What Is the Order of the Mantic Syndicate and Why Is It Running for the United States House?
According to a recent filing with the FEC, a Williston man named Matthew Austin Gullo is running for the United States House of Representatives.
He isn’t affiliating himself with a political party at this point, but on his statement of candidacy form he indicates a campaign committee called (rather disjointedly) Friends of Committee Elect Matthew Gullo (I’ve obscured Gullo’s address, which appears to be a residence, in these screenshots though it’s a matter of public record filed with the FEC):
There is no corresponding filing for that committee with the FEC. There is, however, a committee called The Order of the Mantic Syndicate which was created by Gullo and, per its organizing filing (read below), is affiliated with the Frends of Committee Elect Matthew Gullo.
What is the Mantic Syndicate? I have no idea, and a phone call/email to Mr. Gullo and an agent named in his FEC filings (one Mrs. Brittany Rachelle Good) earlier this week have so far have not been returned. I also sent messages to Facebook profiles which appeared to be for Mr. Gullo and Mrs. Good which did not get an immediate response.
The nearest thing I could find by way of a Google search was a board game company in the United Kingdom.
I was able to find a 2014 news article out of Taft, California, about a Matthew Austin Gullo being arrested in a stabbing incident. That Matthew Gullo was ultimately released – he claimed it was self defense and the man stabbed reportedly wouldn’t cooperate with law enforcement – and I can’t confirm if it’s the same Matthew Austin Gullo who is now living in Williston and running for the U.S. House.
It’s worth noting that the financial institution named in the filing for the Mantic committee is Green Dot Bank out of Pasadena, California. A city which is about a two hour drive from Taft where the aforementioned stabbing incident took place.
At this point the only other candidate in North Dakota’s U.S. House race is incumbent Republican Kelly Armstrong who hasn’t yet officially announced re-election but is almost certainly running for another term.
