It was May 31, 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the National Guard had arrived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles to protect a shopping and entertainment complex developed and operated by the city’s premier luxury shopping developer, sixty-three-year-old Rick Caruso.

Days earlier, protesters had inflicted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property damage at the Grove, another of Caruso’s famous shopping complexes. The developer was irate. He told the Los Angeles Times that, while he decried racism and was “anguished” by the murder of Floyd, city officials in charge when the Grove was vandalized deserved to be booted from office. “You had a sacred duty to protect the residents of this city and you failed,” he said.

“One thing I knew is that he was one of the people most angry about property damage during the post–George Floyd uprisings here in Los Angeles,” said Lex Steppling, national director of organizing and campaigns at Dignity and Power Now, a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated people. “He’s kind of your quintessential neoliberal in that he supports the police so that they can protect his assets.”