff. It was held just a few doors down from the recovery room where Sungida had so recently been alive, alert, and cracking jokes. Doctors and administrators crowded into the cramped room. As Nabil held his newborn, they told him that this was a freak event. They hypothesized that the hormonal roller coaster of labor and birth had caused a blood vessel in Sungida’s liver to burst. Maybe, they said, something about her liver was anatomically different. There was no mention of the repossessed coils, of the tense union meeting, or of the management’s failure to plan for this very scenario. Nabil remembers them saying repeatedly that his wife’s death was improbable and random: “They said, ‘You can think of it like your wife got hit by lightning.’” He had only one question, the one gnawing at him since the night before. Would Otindria blame herself? One of the doctors answered immediately: If she ever does, he should tell her it was the hospital’s fault. Steward’s rise and fall is a telling example of how the private equity playbook has infiltrated American life. Over the last two decades, PE firms, which invest money on behalf of wealthy clients and major investors like pension funds, have been buying up everything from family homes and apartment buildings to day cares and medical practices and transforming them into bundles of assets to be engineered for profit. They charge investors hefty management fees and, in exchange, promise market-beating returns in just a few years. To do that, they focus on cutting costs—scrimping on wages, benefits, and materials—to extract maximal returns. When President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, he unwittingly opened up a fresh prospect for private equity. The droves of newly insured Americans, the industry suspected, would mean a big revenue boost for hospitals. Community hospitals presented a particularly attractive option because Medicaid expansion meant more patients at higher reimbursement rates, and the government would likely bail out facilities that failed. Soon private equity firms were snapping up hospitals like never before. That same year, Cerberus—named for the three-headed dog who guards Hades in Greek mythology—bought six hospitals from de la Torre’s small Catholic hospital chain, Caritas, for $895 million. It put up one-third of the total in cash, and, as is common in private equity deals, financed the rest with loans loaded onto Steward’s balance sheet. Turning a nonprofit into a for-profit required approval from Massachusetts’ attorney general, which she granted on condition that Cerberus invest $400 million in hospital upgrades. Cerberus complied, but covered the cost by saddling Steward with even more debt—loans that Cerberus and its investors would not be responsible for repaying. De la Torre, now Steward’s CEO, introduced himself soon after to the staff of one of the newly acquired hospitals. To a packed auditorium, he recalled learning to scuba dive as a kid and how he’d been taught you should always go with a partner. If you encounter a shark, he joked, you grab your diving knife, stab your partner, and swim away. “He was expecting a big laugh,” one staffer who attended the speech recalls. “But what he got was gasps.” Dadu Shin Cerberus rapidly acquired five more ­Massachusetts hospitals, adding more debt to Steward’s ledger. By 2012, Steward was a $1.9 billion company with 17,000 employees, and it wasn’t long before executives’ cost-cutting efforts began drawing their ire. After the company eliminated more than 100 nursing jobs in two years, the nurses union filed more than 1,000 complaints with the state health department alleging unsafe staffing. Although Steward’s hospital portfolio was then limited to roughly a dozen facilities, it soon closed one of them and shut down pediatrics at another. It also began selling some of its buildings and renting them back. These “sale-leasebacks” ­provided a cash infusion to offset Steward’s growing debt load, which would triple during Cerberus’ first four years of ownership. In mid-2015, de la Torre flew to Alabama to meet with Edward Aldag, the unofficial king of health care sale-leasebacks. A dozen years earlier, Aldag had founded Medical Properties Trust, a one-of-a-kind real estate investment trust (REIT) that focused exclusively on doing such deals with hospitals. The men decided on the spot to work together: MPT’s annual report described them bonding over their “similar philosophies” about the future of health care. All involved had something to gain: ­Cerberus and de la Torre wanted to expand Steward, and an MPT deal would give them the cash to do it. MPT said in its annual report that it would collect rent from Steward hospitals and would have the option to buy any new facilities Steward acquired—to transform them, too, into lucrative tenants. > “It’s just this long line of rinse and repeat of basically looting safety-net > hospital systems.” By 2016, MPT had bought Steward’s nine remaining Massachusetts hospitals for $1.25 billion and leased them back at exorbitant rents. If the aim was to provide quality care, one of de la Torre’s colleagues told the Globe, this made no sense: “We all sort of nodded our heads and rolled our eyes and said, ‘Oh, now I get it. There are no plans to turn this into a viable set of community hospitals. It’s all about pulling money.’” Cerberus used proceeds from the sale to pay itself more than $700 million—a $473 million return on investment. De la Torre received a $71 million dividend. Over the next three years, Cerberus used the remaining funds to finance the purchase of 26 more hospitals in nine states, piling even more debt on Steward, whose facilities continued to face cuts. Patient care fiascoes were starting to escalate. At Good Samaritan Medical Center in 2018, a baby died when her mother’s uterus burst, according to legal filings—overworked staff had ignored her history of placental abruption. In fact, in the years after MPT first got involved, at least 20 patients died at Steward’s Massachusetts hospitals from alleged malpractice; 50 more died at its other facilities across the country during that time, according to the complaints we found. (Some of these cases were dismissed or settled; others remain open due to Steward’s bankruptcy.) In a region full of Harvard-affiliated doctors and hospitals known for being among the nation’s best, Steward’s raw Wall Street calculus was so foreign that it went virtually undetected, says Dr. Paul Hattis, a senior fellow at the Lown Institute, a health care think tank, who has served on the state’s Health Policy Commission. “I don’t think the regulatory apparatus was used to dealing with actors fueled by that kind of greed,” he says. “The money was going into the organization and then out the back door into the dividend pocket of an owner, but then neglecting patient care in the middle. That just was not something that we were used to thinking about having to protect against—the bleeding of an asset. So, you say, ‘Why didn’t regulators do more?’ I think they didn’t fully grasp what was going on until it was too late.” After Sungida’s death, Nabil’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law flew in to help. They shared his small bedroom while Nabil slept on the chaise in the living room, ­Otindria in her bassinet beside him. Every day delivered another gut punch. On Sungida’s phone, Nabil discovered a note she had written to introduce her baby to the world. He opened her inbox to find an interview offer for an economics professorship at Central Michigan University. “Seeing that email, I was like, You got everything you wanted,” he recalls. “It broke my heart.” About a month later, he got an email from a reporter at the Globe. Nurses at St. Elizabeth’s and their union had filed a complaint with the state department of health over the repossession of the embolism coils and what had happened to Sungida. He sat in his office at Boston University, unsure of what to think. He felt lost, even skeptical, but also distraught. Could this coil have saved her? Then he got a bill for the cost of her medevac to Boston Medical. Given what Nabil now knew about the coil, he wondered whether he was being asked to pay $1,076 for transport that should never have been necessary. His anger intensified when he received Sungida’s autopsy report from ­Boston Medical. It said she’d had placenta accreta, a condition that usually needs to be resolved by removing the uterus after birth. If true, that meant St. Elizabeth’s had missed it—yet another glaring shortfall, he thought, in Sungida’s care. He emailed the hospital’s chief medical officer, who in a subsequent briefing disputed the autopsy findings, insisting that there was no placenta accreta—and that her liver was the only problem. > Sometimes, at night, he would hold Otindria close and whisper into the > darkness: “Your childhood would be so different if it was the other parent.” Back home with Otindria, Nabil settled into a routine he repeated every three hours: feeding, fresh diaper, back to sleep. Scrolling Netflix one night, he came across the movie Fatherhood, which follows a dad (Kevin Hart) whose wife dies in a Boston hospital after giving birth to their daughter. The parallels felt uncanny. Hart’s character wrestles with whether to move home to the Midwest, where his mother can help care for the baby. Nabil faced the same dilemma. Sungida’s greatest hope had been for her girl to grow into an independent woman in a place where she would face fewer limits. But he was overwhelmed by the thought of caring for Otindria alone. He decided to go back to Dhaka. As he planned the move, Nabil thought often about how Sungida would have handled the situation so much better. She would have figured out a way to keep Otindria in America and put up a stronger fight to find out what had happened at the hospital. Sometimes, at night, he would hold Otindria close and whisper into the darkness: “Your childhood would be so different if it was the other parent.” If she had to lose a parent, he thought to himself, it should have been him. In the years before Sungida’s death, MPT acquired one Steward hospital after another, binding each facility to a high-rent lease. Steward began to cut costs even more aggressively. In 2017, it closed the maternity ward at a hospital in southeastern Massachusetts. The next year, it shut down Northside Regional Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio, which housed the city’s only labor and delivery unit. In 2019, it closed its hospital in Phoenix and a neonatal unit in Easton, Pennsylvania. When the pandemic hit, it threatened to shutter the Easton facility altogether, demanding $40 million from the state to stay open—the governor granted $8 million. Steward took the money, closed the obstetrics unit, and sold the hospital three months later for $15 million. Steward’s other hospitals deteriorated, according to government proceedings. Janitors at its Haverhill, Massachusetts, facility were buying toilet paper for patients with their own money. At St. Elizabeth’s, nurses purchased specialized bereavement boxes for stillborn babies after the hospital ran out. In West Monroe, Louisiana, a nurse practitioner discovered that Steward had stopped paying its on-call cardiologist as the doctor was caring for a patient in the middle of a heart attack. The company seemed to be bleeding money: It reported losses of $207 million in 2017 and $271 million in 2018. During the pandemic, Steward claimed its largest loss ever—$408 million—despite record levels of government assistance. The company also faced a criminal inquiry in Malta, tied to a $4.35 billion contract it had won to operate three government hospitals in the island nation. Millions in taxpayer funds earmarked for improving the facilities seemed to disappear; Maltese officials sued Steward, accusing it of using the money for bribes and kickbacks and to “unjustly enrich itself.” (Their investigation is ongoing.) > In some years, Steward hospitals made up more than a third of MPT’s assets and > almost half of its revenue. If Steward died, it could take MPT with it. By the end of 2019, Cerberus executives began expressing concern to investors. Then, in May 2020, they engineered a complex transaction that transferred the firm’s $350 million stake in Steward to de la Torre and other Steward leaders as a loan, giving them five years to pay it back. Experts wondered whether this hinted at an impending collapse: In bankruptcy proceedings, lenders tend to get paid whereas stockholders don’t. (Cerberus has denied that this was its motivation.) MPT, too, was thinking about how to protect its bottom line. For the real estate trust, Steward’s survival was existential. In some years, its hospitals made up more than a third of MPT’s assets and almost half of its revenue. If Steward died, it could take MPT with it. Its solution was a top-secret plan executives dubbed “Project Easter,” according to internal documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Publicly, MPT expressed optimism. In an early 2021 earnings call, CEO Aldag bragged that the company “has the strongest portfolio of hospitals in the world.” But privately, according to the OCCRP’s documents, MPT executives knew Steward was desperate for cash, so they devised a scheme that would keep it afloat while enriching executives of all three companies. In the summer of 2020, MPT purchased several Steward properties, pouring $400 million into the company. Six months later, it loaned Steward $335 million to help buy out Cerberus’ stake, bringing the private equity firm’s total profit from its ownership of Steward to $800 million. That same month, Steward paid its investors $111 million, which included about $83 million for de la Torre; MPT, which owned almost 10 percent of Steward, pocketed a cool $11 million. When MPT disclosed the deal in federal filings four months later, the financial press took notice. Not only was the deal “unusual,” per Bloomberg, but it revealed a growing private equity pattern, wherein a sort of Russian nesting doll of financiers work together to make money off struggling hospitals. After the Wall Street Journal and others wrote about the deal, Rob Simone, an investment analyst in suburban Connecticut, began seeing a surge of interest. Simone, 40, was a REIT specialist at Hedgeye, a research firm that does deep dives on stocks and sells them to portfolio managers. Suddenly, client after client was inquiring about MPT, which is publicly traded. Poring over the firm’s financial filings, Simone began to suspect that MPT was propping up Steward well beyond the Cerberus deal, an arrangement he called “a perverse marriage” when we spoke last year. He started publishing research to this effect, and laying out the details on Hedgeye’s YouTube channel in his crisp, fast-talking style. MPT had announced, for example, that it was investing $169 million in a new Steward facility in Texas. A bit of Googling revealed that the project was slated for Texarkana, a small city on the state’s eastern edge. This piqued Simone’s interest: Texarkana’s population was shrinking, and it already had a perfectly good hospital. Developing a pricey new one made no sense. By now, Simone knew MPT’s “special sauce” was buying up struggling safety-net hospitals, which are particularly vulnerable to the devil’s bargain of sale-leasebacks. Indeed, MPT’s high rents have cratered hospital systems in multiple states. Facilities can’t keep up, and they inevitably slash services or close down. Pipeline Health, for instance, declared bankruptcy in 2021, about a year after MPT bought its Los Angeles hospitals. A profitable community hospital in Watsonville, California, closed two years after MPT purchased it. “It’s just this long line of rinse and repeat of basically looting safety-net hospital systems,” Simone says. > It occurred to Simone: What if all this new investment was just a way of > funneling cash back into MPT’s trail of failing hospitals? MPT’s compensation scheme was also quite unusual for a REIT: Executive pay was tied to the dollar value of its acquisitions. The more hospitals MPT bought, and the more it paid for them, the more money the executives brought home. “You don’t just get compensated for paying the highest price, but also to go out and buy anything,” Simone says. “I knew right away when I saw that, this was going to be a bad outcome.” After each hospital system faltered, MPT would buy a new one and issue a flurry of press releases. It occurred to Simone: What if all this new investment was just a way of funneling cash back into MPT’s trail of failing hospitals? Wasn’t this similar to a Ponzi scheme, in that MPT brought on new tenants who could afford to pay the rent to help prop up the older ones who couldn’t? (In a letter to senators, MPT denied the allegation that it is a Ponzi scheme.) Simone hired a photographer to check out the Texarkana project. Financial statements said MPT and Steward were more than $50 million into the build, but the photographer sent back shots of an empty field. In one, a portable toilet lay toppled over. “$50 million was literally tumbleweeds,” Simone says. The photos further fueled his hunch that MPT was covering up Steward’s money problems by providing it cash that would come back to MPT as rent—payments MPT could then record as earnings to maintain a facade of business success. (In 2023, MPT commissioned an investigation that found no evidence of this.) Simone published his Texarkana findings, affirming his earlier recommendation that his firm’s clients should short MPT—bet on the future decline of its stock. Soon after, he received anonymous death threats. Trolls on X went after him incessantly, even posting his home address and the country club to which he belongs. But Simone’s reports motivated other analysts and short sellers to look into MPT. The most prominent was Viceroy Research, which had played a key role in exposing one of Europe’s greatest recent frauds—that of payment processor Wirecard, whose top executives now face criminal charges. In 2023, Viceroy expanded on Simone’s findings, claiming that one of the ways MPT seemed to funnel money to Steward was by dramatically overvaluing its hospitals, according to legal filings. Viceroy calculated that MPT may have overpaid Steward by at least $1 billion for its real estate. For example, it loaned Steward $1.4 billion to buy a chain of 19 hospitals, but soon ­forgave $700 million of the loan. In another case, Steward bought a Texas hospital for $11.7 million and sold it to MPT the same day for $26 million. (MPT sued Viceroy and claimed its underwriting process for determining hospital values is accurate. The case was settled in December.) There were other projects that seemed off. In 2021, Steward announced plans to build a state-of-the-art hospital in Utah, on a parcel of “trust land”—federally owned land bestowed to states to use for public benefit. To this day, the site remains an empty, overgrown field, yet another expensive project that may have existed only on paper. In 2022, Steward spent $60 million on a shuttered Miami hospital that it never reopened. (MPT did not respond to questions about its involvement in these hospital purchases.) But no amount of financial contortion could stop Steward’s downward spiral. As the hospital closures continued, dozens of lawsuits from staff and stiffed vendors piled up, and the federal government sued the company, alleging Medicare fraud. In September 2023, a sales rep marched into St. Elizabeth’s to repossess the embolism coils that, three weeks later, might have saved Sungida’s life. > “I don’t think the regulatory apparatus was used to dealing with actors fueled > by that kind of greed.” Simone is a finance guy, and his research is aimed at helping investors. But as a father of three, he never lost sight of the likely human toll of MPT’s accounting tricks. Without MPT propping it up, he says, “Steward would have become a bankruptcy years ago.” About five years, he figures—five fewer years of “patients dying, hospitals closing, vendors not getting paid…everything would have been pulled forward in time and ended.” In late January 2024, Nabil flew with ­Otindria to Bangladesh. Days later, the Globe published its story about ­Sungida’s death. It sparked a national reckoning. That’s “what finally blew the lid off all this,” a St. Elizabeth’s nurse told lawmakers at a subsequent Senate hearing. That spring, Steward’s bankruptcy proceedings revealed more details about its looting of patient care: It owed nearly $300 million in unpaid wages, including more than $105 million to doctors and $42 million to a single nurse staffing agency. It owed almost $1 billion to various vendors, including $79 million to suppliers of care items ranging from sterilization equipment to newborn test kits. Two Senate committees launched investigations into Steward and the broader trend of private equity in health care. Several states commenced their own accountability efforts—a blistering hearing in Louisiana, an investigation in Arizona, and a new law in Massachusetts that subjects private equity hospital owners to extra scrutiny and prevents them from selling hospital real estate to entities like MPT. Sen. Markey introduced a federal bill, though it has yet to move out of committee, that would regulate PE health care purchases. As Steward fell apart, so did Nabil’s vision of his future. He and Sungida had relished the idea of parenting on their own—the “American struggle,” they’d called it. Now he was back with his parents, who spent hours each day caring for Otindria. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined. He knows living in Dhaka has its benefits. His daughter will be adept in both Bangla and English. Her grandparents have become her best friends—each morning, Otindria drags her grandfather out on a walk to pet the neighborhood goat. But still, to Nabil, every day in Bangladesh feels like a small betrayal. “I didn’t want it to be her home, and her mother didn’t want it to be her home,” he told me. “That’s the broken promise that bothers me a lot.” > St. Elizabeth’s was briefly engulfed by another private equity giant, Apollo > Global Management, before Massachusetts seized it through eminent domain. He tries not to let it show. When I visited Dhaka in February, ­Otindria toddled through the apartment like a tiny queen, with Nabil as her cheerful attendant. He set up her Hello Kitty playpen in the living room, retrieved stuffed animals, and snuck her jalebi, a fried sweet, in between meals. Beneath the photos of Sungida that line most of the walls, he threw himself into playing with his daughter, never letting on that each parenting moment is tinged with sorrow. “I see ­Otindria doing everything Sungida would have wanted her to do,” he says. “But she’s not here to see it.” Nabil has grown angrier at the system that upended his life. In the spring of 2024, he began discussions with a law firm about suing Steward. (He is now pursuing a case as part of the bankruptcy.) A few months later, de la Torre—Steward’s now-former CEO—was spotted at the Olympics in Paris, attending the equestrian dressage competition at Versailles. Federal agents briefly detained him this past fall, serving a search warrant and seizing his phone—potential signs of a federal probe. But as of this writing, neither he nor anyone else involved has been charged with a crime. MPT continues to do its business with Aldag at the helm—in January, another of its hospital chains, Prospect, declared bankruptcy. ­Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-CEO of Cerberus, was recently sworn in as the No. 2 at the Pentagon. The 34 hospitals Steward owned when it declared bankruptcy are now in chaos. There have been hundreds of layoffs as new operators take control, and several closures. St. Elizabeth’s was briefly engulfed by another private equity giant, Apollo Global Management, before Massachusetts seized it through eminent domain and assigned ownership to Boston Medical Center—the same hospital system to which Sungida had been transferred. In October, thousands of miles from this tempest, Otindria turned 1. Sungida and Nabil had agreed during her pregnancy that they wouldn’t host a blowout for their daughter’s first birthday—it felt silly when she wouldn’t care or remember. But Nabil’s parents insisted on a party. Nabil usually rushes home from work to be with his daughter, but that night, he worked late on purpose: This birthday party felt like yet another detour from the couple’s plans, and he couldn’t stomach it—nor dissociate it from the worst day of his life. When he thinks about the future now, everything revolves around Otindria. He daydreams about teaching her to drive one day, just as he taught Sungida when they were graduate students. He isn’t worried about his daughter making good grades or getting into a top college—things Sungida would have worried about. All he wants for her is joy. “Be a chef, go to a party school, travel,” he says. “Enjoy your world.” Nabil no longer can say with any certainty that he and his daughter will leave Bangladesh when Otindria is older. He’d like to, but he’s loath to make any plans. “The future that I wanted imploded on me,” he says. “So now, I am scared to dream.”

For some, the chaos wrought by Elon Musk and his ironically-named Department of Government Efficiency feels strangely familiar. Mysterious outside consultants roaming the halls? The kind who appear to know nothing about the business they’re supposedly auditing for efficiency? Who push cuts into what they presume is fat, but is actually muscle, connective tissue, and Medicaid? The whole thing smells a lot like private equity.  > “They don’t know anything but are acting like they know everything.” Several DOGE figures have experience doing this kind of thing before: Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive linked to the project, presided over a brutal round of private-equity backed cuts at Citrix, a cloud computing company. And while Musk and DOGE mostly aren’t directly representative of the industry that looted Americ, a lot of their tactics are deeply familiar to anyone whose workplace has been devoured by a private equity firm. Even the stated goals are the same: at their core, private equity firms buy supposedly failing businesses and promise to flip them for a profit. But many of the businesses they buy, from toy stores to hospitals to real estate companies, end up going bankrupt; some sources estimate that businesses that are part of a private equity portfolio are ten times as likely to file for bankruptcy protection as those who aren’t.  Having worked at Gizmodo Media Group when it was bought by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, I recognize some of the dynamics and tactics now playing out across the federal workforce. To explain it all, I reached out to another GMG alum, Megan Greenwell, whose forthcoming book, Bad Company, explores how private equity has reshaped American industry. Greenwell and I talked about how DOGE tactics resemble those of private equity firms, and what federal workers and the American public can learn from how the stories of PE-owned companies have played out. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  This feeling right now, of things falling apart in weird ways, is very familiar to those of us who have had private equity buy our workplaces. What tends to happen when private equity comes in? Are there stages or a pattern? It depends a lot from industry to industry. One early sign that feels very familiar to me in the federal government, is random people you have never seen before just start walking around your office and asking the dumbest questions possible. In most offices, they’re not like 17-to-20 year olds, like they seem to be in the federal government, but that feeling of “What are all these strangers doing? How come they don’t know anything but are acting like they know everything?” is a very common first step.  Another one is that things just tend to stop working. When we worked together at the former Gizmodo Media Group, they pretty quickly stopped quality assurance measures, like technical stuff to make sure that the website worked. So the website started breaking all the time. That also feels very familiar here. A lot of stuff is breaking because they’re really breaking it out of malice. But some stuff they’re like, ‘Oh shit, we probably shouldn’t have broken that one,’ right?  There is no systemic thinking. There is no larger plan. They’re just randomly punching buttons to find out what does what and then only realizing the ramifications once things break. So those are two very early ones. That’s day one stuff. Welcome, federal government employees.  What do workers at private equity-bought companies tend to experience? Budget cuts are the biggest thing. The idea that someone like Elon Musk knows better than people who have worked in this world for decades and decades about what you should be spending money on and what you shouldn’t, that is so common. It’s very common to see severe budget cuts including serious, serious layoffs immediately. If there are not huge layoffs immediately, they’re probably coming later. The budget cuts that do go through are the types of things that are, again, going to break systems and make things work a lot less well.  A classic example is Toys R Us, which I write about in the book. They actually didn’t have that many layoffs for the first few years. They closed some underperforming stores, but it wasn’t a huge focus. But they didn’t have enough money to spend on upgrades, because they had taken out so many loans that all of the company’s earnings were going to debt payments. These things were actively making the company worse because they weren’t spending money on them.  For example, Toys R Us had had this vaunted money back warranty program which they replaced that with something much, much worse. Obviously customers are furious, and when customers are furious, they call the stores to complain. They don’t know how to reach the private equity executives in charge. The only people to complain to are these workers, so the workers’ satisfaction is going way down. The in-store experience was getting worse and worse and worse, which meant that they were selling less, which was ostensibly the goal of the company. Budget cuts are sometimes necessary. But in a lot of cases, they really are just shooting you in the foot because they’re undermining your ability to do the basics of the job. Budget cutting that feels nonsensical and is not based in research and not based in what’s actually making you money is super common. What have you learned from your research that could be helpful for folks going through this on a worker level?  Had I known what I know now, I would have quit working for Gizmodo Media Group on day one. So part of me is tempted to say, you just gotta quit. On the other hand, many people who work in the federal government are so mission-driven, right? I really loved my job, but it was not the only thing I could ever see myself doing—whereas a lot of career federal government employees, they’re really coming at it from a perspective of, ‘I have bought into this work at a deep level, and I never want to do anything else.’ For those kinds of people, it does feel kind of glib to say quit day one—and listen, as a citizen of this country, I would strongly prefer some reasonable people stuck around. It’s gonna suck a lot, but if you have it in you to fight, great! Please fight. Do what you can to undermine and obfuscate and allow the good work to keep going on. One of the things I’ve really admired about several of the characters in my book is that they fought. I would not say in any of the primary cases they won—it’s not like they single-handedly took down their private equity company. These folks in the federal government are probably not going to single-handedly take down Elon Musk. But we’ve seen judges say, ‘No, actually you can’t do this,’ and that’s going to keep happening. Some of these people might have legal protections as civil servants that we certainly didn’t have as bloggers.  Totally. And more investment too, right? We were small in the grand scheme of things. The federal government is not small, and so even individual stories tell a much larger tale and matter in a way that like Deadspin dying didn’t—as much as I loved them. It didn’t have the same impact on the entire world like the EPA ceasing to function will.  Right. You know, one thing about private equity is they do really operate in the shadows. That is what they like. That is how they get away with so much. You can’t do that when you’re the federal government, as we’ve seen. There’s going to be a spotlight on absolutely everything. I think anybody who’s worked for a private equity-owned company would tell you if there had been a spotlight, a lot of things would have felt very different. Why does this feel so familiar? Why does this feel so much like private equity? One of the big things is being unable to tease out what is malice and what is just sheer incompetence. This woman I’m writing about at Toys R Us, she was a normal store worker. She was like, ‘OK, the only things you have to do to keep this store running are like X, Y, and Z. So why are you breaking X, Y and Z? It really makes you feel crazy. You feel like, ‘Am I an idiot? The things I know that work, they don’t actually work?’  That feels really familiar—these 19 year olds walking around ruining everything and you can’t exactly figure out why. Like, yes, of course they’re shutting off AIDS medications in Africa because they have determined those lives are not worthy or whatever. But there are other things where it’s like, you can’t kill all of the things that affect all of your voters, right? Medicaid is really, really, really popular. In that case, it does feel like they’re breaking it because they’re too stupid not to rather than because they’re trying to alienate everybody in the country. That feeling of what is up and what is down, and what is malice and what is incompetence, is super, super haunting to me. What is the terminal stage of a private equity owned company? Unfortunately, in a disproportionate number of the cases, the company does no longer exist but the private equity fund makes a ton of money. Hopefully that will not be true with the US government. Although, let’s see.  Let’s see!  It also just results in a lot of people having measurably worse lives, and that is clearly going to be an outcome here. There’s a character in my book whose private equity landlord evicted her purely out of spite, because they did not like the way she was speaking to them when they were being real assholes. There’s another story in my book about this rural hospital where services were stripped and you can’t get basic medical treatment—you’re looking at going 30 or 40 miles in any sort of emergency. Almost always, everything gets worse up to the point of shutting down. Well, Megan, in my opinion, that shouldn’t be legal. What do you think? Right. I don’t think it should be legal. With the federal government stuff, it seems like at least some of it certainly isn’t legal, and we just have to wait for the court system to catch up with the 19 year olds.  They’re very spry.  Yeah, they have endless energy, I guess, with all the Red Bulls.  Something like that.  You know, the reason it’s legal in private equity is because the industry has spent so much money in Washington making sure it’s so. Do you want to know the number of senators and Congress members that get no private equity money? No.  It’s 12 percent. So 88 percent of people on the Hill in both parties took some private equity industry money in the last cycle. This is a pretty universal problem. I got some questions when Trump was first elected about how much worse is it gonna be now—and honestly I’m not sure it’s actually gonna be much worse. Everything else is, but I didn’t see a lot of prospect for more private equity regulation under a Kamala Harris administration either, frankly.  There are certainly attempts to make maybe not the entire industry illegal, but the worst parts of it illegal. Elizabeth Warren has valiantly proposed this Stop Wall Street Looting Act several times and it just never goes anywhere.  So yeah, that’s why it’s legal. Will it ever be illegal? I certainly hope so, but it is going to take a pretty dramatic change in who is representing us. Bad Company is set to be released on June 10.

The first thing the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad. The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it. “Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another, referring to a brand of helicopter. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character, livability, and safety of the neighborhood.” This wasn’t about begrudging the mansion’s new owners, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine; by all accounts, they were “very nice people.” Schwarzman, the 77-year-old CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, had purchased Miramar the year before, in the fall of 2021. The mansion, which boasts 44,000 square feet of living space, including 22 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and a seven-bed, seven-bath guesthouse, was completed in 1915 for a streetcar magnate who later died on the Titanic. Within months of buying Miramar, Schwarzman also acquired the residence next door, Ocean View, which has 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, and a six-car garage. Together, they cost $43 million—making Schwarzman’s megaproperty among Newport’s most expensive home purchases ever. > A slice of Schwarzman’s fortune has gone to indulging his famously extravagant > tastes. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. Schwarzman’s pandemic splurge came just as his firm decided to double down on scooping up rental housing. During the housing crash of the Great Recession, Blackstone had snapped up underwater homes for cheap and eventually made a fortune. The Covid collapse offered Blackstone another bite at the apple. In 2021 and 2022, it bought up 200,000 new units of rental housing at bargain-basement interest rates, adding to a portfolio of more than 150,000 rentals and making Blackstone the nation’s biggest corporate landlord. The firm’s real estate arm is core to its business, worth about $337 billion—about a third of its total investments—and its rental portfolio has seen a healthy return of about $11 billion over the last decade, hiking rent on some of its properties by nearly 80 percent. A slice of that fortune has gone to indulging Schwarzman’s famously extravagant tastes, such as the $5 million bash he threw in 20o7 to celebrate his 60th birthday, or the roughly $200 million worth of vacation homes he’s purchased in England; Jamaica; Palm Beach, Florida; St. Tropez, France; and the Hamptons in New York. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. A longtime Republican megadonor, Schwarzman said in 2022 that he’d no longer support the former president, having called the January 6 insurrection “an affront to democratic values.” But when the abstraction of “values” bumped up against the reality of money, money won. Schwarzman is a major donor again this election cycle, giving more than $20 million to Republican candidates—with the GOP’s tax cuts for the superwealthy set to expire less than a year into the next president’s term. It’s not only the roar of helicopter blades irritating Schwarzman’s neighbors: His massive renovation at Miramar has incensed local residents, not for its opulence—this town is used to the wild construction demands of wealthy out-of-towners—but for its Marie Antoinette level of disregard for the community. And as the drama of his Petit Versailles has irked Schwarzman’s neighbors, it has also offered a window into what happens when he throws his might and fortune behind a goal—be it a Rhode Island palace or a potential president. Miramar under constructionCourtesy photo Not as scene-y as the Hamptons or as flashy as Palm Beach, Newport is only a three-hour drive from Wall Street and, for a relative bargain, offers extravagant manors situated along hundreds of miles of idyllic coastline. But the city of 24,000 is squeezed into the corner of an island on Narragansett Bay, which means that less-affluent residents living in the nearby North End, including military families on its naval base, couldn’t ignore the rich and powerful if they tried. “When I go to a barre class, I’ll just see [US Sen. and multimillionaire] Sheldon Whitehouse outside of Le Bec Sucré, you know, standing in line to get his croissant,” says North End resident and Newport Public Schools activist Amy Machado, drawing out the pronunciation: kwaa–SOHN. Nowhere is the gap between rich and regular more acute than Bellevue Avenue, where the homes that surround Schwarzman’s Miramar are lousy with opulence and the sort of melodrama that only the moneyed set have time for. There’s a replica of a 17th-century chateau built for King Louis XIV and his mistress, along with several of the Vanderbilts’ former summer homes—one made of marble and another a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo. There is also the mansion once home to an alleged murderer, a billionaire tobacco heiress who almost definitely killed her interior designer. On the southern end of the street, old money gives way to nouveau riche: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, currently the world’s second-richest man, has spent more than $100 million renovating his estate and landscaping the grounds with a maze of shrubs and boulders so ugly it has become something of a local pastime to ridicule it. Nearby is a villa owned by another Wall Street CEO that was once home to a Nazi collaborator’s son who was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to murder his heiress wife. > Schwarzman is spending at least $7 million to add, among other things, a pool, > a tennis court, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, and > a guard house. It’s all gorgeous and gossipy until you start thinking about the source of all this money, a nagging feeling almost as old as the town itself: “There is something in the air that has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition,” Joan Didion wrote of Newport in 1967. “[A] sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made.” Schwarzman is, indeed, using harsh money to make pretty things. Specifically, he’s spending at least $7 million to add a pool, a tennis court, two bathrooms, a full guesthouse renovation, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, a guard house, a skylight, a generator, a state-of-the-art geothermal HVAC system, and a modern iteration of the estate’s early 20th-century gardens. And that would all be fine—normal, even, for the area—if it weren’t for what happened on nearby Yznaga Avenue. A short, leafy dead-end road right off Bellevue, Yznaga leads to Miramar’s service entrance. Schwarzman’s contractors soon lined the street seven days a week with dozens of trucks, from early dawn well into the night—sometimes past midnight. The single homeowner on Yznaga, Mark Brice, often found himself unable to get out of his driveway. He asked the city for a parking ban that would stop Schwarzman’s crews, and anyone else, from parking on the street and blocking his route. (Brice did not respond to requests for comment.) Banning parking on a single street may not sound like a big deal. But Yznaga Avenue, named after a 19th-century slave-owning sugar merchant, is one of the only streets where people from less-affluent parts of town can park for free and walk to some of Newport’s most beloved green spaces: Rovensky Park, the Cliff Walk, and “Rejects Beach”—a public beach next to Newport’s most exclusive beach club, Bailey’s. The street has been a local battleground for years, with some wealthy neighbors insisting it is private, even going so far as to put up “No Parking” signs. (Newport’s zoning office confirms that Yznaga has always been city owned.) With Schwarzman’s arrival, the street remained public in theory, but in practice, it had become his construction staging area, with little room for Newporters to park and regular blockades for the one unlucky neighbor.  > “The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view > but quite stunning when you see it.” When Brice’s parking proposal went before the city council last spring, residents were furious that the city was considering a parking ban on Yznaga to solve a problem created by a billionaire. They flooded council members with angry letters: “It is both elitist and selfish to move forward,” one resident wrote. “A thinly disguised effort to enhance the exclusivity of that neighborhood,” opined another. “This has been a benefit forever for residents in an area that is mostly conceded to the uber-rich,” wrote a third person. “There’s a reason the beach there is called Rejects.” The council held two hearings on the bill. From their dais at City Hall, they marveled at how sprawling the construction was. One council member said he analyzed Google satellite photos of Miramar and the project’s spillover onto Yznaga, and even drove down to the area himself. How bad could it really be? “It’s bad,” he concluded. “It is actually unprecedented. I haven’t seen anything that bad in this city. The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.” The council member whose district includes Bellevue agreed. “There is an unfathomable amount of construction,” he told his colleagues. His constituents had taken to sending him videos of the construction vehicles “entering up and down and up and down” Yznaga as early as 4:30 a.m. Every local who testified spoke against the ban, except Brice, the homeowner on Yznaga. For council members, the central question became how to balance public beach access against the needs of a man who couldn’t exit the driveway of his $5 million house. But no one seemed to consider, out loud at least, addressing the root of the problem: the man with the $43 million property who messed up the street in the first place. Eventually, the council voted for a full ban, contrary to the advice of the fire chief and traffic department, both of which recommended prohibiting parking on just one side of the street. So, by inconveniencing his neighbor, Schwarzman got a private driveway where his workers never have to compete for a spot. When I visited in August, I saw six trucks parked bumper to bumper, in violation of the ban. No one from the city seemed to mind. Andrew Rae The fight over Yznaga Avenue, it turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg. About six months after moving in, Schwarzman inquired with the Rhode Island Airport Corp. about registering his Miramar helipad with the Federal Aviation Administration. But Schwarzman abandoned the application, according to the RIAC, and never filed it. That didn’t stop him from having a helicopter land on the property regularly—sometimes multiple times per week. (A Schwarzman spokesperson told Mother Jones that the RIAC’s chief aeronautics inspector visited the site and approved it and that registration is now pending with the FAA. The RIAC told Mother Jones that after the inspector’s visit, no application was ever filed or approved. The FAA also told Mother Jones there is no pending application.) One neighbor in Schwarzman’s flight path wondered why he sometimes opted to fly low right over the neighborhood instead of the water, which would be less intrusive and easy to do, given that Miramar’s landing pad is next to the ocean. “I thought, ‘This is really annoying,’” the neighbor said. “And why is he flying looking down on everybody? Of course, you couldn’t do that to him.” (Schwarzman’s spokesperson denied that the helicopter’s flight path went over the neighborhood.) Then, in January 2022, Schwarzman’s team reached out to the city of Newport for permission to dig up a chunk of Bellevue Avenue to install a fiber-optic cable. Internet in the neighborhood is notoriously slow, and according to emails obtained from the city, it appeared they were planning on installing a private line just Schwarzman’s estate could use. Only after a city official intervened did the team notify neighbors of the upcoming construction and install a public line instead. > When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front > of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. In August 2023, a Bellevue resident called the city manager to complain about the relentless construction and noise that never let up, with work and deliveries going on 24/7. The office contacted Newport zoning to ask when the construction was permitted and got a curt email in response—it was far from the first time it had fielded complaints about Miramar. “Yes the hours are 7am-9pm I will call her the owners of 646 seem not to care about anyone but there [sic] construction project,” the official wrote. And there was more to aggravate neighbors, including drilling for geothermal wells. Workers also dug up the slope that stretches from the mansion to the iconic Cliff Walk, leading piles of soil to tumble onto the pathway. When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. The scenic bluff overlooking Easton Bay, beloved by locals and tourists, is one of the only places in the world where you can go for a hike surrounded by stunning shoreline views on one side and eye-candy mansions on the other. The city eventually closed a quarter-mile of the walk for repairs—they’d found cracks in a portion of the walk behind Miramar and deterioration in the seawall footers that protect from erosion. The sinkhole’s cause was never confirmed, but a few months later, Schwarzman paid for the entire repair. (Schwarzman’s spokesperson called the implication that construction at Miramar had caused the sinkhole “unfounded,” citing “preexisting natural erosion issues.”) Stephen and Christine Schwarzman attend the 2024 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Maybe it was a tacit apology. Or maybe it was a way for Schwarzman to make nice with his neighbors and Newport’s high society, whom he’d been courting with large donations to local charities, like the $20,000 he gave to a soiree benefiting homeless animals run by a local animal league and the approximately $100,000 he gave to Newport’s powerful preservation society. In a town where famous titans—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Dukes—live on forever through palaces constructed in their image, it seems as though Schwarzman is vying to be the next immortal name. In August, he unveiled plans to turn Miramar into a public museum upon his death, saying it would be owned by a foundation and maintained with a special endowment. Not mentioned in the statement is how the move would benefit Schwarzman himself: Without remotely changing his lifestyle, it will help him uphold the philanthropic promise he made in 2020 by joining the Giving Pledge, a club of billionaires who promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. The pledge isn’t binding, and it allows any giving to happen after death. Even better: Turning over the home to a foundation could lower future taxes, as would the museum designation—a common tactic used by the ultrawealthy. A month before the 2016 election, a leaked Access Hollywood video showed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” As the presidential candidate’s lurid remarks ricocheted across the airwaves, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, was en route to Miramar, where he was scheduled to headline a campaign fundraiser. (The home was then owned by a different Wall Street tycoon.) Local GOP leaders issued statements condemning Trump’s words, then walked through Miramar’s stately gates and joined guests to donate more than $500,000. One Republican state representative explained the decision to proceed with the fundraiser despite the national uproar: “If you want to see this revolution happen, you have to get past the man and go with the ideas he represents.” Schwarzman has done exactly that: Grit his teeth and support the guy he thinks will help his business. > In late 2022, Schwarzman vowed to get behind someone else in the GOP primary. > But after more than a dozen candidates fell short, he returned to supporting > Trump. Schwarzman didn’t back Trump initially, but shortly after the 2016 election, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and later agreed to work with the new president as an economic adviser. That connection opened some lucrative doors: On a trip to meet with Saudi officials with Trump in 2017, Schwarzman’s firm announced a $20 billion commitment from the kingdom for a new investment fund. He also advised Trump on China policy, encouraging the president to soften his anti-China rhetoric, which would benefit Blackstone’s extensive holdings in the country. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end “carried interest,” a decades-old tax break for private equity executives. But with Schwarzman on the team, Trump’s campaign promise never materialized. (Last year, Schwarzman earned about $79.5 million in carried interest.) In late 2022, nearly two years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and after Trump-backed candidates in several states lost in the midterms, Schwarzman finally decided he wouldn’t back Trump anymore. This wasn’t the revolution he’d signed up for. He called for “a new generation of leaders” and vowed to get behind someone else in the Republican primary. But after more than a dozen GOP primary candidates fell short, he came back into the fold. In May, with Trump’s Manhattan felony trial in full swing, Schwarzman announced that he would support his bid to defeat Joe Biden. In August, three weeks after Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee, rumors swirled that Schwarzman was set to host a Trump fundraiser at Miramar. A spokesperson for the billionaire denied there was ever such a plan. But on a warm summer Thursday, Schwarzman did throw a bash at Miramar for about 200 people—the same afternoon that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, hosted a fundraiser a few blocks down Bellevue.  Postcard of MiramarLibrary of Congress Schwarzman’s event featured greeters dressed in 18th-century garb and a carnival setup. Bright structures carved to look like castle spires dotted the grounds and guests wandered among them, prohibited from walking through most of the actual palace, which, by now, Schwarzman’s decorators had adorned with a bounty of impressionist paintings and antique French furniture, including a desk that once stood at Versailles. Men in straw boat hats and suspenders ferried attendees to and from nearby parking in golf carts. Walz, meanwhile, went to Ochre Court, a mansion owned by a local Catholic university, Salve Regina. His event had little of Miramar’s pomp: no costumed greeters, no pinstriped chauffeurs, no carnival set. Walz spoke for 17 minutes in the three-story atrium, then sped off to his next event in the Hamptons. By fundraising metrics, the Walz event was a success, raising $650,000. Politically, it stirred up a minor controversy. Nearly half of Rhode Islanders are Catholic, and many, including the state’s powerful diocese, bristled at a Catholic venue hosting a campaign that vocally supports abortion rights. As it turned out, the Walz event organizers had sought out a different space, Belcourt—the third-largest Bellevue mansion. But it wasn’t available. Not because there was an event happening at the 60-room chateau, but because Schwarzman had rented it. He needed a place to store construction equipment during his yard party—and given the dearth of public parking, he would need a spillover lot.