Subject: In College Roommate David Panton, Ted Cruz Finds Unwavering Support - NYTimes.com
From: "Bennett, Eric" <[email-masked]>
To: Comm_D <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:07:31 -0700

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/politics/ted-cruz-college-roommate.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/

In College Roommate David Panton, Ted Cruz Finds Unwavering Support

By JASON HOROWITZ

April 23, 2016

On a break during a business trip to Washington last year, David Panton hailed a cab to take him to the Capitol. He told the driver he was going to see the Texas senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/ted-cruz-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per>.

“He’s racist,” the cabdriver replied, according to Mr. Panton.

Mr. Panton, taken aback, informed his driver that Mr. Cruz had a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the right side of his desk, that he was the only senator to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela and that he had a “black guy” as a college roommate and best man at his wedding.

“I don’t believe that,” the cabby said, as Mr. Panton tells it.

“Well,” Mr. Panton replied, “you’re talking to him.”

Everyone seems to have an opinion of Mr. Cruz, and usually it is not a good one. He has repeatedly come under attack from Donald J. Trump and other rivals as being eminently unlikable, having antagonized even members of his own party. Hillary Clinton joined that chorus this month when she described Mr. Cruz <http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/transcript-politicos-glenn-thrush-interviews-hillary-clinton-221512> as a “meanspirited guy.” The New York primary last week, in which he finished a distant third, may have been the low point in his decades-long struggle with popularity.

But through it all, he could depend on Mr. Panton — his former roommate, debate teammate<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/us/politics/ted-cruz-honed-political-skills-in-princeton-debate-club.html>, business partner and political booster — as a source of unconditional support, the guy who extends a hand when the whole world seems to offer a stiff-arm.

“The media has caricatured Ted as this one-dimensional, hard-core guy,” Mr. Panton, 44, said with some irritation in an interview during his business trip to Washington last fall. “Ted is principled, but he is actually a good guy and was a great friend to me.”

Their friendship dates back to their freshman year at Princeton. Indeed, college contemporaries considered Mr. Panton, a native of Jamaica, to be the more likely of the two to run a nation. But he become better known back home for ill-fated romances with beauty queens than for his leadership qualities.

At first, Mr. Cruz’s freshman roommate at Princeton was Craig Mazin, a screenwriter who has provided a stream<http://national.suntimes.com/national-world-news/7/72/2565655/ted-cruz-college-roommate-craig-mazin-epic-twitter-rant> of often-quoted insults about the candidate’s personality. (“He wrote ‘The Hangover III,’” Mr. Panton said archly of Mr. Mazin.)

But midway through freshman year, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Panton, who enrolled in Princeton at age 16, moved in together. “Ted and I just hit it off,” Mr. Panton said, adding that his friend schooled him on conservative politics. “Ted was very kind to me; he took an interest in what I was doing in my life and in my background.”

They both picked subjects for their senior theses while still freshmen. Mr. Cruz wrote about the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments, Mr. Panton about a Jamaican politician. They were best known around campus, and beyond, as debate partners<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/us/politics/ted-cruz-honed-political-skills-in-princeton-debate-club.html>. When Mr. Cruz was elected president of the Clio, or conservative side, of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, the umbrella group for all of the school’s debating activities, Mr. Panton was his whip. Mr. Panton continued on to be a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and joined Mr. Cruz at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Panton, like Barack Obama before him, became president of the Harvard Law Review.

Former debate team members said Mr. Panton used to duck out of pictures if he determined them to be potentially damaging to his chances of becoming prime minister of Jamaica.

Born to a prominent businessman turned Anglican priest in the Jamaican town Mandeville, Mr. Panton had connections to and a familiarity with the island’s political elite, including the former prime minister of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. He returned to Jamaica as a businessman after his studies and in 1998 co-founded with Mr. Cruz a fund that was created to draw investments for Caribbean ventures. Mr. Cruz put $6,000 into the firm, and ultimately left with $25,000 in cash and a $75,000 promissory note from Mr. Panton that Mr. Cruz had never cashed in.

In 2013, Time magazine<http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/18/ted-cruz-failed-to-disclose-ties-to-jamaican-holding-company/> revealed the venture and noted that Mr. Cruz had failed to disclose the profit on two years of Senate ethics forms. Mr. Cruz called it an oversight.

Days before the Iowa caucuses this year, The Washington Post published an unflattering report <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-ted-cruzs-best-friend-drew-him-into-jamaican-politics-and-business/2016/01/22/5bc43d90-bade-11e5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html> on the ill-fated Caribbean investment fund Mr. Panton founded with Mr. Cruz. Mr. Panton was mortified that the article would do harm to his friend, according to a person who discussed the matter with him but declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign.

A year after Mr. Cruz and Mr. Panton went into business, Mr. Panton married Lisa Hanna, a former Miss Jamaica and Miss World who is now a member of Jamaica’s Parliament, in a New York ceremony during which Mr. Cruz gave the toast.

Mr. Panton soon made the move to politics, leading a youth wing of the Jamaica Labour Party, which Mr. Cruz addressed in 2001, and taking a seat in the country’s Senate. That year, he and Ms. Hanna had a child; Mr. Cruz was named godfather.

But then things stopped going so well for Mr. Panton. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Atlanta, where they divorced months later, touching off an international custody battle that became tabloid fodder in Jamaica. There was more sensational coverage to come. In 2006, Wendy Fitzwilliam, a former Miss Universe from Trinidad, caused a media storm when, unmarried, she announced her pregnancy by Mr. Panton to an audience of teenage girls at Corpus Christi College, a Catholic school in Trinidad. The couple split up and, in 2009, she published a tell-all book, “Letters to Ailan” — the name of her son with Mr. Panton — that offered an at times unflattering portrait of Mr. Panton.

In 2012, she and others who had formed BQ Girls, a beauty-queen musical group, sang and danced to their big song “Runway” for Mr. Trump, who then owned the Miss Universe franchise, in his Trump Tower office.

“He was tickled pink to see Wendy,” said A. T. Dunn, the group’s manager. “He asked her about Trinidad and asked her about her son. He knew about her son.”

By then, Mr. Panton had established himself in the private equity business in Atlanta where he is the chairman of the Jamaican Chamber of Commerce of Atlanta.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Panton set up one of the first “super PACs<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>” supporting Mr. Cruz’s campaign, donating $100,000 to it, though it has been eclipsed by much larger ones.

Since disassociating himself from the super PAC, Mr. Panton has aided his old debate partner by critiquing his performance at debate preparations, according to the person who has spoken with him. Mr. Panton also urged Mr. Cruz, with whom he remains in regular contact, to relate more emotional stories about his upbringing and his late half sister’s battle with drugs<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/us/politics/ted-cruz-half-sister.html>.

Mr. Panton and Mr. Cruz declined to speak in further depth last week about their friendship.

But back in Jamaica, that friendship has at least created a reflected glory for Mr. Panton that many once expected to shine directly onto him.

“Now a major playmaker in his friend’s quest for the White House” The Jamaica Observer <http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/Jamaica-could-well-get-a-real-friend-in-the-White-House_19236257> wrote last year, for Mr. Panton “the possibility now exists that one of Jamaica’s brightest sons could be a close friend to the most powerful human being on earth.”

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