One of my hobbies is keeping tabs on which of our distinguished officeholders could be called the most “Florida Man” of Florida politicians.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, who was held in contempt of court in 2024, used to be in the lead. Then came Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who claimed she’s seen evidence of interdimensional beings (don’t worry, it’s probably just Mitch McConnell). But right now, I think the clear frontrunner is Rep. Cory Mills.
How does he qualify? Let me count the ways.
Last fall, he was hit with a restraining order at the request of his ex-girlfriend, a former Miss United States who is also a Republican state committeewoman from Columbia County.
The couple’s relationship unraveled after news broke about an incident in which police in Washington were called to investigate an alleged assault by the lawmaker against another woman, one he was living with in D.C. That woman was also politically active. She was co-founder of Iranians for Trump and later withdrew her complaint.
Mills, by the way, is married, but not to either of the women I’ve just mentioned. During the restraining order proceedings, he testified that he and his second wife had been separated and she had just filed for divorce.
The congressman’s Florida Man qualifications involve more than just his incredibly convoluted romantic entanglements.
“Mills’ detractors can flip through a Rolodex of scandals and red flags,” Mother Jones reported last month. The story included allegations of stolen valor when he was in the military, claims that he’d hired sex workers while on what was supposed to be a rescue mission overseas, and, since his election, an investigation of some serious ethical violations.
Is it any wonder the convicted felon now living in the White House has endorsed him for reelection?
But what I want to talk about today is something different — something messier than his love life and far more toxic than his political career.
I want to tell you about the hazardous waste he left in Taylor County.
Starting off with a bang
Taylor County lies about 50 miles southeast of Tallahassee. It’s so lightly populated, 20 years ago the U.S. Air Force considered turning it into a bombing range. Fewer than 20 people per square mile lived there.
But that lack of population has paid benefits, too. Taylor County is one of a handful of places along the Gulf Coast where you can harvest your own scallops, which have been called “one of Florida’s tastiest seafood delicacies.”
Nevertheless, people love to dump on Taylor County. I mean that literally.
For decades there was a paper mill in the county seat of Perry that dumped so much toxic waste that it left the Fenholloway River badly polluted.
How badly? Scientists documented fish changing gender. Scores of private wells were polluted. Locals joked that in Taylor County, H2O stood for “two parts horrible, one part odor.”
The state was OK with that, because in 1947 Taylor County officials persuaded the Florida Legislature to designate the Fenholloway as the state’s only “industrial” river.
They made that dirty deal to attract Procter & Gamble, which built the paper mill and began dumping millions of gallons of waste into the river every day.
Such a cavalier attitude toward the environment attracted other factories, too, said Joy Towles Ezell, a native of the county who’s been fighting against pollution for decades. In fact, her handle on Instagram is “Hope 4 Clean Water.”
“We’ve had everything that’s really bad here,” Ezell told me.
Other Taylor County factories include companies in the munitions business. You could say the munitions business is booming there.
One of those factories was run by Mills before the start of his political career. As a result, when he was elected to Congress in 2022, he started things off with a bang — sort of.
“At the start of this term, the freshman Republican from Florida handed out 40 mm grenades stamped with a GOP elephant to congressional colleagues,” the Business Insider reported.
Don’t worry, they were all duds. Sort of like Mills’ attempts at moving legislation. So far, the only bill he’s passed renames a post office in Casselberry.
A former Army medic who maaaayyyy have earned a Bronze Star (accounts differ as to whether he was where he claims he was), Mills is now in the defense contracting business. In 2014 he co-founded, with his wife Rana Al Saadi, a company called “Pacem.”
Pacem’s name comes from the Latin word for “peace” but it was definitely in the war business. It sold arms and riot-control gear, as well as providing law enforcement training and private security consulting.
If you look at its website, though, the company claims its vision has nothing to do with either war or peace. It is “to be teachers of righteousness and students of its implementation,” which sounds like something Quentin Tarantino would put in a screenplay for Samuel L. Jackson to say.
The website offers a quote “attributed to Albert Einstein,” that says, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Then it says their goal is to “strive to transform ourselves … into a better humankind.”
Judging by Mills’ record, I think they failed.
Nevertheless, the company did make Mills a richer man, if not a better one, according to Politico.
Pacem landed big-money government contracts with the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Homeland Security. Among other products, it sold tear gas used on Black Lives Matter protesters. Politico reported that Pacem’s profits paid for Mill’s campaign for Congress — or so it seemed.
Mills’ company continued with those government contracts even after his election, which led to the House Ethics Committee opening an investigation over potential conflicts of interest.
Mills’ company also had clients overseas, and that’s been the source of further controversy.
“Pacem works with secretive arms brokers, including in offshore mercenary and laundering hubs,” independent journalist Roger Sollenberger reported recently.
The company’s “ongoing foreign entanglements have gone unreported — including weapons exports — while Mills sits on House Armed Services and House Foreign Affairs and chairs a subcommittee that exercises direct oversight of his own industry,” Sollenberger wrote.
And then there was the big explosion.
The preventable tragedy
Originally, Mills’ company was based in Virginia. Then, in 2018, it bought a munitions factory in Taylor County named AMTEC Less-Lethal and moved in.
Mills told the Perry News-Herald that this was a return to a place he remembered fondly from his childhood.
“I grew up in the small town of Auburndale,” Mills told the local paper. “From the age of 7 until I was 18, I spent every hunting season in Perry and Mayo, where we had a hunting club in Triple Creek.”
About the time of the Pacem takeover, something horrible happened at the munitions plant. There was an explosion and two employees died — one right away and the other a week later in the hospital.
In 2019, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration levied $188,000 in fines against AMTEC for multiple serious safety violations leading to the fatal explosion. What made things worse, the plant’s top officials had been warned about the danger by someone they had fired.
“Former Taylor County plant worker warned of explosion risk,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
The employee not only told the president of AMTEC that the plant was unsafe, she also complained that her boss made repeated sexual advances to her. Her boss, incidentally, was the plant’s head of safety.
She wound up suing over this. Records indicate the case was settled out of court, and the terms were not disclosed.
While all this was going on, though, Pacem was going through its own detonation.
RIP Pacem
Money turned out to be what ruined Pacem’s peaceful existence in Perry.
“Pacem sued the Small Business Administration in 2023 for millions of dollars of COVID-era federal funding that it claimed to have been wrongfully denied,” Mother Jones reported. “To defend itself, the SBA filed a host of internal Pacem bank documents in federal court.”
Those documents told quite a tale, the magazine reported. They “show that Mills’ arms business was hemorrhaging millions in cash throughout 2018 and 2019. They also make clear that Mills’ company was in disarray when he decided to fail up to Congress.”
Pacem cut a deal with a Canadian lender to pay off its debts and provide access to millions more in cash. Suddenly, Mills had plenty of money for his political campaign.
Meanwhile, the person Mills had hired to run the company for him had a less than impressive resume. Shannon Doyle, a former executive of a digital billboard company, had no background in munitions.
What Doyle had a background in was fraud.
According to Sollenberger, Doyle “had pleaded guilty to investment fraud in 2018; he served an 8-month federal prison sentence in 2022 and has been banned from certain securities trades for life.”
Unfortunately for Mills, the Canadian lender that had bailed out Pacem lost patience with the munitions company’s failure to repay its loans. It filed papers to foreclose on the Perry property, telling a court that Pacem owed more than $66 million.
“Pacem has defended itself by arguing, in part, that a foreign company gaining control of the ‘weapons of war’ at its Florida manufacturing facility poses national security concerns,” Mother Jones reported.
That argument didn’t fly. On Oct. 30, the factory’s 80 employees were all told they were being furloughed indefinitely “due to a gap in production orders,” the Perry newspaper reported. It was the ultimate Halloween trick.
“They pulled us all into a plant-wide meeting and did it all at once,” one employee told Sollenberger. “They said the company is struggling financially.”
A month later, Doyle emailed the idle employees that “the current furlough unfortunately needs to continue. Hopefully, the next update will be more positive.”
There was no further update and the factory remains closed.
Because the employees were furloughed and not laid off or fired, they couldn’t apply for unemployment assistance, one former employee told me.
Ezell told me that she’d heard rumors that, on their last day of work, Pacem’s employees took all the munitions at the plant and blew them up. It struck me that the only better way to demonstrate disdain for their uncaring management would be to play Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” right before setting off the blast.
Alas, I couldn’t find any former employees to confirm this. Taylor County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Dawn Perez said she didn’t believe there had been any such big bang.
“I would’ve heard it from my house because I live next door,” she told me.
That means the grenades and other weaponry could be still sitting there in the plant. This could be a textbook case of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls “explosive hazardous waste,” the kind that can literally blow up in your face.
Blow it up for America
I tried contacting Mills about the shuttered plant, but he’s been avoiding reporters since his restraining order case. He’s posted a lot on social media about how much he supports our undeclared war on Iran, but nothing at all about his own company.
I also contacted two state agencies that deal with pollution but couldn’t get any answers about what they planned to do about this ticking time bomb in Taylor County.
Taylor County has had a rough few years. First it was clobbered by Hurricanes Debby, Idalia, and Helene. Then the paper mill’s current owners, Georgia Pacific, shut the mill down. That led to the closure of a major sawmill, too.
But I think the Pacem plant may offer them a rare opportunity to attract big-spending visitors.
When July 4 rolls around this summer, it will mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the good ol’ U.S. of A. I think the county should offer to take the plant off Mills’ hands, then announce that they’re going to set off the biggest Fourth of July fireworks display ever conceived. Talk about bombs bursting in air!
If Mills is smart, he’ll agree to the deal as long as he gets to push down the plunger to set off the explosion. That’s what a Florida man would do.
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