Mike Mazzei Sends $7,500 a Month to a Company in Roger Stone's Condo

He wants foreign governments out of Oklahoma. Two weeks after his June check cleared, the company he pays registered as a paid agent of a Mexican state government.

By Ron Durbin | Guerrilla News | August 18, 2026

August 19, 2026 Update:

Mazzei has paid $82,500 to Drake Ventures, a company owned by Roger and Nydia Stone. At least six of those payments, totaling $45,000, were made while Florida’s Division of Corporations publicly listed Drake Ventures’ authority to transact business in the state as revoked for failure to file an annual report.

Drake has a repeated history of allowing its Florida authorization to lapse and was not reinstated until May 23, 2026, before Mazzei’s June payment. Florida law gives that reinstatement retroactive effect, but at the time the earlier payments were actually made, the public record showed Drake as revoked and no future reinstatement had yet occurred.

The same company was central to a federal tax lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Roger and Nydia Stone used Drake Ventures to shield income and assets from collection. The Stones later consented to a judgment exceeding $2 million, which the government reported as satisfied in full in April 2026.

Then, eleven days after Mazzei’s June campaign payment, Drake Ventures registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to represent a Mexican state-government agency, even as Mazzei was campaigning heavily against foreign-government influence in Oklahoma.

Mike Mazzei wants foreign governments out of Oklahoma. He says it in ads. He said it to News 9 in March, describing a mess of "communist Chinese and their cartel partners owning land" here, and promising executive orders on day one. His website lists it as one of three things he intends to fix. He would like you to picture him at the state line with his arms crossed.

On June 9, Mazzei's campaign mailed $7,500 to a Delaware shell company that operates out of a condominium in Fort Lauderdale. Roger Stone's wife manages it. Florida revoked its registration last September because nobody bothered to file an annual report. Its registered agent quit in 2015 and no one replaced her.

Roughly two weeks after that check, the same company registered itself under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as paid counsel to the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí.

Mazzei has now sent this company $82,500.

He does not dispute any of it. He has said on camera that Roger Stone advises his campaign. What he has not explained, and what nobody has made him explain, is why a man running to wall Oklahoma off from foreign influence pays his senior adviser through an entity that the State of Florida no longer recognizes and that took a foreign government as a client while collecting Oklahoma campaign money.

Eighty-eight cents of every dollar came from one guy

On August 17 at 7:42 p.m., eight days before the runoff, the Mazzei for Governor committee filed seventy-six pages with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission. Joel Sander signed it. Ethics number 11794.

Those pages destroy the premise of the campaign.

Mazzei has taken in $12,466,945.59. He loaned himself $11,005,000 of it. Every Oklahoman who has ever given him money, statewide, across a year and a half, contributed $1,436,090.95 combined. Political action committees gave him $25,000, which in a race this size, barely covers the coffee.

Mazzei loaned Mazzei roughly seven dollars and sixty-six cents for every dollar an actual Oklahoman handed him.

He burned through $12,315,210.25 of it already. He has $151,735.34 left, and he only has that because on August 10, the closing day of the reporting period, he wired his own campaign another $110,000. Strip that out and the report shows $41,735.34 in the bank two weeks before a statewide runoff.

His committee spent $1,419,387.83 over seventy days. That works out to $20,277 a day. At that pace the remaining money lasts a week. The runoff is in a week.

The loan schedule lists Mike and Noel Mazzei as the lenders, at 11901 South Granite in Tulsa. Zero percent interest. The campaign wrote the repayment terms itself: repay as campaign funds become available.

Remember that phrasing. It matters more than it looks.

A shell in a condo, and the state that stopped recognizing it

Page seventy of the report, wedged between $650 paid to an individual for valet parking and $700 in Starbucks gift cards bought at a Walgreens, sits this:

6/9/2026 | DRAKE VENTURES, LLC | 1045 NE 18TH AVENUE, #101, FT. LAUDERDALE, FL 33304 | SENIOR CAMPAIGN ADVISOR | $7,500.00 | Aggregate: $82,500.00

Pull the Florida Division of Corporations file on Drake Ventures and the company stops being mysterious immediately.

Nydia Bertran Stone has been married to Roger Stone for thirty-four years. The address on Mazzei's campaign filing matches the address on the corporate record exactly, unit number included.

Two facts fall out of that table, and no Oklahoma outlet has published either one.

Florida killed the registration eleven months ago. Mazzei paid the company anyway, in June, and a large share of the $82,500 went out after the revocation date.

Before anyone drafts a correction demand: a revoked Florida foreign-entity registration does not dissolve the underlying LLC, and cutting a check to a company with a lapsed state filing breaks no law. The failure here is diligence. Mazzei's committee moved $12.3 million and pays an accountant $5,300 to keep the books. A corporate search costs nothing and takes ninety seconds. Somebody either ran it and shrugged, or never ran it at all.

The second fact is simpler. Oklahoma Watch, The Hill, and The Lost Ogle all reported the figure $67,500, which was current through March. The August 17 filing says $82,500. Fifteen thousand dollars have moved that nobody counted.

The federal government has described this company at length

Roger Stone caught seven felony convictions in November 2019 for lying to Congress, tampering with a witness, and obstructing an official proceeding. A judge gave him forty months. President Trump commuted the sentence in July 2020 and pardoned him outright that December.

The tax case is a separate matter, and it is about this exact company.

In April 2021 the Justice Department hauled Roger and Nydia Stone into federal court in the Southern District of Florida over roughly $2 million in unpaid income taxes. The Stones denied it. Nothing in the complaint has been proven, and this article treats all of it as allegation.

The government's theory is what makes it worth reading. DOJ alleged the Stones ran Drake Ventures to collect money Roger Stone personally earned, to cover their personal expenses, to "shield their assets, and avoid reporting taxable income." Prosecutors told the court that the company had no website, no phone number, no members outside the Stone family, and an address identical to the Stones' own home. The complaint listed what the company's accounts paid for. Groceries. Dentist bills. Salons. Clothing. The government also alleged the couple bought the Fort Lauderdale condominium at that address using Drake Ventures money routed through a family trust, and called the transfer fraudulent.

Strip the legalese and the government told a federal judge that Drake Ventures is not a business. It is a checking account with a mailing address. Mike Mazzei, who wants to run the executive branch of the State of Oklahoma, has been feeding that checking account $7,500 a month.

January: scam. May: strongly support.

Mazzei did not always love the Inola aluminum smelter. He hated it loudly, on video, for four months.

January 29. He posts a Facebook video calling the project a "billion dollar scam," according to Oklahoma Politics Today, which reviewed the footage. The smelter is a $4 billion plant proposed for Rogers County, developed jointly by Emirates Global Aluminum, owned outright by the government of the United Arab Emirates, and Century Aluminum of Chicago. The Emiratis hold sixty percent.

March 30. At a debate he attacks the incentive package and demands to know why Oklahoma is shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars at a company owned by the UAE. He promises that under him, "we're going to collaborate with Oklahoma-based businesses." Oklahoma Watch reported it as he said it.

April 9. Still against it at the Freedom Caucus debate, per a timeline the group Oklahoma First assembled and the Oklahoma Gazette published.

May 29. He announces he strongly supports the smelter. Hours later Donald Trump endorses him on Truth Social. Attorney General Gentner Drummond sues in Rogers County to stop the project that same week.

June 9. Mazzei's campaign sends Drake Ventures another $7,500.

June 16. He finishes second in the primary by four-tenths of a point and lands in a runoff.

July 1. Ryan Plotkin, who runs U.S. Aluminum Company, writes Mazzei a check for $3,500, the maximum an individual may give per election.

August 3. Drummond stands on a debate stage and accuses Stone of engineering the reversal to buy the endorsement. Oklahoma Watch confirms the payments afterward. It does not confirm the causation, and neither does this article.

Mazzei says research changed his mind. He points to jobs, national security, and supply chains. Candidates get to change their minds, and the ones who never do should worry you more than the ones who do.

But he called it a scam in January. He attacked Emirati ownership in March. He was still opposed in April. He was for it on the exact day the endorsement dropped.

Everyone involved insists nothing happened

Give Mazzei credit for not hiding the relationship. He told KFOR in June that Stone "has been an adviser to the campaign almost since the beginning," and that Stone joined a crowd of people pushing Trump to endorse. He told Fox News that Stone is "one of many political advisers and teammates." He has called the pay-for-endorsement theory absurd on the ground that a billionaire president does not sell his name for a few thousand dollars.

That last argument holds up, and it deserves to be said plainly. Nobody has produced any evidence that Donald Trump received anything. This article alleges nothing of the sort.

Stone answered his critics on X with characteristic restraint. He wrote that he joined the campaign "when he was at 2%," and that Mazzei earned the endorsement by climbing in the polls. He added, to anyone still complaining: "If I have to save Oklahoma, I will."

Roger Stone, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is going to save Oklahoma. He did not say from what.

In June, the adviser signed up with a foreign government

Late in June 2026, Drake Ventures filed a registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to represent the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí, describing the work as government and public relations counsel on "trade and economic development." It appears to be the first FARA filing Stone has ever made through the company.

Set that beside the candidate's platform.

Mazzei promises to bar foreign governments from owning Oklahoma land. He spent four months attacking a project because an Emirati state company owns most of it. And in the same month his campaign wired another $7,500 to Fort Lauderdale, the firm collecting that money signed on as a paid representative of a foreign government.

Stone has been working. Politico reported in April that he is back in the lobbying business, with roughly $1 million in first-quarter 2025 contracts across four clients. NOTUS found that the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, a nation with about 278 people living on its reservation, paid Stone $250,000 between April and September of last year. E&E News reported in January that Drake Ventures registered to lobby for a Utah oil-train developer. Politico counted rare earth and mining clients among the rest.

So the firm advising Mike Mazzei on Oklahoma policy currently represents a foreign state government, a tribal government, an oil-by-rail developer, and a mining portfolio.

Lobbyists lobby. Nobody expects a vow of poverty. But that client list belongs to the senior adviser of a man whose entire pitch is that foreign money has its hooks in Oklahoma and he alone will pull them out.

Barney Keller collects twice

City News OKC, walking through how the endorsement came together, reported that Stone worked the effort alongside Barney Keller, a Republican media strategist.

Keller turns up in the campaign finance report from both directions at once.

He gave Mazzei money. Schedule A: "KELLER, BARNEY, 1 BARBER, WAYLAND, MA, PRESIDENT JAMESTOWN ASSOCIATES," $3,500 on June 3. The maximum.

Then his firm took money. Jamestown Associates, the New Jersey shop that cut Donald Trump's ads in 2016 and 2020, has billed the Mazzei campaign $274,785.84.

The two men credited with delivering the endorsement pulled $357,285.84 out of this campaign between them, and one of them wrote the candidate a personal check on top of the invoices. Every dollar of it is disclosed and every dollar of it is legal. But every single dollar makes us go hmmm……

Midland, Texas has taken more Oklahoma money than Tulsa

Add up where $12,315,210.25 actually landed and the map gets embarrassing.

Guerrilla News totaled every out-of-state vendor in the filing. The number comes to roughly $10,362,597, or 84.1 percent of everything this campaign has ever spent.

One firm in Midland, Texas took sixty-nine cents of every dollar.

Oklahoma vendors split the crumbs. A Bixby social media shop cleared $281,104. A Tulsa LLC took $115,783 and lists a house on South Erie Street as its address, and its campaign office coordinator gave Mazzei $500 back. A sign printer got $23,020. A FedEx Office got $13,750.

Gentner Drummond, who has his own problems and is nobody's hero in this story, keeps needling Mazzei for collecting "endorsements from people that don't live in Oklahoma." Drummond undersold it. The endorsements are the small part. The ad buys, the mail, the data, the polling, the digital fundraising, and the senior adviser all left the state too.

The $3,500 that matters more than the $8.4 million

Which brings us back to July 1.

Ryan Plotkin runs U.S. Aluminum Company as president and chief executive. His family founded it in Oklahoma City and owns M-D Building Products. He lives in Jones, Oklahoma. He is an American citizen, U.S. Aluminum is an American company, and his contribution broke no law. Get that right, because the sloppy version of this story is defamatory and the accurate version hits harder.

On February 24, U.S. Aluminum signed an agreement with Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum to explore building a downstream fabrication plant beside the Inola smelter. Century announced it. The Oklahoma Department of Commerce promoted it. U.S. Aluminum remains the first and only downstream company to sign anything with the developers. The plan is to pull molten metal straight from the smelter and turn it into parts for the electrical, defense, aerospace, automotive, and machinery industries.

Kill the smelter and that plant dies with it.

Mazzei spent January through April attacking the smelter while promising to work with Oklahoma-based businesses instead. He flipped on May 29. Six weeks after that, the chief executive of the Oklahoma-based business whose Inola plans live or die with the Emirati project maxed out to him.

He kept his promise on a technicality. He is collaborating with an Oklahoma-based business. It happens to be the one holding the first ticket in line at the plant he called a scam.

Guerrilla News has asked Mr. Plotkin and U.S. Aluminum Company for comment and will publish whatever they send.

The IOU he carries into the governor's office

Back to that loan, and the phrase the campaign chose for its repayment terms.

Oklahoma Ethics Commission Rule 2.67 lets a candidate lend his campaign unlimited money from personal or joint marital funds. The loan needs a signed, dated, contemporaneous writing. It cannot carry interest. Mazzei's joint loan with his wife fits the rule cleanly, and anyone telling you it does not has not read it.

The rule permits something else. A committee may repay that loan out of contributions it receives. Oklahoma sets no cap on it. Other states cap exactly this, for the reason you already worked out.

Follow it forward. Mazzei wins the runoff on August 25. He beats Cyndi Munson in November, in a state where no Democrat has won statewide since 2006. In January he takes the oath as governor of Oklahoma while holding an interest-free $11,005,000 IOU against a campaign committee that can keep raising money from people who need things from him.

Under Oklahoma law as written, every dollar contributed to Mazzei for Governor after that date could travel from a donor's checkbook, through the committee, and into the personal bank account of the sitting governor, labeled loan repayment.

That is not corruption. That is the statute. Which is worse, and which explains why Mike Mazzei has never once been asked on a debate stage whether he intends to pay himself back.

Eight days left. Somebody ask him.

$2,372 for a haircut

The same seventy-six pages that route $82,500 to a revoked Florida shell also record $3,539.40 paid to a woman in Ada for grooming. Not literature. Not consulting. Grooming. Eleven hundred sixty-six dollars to get the candidate ready for a forum in Lawton, and twenty-three hundred seventy-two dollars for one appearance in July.

On August 6 the campaign paid the Oklahoma Ethics Commission $800, itemized as a compliance fee, bringing its running total in penalties to $927.50.

Add it up. A man asking Oklahomans to hand him a $13 billion budget has been penalized twice by the agency that polices campaign money, spent more grooming his hair than a lot of Oklahomans spend on a mortgage payment, sent 84 percent of his war chest out of state, and paid a pardoned Florida operative more than he paid any business in Tulsa. He financed nearly all of it himself because he could not persuade Oklahomans to do it for him. And he spent $12.3 million telling those same Oklahomans that somebody else is selling out their state.

The runoff is Tuesday, August 25. The Ethics Commission filing is public. The Florida corporate record is public. The FARA registration is public.

Nobody has to take my word for any of it. Go pull them.

Ron Durbin is a reporter with Guerrilla News. Every figure here comes from the Mazzei for Governor 2026 Pre-Runoff Contributions and Expenditures Report filed with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission on August 17, 2026, from Florida Division of Corporations records, or from the reporting cited below. Allegations identified as allegations remain unproven. Send corrections to ron@guerrillaarmy.com and we will publish them promptly and prominently.

Bibliography

Primary records

1. Mazzei for Governor-2026, 2026 Pre-Runoff Contributions and Expenditures Report, Oklahoma Ethics Commission, Ethics No. 11794, filed August 17, 2026
2. Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations, entity detail for DRAKE VENTURES LLC, Document No. M06000000027
3. Oklahoma Ethics Commission Rule 2.67, Loans to Candidate Committees
4. Oklahoma Ethics Commission, State Candidate Guide
5. Oklahoma Ethics Commission, Contribution Charts
6. Century Aluminum Company, Form 10-Q, quarter ended March 31, 2026, SEC

Roger Stone and Drake Ventures

1. CNBC, "Justice Department sues Trump ally Roger Stone and wife over alleged $2 million in unpaid taxes," April 16, 2021
2. ABC News, "Justice Department sues Roger Stone, wife for $2 million in unpaid taxes," April 16, 2021
3. Forbes, "Feds Sue Roger Stone Over Almost $2 Million In Unpaid Income Taxes," April 16, 2021
4. Above the Law, "Roger Stone Quit Paying His Taxes Because DEEP STATE," April 20, 2021
5. The Daily Beast, "Justice Department Sues Former Trump Adviser Roger Stone for $2 Million in Unpaid Taxes"
6. The Daily Beast, "Roger Stone Is Raking It In, From Candidates He Endorses"
7. The (b)(7)(D), "Roger Stone Continues Move Into Foreign Lobbying," June 2026
8. NOTUS, "This Tiny Louisiana Tribe Is Teaming Up With Roger Stone to Score Big Wins in Trump's Washington," November 13, 2025
9. E&E News by Politico, "Utah oil-train builder hires Roger Stone as lobbyist," January 2026
10. StoneZone, reposting Politico's "Roger Stone Is Back," April 2026
11. Media Matters for America, on Drake Ventures as Stone's Florida firm, July 2015
12. Wikipedia, Roger Stone, for conviction counts, sentence, commutation, and pardon dates

Mazzei, the Stone payments, and the Trump endorsement

1. Oklahoma Watch, "From Roger Stone to the Inola Smelter: Fact-Checking the Oklahoma Governor's Runoff Debate," August 5, 2026
2. KFOR, "Some question whether Mazzei's campaign paid for Trump endorsement; Mazzei denies," June 4, 2026
3. NonDoc, "'Tremendous honor': Donald Trump endorses Mike Mazzei for governor of Oklahoma," May 29, 2026
4. The Hill, "Donald Trump-backed candidate heads to runoff in Republican primary for Oklahoma governor," June 17, 2026
5. Fox News, "Trump-backed candidate wins Oklahoma Republican gubernatorial primary," June 17, 2026
6. The Lost Ogle, "Art of the Deal: Mike Mazzei Paid Roger Stone $67,500 Before Landing Trump Endorsement," June 1, 2026
7. City News OKC, "How Roger Stone Engineered Mike Mazzei's Trump Endorsement: 'I Joined When He Was at 2%'," June 2, 2026
8. KOCO News 5, "Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei addresses Trump endorsement and Roger Stone payments," June 10, 2026

The Inola smelter and the position change

1. Oklahoma Politics Today, "Mazzei called Inola smelter a 'billion dollar scam' before flip-flopping ahead of Trump endorsement," June 9, 2026
2. Oklahoma Watch, "As Mazzei Changes Tone on Smelter Project, Drummond Moves to Block It," June 4, 2026
3. Oklahoma Gazette, "Inola Smelter Questions Surface Ahead of Tonight's GOP Governor Debate," August 2026
4. News On 6, "Why did Mike Mazzei change his stance on Inola aluminum smelter project?" July 15, 2026
5. News 9, "Drummond seeks injunction to block proposed aluminum smelter in Inola," August 2026
6. News 9, "What Did President Trump Say in His New Mike Mazzei Campaign Video?" July 16, 2026
7. Tulsa World, "Mazzei, Drummond take opposing positions on Inola smelter," August 2026

U.S. Aluminum Company and the downstream agreement

1. Century Aluminum press release, "Oklahoma's Burgeoning Aluminum Hub Gets Boost with Agreement Between U.S. Aluminum Company and EGA, Century Aluminum," February 24, 2026
2. GlobeNewswire, same release, February 24, 2026
3. Oklahoma Department of Commerce, announcement of the U.S. Aluminum agreement
4. Tulsa World, "Companies behind aluminum smelter in Inola sign agreement with fabricator," February 25, 2026
5. KFOR, "Oklahoma-based company joins agreement in Inola Aluminum plant project," February 25, 2026
6. U.S. Aluminum Company, press page

The race and the money

1. KOKH Fox 25, "Gubernatorial campaign finance reports show contrasts in loans, donors and spending," August 18, 2026
2. Oklahoma Watch, "Gubernatorial Candidates Rely on Personal Money to Launch Campaigns," February 5, 2026
3. Ballotpedia News, "Gentner Drummond (R) and Mike Mazzei (R) campaign on experience and Trump support in the August 25 Republican runoff for Oklahoma governor," July 1, 2026
4. KFOR, "New independent poll shows Oklahoma Republican governor's race deadlocked," August 2026
5. News 9, "Gentner Drummond highlights endorsements ahead of Republican Oklahoma governor runoff," August 2026
6. News 9, "Mike Mazzei Talks 2026 Oklahoma Governor Run," March 23, 2026
7. Mike Mazzei for Governor campaign website
8. NBC News, "Mike Mazzei and Gentner Drummond advance to GOP runoff in Oklahoma governor contest," June 17, 2026
9. KOSU, "2 Republicans advance to August runoffs for Oklahoma governor," June 17, 2026