This story was produced in collaboration with Mother Jones.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020 and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The Central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics — one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs — or is run — specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida — sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020 — along with their political consultants — had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers.

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by less than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

‘Ghost candidates’ spur charges

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles's outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance-related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, meanwhile, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race — a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles's back — was not charged.)

In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation — the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

Utility dark money trail exposed

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles's attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the f— he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority — by whatever means — would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills — and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy said during a June 2022 interview. He also admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodriguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell” — a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super PAC, to fund “ ‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That's exactly what happened with our complaint.”

Scenes from a political scandal

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and dozens of interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles's long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some monopoly utilities have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry — a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10% nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8%.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors — which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers — some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison — to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles's Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer — an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL. But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

In October 2017, Artiles was invited to attend a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream — a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.”

Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing. “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Digging for utility dirt

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as unnamed co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second largest utility holding company and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and  the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’s co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’s dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates has been charged with a crime.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his — and FPL’s — involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies  and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available — information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

Consultants’ secrets spill out

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature and the Capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session — for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party and two years since Artiles's arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced — at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’s alleged secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’s work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis — a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale — a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing in May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced — and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit — and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayers’ interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable. And the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. “The state's position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles's alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team are attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con.

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got f—ed on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist. “

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, whether and to what extent anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles's trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn't have a fully functioning democracy.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.