"The Jaw-Droppingly Sketchy Past of America’s Newest Billionaire Read more: The Jaw-Droppingly Sketchy Past of America’s Newest Billionaire"

From Esquire:
The craziest story about the circus you'll ever hear has almost nothing to do with the circus at all. 

The circus is supposed to be a place of mystery and wonder, a marginally profitable enterprise that travels from town to town, always hovering on the edge of legality. It’s supposed to be close to the bottom rung of the entertainment ladder, maybe a notch behind repertory theater and a notch ahead of cockfights. It’s supposed to be a little dangerous, a little dirty, and a little exploitative -- the kind of place where you might see something politically incorrect, cut yourself on a poorly-assembled carnie ride or catch a nasty social disease in one of the trailers out back.

Circuses are scary. They’re creepy. They’re fun.

And they are now a billion dollar business.

According to Forbes, Feld Entertainment, the company that owns Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, brought in over $1 billion in gross revenue last year. In the process, it also made its CEO, Kenneth Feld, into America’s latest billionaire; according to Forbes, Feld’s holdings are worth roughly $1.8 billion.
On the surface, Feld doesn’t seem exciting enough to be running the Greatest Show on Earth. He didn’t come to the circus world in a classic manner. He wasn’t kidnapped by gypsies, on the run from the law, or tempted by a demonic ringmaster dangling the promise of eternal life. Rather, he entered big top life with a management degree from Boston University and a family legacy. His father, Irvin Feld, bought the circus in the '60s, then sold it to Mattel, then bought it back again in the eighties.

By then, though, the circus wasn’t quite the old, tattered road show of yesteryear. Under the Felds’ management, it branched out, adding in Disney on Ice, Doodlebops Live, Monster Jam, and a bunch of other traveling shows.

But while the Feld family has pushed Ringling Bros. all the way into hard-G territory, this is still the circus. It still retains a little whiff of something diabolical.

Take, for example, Kenneth Feld’s battles with his sister Karen. For years, the two were in and out of court, fighting over a shared inheritance and claims that he kicked her out of her home. The capper was a 2011 lawsuit, in which she demanded $110 million, alleging that he ordered security guards to eject her from a bereavement service for their aunt. Ken Feld countersued, claiming that she began shouting anti-Semitic slurs at the Shiva service (the Felds are Jewish). Both court cases were dismissed.

But Ken Feld’s battles with his sister pale in comparison to his fight with Jan Pottker, a freelancer who wrote about the Feld family in 1990. Pottker’s story, which was published in Washington DC-area business magazine Regardie’s, brought to light several Feld family secrets, including Irvin Feld’s homosexual affairs, his wife’s suicide, and the roiling animosity between Kenneth and Karen. On the trail of a fascinating story, Pottker prepared to write a book about the family. And that’s where Kenneth Feld’s larger-than-life circus bona fides came into play, as the seemingly mild-mannered executive launched a stunning three-ring operation whose size, scope, and outrageousness rivaled anything seen under the Big Top.

In the early 1990s, as Pottker was starting to plan a book on the Felds, one of the CIA’s top spies was in deep trouble. Clair George, Deputy Director of Operations under Ronald Reagan and a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal, was on trial for lying to a Congressional committee. With a pocketful of legal bills and limited job opportunities, he went to work for the Felds as a consultant.

One of his jobs was, allegedly, to procure a panda for use in a circus act.
After the Regardies story came out, Kenneth Feld gave him a new job: derailing Jan Pottker.

Over the next eight years, George used a variety of methods to keep Pottker from pursuing her investigation of the Felds. Among other things, he and his accomplices tapped her phones, bugged her house, and had her tailed. Eventually, they took it a step further. One of George’s operatives, journalist Robert Eringer, launched an operation to distract her from the Feld book. Posing as a “book packager,” he arranged for her to write an exposé of the Mars candymaking family.

That book, Crisis in Candyland: Melting the Shell of the Mars Family Empire, was published in 1995, but wasn’t on shelves for long. After the publisher refused to pay for photographs that appeared in its pages, it ended up getting pulled from bookstores. In fact, the publisher, National Press Books, didn’t pay for much at all. According to a later deposition from Eringer, the circus paid Pottker’s $25,000 advance, funneling the money through various bank accounts....MORE