On July 10, 2020, Terry Tamminen wrote a letter to the board chair of Waterkeeper Alliance, the clean-water group founded and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to say that he wanted out.

Tamminen, a veteran, highly-regarded environmentalist and co-founder and longtime board member of the organization, had become concerned about the outfit’s finances—so worried that he was tendering his resignation. At issue was at least $67 million that Kennedy’s group had received and passed along over the previous six years—an eye-popping amount for a non-profit that prior to this influx of money had annual revenues of about $4 million, according to its tax filings. Tamminen noted in his letter that he had repeatedly asked Kennedy and other top WKA officials for an explanation regarding these funds—the source of the money and its ultimate use—and had received no satisfying response. He wrote that either there was “no proper documentation” covering this large flow of funds or such documentation was being “withheld” by Kennedy and the staff.

Tamminen had come across a situation that had raised questions among staff at WKA and people within the group’s orbit about the organization and Kennedy’s handling of tens of millions of dollars. His letter was prompted by a legal complaint that claimed WKA had “funneled millions of dollars to the Bahamas” to assist Louis Bacon, a hedge-fund billionaire, in his purported effort to “destroy and damage” Peter Nygård, a Canadian fashion mogul, who owned an estate next to Bacon’s on the island nation. The complaint, filed in a lawsuit brought by Nygård against Bacon, alleged that WKA had engaged in “illegal and/or improper activities” to benefit Bacon, a major financial backer of WKA. It also claimed Kennedy had “carried out illegal and improper activities to further [Bacon’s] scheme to damage [Nygård’s] business and property at the direction of, under the supervision of, at the request of or on behalf of [Bacon].”

“Where did that money go? The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s letter suggested that he was concerned about possible misconduct at Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of hundreds of organizations across the globe that protect bodies of water, and that he worried that Kennedy was not being straightforward about the matter. The Nygård complaint was ultimately dismissed. But with Kennedy, an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to run the massive Department of Health and Human Services, this episode—involving millions of dollars—could shed light on his managerial experience and competence.

A Mother Jones investigation has found that charities associated with Bacon, the co-founder and CEO of Moore Capital Management, did contribute at least $63 million to WKA and that these funds were subsequently sent by WKA to Save the Bays, a small environmental group that Bacon, Kennedy, and others had started in the Bahamas and that filed multiple environmental suits against Nygård.

This money flow occurred at the same time Bacon was involved in a bitter feud with Nygård. The two owned adjacent estates in Lyford Cay, a posh community for the super-rich in the Bahamas, and a property dispute—they shared a driveway—had evolved into wild combat costing each millions of dollars. And Save the Bays and its lawyer had become involved in Bacon’s battle with Nygård.

Some WKA staff and associates considered these large transfers of funds to Save the Bays unusual and wondered how this modest outfit was absorbing and spending tens of millions of dollars. For them, it was a sign of Kennedy’s autocratic management of WKA. “You couldn’t really ask questions about this,” a former staffer says. “There was a cult of Bobby.”

Through 2023, the amount of money routed through Kennedy’s organization to finance what was described in its tax records as a program in the Caribbean totaled $79 million. A WKA trustee replying on behalf of the group to queries from Mother Jones maintains this money financed environmental-related litigation mounted by Save the Bays in the Bahamas. Former WKA staff say this is a tremendously high figure for such cases and assert there was no sufficient public documentation that this funding was appropriately handled. “Where did that money go?” asks Bob Shavelson, a former founding WKA board member. “The whole thing stunk. It was obvious they were hiding something. They have never provided good answers.”

Tamminen’s queries about WKA’s finances in 2020 were triggered by a news report about the years-long feud between Bacon and Nygård. Their titanic battle had come to involve multiple lawsuits in varying jurisdictions, private investigators, gang members, phony websites, an allegation of a murder plot targeting Bacon, charges of harassment, political intrigue, secret recordings, and accusations of sexual assault against Nygård.

Eventually, Nygård ended up being convicted in Canada last year of sexual assault and sentenced to 11 years in prison, while still facing trials for sex crimes and other charges in Montreal, Winnipeg, and New York. And Bacon won a defamation case against Nygård and a $203 million judgment, but in November that award was tossed out.

Tamminen had spotted a story about the complaint Nygård had filed on April 30, 2020, in a New York federal court alleging that Bacon and others had engaged in a pattern of illegal conduct for years to defame him and destroy his fashion brand. Nygård listed a host of people and organizations supposedly involved or knowledgable of this alleged scheme, including Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy, and Fred Smith, a Bahamian lawyer and co-founder and board member of Save the Bays, the group that Kennedy and Bacon had helped to start. (Smith was also a member of Waterkeeper Alliance.) Launched in 2013, Save the Bays had sued Nygård for dredging and other activity that, the group contended, had despoiled Clifton Bay, which Nygård’s gaudy and palatial estate overlooked.

There is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money… Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

Nygård’s complaint stated that Save the Bays had relied “heavily on funding and support from Waterkeeper Alliance.” The filing also cited a 2010 Denver Post story in which Kennedy had praised Bacon, noting he was the “single largest supporter” of the Waterkeeper Alliance. A lawyer who has worked with WKA describes Bacon as “one of Bobby’s rich-guy friends.”

After reading about this complaint, Tamminen wondered about WKA and Kennedy’s connection to the Nygård-Bacon face-off. According to his resignation letter, on July 2, 2020, Tamminen emailed Mary Beth Postman, the deputy director of WKA, and asked, “Did we run any litigation funding for this case through WKA? Some rumors flying around, but I don’t recall anything like that on our 990s.” He was referring to the annual tax return that nonprofits must file. WKA’s public 990s indicated that tens of millions of dollars had been sent to the Caribbean without detailing what they financed. A onetime WKA associate says, “This looked totally smelly.”

According to Tamminen’s resignation letter, he soon spoke with Kennedy and asked for records related to this funding, and Kennedy, was “unable to provide the documents (or a verbal explanation).”

Afterward Postman informed Tamminen that the WKA had a “fiscal sponsorship agreement” to support work in the Bahamas. This meant WKA was receiving, as a pass-through, money for the Bahamian group. Acting as a pass-through is a common practice for nonprofits, but they can only do this to support charitable activity, usually a project in sync with their own missions. They can charge a percentage of the funds for this service, often in the 7-to-14-percent range, and, according to the WKA trustee who replied to queries from Mother Jones, the organization did receive a cut. The trustee would not say how much.

Tamminen pressed Marc Yaggi, the CEO of WKA, for documentation and details on the source of the millions sent to the Bahamas, the recipients of those funds, and how this money was spent. “We can’t be funneling millions of dollars (3X our own budget as shown on 990s) to [nongovernmental organizations] without full transparency about how the money is being spent and an unambiguous contract with those recipients about what is allowable and, specifically, what is not,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

Finally, according to the letter, Tamminen was sent a spreadsheet from WKA trustee William Wachtel indicating that the majority of the more than $67 million in question went to the Coalition to Protect Clifton Bay, an earlier name for Save the Bays, and “an invoice for reimbursement by WKA from lawyers involved in the [Nygård-Bacon] litigation…in the amount of $1,752,193” for a three-month period in 2020.

Tamminen deemed this reply insufficient. At this point, he threw up his hands and decided to quit, noting in his letter, “I have a fiduciary responsibility to understand the organization’s finances” and stating that because Kennedy and his staff had not provided adequate documentation he could not perform this basic task.

Tamminen declined to comment.

In response to a long list of questions sent to Kennedy by Mother Jones about WKA forwarding money to the Bahamas, RFK Jr. texted, “The coverage on me from mother John’s [sic] has been consistently hostile and inaccurate. MJ was once a counter culture journal that spoke truth to power It now seems to be yet another propaganda bullhorn for the DS Regime.” (Might “DS Regime” refer to a Deep State Regime?) Asked if this text was his full response to the list of queries, Kennedy did not reply.

Tamminen’s letters, Shavelson says, was a “damning piece of evidence.” His resignation drew attention within WKA and its large network of local Waterkeeper groups to a curious question: Why had Kennedy’s organization passed along so much money to the Bahamas? “We didn’t really know who was giving us this money,” a former staffer says.

The WKA’s 990s show that through 2023, the total amount that passed through what the group called its Central America/Caribbean program was $79 million. On the 990s available to the public, the name of the recipient of those funds were redacted. (This is unusual; grantees tend to be identified.) A former WKA staffer says that the recipient listed on the 990s was the law firm of Fred Smith, the Bahamian lawyer who, with Kennedy and Bacon, helped organize Save the Bays and who was associated with Bacon’s wide-ranging fight against Nygård. That battle included a lawsuit charging Nygård with sex crimes.

WKA staff and associates of the Waterkeeper Alliance were suspicious of this funding arrangement. The amount of money going to Save the Bays was “off-kilter,” a former WKA staffer says. “It was disproportionate to the size of the program. They had an office that was maybe 400-square-feet with one full-time staffer and some part-timers. We did not know the source of the money going down there.”

Save the Bays has run a radio show and a youth education program. Its website is no longer operational, and the phone number listed on its Facebook page is out of service. “I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation,” Shavelson says.

“This money was orders of magnitude greater than anything in my experience in my 30 years of practice as an environmental lawyer,” says Daniel Cooper, the founding partner of Sycamore Law, a firm that specializes in filing environmental enforcement cases for grassroots nonprofits. (He was not involved in the Save the Bays litigation.)

The former WKA staffer adds that “there was a very closed loop on that money, with Bobby involved.” Some staffers at the time questioned whether some of the funds going to the Bahamas were being used for the ongoing conflict between Bacon and Nygård beyond the environmental lawsuits Save the Bays had filed regarding Nygård.

A key issue was the source of the funding. A review conducted by Mother Jones of charitable organizations associated with Bacon—Moore Charitable Foundation, Belvedere Charitable Foundation, and Bessemer Trust—shows that these entities donated a hefty amount, nearly $63 million, to the Waterkeeper Alliance from 2014 through 2023. (Unlike the Moore and Belvedere foundations, the Bessemer Trust, a multifamily office that oversees more than $200 billion for endowments, families, and foundations, is not controlled by Bacon. But Bacon’s contributions to its Bessemer Giving Fund closely matched the contributions it sent to WKA.)

The WKA trustee confirms that the Bacon donations to WKA were the source of the funds that Kennedy’s outfit passed to Save the Bays. If so, that means Bacon was sending money to WKA—a group for whom he was a major supporter—that Kennedy’s organization, after taking a cut, was forwarding to a group that Bacon, Kennedy, Smith and others had formed, which subsequently filed lawsuits against Bacon’s archnemesis.

For years prior to Tamminen enquiring about WKA’s activity in the Bahamas, Save the Bays had been a controversial organization on the island nation and had prompted questions about its funding and relationship to Bacon. During a 2016 television interview, Fred Smith refused to acknowledge that Bacon was a major financial supporter of Save the Bays. “It is often used as some measure of criticism against us,” he said. When the host suggested that Bacon had used Save the Bays “to get at Peter Nygård…to discredit Peter Nygård,” Smith replied, “Louis Bacon doesn’t need Save the Bays to do what you are suggesting.” In this interview, Smith said, “I have never been paid by Save the Bays… I’m a director of Save the Bays.” (About that time, Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald claimed Save the Bays, through its environmental lawsuits, was trying to destabilize and “overthrow” the Progressive Liberal Party government—a charge Smith denied in this interview. Nygård, a PLP supporter, once bragged he had donated $5 million to party.)

After Tamminen’s resignation caused a fuss for WKA, the law firm run by WKA trustee William Wachtel conducted a review of the money sent to the Bahamas and produced a private report. Wachtel was part of this review, according to the trustee who spoke to Mother Jones. In a one-page statement, the WKA board of directors called this inquiry an “independent assessment.” It said that the review found “no red flags” and concluded there was “no clear evidence of misuse of funds” and “no clear evidence of donors improperly gaining benefits from donations”—presumably a reference to Bacon. The statement did not mention Bacon, Save the Bays, or the Bahamas.

Former WKA associates point out that this was not an independent investigation, given that it was conducted by a trustee. “This was a bogus audit,” Shavelson says. A onetime WKA associate says, “To have a trustee conduct an investigation that then says ‘nothing to see here’ doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The inquiry’s final report was shared with an audit committee of the WKA board, not the full board.

The WKA trustee says this inquiry showed that the $79 million was mostly spent on litigation conducted by Smith and his law firm for Save the Bays and that the inquiry reviewed billing documents and invoices from Smith and determined they were accurate and covered legitimate expenses. “We saw nothing spent for anything other than the litigation that went on,” the trustee says. A former board member, who has not seen the review, says that they learned the litigation billing included expenses for lavish hotel suites, limousines, and security services.

Save the Bays and Smith did indeed engage in environmental-related litigation. In 2015, the group launched a legal action regarding pollution attributed to a power plant. It successfully sued Nygård for illegally dredging Clifton Bay to expand his property, and that case led to the Supreme Court of the Bahamas seizing his property in 2018. It also filed a legal action claiming Nygård had engaged in unauthorized construction. In 2021, Save the Bays and Waterkeeper Bahamas filed a case to compel judicial review of foreign oil development in the Bahamas.

But former WKA associates say the nearly $79 million price tag for Save the Bays litigation seems exceedingly high. “The cost of an illegal dredging case is in the tens of thousands of dollars,” a former WKA staffer says. Shavelson asks, “Where’s all this litigation? There would have to be a mountain of stuff for those billables. I’ve never heard of that amount of money being spent on that type of litigation.” Another former WKA associate says that the typical cases that Waterkeeper Alliance members bring range for $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that there is “no way you can spend $79 million on this type of litigation. You can buy a whole ecosystem for that amount of money.” This source adds, “Without details, there’s no way you can explain these numbers.”

While Smith was filing environmental cases for Save the Bays, he was a key ally of Bacon in the billionaire’s fierce fight with Nygård. According to a lengthy New York Times account of the Bacon-Nygård clash, Smith worked with private investigators and found 15 Bahamian women to participate in a sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. He also encouraged women who claimed to be Nygård victims to go to the Bahamian police. The newspaper noted that Smith created a nonprofit called Sanctuary, which he and Bacon funded, and that it paid Bahamian lawyers and investigators involved in putting together the sex crimes lawsuit against Nygård. Smith and the private investigators, according to the newspaper, compensated at least two witnesses who located alleged victims.

Nygård reportedly spent $15 million on a smear campaign against Bacon, which included television and radio ads, doctored videos, and outlandish accusations, and Bacon said in court that he expended $53 million for investigators and lawyers in his legal fight with Nygård.

Mother Jones sent lengthy lists of questions to Marc Yaggi and Mary Beth Postman of WKA, Fred Smith, Save the Bays, Louis Bacon (through his Moore Charitable Foundation), and the Trump transition team. It asked WKA if it would release unredacted versions of its 990s. It asked if WKA could provide an accounting of the litigation the tens of millions of dollars supposedly financed. It asked whether Tamminen’s account—including his claim that Kennedy would not provide him information to confirm the money sent to the Bahamas was handled appropriately—was accurate. None of them, except Katie Miller, a Trump transition staffer, replied. Miller emailed, “As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to left wind [sic] activists masquerading as journalists.” The Bessemer Trust did not respond to a request to comment.

Several months after Tamminen prompted a stir about the Bahamas money, Kennedy resigned as WKA president. The WKA trustee says the Bahamas project was not a factor in Kennedy’s resignation. By that point, Kennedy had become a leading promoter of Covid disinformation, and this had caused concern within WKA and among the group’s funders and supporters.

When WKA in November 2020 announced Kennedy’s resignation as president, he said, “Waterkeeper is my life’s work and will always be my proudest achievement…. I’m immensely proud of what we created.” He added, “My dreams overflow with the thousands of miles of magnificent waterways that I’ve been privileged to paddle or travel with many of you over 40 years; the mangroves, the muskies, the Spanish moss, the schooling salmon, the shrimp, crayfish, blue crab, and yellow perch, the calving glaciers and all that flowing water from the Himalayas to the Tetons, from the Andes to the Arctic, from Bimini to Homer, from Bhutan to the Jordan, and from Lake Ontario to the Futaleufú.” He did not mention the Bahamas. Upon his departure, the board named him president emeritus.