Mel Sembler, developer and GOP fundraiser, has died at the age of 93

Mel Sembler, a gregarious developer and major Republican fundraiser whose largesse was repaid with ambassador awards by two presidents and who founded a controversial “tough love” drug rehabilitation program, died Oct. 31 at his home in St. Petersburg. , Florida. He was 93.

His son Brent said the cause was lung cancer.

Mr. Sembler, who developed more than 350 shopping centers and other retail projects in the Southeast, was a sought-after fundraiser for Republicans and could shake the money tree for $11 million at one dinner. He was also an advisor to office seekers in the Republican establishment who had open access to power in the era before the rise of Donald J. Trump. His beneficiaries included Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and three members of the Bush clan.

Mr. Sembler was outspoken about the role of money in politics. “Money gives you a voice,” he told The Tampa Bay Times in 2019. “Without money you have no voice.”

His fundraising spanned from the 1980s, when $100,000 was the pinnacle of political donations, to the current era of eight-figure donations to super PACs, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

After donating more than $100,000 to George HW Bush’s successful 1988 presidential race and chairing his inaugural committee, Mr. Sembler was appointed ambassador to Australia. He served throughout President Bush’s term, from 1989 to 1993.

The transactional nature of the appointment — a political patronage ingrained in both parties — led cartoonist Garry Trudeau to depict Mr. Sembler in a “Doonesbury” comic strip as the highest bidder at an evening wear auction for the postal service in Australia.

Mr. Sembler forged particularly close ties with the Bush family. As finance chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2000 elections, he arranged more than $220 million in donations for George W. Bush and other candidates. The second President Bush appointed him ambassador to Italy, where he served from 2001 to 2005.

The Sembler family once celebrated a Shabbat dinner at the White House, after which Mr. Bush, who liked to go to bed early, got up from the table and said, “Okay, Semblers, time to go home,” Brent Sembler recalled in an interview. . Mr. Bush later worked on his memoirs in a dressing gown on the patio of Sembler’s home. His brother Jeb liked to call Mr. Sembler’s wife, Betty, the “ambassador.”

For Jeb Bush, the third member of his family to run for president, Mr. Sembler oversaw donations of more than $100 million to a super PAC in 2015 — a figure so daunting that experts predicted Mr. Bush could be unbeatable in the Republican Party’s primary arena. that was putting it together.

But Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, flamed out early, a victim of Republican voters’ Bush fatigue and of the populist unrest that propelled Trump, who would reshape the Republican Party.

“I don’t understand our country anymore,” Mr. Sembler told The Tampa Bay Times after Jeb Bush’s premature withdrawal. He said he would “seriously think” about voting for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the general election.

But Mr. Sembler, like many traditional major Republican donors, ended up with Mr. Trump. He was appointed vice chairman of finance by the Republican National Committee in 2016 to bolster Trump campaign donations. He later raised money for the inauguration.

“I am a supporter of the party, and he is the leader of my party,” Mr. Sembler explained two years later.

Melvin Floyd Sembler was born on May 10, 1930 in St. Joseph, Missouri, the son of Benjamin Sembler, a businessman, and Fanny (Magoon) Sembler, a homemaker.

Mel Sembler met Betty Schlesinger when they were students at Northwestern University, and they married in 1953. She died in 2022. In addition to his son Brent, Mr. Sembler is survived by two other sons, Martin and Greg; a sister, Delores Krakower; and 12 grandchildren.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Sembler convinced a group of merchants in downtown Dyersburg, Tenn., to move to a new configuration of side-by-side stores along a highway. It was an early incarnation of the strip mall.

After moving his family to St. Petersburg in 1968, Mr. Sembler began developing shopping centers, eventually anchored by a Publix or other supermarket, in small towns throughout Florida. The Sembler Company went on to develop the flashy BayWalk entertainment complex in St. Petersburg and Centro Ybor, a shopping center in Tampa.

Beginning in 1976, Mr. Sembler also financed and oversaw a chain of residential drug treatment centers for adolescents, Straight Inc., which embraced a strict program of incarcerating teenagers and subjecting them to intensive supervision and peer pressure.

The motivation behind the centers, according to Brent Sembler, was his parents’ discovery that one of their three sons had become addicted to drugs. One of the first visitors to one of the Straight centers, in the 1980s, was Nancy Reagan, then the first lady, who drew on the experience to create her “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign.

About a dozen centers opened in several states, but the program was shut down due to controversy in 1993. A Virginia jury had a former Straight Inc. resident. Awarded $220,000 for being held against his will, and a Florida jury awarded another former client $721,000 in a lawsuit. about abusive practices.

Mr. Sembler continued to support anti-drug causes. In 2016, he donated at least $1 million to defeat a constitutional amendment in Florida that sought to expand access to medical marijuana. Voters overwhelmingly approved the measure.