In 2001, Gelbaum branched out with two back-to-back anonymous gifts to the Sierra Club Foundation that dwarfed all previous individual contributions to the club. The $101.5 million in donations led to a 10-fold increase in the club's Youth in Wilderness programs and expansion of many other club activities.
But the windfall caused a stir internally. Gelbaum's identity, known only to a few Sierra Club officials, became an issue in a bitter struggle for control of the club's board of directors.
A slate of candidates, which wanted the club to call for tighter controls on immigration to stabilize the U.S. population and its impact on the environment, demanded to know the source of the donations. The candidates contended that the club's leadership opposed their election partly because of pressure brought by the secret donor.
"Is this foreign money? Is it money that comes with special obligations? I would want to know I'm not running a laundry or being a front group for an entity that doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart," said former Colorado Gov. David Lamm.
Lamm and other like-minded candidates were soundly defeated in a vote of club members last April, and the source of the money was not revealed. But clues surfaced during the flap.
A Sierra Club official let slip a comment about a pair of unnamed brothers. That and other bits of information led The Times to Gelbaum, who, with his brother, Daniel, sat on the Wildlands Conservancy's board of directors, along with Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope.
David Gelbaum insisted that he played no role in the election. He dismissed allegations that he is calling the shots at the club in any other way.
"None of that is true," he said. "I'm not some Svengali. I'm not that engaged."
But he said Pope long had known where he stood on the contentious issue. "I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."
Gelbaum said he was a substantial donor at the time but not yet the club's largest benefactor. Immigration arose as an issue in 1994 because Proposition 187, which threatened to deny public education and health care to illegal immigrants, was on the state's ballot.
He said he was so upset by the idea of "pulling kids out of school" that he donated more than $180,000 to the campaign to oppose Proposition 187. After the measure passed, he said, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to civil rights lawyers who ultimately got the measure struck down in court.
