Rich father-in-law has helped, complicated O’Rourke’s career
EL PASO, Texas — Beto O’Rourke was running for the El Paso City Council in 2005 when he asked to meet with the illustrious real estate investor William Sanders.
Sanders had earned a fortune and a reputation as a brilliant businessman in Chicago before returning to his remote hometown on the West Texas-Mexico border. He thought the aspiring politician was there to solicit a donation. But O’Rourke was seeking permission to marry Sanders’ daughter Amy, whom he’d met less than three months before.
“I sat down with him in his office and he was kind of an imposing figure and I was very nervous,” O’Rourke said in a phone interview. After he asked for Sanders’s blessing, it got worse: His future father-in-law spent “a lot of time talking about her previous boyfriend, whom he liked a lot.”
“It was a very awkward — very, very awkward — conversation.”
Thus began a complicated relationship that would color the personal and political life of O’Rourke, now seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Worth at least $500 million according to a conservative Forbes estimate, Sanders has helped make Beto and Amy O’Rourke millionaires. O’Rourke won his city council race and briefly supported an ambitious, though controversial and ultimately unsuccessful, plan to redevelop downtown El Paso that Sanders was leading.
Later, Sanders’ timely donation helped transform his son-in-law from longshot primary challenger to congressman, setting him up to nearly upset U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz last year and catapult him into the presidential race.
The two are both advocates for virtually open U.S. southern borders. While O’Rourke argues it’s a cultural and humanitarian imperative, though, Sanders approaches the issue more as an economic opportunity.
O’Rourke’s campaign says Sanders plays no role — either formal or otherwise — in their candidate’s 2020 bid. Still, O’Rourke, known as a down-to-earth champion of little-guy values, might never have made it on the national stage without the help of an intensely private tycoon who embodies the kind of figure top Democrats now rail against.
“I think Bill has always helped in the background,” said Mike Dipp Jr., an El Paso businessman who has known Sanders for years.
The same year O’Rourke won his city council seat, he married Amy on the sprawling Sanders family ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The former punk rocker said he and Sanders didn’t get along well at first but that he eventually became close to his hardcharging father-in-law, viewing him as a father figure after his own dad died in a 2001 bicycle accident.
By the time O’Rourke came into his life, Sanders had already spent decades at the top of America’s real estate industry, a visionary who spotted trends before others, developed strategies to capitalize on them and built top-notch management teams to execute his plans. He was focused then on industrial developments on both sides of the border, which he believed was the future of manufacturing.
Sanders founded Verde Realty in 2003 to focus on investments in the Southwest, where he believed cheap labor costs and a booming population would make the region thrive. He fostered business relationships in Mexico that envisioned the free flow of goods, people and capital in the most seamless way possible, where the border was little hindrance rather than walled-off.
Journalist Steve Bergsman, who wrote about Sanders in a 2006 book on real estate financing, described him as a workaholic whose vision of making El Paso an industrial powerhouse “really laid the groundwork for Beto’s rise, even before he had probably met or heard of him.”