WASHINGTON -- As nearby tourists debated the color of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Thursday afternoon, Greenwater Services President Chas Antinone Jr. bent down, scooped a plastic bottle through the surface, and held it up to the sun.
"It's not going to get much better than that," Antinone said, admiring the water's crystal appearance.
Until recently, Greenwater Services was an obscure water-treatment company in rural Ohio, with the lowest of corporate profiles. Antinone is one of three full-time employees. His personal cellphone number was on the website.
Then President Trump sought to renovate the pool for America's 250th birthday this week and ended up with slimy green algae blooms that clouded its waters. Greenwater -- a company partly owned by one of Trump's friends, John "J.J." Cafaro -- earlier had gotten a no-bid, $1.7 million contract to clean it up. Cafaro is a twice-convicted federal felon, who admitted in the early 2000s to bribing a U.S. congressman to secure federal contracts.
Over the past week Greenwater became a punchline for late-night monologues, and Antinone scrubbed his phone number from the internet after being inundated with angry voicemails accusing him of swimming in corrupt public cash.
"We've got nothing to hide," Antinone said during an hourlong interview, speaking about his company's role in the administration's effort to give the historic pool a face-lift. By the end of the week, the multicolored water had largely turned clear and fencing had started to go up around it in preparation for the July 4 fireworks.
When asked about Cafaro's involvement, Antinone looked at his spokeswoman.
"He's just an Ohio businessman that invested in an Ohio company," said the spokeswoman, Erin Kramer. "That's kind of the extent of his involvement." Cafaro didn't return calls for comment.
The startup company, which says it has completed about 15 jobs in three states, uses proprietary water-purification technology that includes a contraption the size of a small trailer. The technology's hoses and nozzles can pump out ozone in microscopic nanobubbles that don't float and can spread more widely through water than the gas's traditional form.
Greenwater got the reflecting-pool contract in April and deployed its technology by June. It also landed another no-bid federal contract last August to test its technology on the sewage-choked Tijuana River in San Diego County, California. It was part of a cross-border effort to stem the flow of as much as 30 million gallons of sewage a day from Tijuana, a border metropolis whose waste infrastructure hasn't kept up with growth.
The pollution has often made local U.S. beaches unsafe for swimming and has been tied to headaches, lung irritation and other symptoms in places such as Imperial Beach, Calif., where officials have distributed thousands of air purifiers to residents.
The U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, an agency that operates under foreign-policy guidance of the State Department, agreed to pay Greenwater as much as $2.5 million as part of a pilot project to test its technology on the Tijuana River.
Some scientists and local officials raised doubts about whether the experimental technology was a viable option.
"I really don't think the ozone will do any good unless you are able to ozonate the entire flow," Douglas Liden, an environmental engineer with the Environmental Protection Agency's border office, wrote in a May 2025 email to another researcher.
"I also think the first storm will wash out any equipment you install...," he added. Liden, whose email was obtained from a nonprofit group's public-information request, didn't respond to a request for comment.
The commission, overseen by a Trump appointee, said it agreed to a rare no-bid contract for the Tijuana River project because it has "a responsibility to think creatively and evaluate every credible tool that can bring relief to the Americans living with this crisis now."
The pilot project ended early, and Greenwater earned about $1.1 million, after a storm last October did indeed wash away its machines. The commission said Friday that the project demonstrated its capability to kill bacteria and eliminate odors related to the sewage, but that the equipment and project design would have to be modified to work on unpredictable river flows. Antinone agreed, saying the project would need a significant increase in size and scope to have an impact on the river.
An Ohio native, Greenwater investor Cafaro is the scion of the family-owned Cafaro Co., one of the largest shopping-center developers in the U.S. In 2002, Cafaro was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery after he testified to giving a congressman $13,000 in cash and other favors in the hopes of winning federal contracts for an aerospace company his daughter led.
Eight years later, Cafaro pleaded guilty to a second felony, making a false statement to the government, in relation to a loan he gave to a staffer for his daughter's failed campaign for Congress -- a loan that he later concealed from government investigators. The daughter, Capri Cafaro, declined to comment.
In 2016, Cafaro donated $50,000 to a televised fundraiser hosted by Trump, earning a shout-out from the future president, who called him "a man who made a lot of money in Cleveland."
Cafaro's trust is listed on federal contracting records as Greenwater's owner. Its corporate records in Florida list Cafaro's home in Palm Beach County, near Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, as its address.
Cafaro has at times pitched Greenwater's business. After a local Florida news report about contamination in the Loxahatchee River about five years ago, Cafaro called an official with the river district in Jupiter, Fla., Bud Howard. "He said, 'We have a company I think can fix that,' " Howard said in an interview. Greenwater ran some tests that worked in 250-gallon containers, but didn't meaningfully clean up the river, Howard said.
The White House and the National Park Service have denied that Cafaro or anyone at the White House played any role in Greenwater landing its recent federal contracts.
Antinone and Kramer, the spokeswoman, have been a regular presence near the pool since it became the focus of international attention, pleading with reporters to highlight how, as the week wore on, the company's treatment seemed to work and the water cleared.
When Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D., Va.) visited the pool last week, scuba mask in hand, to attempt to film a humorous TikTok video about the saga, Kramer made a cameo touting the environmentally friendly nature of Greenwater's treatment.
A water-quality researcher at Ohio State University, Heather Raymond, said Greenwater's technology shows promise.
"This little tiny company is suddenly out there in the national spotlight. But they have a good technology," Raymond said.
Write to Will Hobson at Will.Hobson@wsj.com and Jim Carlton at Jim.Carlton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 28, 2026 18:00 ET (22:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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