The case rocked the US Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, one of the nine judges of the institution, would have benefited from very expensive donations in kind over the past twenty years. According to the group of journalists ProPublica, Clarence Thomas, known for his conservative positions, would have failed to declare many trips and gifts from which he was able to benefit, in contradiction with the American law which obliges judges and civil servants to disclose the advantages obtained. It is in particular a question of cruises on a mega yacht, flights in a private jet, the financing of the studies of a grand-nephew in a posh boarding school, or the purchase and renovation of the house occupied by the judge’s mother. .
All these donations come from the same man: the discreet Texan billionaire Harlan Crow. His company, Crow Holdings, manages $29 billion in assets, and his personal fortune is close to two billion dollars. “Harlan Crow is one of my best friends. As friends do, we have accompanied them on a number of trips,” Clarence Thomas said in a statement.
Generous donor
Harlan Crow is a pure-bred Texan, born in Dallas in 1949 into a privileged family. His father, Trammell Crow, is a famous real estate developer and founder of Crow Holdings. In 1971, Forbes calls it the largest real estate owner in the United States, with interests in nearly 28 million square meters of offices, housing and shopping centers. The American magazine also analyzes the particular strategy of the businessman, made of accumulation of capital rather than taking immediate profit: “The conventional real estate strategy consists of borrowing, building, dividing up and selling. (…) But it was by keeping everything he built that Crow became, at 56, the largest private landowner in the United States.
On the death of his father, Harlan Crow inherited the family business, which he further diversified into real estate management. Like Trammell, who actively supported Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1984, he is a staunch Republican. Over the years, he will even become one of the main financiers of the party. always according to ProPublica, he reportedly handed out more than $10 million to various conservative groups. The collective of journalists specifies that this sum could be much higher, because certain organizations keep their funders secret. Locally, he also donated $175,000 to the Texas Republican Party in 2021.
His “garden of evil”
Harlan Crow also uses his immense wealth to finance lobbying bodies, such as the “Club for Growth”, which he co-founded in 1999, an interest group which fights for the reduction of taxes in the United States. He also gave money to the center-right political party “No Labels”, and even to Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, known for his pro-tax stances.
The billionaire is a relatively secretive man, reluctant to vent in the press. He lives in a massive Dallas residence bought for $55 million, according to the site Business Insider. In 2003, a journalist from New York Times manages to be invited to the billionaire’s house: she discovers there what Harlan Crow describes as “the garden of evil”, namely a collection of statues representing the greatest dictators of the twentieth century. There are notably busts of Nicolae Ceausescu, Tito, Hosni Mubarak, Lenin and Stalin. “These statues can be used as a tool to remind new generations of the failure of the wicked and the triumph of the good,” he said at the time.
