VIII-A. The Man With No Title

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Alan Levin has never been elected to anything. For eighteen years, he has been standing where Delaware decides who gets what.

 

A Promise Made Inside An Empty Factory

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On the morning of October 27, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden walked into a shuttered automobile plant on Boxwood Road, near Newport, Delaware, and told a room full of laid-off autoworkers that they were going to get their jobs back.

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General Motors had built cars in that building since 1947. Five thousand people had worked there at the peak. Eight and a half million vehicles had come off those lines. It had closed three months earlier, after sixty-two years, and the men and women standing in front of the Vice President that morning had spent the summer figuring out what a person does at forty-eight when the plant closes.

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Biden lives three miles away, in Greenville. He had come to announce that the United States Department of Energy would lend more than half a billion dollars to a California startup called Fisker Automotive, which wanted to build plug-in hybrid sports cars in that building. Governor Jack Markell stood beside him. This is seed money, Biden said, that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars in good new jobs. The loan, he told them, would let some of the best workers in the world reclaim their jobs.

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Six months later, in April 2010, Governor Markell’s administration put in twenty-two million dollars of Delaware’s own money, a state loan and a state grant together. Contemporary accounts in 2014 put the state’s exposure at twenty million and at more than twenty-one million; the twenty-two million figure comes from Karl Baker’s 2023 reconstruction, which had the benefit of the full bankruptcy record. Fisker promised two thousand factory jobs and three thousand more up and down the supply chain.

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Not one car was ever built in that building. Not one Delaware worker was ever hired to build one.

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What stands on that ground today is an Amazon warehouse, the largest building the company operates in this state. How it got from one to the other runs through a small number of Delawareans who have known each other a long time, and through one man in particular who has never held elected office in his life.

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The Man In Two Chairs

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Alan B. Levin does not vote on anything. He does not sign laws. He has never stood for election. Walk down Market Street in Wilmington and ask ten people who he is, and you will get ten blank looks, and that is not shyness. It is the shape of the career.

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His father, Harry, opened Happy Harry’s with a single drugstore. Alan took it and made it enormous. Seventy-six stores across four states, two thousand seven hundred employees, revenues climbing toward half a billion dollars, roughly two of every three prescriptions filled in Delaware. By the end it was the tenth largest drugstore chain in America. Walgreens bought it in July 2006, and the sale made him rich enough that he never again had to want anything from anyone.

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He had been in and out of government the whole time. He prosecuted as a deputy attorney general under Delaware Attorney General Richard Gebelein. He staffed United States Senator William Roth as his executive assistant and counsel. He ran Delaware’s Private Industry Council through the nineties. In 2001, he chaired the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, which his own official biography describes, without embarrassment, as the organization that directs lobbying for the industry. He sat on the national board of the United States Chamber of Commerce. In 2005, he chaired Delaware’s Chamber and got the gross receipts tax cut. Somewhere in there, he collected the Delaware Distinguished Service Medal for helping the families of Guard and Reserve members deployed to Desert Storm and Iraq, and board seats at Wesley College and the Red Cross of Delmarva, and advisory seats at Delaware State University’s business school and the University of Delaware’s Lerner College.

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After Walgreens, he started a venture fund, Innovation Capital Partners, and put money into a spectroscopy company called Centice and a hiring-reference company called Skill Survey. And he took a seat on the board of A. Duie Pyle.

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A. Duie Pyle hauls freight and runs warehouses. Before Alan Levin ran the state agency that hands companies public money to build here, before he chaired the corporation that owns the Port of Wilmington, and before he came to chair the council that decides what Delaware can afford to spend on a container terminal, he sat on the board of a trucking company.

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In December 2008, the incoming governor, Jack Markell, gave him two jobs at once.

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The first was Director of the Delaware Economic Development Office, a cabinet post, the agency that decides which private companies receive state money to build in Delaware. The second was Chairman of the Board of the Diamond State Port Corporation, the state-owned company that owns the Port of Wilmington.

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One man. The office that gives out the money, and the board that owns the port. Nobody voted for him for either.

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How Things Reached His Desk

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In the summer of 2023, a reporter named Karl Baker published three stories in Delaware Online and The News Journal about what a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden showed about business in Delaware. Most of the country had spent three years arguing about that laptop and about foreign money. Almost nobody had looked at what it said about Wilmington.

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What it showed was a state clawing out of a recession and paying almost anyone who promised a job.

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On February 3, 2010, a California political donor named Wade Randlett, who had worked on the Obama transition and ran a company called Next Fuels, emailed Governor Jack Markell directly. Randlett wanted to put solar panels and other alternative energy equipment at the Delaware City refinery. He opened by mentioning that he and the Governor had a mutual friend. The friend was Hunter Biden.

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Markell answered from a private email account he kept under a false name. The name was Alan Jackson. Delaware reporters would find that out in 2015.

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Markell handed Randlett to Alan Levin.

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Ten weeks later, on April 20, 2010, Levin wrote an email introducing Randlett to another possible partner for the refinery project. In it, he explained where Randlett had come from. Randlett, he wrote, came to us at DEDO through the Vice President’s Office.

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Reading the underlying emails thirteen years later, The News Journal called that a seemingly inaccurate statement.

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Karl Baker asked Alan Levin about it in 2023. Levin answered by email, and he did not deny writing it. He talked first about the economy, about how Delaware was coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Then he explained himself.

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If the mention of the VP’s Office in the email was authentic, it was probably an effort by me to add credibility to the venture again because I wanted as many jobs created as possible. Alan Levin, who ran Delaware’s economic development office from 2009 to 2015.

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He added that nobody ever pressured his office to favor companies connected to the Bidens.

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Randlett was not the only one. A staffer inside Levin’s agency put it in writing that they would pull out the stops for two more companies Hunter Biden had brought around, an Israeli air conditioning maker called DuCool and a water technology outfit called Aqua Sciences.

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And ten miles west of the Boxwood plant, at the old Chrysler factory in Newark that the University of Delaware was turning into a research campus, a Rosemont Seneca employee named Michael Muldoon was drafting a sales pitch. His firm, he wrote, was working closely with a team at the University of Delaware, in coordination with businesses and the State government, to help find clean tech companies to fill a technology park at the site of an old Chrysler plant. He called the university one of Rosemont Seneca’s strategic partners.

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He sent the draft to Hunter Biden in November 2010 with a note. He had made it for fifteen thousand dollars for introductions. Let me know if that sounds good, Muldoon wrote, and I’ll get it out the door.

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Hunter Biden had one question. Would it include success fees and equity.

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It would, Muldoon answered. He added the equity and percentage pieces project by project.

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Fifteen thousand dollars to be introduced to a state university and a state government, with equity negotiated case by case.

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The refinery project died in the end, killed by senior management at PBF Energy, the private equity firm that had bought the Delaware City refinery. Nobody got anything. But for about a year the State of Delaware worked hard for it, and Alan Levin worked hardest.

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Twenty-Two Million Dollars and a Building Full of Nothing

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Fisker Automotive was the big one, and Hunter Biden’s own firm was in it early.

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It’s our fund that’s in the deal, he wrote in December 2010 to a Philadelphia money manager named Wayne Kimmel, an old friend from Kimmel’s days at ETF Venture Funds. Cool company, right.

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In May of that year, Fisker had trucked its luxury sedan, the Karma, to a Jaguar dealership in Wilmington and unveiled it to a crowd. The next month, a bankruptcy judge signed off on Fisker buying the Boxwood plant. Weeks after that, an investment banker named Barry Yerger, of Barley Mill Asset Management, emailed Hunter Biden with sincere thanks for any and all help provided concerning Fisker, particularly the introduction to Kimmel, and added his congratulations to all on the finalization of the Boxwood Plant transfer. Yerger would not talk to Karl Baker in 2023, and so nobody knows who all he was congratulating, or for what.

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Then it fell apart in the ordinary way. Fisker missed its production milestones. The Department of Energy shut off the loan. The battery supplier went bankrupt in 2012. By spring of 2013, Fisker could not make a ten million dollar payment. In November, it filed.

 

Hunter Biden was listed personally among the creditors, along with three investment funds bearing the Rosemont name at addresses matching Rosemont Seneca Partners. Delaware taxpayers stood third in line, behind the federal government and Silicon Valley Bank, and got back essentially nothing of the twenty-two million.

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Also in the wreckage was Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the Silicon Valley venture firm whose managing partner Raymond Lane had been chairman of Fisker’s board. Al Gore was a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins then. So was John Doerr, a major Democratic donor who sat on President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board while the administration was steering some ninety billion dollars into clean energy.

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Four years later Henrik Fisker, who founded the company, blamed the battery supplier and his own failure to raise more money. If we would have got the money, he told The News Journal in 2017, we would have been in Delaware today as the original company.

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Delaware put twenty-two million dollars of public money into a company that never built a car here and never hired a worker here, and then stood third in line to get it back.

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Two Chinese Companies And A Rigged Auction

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What happened to the wreckage is worth following, because it explains who owned the building when New Castle County came knocking.

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In October 2013, one month before Fisker filed, the federal government auctioned off the one hundred sixty-nine million dollars Fisker still owed on its federal loan. Exactly one bidder showed up. A Delaware limited liability company called Hybrid Technology, controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li, bid twenty-five million dollars for the whole thing, and won.

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Federal investigators would later conclude that Li’s company had rigged that auction and cost American taxpayers millions. Hybrid Technology paid the government twenty-nine million dollars in 2020 to make the claims go away.

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The hard assets went separately. On March 24, 2014, Wanxiang America, the American arm of what was then China’s largest auto parts manufacturer, bought them for one hundred forty-nine million dollars. The Boxwood plant came along inside that sale. Fisker had told the Department of Energy the year before that the property was worth forty million.

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And according to Alan Levin, somewhere in there Hunter Biden telephoned Governor Markell to connect him with Chinese investors interested in the plant. Markell’s people arranged a tour. Hunter Biden canceled it. Levin said nobody ever told him the investors’ names.

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Jessica Tillipman, who teaches government contracts law at George Washington University and serves as its assistant dean for procurement law studies, read the record for Karl Baker. She called it ugly, said it did not appear to break any law, and said it carried the appearance of favoritism. Most people in politics who care about ethics, Tillipman said, take pains to avoid this situation.

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The County Tries To Buy It Back

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Tom Gordon had been County Executive of New Castle County before, and by 2014 he was back. He is not a subtle man, and he did not have a subtle idea.

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He wanted the county to buy that plant. Not to sit on it. He wanted to turn the old General Motors factory into a distribution hub tied to an expanded Port of Wilmington, so that ships coming into Wilmington would unload into a warehouse the county owned, on land the county controlled, employing people the county could count.

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He gave the job to his second in command, Chief Administrative Officer David Grimaldi.

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On June 3, 2014, two News Journal reporters, Adam Taylor and Aaron Nathans, put the plan in the paper. New Castle County was offering nine million dollars. When Karl Baker went back through the record nine years later, the figure he found for what Tom Gordon proposed was nine point nine million. The number announced was nine million. The number that reached Wanxiang was nine point nine.

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Gordon told them exactly what he was thinking. I would like to buy it and make something happen there, he said. We want some sort of manufacturing, because we have too many big-box stores here. We need real jobs that pay real money.

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Grimaldi told them that if the county could restore local control to the site and then work with the state, the property could be economically successful again.

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Another council member, Penrose Hollins, told the reporters he had never heard about any of it. Hollins pointed out the obvious problem. Landing a real employer takes state money, and the state has it. DEDO has all the bucks, he said.

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And then Taylor and Nathans called the Delaware Economic Development Office, and Alan Levin gave them a sentence.

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Alan Levin said he was not aware of any credible offers to buy the site.

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New Castle County’s nine million dollars was the headline of the story his quote ran in.

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Levin went on. He said state officials and Senator Tom Carper’s office were talking with Wanxiang about what to do with the property. He wrote in an email that Wanxiang was still performing their due diligence and deciding what use of Boxwood would be in their corporate best interest.

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The reporters also called Roger Brown, the interim president of the reconstituted Fisker Automotive, which still had its name on the operation. Brown told them something that did not match at all. There’s so many people who came to us, he said, saying, I’ll buy the property, this and that, yada yada yada. He explained how it works in his trade. None of them tell you it’s not for sale, Brown said. They always tell you, make an offer. That’s just the natural instinct of a real estate guy.

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The state’s economic development director said there were no credible offers. The man sitting on the property told the same two reporters that people would not stop trying to buy it. Both quotes ran in the same newspaper on the same day.

 

What Alan Levin Did That Was Not In The Paper

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That same month, David Grimaldi told Alan Levin what New Castle County intended to do.

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Levin wrote back and told him to stand down. He strongly urged the county, in his words, to wait until Wanxiang determined its interest.

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Grimaldi did not wait. He answered that the county and the state would have to agree to disagree. We will send the offer letter out to Wanxiang momentarily, he told Levin, as there doesn’t seem to be a need for a meeting.

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Then he did the work. The county hired a well-known land use lawyer to draft a purchase agreement. Grimaldi got on a plane to Chicago and walked into Wanxiang America’s office and pitched them himself. They listened. They were interested.

 

He flew home feeling good about it.

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But when I got back, I got a strange email from them that said You guys in Delaware need to speak with one voice. It seems that there was somebody at the state who was pushing back on our transaction. David Grimaldi, Chief Administrative Officer of New Castle County.

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Grimaldi would not name the somebody at the state. He did not have to. Two weeks earlier, Alan Levin had told a newspaper there were no credible offers on a day when New Castle County’s offer was the headline, and in that same month, Alan Levin had written to Grimaldi telling the county to sit down and wait.

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Those emails came out later, through an open records request. Nobody was looking at them at the time.

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New Castle County never bought the plant.

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Meanwhile, At The Port

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While all of that was happening on Boxwood Road, Alan Levin was also chairing the board that owns the Port of Wilmington, and he was trying to lease it away for fifty years.

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The company was Kinder Morgan, out of Houston, which moves energy for a living. The offer was two hundred and a half million dollars, $200.5 million, of investment in exchange for half a century of control.

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The longshoremen of Local 1694 did the arithmetic that anybody on that dock could do. Kinder Morgan is an energy company.

 

Wilmington is a fruit port. Bananas and petroleum coke do not share a berth. They fought it in public, loudly, and the General Assembly passed a law to slow the whole thing down.

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In March 2013, Kinder Morgan quit, and it put its reasons in a letter. The letter was addressed to Alan Levin, by name, as Chairman of the Diamond State Port Corporation. Kinder Morgan’s Schlosser wrote that the company has choices in terms of where it will invest substantial resources, and that the current union leadership at your facility does not make Delaware a good choice at this time.

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Your facility. The letter that killed the first privatization of the Port of Wilmington went to one man, and that man held both the state office that wanted the deal and the chairmanship of the public corporation sitting across the table from it.

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State Representative John Kowalko of Newark said afterward that Delaware ought to just invest in the thing itself, something in the neighborhood of a hundred fifty million dollars over fifteen years, and keep it public. Nobody did that.

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The first time, they tried it where people could see, and the people beat them. Everything after happened somewhere else.

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What He Built Instead

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Amazon opened the first fulfillment center in its entire network in New Castle, Delaware, in 1997. Its second Delaware building is the one that matters here.

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On June 29, 2012, with Alan Levin running Delaware’s economic development office, Amazon announced a million square feet in Middletown, ninety million dollars, more than eight hundred fifty full-time jobs. Four weeks later, Levin himself announced that Delaware’s Council on Development Finance had recommended a Strategic Fund grant for another company. That is how the office worked, and it is worth noticing. When state money went out the door, the Director’s name went out with it.

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Levin was not a clerk approving Amazon’s paperwork. He built the pattern. Under him, the agency turned Delaware’s economic strategy toward logistics and big-box distribution, aiming squarely at companies like Amazon to replace the manufacturing that had left.

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So consider what Tom Gordon was actually up against in June 2014 when he said Delaware had too many big-box stores and needed real jobs that pay real money. The office that told him there were no credible offers on Boxwood Road was, in those same years, rebuilding the state’s entire economy around big-box distribution.

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Everybody Goes to the Same Law Firm

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On April 30, 2015, Governor Markell’s office announced that Alan Levin was leaving at the end of the legislative session. His last day was June 30. The announcement listed the companies that had come to Delaware or grown here on his watch, and Amazon is the first name on the list. His deputy, Bernice Whaley, was confirmed to replace him.

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He went to two places, and the first one had been filling up with Delaware government for years.

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Drinker Biddle and Reath had an office in Wilmington at 222 Delaware Avenue. Levin arrived as Of Counsel and as the firm’s director of business development.

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He was in the company. Thomas McGonigle had been Governor Markell’s chief of staff since 2009, and before that managing partner of Wolf Block’s Wilmington office, and before that chief legal counsel and policy director to Governor Tom Carper, and before that a deputy attorney general. Markell announced on November 15, 2012, that McGonigle was leaving for Drinker Biddle. He went on to run the firm’s Wilmington office.

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Geoffrey Sawyer had been Markell’s deputy chief of staff, and in the firm’s own description of him, he directed economic development efforts for the state and oversaw Delaware’s collective bargaining.

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Joseph Schoell had been chief legal counsel to Governor Ruth Ann Minner. Mary Kate McLaughlin had been chief of staff at the Delaware Department of Education. Gregory Patterson had been Markell’s legislative liaison and then deputy chief of staff, and at Drinker Biddle he became senior government relations director in Delaware with clients including St. Francis Hospital and AstraZeneca. Douglas Gramiak, who had been chief of staff to Governor John Carney, came last.

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A chief of staff to one governor. A deputy chief of staff to the same one. A chief legal counsel to another. A chief of staff to a third. The state’s economic development director, who was also the port chairman. One firm, one city, one decade.

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Drinker Biddle merged in 2020 and became Faegre Drinker. In June 2021, McGonigle took eight people two floors down in the same building to Barnes and Thornburg, Suite 1200, and became the partner in charge there.

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Today, four registered lobbyists for the Diamond State Port Corporation file from that suite. Thomas McGonigle, since November 1, 2019. Douglas Gramiak, since January 20, 2020. Shawn Tucker, since March 17, 2023, who used to run New Castle County’s Land Use department. James Smith Junior, since October 20, 2023. Delaware has paid Barnes and Thornburg thirteen million seven hundred nineteen thousand four hundred eighty dollars and nineteen cents.

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And What Geoffrey Sawyer Does There Now

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Unclaimed property is money that stops moving. An account nobody touches. A dividend check nobody cashes. Shares nobody claims. Because so many companies are incorporated here, Delaware collects an enormous amount of other people’s forgotten money, and it is the state’s third-largest source of revenue.

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Geoffrey Sawyer, Governor Markell’s old deputy chief of staff, is a partner at Faegre Drinker in Wilmington, and unclaimed property is his practice. His firm biography describes him as known for advising states and large corporations on complying with unclaimed property laws. Then it says what he actually does. He leads the firm’s representation of the State of Delaware’s Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program, which has more than 1,200 enrolled companies.

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That is the same fund that sent nearly two hundred million dollars to the Diamond State Port Corporation in January 2025. It is the fund the 2026 bond bill opened by another sixty million. And it is one of the revenue lines forecast by the council Alan Levin now chairs.

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Delaware pays a private law firm to run the compliance side of its unclaimed property program. The partner who leads that work advises both the states collecting the money and the corporations that owe it. A former colleague from that firm now chairs the council that forecasts the money. Four more alumni of that firm are the paid lobbyists for the port the money built.

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This drew questions once. Drinker Biddle won Delaware unclaimed property work, and Markell’s people showed up at the firm not long after. McGonigle said publicly that he took no part in the bidding while he worked for the Governor, that he does not work on the state program, and that he has never billed a minute to it. Joseph Schoell, who helped win the contract, said the firm bid in good faith.

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The Other Place He Went

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The second door Alan Levin walked through in 2015 was SoDel Concepts, the Sussex County restaurant company his late friend Matt Haley had built. He became Senior Advisor, and he still is.

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Years later, when a magazine named Levin one of the most influential Delawareans, SoDel’s president Scott Kammerer put out a statement about him. Levin, he said, had played a pivotal role in the growth of Amazon in the state.

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That is not a critic’s line. That is his own employer’s press release.

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Ten Dollars

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Wanxiang America never did anything with the plant either. In October 2016 it hired CBRE to find somebody who would.

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On October 25, 2017, a company called Boxwood Industrial Park LLC bought the whole one hundred forty-two acres at 801 Boxwood Road. Boxwood Industrial Park LLC belongs to Harvey, Hanna and Associates, a development firm out of Newport run by E. Thomas Harvey III and Thomas J. Hanna. M&T Bank put up the financing. Harvey said the firm was excited to bring its vision to reality. Hanna said his parents had grown up in Newport and Richardson Park, and that his father, his uncle and his grandfather had all worked in that plant.

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Two purchase prices exist for that sale. Both were printed by Delaware Business Times. Covering a community meeting, the paper reported that the price recorded for more than three million square feet of manufacturing space was ten dollars. Writing later about how the deal came together, the same paper reported that Harvey Hanna paid about ten point four million dollars, according to New Castle County land records.

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The day the purchase was announced, October 10, 2017, the Associated Press reported that neither the sale price nor specific redevelopment plans had been disclosed. It has stayed that way.

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The County Executive of New Castle County that day was Matt Meyer, and he was delighted. It’s an exciting turn of events to get Boxwood into local hands, Meyer said. Harvey Hanna, he added, has a history of being committed to the county and the state. He said he would be open to offering county tax incentives to help redevelop the site, because it would raise the property value.

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A year earlier, before he took office, Matt Meyer had been asked what should happen to the plant. Private sector demand, he said then, should decide the fate of the facility.

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Three years after New Castle County tried to buy that plant and was told to stand down, a new County Executive welcomed its sale to a private developer at a price nobody would disclose, and offered county tax breaks on top.

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Ten dollars on a deed is what a buyer and a seller write when they do not want the real number in the paper. Delaware charges its realty transfer tax on what was actually paid, so the true figure exists on the instrument. The number the public gets is ten dollars.

 

Fisker paid eighteen million for that plant. Delaware put in twenty-two million and got nothing. New Castle County offered nine million and was told there were no credible offers. Three years later, the deed said ten dollars.

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Who Bought It

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E. Thomas Harvey III grew up in Wilmington, graduated from Conrad High School in 1970 and from the University of Delaware in 1975. Before he was a developer, he was in the trash business, and he was in it for twenty-five years. Harvey and Harvey Inc., Home Waste Inc., Harvey Mack Volvo Sales and Service. Confi-Shred. Together they cleared a hundred million dollars a year and offered the first recycling service anyone in Delaware had. In May 1997, he sold the whole thing to USA Waste of Delaware, which later became part of Waste Management. He sat on the Board of Governors of the Environmental Industries Association and the Chairman’s Council of the National Solid Waste Management Association and ran the Maryland and Delaware solid waste association.

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Then he became a developer. He is president of Dewey Beach Enterprises, which built Lighthouse Cove and opened the first Hyatt-branded hotel in Delaware there in September 2013. In 2015, he co-founded TKo Hospitality Management, which now runs twenty hotels, five banquet halls, and four restaurants. In 2017, he launched Big Box Buildings with his son John. He joined the board of Trash Tech in 2016 and invested in it. He lives in Centerville and Rehoboth Beach.

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He gives a great deal away and lets people know. Former board chair of the American Heart and Stroke Association of Delaware and still on its Northeast Region board. Twenty years on the Board of Trustees of Goldey-Beacom College, four of them as chair. He and his wife Robin Adair Harvey launched the American Heart Association Delaware Harvey Family Research Symposium in 2019.

He ran the Centerville School board and sat on Sanford School’s board. He sponsors two Wilmington youth teams in the Sonny Hill league in Philadelphia. He is a Delaware Diamonds benefactor at the University of Delaware, on the Lerner College advisory board, in the University of Delaware Alumni Wall of Fame and in the Conrad High School Hall of Fame.

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Thomas J. Hanna, whom everyone calls T.J., teamed up with E. Thomas Harvey III in 1997 and turned a small real estate outfit into one of the largest development companies in the state. Harvey’s own executive biography dates the founding of the firm to 1998, a year after the partnership, which is the difference between when two men shook hands and when the paperwork was filed. Hanna has put up more than six million square feet across the mid-Atlantic. His own industry credits him with turning the Boxwood plant into one of the largest Amazon facilities in the country. He started the Delaware KIDS Fund in 2008, and it was renamed Sam’s KIDS in 2023. He stepped back from daily operations in 2025.

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Now hold their lives up next to Alan Levin’s.

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Alan Levin and E. Thomas Harvey III both sit on the advisory board of the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business and Economics.​

Alan Levin chaired the board of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce in 2005. In 2019, that same Chamber handed E. Thomas Harvey III its Marvin S. Gilman Award.​

E. Thomas Harvey III sat on the board of the Delaware National Guard. Alan Levin holds the Delaware Distinguished Service Medal for his work with Guard and Reserve families.​

Both men keep a house in Rehoboth Beach.​

In 2015, E. Thomas Harvey III co-founded a hospitality company running hotels and restaurants in the Delaware beach towns. That same year, Alan Levin became senior advisor to a restaurant company in those same towns.

​Alan Levin and T.J. Hanna are close friends.

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And What Harvey Hanna Gave Matt Meyer

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Between December 18, 2021 and January 25, 2022, six people connected to Harvey, Hanna and Associates each gave Matt Meyer the maximum a person may legally give in Delaware. Thirty-eight days, seven thousand two hundred dollars.

 

E. Thomas Harvey, listed as Harvey, Hanna and Associates, December 18, 2021, one thousand two hundred dollars.

Robin Harvey, listed as Harvey Hanna, December 18, 2021, one thousand two hundred dollars. The same day as her husband.

​Thomas Harvey, listed as Harvey Hanna, December 30, 2021, one thousand two hundred dollars.

​Thomas Hanna, listed as Harvey Hanna, January 3, 2022, one thousand two hundred dollars.

​Katherine Kinnard, listed as Harvey Hanna, January 4, 2022, one thousand two hundred dollars. Michael Kinnard is the firm’s Vice President and General Counsel.

​Murray Dingwall, listed as Harvey Hanna, January 25, 2022, one thousand two hundred dollars.

 

Four years after Matt Meyer called it an exciting turn of events to get Boxwood into local hands, six people from the company that got it wrote him six maximum checks inside five weeks.

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John C. Fannin III, who used to be president of Harvey Hanna and is now executive adviser to its board, was made the first chair of the Delaware State Chamber Foundation. And the lawyer handling Harvey Hanna’s newest land purchases in Middletown is Shawn Tucker, the Barnes and Thornburg partner who lobbies for the Diamond State Port Corporation.

 

Six Months Later, Gulftainer Wanted It Too

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On an evening in April 2018, about five hundred people crowded into a meeting of the Diamond State Port Corporation board, which voted unanimously to lease the Port of Wilmington for fifty years to GT USA Wilmington LLC, a brand new Delaware subsidiary of Gulftainer, a terminal operator out of the United Arab Emirates.

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Peter Richards, Gulftainer’s chief executive, stood up and talked about freight and warehouse space at Boxwood Road. Gulftainer, it was reported plainly at the time, was in talks with Harvey Hanna, which owns the old GM Boxwood Road site, about developing an inland port. Jeff Bullock, then Delaware’s Secretary of State and chairman of that port board, used the same words and said the state would make sure roads like Interstate 495 could carry it.

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Richards named two more sites near the port where the operation could expand. Pigeon Point and River’s Edge.

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Six months after the deed recorded ten dollars, Harvey Hanna was named in public as Gulftainer’s partner for an inland port serving a fifty-year lease of the Port of Wilmington. And one of the two adjacent sites named beside it, Pigeon Point, is where AutoPort has processed cars since 1981, and where the Diamond State Port Corporation has held a free option to buy since 1995 and has renewed it six times without ever using it.

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Gulftainer signed that September and promised up to six hundred million dollars, four hundred million of it for a container terminal at Edgemoor, the old DuPont site the port corporation had bought in 2016. Gulftainer never built it. In 2023, the port quietly passed to a different company, Enstructure, without the General Assembly approval Delaware law requires.

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Harvey Hanna also owns the Delaware River Industrial Park, forty-five acres on Lambson Lane in New Castle, half a mile from the Port of Wilmington where Interstates 95, 295 and 495 come together. In 2024, the firm finished a hundred thirty thousand square foot building there and leased all of it to PODS.

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Tom Gordon wanted a distribution hub at Boxwood Road tied to an expanded Port of Wilmington. Alan Levin told the county in writing to wait. The county waited. Gordon’s idea got built. New Castle County does not own it.

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What Stands There Now

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Harvey Hanna knocked the General Motors building down in 2018. In November 2019, it sold eighty-eight acres to Dermody Properties of Nevada, which built to suit. Dermody put in at least two hundred million dollars. Amazon added fifty million in robotics. Delaware handed Amazon four and a half million dollars in cash to come.

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Three point eight million square feet at 1025 Boxwood Road. Roughly three thousand people work inside. There is an Amazon sortation center at 801 Boxwood Road, and delivery stations at 851 Boxwood Road and 2421 Bear Corbitt Road in Bear.

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Joseph N. DiStefano has been writing about business in this region since 1988, when he joined The Philadelphia Inquirer out of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics and United States history. He has covered Wall Street for Bloomberg, worked for the Delaware News Journal, written a book about how the Roberts family built Comcast, and won a Gerald Loeb Award for his reporting on pensions. He has written the Inquirer’s PhillyDeals column since 2007. He describes his own beat as businesses, bosses, workers, fraud and the regional economy, and he once told an interviewer that news is information somebody else wants to suppress.

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In February 2020, he went through Amazon’s subsidy application for the Boxwood Road warehouse and wrote down what the jobs were actually worth.

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Amazon was promising fifteen dollars an hour to most of the thousand workers named in its application for four and a half million dollars in upfront state aid. The Amazon bosses on site, DiStefano wrote, would be paid less than General Motors workers used to be paid, counting inflation. The building was five and a half stories and cost two hundred fifty million dollars. Delaware’s development finance council approved the money unanimously the week before he wrote.

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The county’s unemployment rate at the time was under three percent. Does Meyer really need a thousand more fifteen-dollar-an-hour jobs, DiStefano asked, and will many of the workers come from out of state, as they do at Amazon’s existing warehouses.

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Delaware paid four and a half million dollars for a thousand jobs at fifteen dollars an hour, on ground where five thousand people once made cars for a living.

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THREE HEADCOUNTS, ALL CORRECT AT THEIR OWN DATE. One thousand is what Amazon put in its 2020 subsidy application and the number Delaware approved $4.5 million against. Fifteen hundred is the figure in E. Thomas Harvey III’s own executive biography of March 31, 2025. Roughly three thousand is current reporting. Use the application figure when discussing the subsidy, Harvey’s figure when quoting Harvey, and the current figure when describing the building today.

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Harvey Hanna kept buying along the same road. In June 2026, an entity it owns, Route 40 LLC, received $1.14 million in state transportation grant money for 10.5 acres at 600 Pulaski Highway in Bear to build two warehouses. In July 2026, the firm paid twenty-five point three million dollars for a hundred and three acres at Jamison Corner in Middletown, bought from EQT Real Estate and approved for one point three million square feet, its first big purchase south of the canal.

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Tom Gordon said Delaware had too many big-box stores and needed real jobs that pay real money. What stands on that ground now is a big box. It is the largest one in the state.

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And in October 2019, Matt Meyer, then County Executive of New Castle County, appointed Alan Levin to run a twelve-person task force on the future of the Wilmington and New Castle County Airport. The task force recommended against renewing the county’s thirty-year lease with the Delaware River and Bay Authority. The Delaware River and Bay Authority has confirmed that Amazon wanted that airport as an air hub.

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The airport sits between Boxwood Road and Middletown, in the middle of everything above.

 

The Second Chance

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Matt Meyer became Governor of Delaware in January 2025, and within a year the same people were sitting in every room that decides.

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Alan Levin was appointed to the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council and made its chairman in the same act, having never served a day on it. The council is thirty-odd appointed members from business, banking, accounting, labor, academia and the legislature, and what it votes on is not advice. The Delaware Constitution forbids the state from appropriating more than ninety-eight percent of the council’s revenue estimate, so the council sets the ceiling on the entire state budget. A rule in place since 1991 caps new borrowing at five percent of that same estimate, so the council also sets the outer wall of the Bond Bill. Unclaimed property is one of the lines it votes on. Nobody elects any of them, and under Executive Order 62, signed by Governor John Carney on August 27, 2024, they serve at the Governor’s pleasure and the Governor picks the chair.

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To make room for Levin, Governor Meyer removed Michael Houghton, a Wilmington attorney who had chaired that council for eight years and who had chaired Delaware’s unclaimed property task force in 2014.

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What The Money Actually Was

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Truthline audited ninety-two campaign finance reports filed with the Office of the State Election Commissioner across five committees tied to Matt Meyer: Meyer for New Castle County, Meyer for Delaware, Change Can’t Wait PAC, Citizens for a New Delaware Way, and its Third-Party Advertiser. Nine thousand sixty-three individual contributions, seven million nine hundred ninety-eight thousand four hundred thirty-five dollars.

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Alan Levin gave twenty-nine thousand one hundred dollars of it across eight contributions going back to April 2016. Ellen Levin gave four thousand across five. Richard Levin, most likely his son, gave three thousand fifty across seven. Thirty-seven thousand six hundred dollars from the family, across twenty-six checks, over nine years. Fifteen thousand of Alan Levin’s went to Change Can’t Wait PAC on June 10, 2024, three months before the primary, into the political action committee he himself chaired.

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He was not the largest giver. He was not close.

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The largest single source of money behind Matt Meyer’s campaign for Governor was Phillip Shawe, co-chief executive of TransPerfect Translations International of New York, whose company was at the center of one of the longest and most bitter corporate fights in the history of Delaware’s Court of Chancery. Shawe and TransPerfect put one million three hundred thousand dollars across five contributions between June 13, 2024 and November 18, 2025 into Citizens for a New Delaware Way, a political action committee and third-party advertiser pair that is the second-largest pro-Meyer vehicle in the filings.

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Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, gave two hundred fifty thousand dollars to Change Can’t Wait PAC on September 4, 2024, six days before the Democratic primary.

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The Hynansky family, which sells automobiles in Delaware, gave eighty-six thousand nine hundred dollars across thirteen contributions, and Louis Capano gave forty-five thousand across two. One Hynansky contribution of twenty-five thousand dollars, filed June 8, 2023, appears in the record under the name John Hyanski, missing the second n. Whether that was a transcription error or a filing choice cannot be determined from the document. What can be determined is that a name search that did not check for misspellings would never have found it.

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And Charuni Patibanda gave one thousand fifty dollars across five contributions between June and December 2023, and four hundred more in 2019, before Governor Meyer made her Secretary of State and chair of the board of the Diamond State Port Corporation.

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The road, and who bought along it

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Drive north on Interstate 495 and get off at Exit 4. Edgemoor Road runs into Lighthouse Road, and Lighthouse Road runs into Hay Road, and Hay Road is the access road for the Edgemoor terminal site. That interchange is the spine of the whole corridor, and everything built along it, warehouse, logistics, or commercial, gets the benefit of a six hundred thirty-five million dollar public infrastructure project whether or not it has anything to do with ships.

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Drawbridge Claymont gave thirty thousand dollars to Change Can’t Wait PAC. Drawbridge Claymont and the D2 Organization then received one million dollars from the Delaware Site Readiness Fund for fifty-eight acres at 6300 Philadelphia Pike in Claymont, for demolition and engineering work. Claymont sits directly along that corridor, on Interstate 495 and Governor Printz Boulevard, north of Edgemoor.

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Thirty thousand dollars into the Governor’s political action committee. One million dollars out of a state fund, for fifty-eight acres on the same road as the port.

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That is one parcel and one contributor. The question the corridor raises is larger, and it is answerable from records anyone can pull: who bought industrial land between the Pennsylvania line and the Port of Wilmington in the years before the Edgemoor expansion was announced, and how many of those buyers appear in the campaign finance filings. Every deed in that stretch is recorded with the New Castle County Recorder of Deeds, indexed by parcel, and every contribution is in the Election Commissioner’s archive. The overlap is a matter of arithmetic.

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Alan Levin’s twenty-nine thousand one hundred dollars is not what makes him matter. He is the one the Governor put in the chair. The money that bought the campaign came from a New York translation company that had spent years at war with Delaware’s own Court of Chancery.

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Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez was sworn in as Secretary of State on January 28, 2025. That office runs the Division of Corporations, which registers the roughly two million companies incorporated here, and also professional regulation, small business, the bank commissioner, the Public Service Commission, the public advocate, the Public Integrity Commission, the state archives, libraries, the arts, human and civil rights, alcoholic beverage control, the Veterans Home, and the unclaimed property Voluntary Disclosure Agreement program that Geoffrey Sawyer’s firm represents. She sits on the revenue council. She chairs the board of the Diamond State Port Corporation. Before all that, she ran New Castle County’s Land Use department under County Executive Matt Meyer.

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Gregg Patterson became Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. He is the Gregory Patterson who was Governor Markell’s deputy chief of staff and then Drinker Biddle’s senior government relations director in Delaware.

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And Marcus Henry, who had been Matt Meyer’s economic development and policy director at the county, succeeded him as County Executive and now signs off on land use across the whole corridor.

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The council that certifies the revenue. The department that holds the marina lease. The board that owns the port. The office that registers the corporations. The county that approves the land use. Inside one year, all of them.

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What That Produced

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Eleven days before Matt Meyer took the oath, on January 10, 2025, the Diamond State Port Corporation paid two million eight hundred fifty thousand dollars for 1.91 acres at 701 Christiana Avenue and handed the land to Enstructure, the private operator. That address is the business address of Murphy Marine Services, a stevedoring company that has worked the Port of Wilmington for decades and has been a lobbying client of the Wilmington attorney Darrell J. Baker since October 20, 2008. In that same month, nearly two hundred million dollars of unclaimed property moved to the port corporation.

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Over the fiscal year that followed, the council Alan Levin chairs raised Delaware’s constitutional spending ceiling by seven hundred forty-seven and a half million dollars across four meetings. It never once said the word port in four sets of published minutes.

Those meetings got shorter as the numbers got bigger. October 20, 2025 ran a hundred seventy-nine minutes. December 15, a hundred seven. March 16, eighty-seven. May 18, seventy-five. Fifty-eight percent shorter across one fiscal year, under one chairman.

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Public comment is the last item on every agenda. In October, December and March, the minutes record that nobody signed up. On May 18, 2026, one man did, and it was Rick Geisenberger, who used to be Delaware’s Secretary of Finance and before that ran the Division of Corporations. He told the council that anyone watching closely could have seen the corporate revenue problem by December and certainly by March from public data, called the flat franchise tax growth totally unprecedented, and asked whether it was prudent for Delaware to lean harder on unclaimed property.

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Six weeks later Delaware leaned sixty million dollars harder.

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In March 2026, Michael Houghton had asked the Department of State for corporate revenue figures it had not produced. Two days later he got an email from Governor Meyer’s office ending his service. In May he asked Brian Devine, the interim executive director of the Diamond State Port Corporation, where an extra hundred ten million dollars for Edgemoor was coming from. Within days he was off that task force too. The administration did not say the money came from unclaimed property until late June.

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In the small hours of July 1, 2026, the General Assembly passed House Bill 500. One hundred ten million dollars to the port. Thirty million to buy a marina. The cap on unclaimed property raised by sixty million. Governor Meyer signed it on July 6 and struck exactly one line out of more than one point two billion dollars, and the line he struck was thirty-five million dollars to expand Legislative Hall, the building where the General Assembly works.​

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Then And Now

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In 2013, the privatization of the Port of Wilmington died in public, killed by a union that could see it and a legislature that could vote on it. Kinder Morgan wrote a letter naming the union and walked.

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In 2023, the port changed hands with no concurrent resolution, no vote of the General Assembly, and no public hearing, because language slipped into a bond bill had traded sixty-two elected legislators for five signatures.

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In 2014, New Castle County tried to buy the largest industrial site in the state for nine million dollars, and Alan Levin told a newspaper there were no credible offers while telling the county in writing to stand down. In 2017, that site changed hands on a deed that said ten dollars, and six months later the buyer was named in public as Gulftainer’s partner for an inland port.

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In 2015, the men who had run three Delaware administrations went to work at one law firm. By 2021, four of them lobbied for the state corporation that owns the port. By 2025, one of them chaired the council that decides what Delaware can spend on it, one ran the department that holds the marina lease, and one ran that firm’s work on Delaware’s unclaimed property program.

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The first time they tried this, it all happened where people could watch. The second time, the vote became five signatures, the money came from a fund whose balance the state will not disclose, the one man who asked about it got an email, and the bill passed before sunrise.

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And This Month, In Dover

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The newest one did not start with a company. It started with three executive orders, signed in order, each making the next possible.

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Executive Order 16 is the map. It concerns the Delaware Strategies for State Policies and Spending, the documents and maps that decide where the state puts its own money. After the Cabinet Committee on State Planning Issues approved the 2025 update on January 12, 2026, the order tells the Office of State Planning Coordination to run a 2026 Smart Growth Visioning process, to change those maps ahead of the normal five-year cycle, and to inventory every incentive the state can use to move development. It opens the map early and counts the levers.

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Executive Order 18 is the speed. Signed February 26, 2026, Governor Meyer’s first order of the year, it created the Delaware Permitting Accelerator. One contact per agency. Agencies reviewing at the same time instead of one after another. A four-month target. A hundred twenty business days for housing. Energy is a priority category. Delaware, Meyer said, needed to stop being leaders of no and slow and become leaders of yes and now. Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola and Speaker Melissa Minor-Brown both stood behind it. Applications opened May 4, 2026, under the name JobsFirst.

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Executive Order 23 is the control. Signed July 26, 2026, it lets Governor Meyer change the Permitting Accelerator in writing whenever he likes, without another order.

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Nine days later, on August 4, 2026, a Wilmington startup called Aternium, founded by Andrew Cottone, announced that Dover would be home to its first commercial clean hydrogen and heavy water plant. Two hundred twenty-six million dollars, about twenty acres at 201 and 301 Garrison Oak Drive, inside a four hundred-acre industrial park the City of Dover bought in 1999 with state money. Governor Meyer said the investment puts Delaware at the forefront of the next generation of energy and advanced manufacturing.

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Two and a half weeks before that announcement, in mid-July, the Dover City Council had unanimously rewritten its zoning code to allow clean hydrogen plants in its industrial districts. Andrew Cottone spoke in favor of the ordinance before the council voted. A representative of the Becker Morgan Group also spoke for it, and described his own coming role as helping that company with process, site planning, planning commission, and surveying.

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Aternium does not own the land. It expects to close in the last quarter of 2026. Engineering is due in February 2027, the investment decision in March, groundbreaking later that year, operations in 2028. Dover rewrote its zoning for a plant nobody has bought, engineered, financed, or permitted.

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Linda Parkowski of the Kent Economic Partnership called it a major win for Central Delaware.

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Dover changed the zoning first, and the company announced second. The permitting accelerator was built first, and the project came second. And it went to Kent County, where a two hundred twenty-six million dollar hydrogen plant draws a fraction of the questions the same plant would draw sixty miles north.​

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