Clarence Thomas's $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It [View all]

[Zorro]

The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.

Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.

With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.

There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”

But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.

His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/us/clarence-thomas-rv-anthony-welters.html?unlocked_article_code=91TGzVPCPPCehiz0--OzHCamWbu8MjGV2bKOB7AZ-kmfuOXax4AQ8BKNoKVi82XLnH46TcKDRrL4MRXcA79QuP6vjzJc_b-TnedKjQ9pfMmdBDwCUQYMdXTBJ1CYPBch62IoPZUH8mM5c3Xh4BLUmGx3Ldvra-va5aTpLaagPbAXXoI7bsZVL6ENm-8I3AGKHcRMIgQGvWGmRCXiOkdUDLxk5S2j4GXnHWC08VMVieXVKusX7ZSwUBfdTo3-dis8a1sAJLf5V4zPA-8B7rJoUj301_3NMo2mhaYRvl16xuj41V5hXyj1Eqk9WTm1JkDlN9aCGx97aCxHt1oKhF6f18hAMdk6C0k&smid=url-share