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The plan involved a covert political operative who worked with Putin, a double amputee, a settlement with Texas A&M, and—ultimately—a failed bid that opened up the opportunity for Donald Trump's presidential run.
As Donald Trump finds new ways to drag out his vicious feud with the National Football League— he tweeted Monday morning that there's "no leadership in the NFL"—a big question looms about where this all began. Could it be, as several reports now suggest, that this whole national trauma can be traced back to Trump's failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills back in 2014?
That's what some team owners have reportedly said, contending that the president is driven by a personal grudge stemming from his multiple doomed efforts over the decades to become the owner of an NFL franchise. Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan told USA Today that Trump is "jealous" of the league and its owners, having failed to become one. "He's been elected President, where maybe a great goal he had in life—to own an NFL team—is not very likely," Khan said.
But, come on, how badly did Trump really want to buy the Bills? Badly enough, it seems, to create a dubious grassroots campaign to pressure the team and the league to not sell to a rival group of bidders.
Back in early 2014, with the team for sale and potential buyers in the process of being narrowed to three finalists—Trump, Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula, and a group of Toronto investors led by Jon Bon Jovi—speculation was rampant that the would-be Canadian buyers planned to move the franchise north of the border. That's when a local fan group sprang up, hoping to turn sentiment in Buffalo against Bon Jovi and his partners.
These activist Bills backers called themselves "12th Man Thunder" and began orchestrating colorful stunts like establishing "Bon Jovi-Free Zones" in local bars, antics that earned them ink everywhere from Breitbart to New York magazine. (All that attention also got them into a legal showdown with Texas A&M over the use of the phrase "12th man," which the Aggies had trademarked.)
But what almost nobody knew—until now—is that the whole thing was pulled together by the then-future president of the United States. In the spring of 2014, Trump hired veteran Republican operative and Buffalo resident Michael Caputo—a close associate of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Caputo had worked with Ollie North during the Reagan years and then helped boost the careers of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as a political consultant in Russia—now he was enlisted to create a group that would scuttle Bon Jovi's NFL chances.
"Trump knew he couldn't outbid the Canadians," Caputo recounted to me recently. Instead, Caputo explained, he would scare them off by turning Buffalo against them. Two days after we spoke, the president took the stage at a political rally in Alabama and began his smoldering feud with the NFL by calling any player who showed the temerity to kneel during the national anthem a "son of a *****."
In a stroke of cunning, Caputo recruited Chuck Sonntag, a double amputee cancer survivor, to serve as the group's leader. Press coverage would occasionally identify Caputo as a "PR consultant" to the group, while reporting that it was founded by Sonntag as he lay recovering from his amputations in a rehabilitation center. "It was easier for Sonntag to lose his leg than his team," Caputo recalled.
(Astroturfing like this—covertly funding a supposedly grassroots group—was not a new tactic for Trump and his operatives. Back in 2000, Stone and Trump's Atlantic City casino business paid massive fines after they funneled $150,000 to a group called "the Institute for Law and Society" to run newspaper ads opposing the legalization of a Native American casino in the Catskills and failed to disclose the transaction to New York's lobbying regulators.)
Trump's involvement in the Buffalo scheme was short-lived. According to Caputo, not long after 12th Man Thunder was formed, Trump entered a $1 billion bid for the Bills, and as a condition of that offer, was forbidden from participating in public outreach efforts related to the sale. So, as Caputo recalls, Trump called him and told him that he had to break off contact with him and the fan group. "I can't talk to you anymore because of the NDA I signed," Caputo remembers Trump saying. "Have a good time."
Charlie Pellien, a Buffalo local who co-founded the group said that keeping a lid on Trump's involvement was a challenge. "It was all behind the scenes and we weren't even allowed to mention his name because of the agreement that he signed," Pellien told me. "I was bursting at the seams to tell people, 'Hey, this was Donald Trump's idea.'"
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