The federal government handed $1.7 million to a three-person water-treatment company partly owned by a twice-convicted felon who once bribed a congressman, because the president wanted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to look nice for the Fourth of July.
Greenwater Services of rural Ohio had the corporate profile of a mailbox. Its president, Chas Antinone Jr., was one of three full-time employees. His personal cell phone number was on the website. Then the president’s friend John “J.J.” Cafaro—who donated $50,000 to a televised Trump fundraiser in 2016 and earned an on-air shout-out as “a man who made a lot of money in Cleveland”—bought into the company. Cafaro is a shopping-center scion from Niles, Ohio, who in 2002 was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery after he testified, on the record in court, that he had given a United States congressman thirteen thousand dollars in cash and other favors to win federal contracts for his daughter’s aerospace firm. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to a second federal felony—making a false statement to the government—about a loan he made to a staffer for his daughter’s failed congressional campaign and then concealed from federal investigators. Federal contracting records list Cafaro’s trust as the owner of Greenwater Services. The company’s Florida corporate records list Cafaro’s Palm Beach County home, near Mar-a-Lago, as its address.
When a twice-convicted felon’s trust is the owner of record for an obscure Ohio startup, and that startup suddenly receives a no-bid $1.7 million federal contract to clean the centerpiece of the administration’s $14.2 million renovation to dye the water American-flag-blue for America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday—the pool went green, the administration blamed vandalism, proof was never produced, it became a late-night joke—you are not looking at a procurement anomaly. You are looking at a receipt.
This is not the first time the Cafaro trust fed at the no-bid trough. Last August, Greenwater won a no-bid contract for up to $2.5 million from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission—an agency that operates under State Department foreign-policy guidance and is overseen by a Trump appointee—to test its proprietary ozone-nanobubble technology on the sewage-choked Tijuana River. The commission said it had “a responsibility to think creatively and evaluate every credible tool that can bring relief to the Americans living with this crisis now.” An Environmental Protection Agency environmental engineer named Douglas Liden wrote in a May 2025 email, obtained through a public-records request, that he “really” did not think the ozone would do any good unless the entire flow could be ozonated, and that “the first storm will wash out any equipment you install.” The first storm washed it out. Greenwater earned about $1.1 million of the as-much-as $2.5 million before the storm ended the pilot. The commission said the project “demonstrated its capability to kill bacteria and eliminate odors.” It also said the equipment would have to be modified to work on unpredictable river flows. So: a tested-and-failed pilot, paid for at scale, then a no-bid contract at the Lincoln Memorial.
Five years ago, when a local news outlet in Florida ran a story about contamination in the Loxahatchee River, Cafaro telephoned the river-district official in Jupiter, identified himself, and offered the services of “a company I think can fix that.” The official, Bud Howard, told the Journal the equipment worked in 250-gallon containers and did not meaningfully clean the river. The pitch Cafaro made to a Florida official is the pitch he evidently made to the federal government: a company “I think can fix that,” with technology that works in 250-gallon containers and not much else.
The mechanism is not complicated. The state becomes a personal checking account for the chief executive’s rolodex. No-bid contracts are the currency. A twice-convicted federal felon who once bribed a congressman to win federal contracts becomes a major donor to a presidential candidate. The donor buys access; access becomes no-bid federal contracts; no-bid federal contracts become a failed pilot on a sewage-choked river; the failed pilot becomes another no-bid contract at the Lincoln Memorial; the Lincoln Memorial goes green and becomes a late-night joke; and the company explains, on the record, that the man whose trust owns the company and who lives down the road from the president’s resort is just an Ohio businessman with an Ohio investment. The contracts are no-bid because bidding would require explaining why a three-person company that has completed about fifteen jobs in three states is the right outfit to clean the National Mall’s most-photographed body of water. The explanation would be the donation, the relationship, the conviction—which is to say, the system working as designed, and the man the system was designed for being the man who used it.
It is the same playbook that funded the Tijuana River pilot. The same defenders of the free market who spent decades screaming about crony capitalism and government waste now treat no-bid contracts for a felon’s startup as a matter of national pride, right up until the water turns green.
The White House and the National Park Service say Cafaro and the White House played no role in Greenwater landing its recent contracts. The company’s spokeswoman, Erin Kramer, told a reporter this week that Cafaro is “just an Ohio businessman that invested in an Ohio company. That’s kind of the extent of his involvement.” The convicted contractor, in other words.
Cafaro’s innovation was to let the contracting apparatus do the bribing for him—the same man, the same federal contracts, twenty-four years apart, the second time better at it because the money flows in his direction now and the technology can fail twice in a row without the apparatus pausing.
The water at the Lincoln Memorial is being refenced for the Fourth of July fireworks. The money is gone. The felon is still a partner. The country can believe that the twice-convicted briber of federal officials whose trust owns the company and who lives near Mar-a-Lago is just an Ohio businessman with an Ohio investment—or the country can believe its eyes. Both cannot be true at once.