The latest twist in the saga of Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii estate has left a family decrying the power of the Facebook billionaire to separate them from their ancestral lands.
In March, the family members were able to block their distant cousin from buying one of four small parcels of land up for auction on the island of Kauai. The outcome was shocking because that distant cousin, retired professor Carlos Andrade, had the backing of Zuckerberg, whose 700-acre estate fully surrounds the disputed parcels.
But on Tuesday, the rules of the universe reasserted themselves. At a court hearing to finalize the outcome of the March auction, Andrade was able to reopen the bidding and win the title to all four of the parcels for a total of $2,145,000.
“The family is devastated,” said Wayne Rapozo, the leader of the group of relatives who were trying to outbid their billionaire-backed cousin, in an email to the Guardian. Rapozo described the bidding process as “a front for fraud and deceit against the Rapozo family” and said that the case “violates fairly basic notions of justice in Hawaii and the United States”.
The final outcome more than doubles the amount that Andrade appeared able to pay in March, when he bid a total of $1,060,000 for three of the parcels, and failed to outbid Rapozo’s offer of $700,000 for the fourth. Details of Tuesday’s bidding were reported in the Garden Island newspaper.
The dispute between Andrade, Rapozo and Zuckerberg has its roots in Hawaii’s complicated history of land ownership. The four parcels, known as kuleana, were purchased by a Portuguese immigrant, Manuel Rapozo, in 1882, and passed on to his seven children when he died intestate in 1928.
By the time Zuckerberg purchased the surrounding acres in 2014, the title to the four parcels was divided between hundreds of descendants. Among them was Andrade, who claims to be the only family member to have ever lived on or cared for the parcels – a claim other family members dispute.
Zuckerberg filed a series of lawsuits in 2016 in an attempt to find all the claimants to kuleana inside his estate and buy out their shares, ensuring his privacy. Following intense local and international backlash to the suits, which were viewed by many Hawaiians as consistent with a long history of colonialism and dispossession, Zuckerberg dropped the lawsuits but said he would support Andrade’s continuing efforts to gain control over the four Rapozo family parcels.
Those efforts culminated with the public auction and Tuesday’s hearing. Litigation will continue, however, as Rapozo and another of the family “holdouts” have filed a separate claim alleging that Andrade’s alleged cooperation with Zuckerberg was improper.
“Unexplained wealth or purchase habits grossly different from normal means and habits usually raise money laundering and foul play issues,” said Rapozo, who grew up on Kauai and now lives and works in London as a corporate attorney. “In the UK, I would not be able to take on a client seeking to purchase a property or business in excess of a rational review of their wealth or earning history.”
Representatives for Andrade and Zuckerberg did not immediately respond to queries from the Guardian asking whether Zuckerberg or his affiliated companies had been the source of funds for Andrade’s bids.
Added Rapozo: “I want our kupuna [elders] to know their legacies matter and I want the Rapozo children to know that there is nobility in a principled defense even if painful and overwhelming.”
