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Alex Spanos’ company is one of the nation’s largest apartment developers. He also owns the NFL’s San Diego Chargers. Taxpayers agreed to spend $78 million in 1997 to renovate the Chargers’ Qualcomm Stadium in return for a pledge that the Chargers would stay in San Diego until 2020. The city also agreed to buy any leftover tickets that the Chargers do not sell at games. By 2000, however, Spanos was complaining again that the team needed yet another new stadium. This apparently was news to the NFL, which already had planned to hold the 2003 Super Bowl at the old stadium. Wildfires that torched San Diego in 2003 have made it all the harder for Spanos to make a case for public funding of a new Chargers stadium, despite threats that he might move the team to Los Angeles. Spanos made the 2003 Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $860 million. Spanos is a member of the “Republican Regents,” the elite group of donors who gave $250,000 or more to the GOP in the 2000 election cycle. By contributing $5 million to so-called 527 groups that supported the Bush campaign in 2004, Spanos ranked among the top five GOP donors. The 2000 Bush campaign paid Spanos Companies $19,064 to reimburse it for flights taken on its corporate jets. In his autobiography, Sharing the Wealth, Spanos says his first venture was a catering business that he started with an $800 loan for a truck in 1951. The book’s endorsers include President Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Jack Kemp and former California Governor Pete Wilson. Spanos, who accompanied the first President Bush on a visit to Greece, is active in the Greek Orthodox Church of America, whose eminencies visited the second President Bush in the Oval Office with Spanos. Preisdent Bush appointed Spanos and Archbishop Demetrios to his Presidential Delegation to the Athens Olympics. Bush also headlined a fundraiser for Bill Simon’s failed California gubernatorial campaign in Stockton’s AG Spanos Jet Center in 2002. Spanos then became a top funder of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 Total Recall campaign. President Bush appointed Spanos to the Kennedy Center board in 2004.
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Of Special Interest
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| Profile last updated
Dec 4, 2004
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