Who is Mary Stranahan, what is the High Stakes Foundation, and how did I connect this Big Sky philanthropist to the Epstein network? Great questions! Let’s begin with Mary.
Let’s start with spark plugs. To put it simply, spark plugs are the small bolts of lightning that start your car. They work by creating an arc of electricity across a gap that ignites the mixture of fuel and air. This small explosion powers your pistons and makes the entire vehicle move. All of the ingredients: the gap, the mixture of fuels, the larger machine, all need the tiny spark plug to go– Now think of all the people, products, and industries that move everyday because of that small spark.
Perhaps it is appropriate that Mary Stranahan was born into the family that created and owned the largest spark plug company in the world. She herself finds the small gaps, with the right mixture of people and place, and adds the spark that makes an entire system move forward.
Mary’s grandpa, Frank Stranahan, helped build the Champion spark plug company with his brother, Robert, and now this successful company is a part of Apollo’s portfolio, and it’s through Apollo that Epstein’s influence enters the picture via Leon Black. Here’s a portion of the letter Apollo sent its investors after its connection to the Epstein network emerged:
To Our Partners,
In light of the variety of media and social traffic we feel compelled to again reach out. Despite the flurry of coverage and certain constituents pushing their own agendas, the facts remain the same. In 2020 Apollo initiated an independent, transparent, and thorough investigation in regard to any relationships with Jeffrey Epstein. The publicly released report can be found here.
The facts matter. From an Apollo perspective, there’s nothing new in these documents. Neither Marc Rowan nor anyone else at Apollo (excluding Leon Black) had either a business or personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Black, who left the firm in 2021, previously retained and compensated Mr. Epstein for personal tax advice. In select instances, Mr. Rowan and other Apollo employees provided information to Epstein in connection with his tax work for Mr. Black. While Mr. Epstein sought to do work with the Apollo co-founders other than Mr. Black, it was declined at every turn.
The money Mary Stranahan uses to influence things–like Montana media and non-profits, including the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative–got activated after Mary came out of the closet as a rich person and fully embraced her wealth. Before this moment of clarity, Mary was doing doctor stuff for poor Montana Indians on their Big Sky reservations. Very noble.
The community was about a 50/50 split of Native Americans and white people so she was keenly aware of the racism, both overt and subtle. She was a white doctor on Native land so she learned everything she could, including taking Native History classes at the Salish Kootenai College. She loved delivering babies, tolerated surgeries, and especially adored the way entire Native families would show up whenever someone was in the hospital. By living on the Reservation, she saw the enormous impact job creation had on decreasing domestic violence and substance abuse and improving lives, families, and entire communities. Mary became passionate about economic development. Both combating racism and supporting economic development became cornerstones of her ongoing work after retiring from healthcare.
Up until this point, Mary had been individually philanthropic with LGBTQ and environmental organizations, as well as through a family foundation started by her parents, The Needmor Fund, but also somewhat closeted as a wealth holder. In 2006 she attended a Play BIG conference in Canada. Play BIG was started by Carol Newell who had shifted from being an anonymous investor to a leader in impact investing. Play BIG supports individual wealth holders who want to activate their whole portfolio (investing, lending, and giving) to be in greater alignment with the values of environmental regeneration and social equity. After the push from Play BIG, in 2007 Mary went public as a resource and hired Dawn McGee as her CEO to help her focus and transform her wealth into impact in Western Montana. When asked what is the smartest thing she has ever done, the answer comes quickly, “Hire Dawn.”
After Mary “hired Dawn” the money started flowing to all kinds of organizations, like the Montana Free Press, The Pulp, the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative, and SO MUCH MORE!
If you don’t see this list of funding recipients and understand how money is used to control narratives, keeping local populations uninformed about how power REALLY functions, then let me return to a spot in Missoula that is now a HAZMAT situation just a few dozen feet from the Bitterroot river.
Missoula Works, a subsidiary of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative, got paid to clean up this land near Buckhouse bridge, which is owned by IMEG and is being developed into more storage units, but, for some reason, this particular spot of heaped trash was left to CONTINUE POLLUTING (as I write this) the land AND water. After talking with someone from DNRC yesterday, I’m starting to realize this isn’t getting cleaned up because this plot of land is literally NO MAN’S LAND.
While my chat with DNRC didn’t illuminate the technical owners of this parcel, it did present the possibility that digging into deed information at the County might help point the figurative finger because deed info might show if any changes to the property line were made in the process of the previous owner selling the property to IMEG.
A few years ago I connected the previous owner, Spencer Properties LLC, to Blue Line Development, which built the Trinity Apartment complex by the jail and perpetrates the affordable housing subsidy scam at a regional level. I’ve literally had people in Colorado reach out to me because of my local reporting on Blue Line Development, and they reached out to ME because this kind of reporting simply doesn’t occur with the media recipients of Mary’s spark plug money, and now you know why.
One final example of how Mary is playing DEMOCRAT politics with her spark plug money, and that example goes by the name Pam Bucy, a former Lewis and Clark County Prosecutor and failed candidate for Montana’s Attorney General Office. Here’s a little more bio information from Ballotpedia:
Upon graduating from law school, Bucy was hired as a criminal prosecutor with the Lewis & Clark County Attorney’s office.[5] She went on to work as Executive Assistant Attorney General under former attorney general Mike McGrath, who would go on to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Montana. Her time as chief deputy attorney general provided Bucy with the opportunity to represent the state in front of the Supreme Court and establish her specialty as a prosecutor of sex-related crime; In addition to handling her combination civil and criminal caseload, she led the office to create and develop its system for registering sex and violent offenders.
Developing a system to register sex offenders, you say? And what’s Pam up to these days?
That’s right, she’s a board member for the “Prickly Pear Land Trust“, which got a nice $30,000 from the High Stakes Foundation. No wonder Pam can afford to crack a smile like that!
If you appreciate knowing shit about the corruption lurking beneath the pretty surface of this liberal mountain college town, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page because no foundation will ever touch the kind of work I’ve dedicated myself to doing after being an insider of the Homeless Industrial Complex for nearly a decade. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!
Is there any connection to the Dinny Stranahan Research Institute out behind Famous Daves on Reserve? Dinny was also an apparent rich doctor, who died around 2005ish from cancer after building the institute, which if I remember right was to study cancer.
Not sure, but worth looking into.