Is he a magnetic figure who brings people together around open water swimming or is he a charlatan who uses a charity to create income where there should be none?
Bryan Mineo, who runs One With the Ocean (OWO), has been featured in many glossy magazines as a transcendent figure who has changed the landscape of open water swimming. Particularly, Bonnie Tsui, whose 2020 book Wy We Swim made her a star among avid swimmers, featured him in AFAR Magazine, a travel magazine.
On an absurdly picturesque Thursday evening at Encinitas’s Moonlight State Beach, a stretch of white sand on the coast of Southern California, 50 of us circled up under a 100-foot-tall palm tree. Bryan Mineo, an enthusiastic 37-year-old with the abs of a Marine and sleeve tattoos that reflect his dual passions in life—the ocean and music—gave us our brief. Sprint to the ocean with buoys, swim for 500 yards, exit to pick up beach trash, dive back in the water for another 500 yards, and emerge to pick up more litter. Rest, then repeat.
For the nonprofit One With the Ocean (OWO), the world’s largest open-water swim group, it was just another Thursday night “SLOG,” or what Mineo, OWO’s founder, described as the swim version of the Swedish fitness trend of “plogging": jogging plus plocka upp (picking up) trash. A random sampling of OWO’s collection this year includes dental floss, cigarette butts, rugs, broken chairs, discarded clothing, sex toys, and countless plastic items—bottle caps, buckets, bags. I looked around at the happy beachgoers bathed in this golden-hour light, seemingly incapable of chucking anything like a dildo or a doughnut wrapper into the sand. But humans will do as humans do, even at the beach.
“So what we try to do,” Mineo said cheerfully, “is clean up after them.”
He’s also been featured in the Dallas Morning News, a local NBC affiliate, and more travel magazines.
Bryan Mineo spent a lot of time in a 2021 deposition claiming he was honest.
Is that so? Only minutes after making this pronouncement, Mineo may have committed perjury. Below is what he stated.
There are two charities which do free lessons for kids in Compton: Trident Swim Foundation and Revolution Aquatics.
I have confirmed neither received a direct donation and Mineo’s attorney, Raj Matani, has also acknowledged this.
Orion Young is the principal at the Trident Swim Foundation, and he provided this statement, “I have confirmed with the main office that we have no records of receiving any direct payments or donations from One with the Ocean or Bryan Mineo personally. To be clear, that is not to say they did not contribute financially to the operational costs of running Play in the Waves.”
Play in the Waves is a program which teaches swimming to inner city kids, however, Bryan stated that it amounted to eight one-hour sessions in 2020.
Raj Matani, regarding Revolution Aquatics, also claimed that while OWO did not provide direct funding, it raised funds to support operations it partnered with Revolution Aquatics.
“{t}o be clear, Mr. Mineo did not raise money specifically for any specific charity. One With the Ocean (OWO) does general fundraising and then allocates the money for its own programs or work it does in collaboration with other non-profit organizations. Among the programs that OWO supports is Revolution Aquatics (RA).” Matani stated in an email. “I cannot speak for RA's public statements, however, OWO does have evidence to support its work with RA. Mr. Mineo has reached out to his Board, accountants, and RA to provide documentation to this effect. Upon receipt, we will be happy to affirm the good work that Mr. Mineo and his team does.”
The problem is that Mineo did not say he did general fundraising or fundraising to support programs OWO partners with other charities; he said he raised money to donate to other charities.
In fact, there are many charities- many of the most prominent started by America’s most famous entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, WK Kellogg, John D. Rockefeller, and RJ Reynolds- which do nothing but contribute to other charities.
These non-profits do it in the form of grants, which is how such donations are supposed to be made. Obviously, Mineo did not do that here. He suggested a non-existent donation which presumably would have gone to general operations.
This may seem like it’s an argument about a distinction without a difference, but it’s not.
It’s not entirely clear why OWO needs to be a non-profit. In another part of the deposition, Bryan said that he operated his organization for some time without forming a non-profit.
What changed? Why did Bryan start raising money and take a salary in 2019; I asked Kari Stoever, a board member.
“Michael - we were not a registered C3 in early 2019. We had hard costs to run the swims as I discussed before, and we also had a vision for how we were tying the environmental goals with the swim function.” Stoever said through LinkedIn.
Check out my interview with Ms. Stoever here.
This brings us back to the exorbitant salary which Mineo receives, something I featured in the original article on OWO. It’s as much as $150,000 or it is $89,300.46, according to Matani.
Matani previously threatened to sue me over this discrepancy.
Things would be cleared up if OWO listed its tax returns on Guidestar but none have yet to be supplied. It did release a basic financial report.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Revolution Aquatics maintains operations with no budget.
Trident Swim Foundation raised twice what OWO lists, and Orion only took in a salary of $36,667, according to its returns filed on Guidestar.
Raj Matani said something else to me during our discussion, “If you want to get into nuance and vilify an organization that supports inner city kids and the environment, then that is a career choice you can make.”
It reminded me of something a lawyer for Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago told me years ago, “‘We’re the good guys,’ the attorney screamed. The charity certainly appears to be. On the surface, Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago Inc. is a parochial, garden-variety liberal nonprofit located in the Windy City. But if you look deeper you find that NHS runs an empire of sorts whose power extends beyond its home base, and that it is deeply tied to the world of Saul Alinsky-inspired radical left-wing community organizing and the corruption that accompanies it.”
I found that NHS engaged in mortgage fraud; taking advantage of at least one African American family while giving a sweetheart loan to a white guy with clout.
It’s easy to hide misdeeds while covering yourself in the veneer of doing noble work.
Mineo claims to have created a community of people around open water swimming, but it still doesn’t explain why he should make about six figures to clean a few beaches, sporadically teach kids or lead group swims.
Post-Script
Check out the previous articles in this series: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4. Article 5, Article 6, and Article 7.
Check out the new fundraiser to help investigate more non-profits which don’t receive enough scrutiny.