Financial mystery deepens in popular swimming non-profit
How much does One With the Ocean make? No one really knows.
Bryan Mineo, the swimming guru behind a popular southern California swimming non-profit, still can’t answer basic questions about his organization’s financials and tax documents provide no more clarity.
Mineo runs One With the Ocean (OWO) which has been featured in articles by popular swimming author Bonnie Tsui and other leisure magazines.
He does good work, or so it seems.
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.”
An OWO board member, Kari Stoever, stated, “I have been a donor since the launch of OWO 501 (C)3. As a board member and supporter, I could not be more pleased with how the organization, led by Brian and supported by hundreds of volunteers, are connecting communities to one and other and the ocean.”
Who wouldn’t want to contribute to that?
When I investigate a non-profit, I am often reminded of what a lawyer for Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) of Chicago told me.
NHS of Chicago purported to help build up impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago.
“We’re the good guys,” the attorney screamed.
Along with helping blighted communities, they also provided predatory loans for poor blacks in those communities while giving sweetheart loans to connected white folks.
It makes some sense to hide nefarious activities in non-profits; it’s the last place most would look.
Since April, one main thing has bothered me about OWO. It seems that it provides an exorbitant salary to its founder, Bryan Mineo. Below is part of a deposition Mineo did in 2021.
He suggests that this non-profit, which he started in 2019, pays him $150,000 yearly.
It turns out that this was not accurate. His attorney, Raj Matani, reached out to me to demand a correction.
Raj even threatened to sue me, arguing my screenshots of his client’s deposition amounted to defamation.
That turned out to be a bluff, but Mineo’s compensation continues to be hard to nail down.
In the most recent deposition from November, he stated that his income was about $42,000 through July before falling precipitously.
This seems like a reasonable salary, except for one thing: how much did OWO raise?
That’s not entirely clear.
(Mineo blamed me, claiming my “smear campaign” caused the reduction in fundraising)
This is no small thing. Mineo has represented that he makes as much as $150,000 yearly- what the top one percent of non-profit proprietors make- while offering numerous different numbers all while being unable to ever state just how much the non-profit has raised.
Fortunately, OWO is a 501 ©3 which means it is required to release its tax returns, known as 990s.
Unfortunately, there are no 990s published on Guidestar.org, which publishes all the 990s for non-profits in the US.
Mineo claimed during the deposition that the 990s for 2021 had recently been filed.
Those tax returns are not listed- as of publication- on Guidestar and neither are the tax returns for 2020.
That’s very important because the tax returns would show if this is much ado about nothing, or if I’m right that his salary is exorbitant.
I reached out to Raj to clear things up but received no response.
It’s nice that Mineo is bringing people together through swimming and cleaning beaches but he’s not the only one.
Revolution Aquatics does something similar, and it is entirely volunteer. They raised nothing, according to their financial statements.
Trident Swim Foundation is another non-profit OWO partners with. Their head made far less than Mineo.
Trident brought in almost $300,000 in the last year-2020- which taxes were available.
As a 501©3, OWO is required to make their tax returns public: that’s one of the duties required in exchange for not paying taxes. That doesn’t seem to be happening and that’s not acceptable, even if it teaches swimming in the inner cities and cleans up beaches.
The full deposition is below.
Post-Script
Check out the previous articles in this series: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4. Article 5, Article 6, Article 7, and Article 8.
Check out the new fundraiser to help investigate more non-profits which don’t receive enough scrutiny.