To understand how Donald Trump would come to use the power of the presidency to promote a small discount gas station operation — one with murky finances, mysterious ownership and allegedly dubious business practices — you need to start with a former South Jersey mayor who also happens to be a Super Bowl-winning NFL kicking coach.

Earlier this year Coach Randy Brown approached the White House with an ambitious idea — trying to restart an idled oil refinery in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to reverse years of declines in U.S. fuel production. The Iran war was only a few months old, and Americans were already seeing price hikes at the pump. But Brown wasn’t necessarily a natural fit for the complicated refinery project — he’d served three terms as mayor of Evesham, New Jersey, nearly a decade earlier, and had a title insurance company in addition to his NFL duties.

One industry official who discussed the idea with Brown separately left their meeting deeply skeptical about its seriousness. This official, granted anonymity to describe private business discussions, recalled thinking that there may have been “someone shady or political” behind Brown and his associates. Brown brought with him a youngish former director at the commodities firm Mercuria named Yoni Gontownik. (Gontownik did not respond to questions for this article.)

Paperwork circulated at the time and reviewed by POLITICO Magazine also named another participant in the project — Universal Property Services, a company associated with Shamikh Kazmi, a New Jersey fuel operator with a checkered business history.

Brown and his collaborators never did restart the St. Croix refinery. But they did note the president’s repeated public calls, throughout June, for retailers to lower their gas prices. They approached the administration again, according to a White House official, this time with a much more modest plan. On June 23, they filed paperwork in Delaware to form something called Freedom Fuels Network, LLC — which would turn out to be a few dozen discount gas stations in Philadelphia and South Jersey, including one in Brown’s own town.

Just over a week later, their little concern hard launched with an announcement from none other than the president of the United States.

On the scale of second-term Trumpian antics, the promotion of several dozen gas stations in the Eagles-and-Wawa belt of Pennsylvania and South Jersey — plus two new ones that opened in Detroit this fall — doesn’t look like much relative to the ballroom, the crypto ventures or the $400 million plane gifted by Qatar. But it is a highly visible manifestation of his flailing efforts to address a political liability unleashed by his own decisions, relying on unvetted private businesses to lower gas prices in the absence of better ideas to open the Strait of Hormuz.

It is also a high-octane metaphor for the president’s approach to governing, with all its corner-cutting and haste and disdain for regulation, its triumph of marketing over substance and consistent fights with the press. As in many such stories, the tale of Freedom Fuel features private business interests finding bizarre ways to pander to the White House. Despite the operators’ and the administration’s best efforts, and the seemingly innocent promise of cheaper gas, the tale of Freedom Fuel also shows how the administration’s free-wheeling approach to problems can create an even bigger mess.

At the time, it was mysterious why and how Trump started posting, on July 1, about “a VERY smart retailer” lowering gas prices at 25 “FREEDOM FUEL” gas stations in time for America’s 250th anniversary, “because they love the U.S.A.”The White House official now says the owners brought the idea to the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, who flagged it to the president, who put it on Truth Social.

More official promotion followed: On July 3, Jarrod Agen, the council’s executive director, visited one of the stations, posing alongside White House deputy press secretary Taylor Rogers flashing double thumbs-ups, her post attributing “relief at the pump” to “President Trump’s strong leadership.”On July 7, the White House’s YouTube channel put up an ad for the gas stations, featuring patrons thanking Trump by name and a voiceover by Agen crediting “President Donald J. Trump” with “leading the charge to lower gas prices, right here at Freedom Fuel Network’s gas stations.”

The price per gallon: $3.47, in honor of the 47th president — 50 cents lower, per Agen, than the average price per gallon in Pennsylvania.

Yet the White House also insisted to reporters that the stations were private businesses with no formal government backing or subsidies — minus, presumably, the value of free national advertising and earned media — that could explain their steep discounts. “Freedom Fuel is a patriotic company doing a good thing for drivers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by lowering their gas prices,” Rogers told POLITICO in a statement in early July. “They are doing their part to answer the President’s call to lower prices at the pump.”She declined to say who was behind the company.

It was only when the investigative news site The Newsground, and then POLITICO, gothold of the formation documents that the involvement of Brown and Gontownik became public. Still, despite their high-profile launch and splashy prices, Freedom Fuel’s backers and operators stayed scrupulously mum when asked how the math could possibly work, as other industry players noted they must be losing money. The first rule of Freedom Fuel, apparently, was .

Meanwhile, the feel-good story of private citizens cutting into their own profit margins for the sake of their communities started to look a lot more complicated. POLITICO also discovered that Kazmi, the fuel retailer whose business had appeared on paperwork related to the refinery talks, was the authorized operator of a number of Freedom Fuel stations. And Kazmi’s stations that became part of the network had racked up fines in New Jersey for safety and environmental violations; another had failed an inspection in Philadelphia; yet another Pennsylvania station was at the center of a trademark dispute between BP and a Kazmi family company in 2021.

Then, late in August, came another break in the mystery: The fuel supplier Mansfield Oil Co. sued a company headed by Shamikh’s brother, Syed Kazmi, alleging it had stolen almost $4 million worth of fuel and sold it on the cheap to stations in the Freedom Fuel network. Freedom Fuel itself wasn’t named as a party in the lawsuit or accused of wrongdoing, though Mansfield later added Shamikh Kazmi to its complaint; the White House official said in a statement that the administration “has had zero contact or dealings” with Syed Kazmi or his company, KRSM Inc. KRSM disputed the allegations via a statement from its lawyer, Mauro Tucci, calling the matter an “accounting dispute” over mispriced invoices.

Syed Kazmi did not respond to a detailed list of questions from POLITICO Magazine sent through Tucci. In response to POLITICO’s previous reporting on Freedom Fuel, Urs Broderick Furrer, a lawyer for Mansfield, said in a statement that “Syed Kazmi is a principal owner, and President, of KRSM, Inc,” and that “KRSM has failed to pay for fuel that they lifted off of Mansfield’s account. That is not an accounting dispute. The fuel was delivered to at least 10 of the Freedom Fuel Network locations, as listed on the Freedom Fuel Network’s website.”

This is the fullest account yet of how Freedom Fuel came about. None of the proprietors provided comment despite repeated requests, nor did they respond to detailed questions. Several weeks into the reporting for this story, however, we received a statement on behalf of the Freedom Fuel Network from Elnatan Rudolph — who’s been described in these pages as a “one-time apprentice of Roger Stone” — saying that the Freedom Fuel Network “has never contracted with Mansfield, and has never bought fuel from or sold fuel to it.”

Rogers, the White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement: “The President wants retailers to lower their prices at the gas pump, and he supports retailers who have taken the initiative to do just that.”

Ask around Evesham about ex-mayor Randy Brown and one detail comes up repeatedly: the Super Bowl ring. Brown is in his 19th season as a kicking coach for the Baltimore Ravens — which, during his three-term mayoralty from 2008 through 2018, sometimes made for awkward scheduling. “They had a little problem this year with snow removal up there I guess,” said John Harbaugh, then the Ravens’ head coach, in a 2010 NFL documentary about Brown. “Randy was trying to organize all that, so he didn’t get down there for a day or two when we needed him.”

But his non-politics gig also wound up getting him his signature piece of jewelry when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2013.

The mayor wore the ring everywhere, according to three residents. Some of his constituents took to fashioning their own rings out of foil, in one case to dress up as Brown for Halloween, and in another to troll the mayor at city council meetings. One GOP operative who met with him occasionally back then recalled that, upon sliding into a diner booth, Brown would move the ring to his outside hand so people could see it. “Once the Ravens won the Super Bowl, his ego was out of control,” said the operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly, though he also called Brown an effective mayor.

“He used to give signed photos of to kids.”Brown even joked about his self-confidence to the The ahead of the fateful Super Bowl. “My friends say if we win, they’ll need a crane to get my head inside town hall,” he told the paper.

He liked winning and found creative ways to do it. The son of a GOP council member, Brown was a lifelong Republican, and had run the 2003 reelection campaign of the town’s longtime Republican mayor, Gus Tamburro, according to the . But when, in 2007, he mounted his own run for mayor against his former boss, the county Republican party declined to back him against the incumbent.

So he became a Democrat, then switched back before his first term was up. “I don’t like someone who runs as a Democrat, wins, and then flips,” said one longtime resident, granted anonymity to preserve relationships in town. “That’s annoying. Don’t do that.”On the other hand, at the time, Evesham’s elections were technically nonpartisan, and party labels didn’t mean much at that level. John McKenna, who ran with Brown as a Democrat and remains one, said Brown and his brother grew up in and cared about the community — and their mother was McKenna’s kindergarten teacher.

“No matter what he does, someone’s not gonna like it,” McKenna said. But “everything we tried to do” — from downtown redevelopment to new athletic facilities — “was in the best interests of the families and the taxpayers and the children.”Brown was also reelected twice by comfortable margins, the second time with over 60% of the vote. Plus, he coached three of the NFL’s “most accurate field goal kickers of all time,” ESPN reported in 2019.

Brown flirted with runs for Congress — for which he was a credible candidate, as the successful mayor of the biggest town in his district — and for governor, which was more of a stretch. “Look,” said one senior Republican in New Jersey, “Randy Brown has been trying to be something more than he is for a long time.”But until this summer, his public-facing career remained that of a three-term former mayor with a Super Bowl ring, which is not too shabby; he had declined to stand for a fourth term in 2018, as the municipal and county terrain shifted toward Democrats.

“By the time 2025 rolls around he was a relic, unthought of in statewide politics,” said the GOP operative. “Until this story brings him back.”

Well after Brown’s name had faded from statewide memory, a gas station in Evesham needed a new operator. The retail chain that ran more than a dozen stations in New Jersey had gone under, and the property owner — New York-based asset manager Blue Owl — settled on Shamikh Kazmi to take them over in early 2024,g triple-net leases that essentially handed Kazmi the keys and let him take over.

The Evesham station is now a Freedom Fuel branch. (Blue Owl previously told POLITICO that it’s “not involved in the tenant’s operations or business decisions.”) And though it’s unclear exactly how the ex-mayor and the businessman got connected — neither of them will say — it was the revelation of Kazmi’s name, not Brown’s, that imbued Freedom Fuel with the whiff of scandal.

Along with his brother, Syed, Shamikh Kazmi had been in the fuel business in and around Pennsylvania, New Jersey and elsewhere for years, as had his father. A website for one of their companies describes it as a “top tier” petroleum distributor, retail operator and real estate developer, with more than 75 years of industry experience and more than 500 locations.

But Eric Blomgren, executive director of the New Jersey Energy Marketers Group, which represents fuel retailers and distributors in the state, said that in his circles, “nobody had heard the name [Kazmi] until the Freedom Fuel stuff started.”The Kazmis’ website “makes it sound like they’ve got hundreds of stations across the Northeast,” he said. “How do you not have your picture online anywhere with 500 locations?”The website also claims “partnerships” with industry giants like BP and Shell, but spokespeople for those companies denied having any direct commercial relationship. Neither Kazmi returned requests for comment.

To the extent the Kazmis did have a public reputation in the world of East Coast fuel, much of it came out of a series of lawsuits in which the Kazmis sued or were sued, and sometimes countersued. There was the 2020 fight with fuel distributor Lehigh Gas involving more than $700,000 in unpaid rent at Syed Kazmi’s 17 Florida gas station franchises, in which a judge ruled that Lehigh was justified terminating the franchises.

There was BP’s 2021 trademark lawsuit against Diwan Petrol, where Syed Kazmi served as president, in which BP won a default judgment and permission to remove its signs from Kazmi’s property — with the help of U.S. Marshals if necessary. There was the accusation, that same year, that Shamikh Kazmi’s company took more than 230,000 gallons of fuel from a distributor without fully paying for it; Shamikh Kazmi denied wrongdoing, but the distributor won a default judgment on several claims.

There was the 2022 case in which 7-Eleven sued Syed Kazmi and his company, alleging serious franchise violations and hundreds of thousands in unpaid cigarette purchases; Syed Kazmi denied wrongdoing and countersued, but 7-Eleven ultimately won a roughly $383,000 judgment.

The Kazmi brothers have also faced issues with state regulators. In May, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection levied a $429,900 penalty against 17 stations managed by Shamikh Kazmi and owned by Blue Owl, with around half that fine stemming from violations at stations that are now part of the Freedom Fuel network. The fine had not been paid as of Oct. 14, though a hearing has been requested, according to DEP spokesperson Larry Hajna.

And Freedom Fuel would also figure in the largest-scale Kazmi-related litigation to date. Early in August, a wholesaler called Mansfield Oil Company of Gainesville filed suit against Syed Kazmi’s company KRSM. A Mansfield employee testified that KRSM had been drawing 30,000 gallons a month from their terminals for years without issue, but got 1.1 million gallons over a period of weeks shortly before Freedom Fuel launched, far exceeding its credit limit of $150,000, and then didn’t pay the bill of close to $4 million.

Neither party disputes the nonpayment, though Syed Kazmi has said he was overcharged and will pay when the discrepancy is resolved. Mansfield admitted to an invoicing error, which it said was promptly fixed. Michael Mansfield Jr., Mansfield’s co-owner and operator, testified at a hearing in late August that others involved in litigation against Kazmi companies had experienced difficulty collecting — suggesting some skepticism as to Kazmi’s promises of future payment.

The complaint alleges that KRSM sold the fuel to stations in the Freedom Fuel Network — 14 of them, all in Pennsylvania, according to court documents — and was able to do so at a discount “because it never paid Plaintiff for such fuel.”In other words, the complaint contends: Freedom Fuel gas at those stations is cheap because it’s stolen.

At the August hearing, Syed Kazmi testified that he didn’t know what Freedom Fuel was, although a document filed by the Kazmis as part of a separate lawsuit last year links KRSM to an address that’s currently in the Freedom Fuel Network. (Asked during the proceedings if he did business with his brother, who is the authorized operator of several Freedom Fuel locations, Syed Kazmi replied: “What do you mean by business?” Asked for details about his own business and any ownership positions in Shamikh Kazmi’s, he repeatedly responded, “I don’t know the current status of what I own, and what I don’t own.”)

The litigation continues, and Tucci said that, other than disputing the allegations and attributing the matter to “fuel invoices mispriced by Mansfield oil,” KRSM would not be commenting further. In a later filing, one of Kazmi’s lawyers characterized the Freedom Fuel allegations as a clear attempt “to defame Defendants and recast the action with wholly irrelevant political undertones.”Meanwhile, in early September, Freedom Fuel broke free of the Northeast with a new station in Detroit, selling fuel for the promotional price of $3.47 a gallon.

The price had jumped to $4.13 a gallon as of this week, according to price tracking service GasBuddy. Shamikh Kazmi’s contact information is listed on the corporate paperwork for both Detroit stations along with the name “Muhammad Kazmi,” which the Mansfield lawsuit alleges is an alias for Shamikh, or possibly a family member.

On a mild Sunday in August, we steered a rental Kia through some of the grittier neighborhoods of Philadelphia, over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into South Jersey, and back again in search of answers. It became apparent fairly quickly that the people on duty at the stations themselves weren’t going to be fonts of information about who was running the overall show. We were cautioned at a station in Nicetown — featuring an ad for AJ’s Pest Control under its sign for $3.99 gas, and pumps still bearing Phillips 66 logos — that the guy manning the kiosk probably wouldn’t want to talk to a white person, given what was going on with Trump and immigration crackdowns and the likelihood we could be cops.

Anyway, this station had long been cheaper than the others in the neighborhood, who knew why? Still, the attendant offered guidance when the credit card screen at pump eight was busted (go to pump six), and recognized the name of Shamikh, whom he identified as the manager.

Among the half-dozen stations we visited, some were better kept than others, some had attached car washes, one had a food truck outside. All bore the hallmarks of a hasty brand change, with Freedom Fuel signage grommeted over preexisting branding, failing to conceal the yellow and red striping of a Shell station here or the blue-and-lighter-blue hues of a Sunoco station there.

At the Evesham station, a sign for former GOP gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciatarelli was stuck sideways to a window above a Marlboro ad, and the attendant scurried among cars in line with New Jersey’s prohibition on drivers pumping their own fuel. He said he had seen Brown maybe twice in the past month and Shamikh Kazmi maybe once but didn’t know why the gas was so cheap: “I’m at the bottom of the chain.”

Back in Philly, at a station on Roosevelt Blvd festooned with American flags, we chatted with a customer named Tommy from the neighborhood who did not provide his last name. We asked what he made of the whole Freedom Fuel phenomenon, and mentioned the lawsuit alleging that certain discounts were enabled by stolen fuel. He registered no surprise — he was aware of the Trump promotions, and declared this White House “the most crooked-ass shit I’ve seen in my gangster motherfucking life.”But it’s still cheap gas, we said, right? “Oh yeah,” he said. Though he pointed out that the BJ’s down the street was still cheaper.