Billionaire Donors Hide Behind Velvet Curtain at Republican Convention

When oil and chemical baron David Koch took his seat among the throngs of Republican grassroots activists on the convention floor in Tampa this week, he was making a rare appearance on behalf of the small group of wealthy donors who are bankrolling a good portion of Mitt Romney's bid for president.

For the past several days in Tampa, Koch has been the exception. Most of the deep-pocketed donors -- the ones fundraising consultants call "the whales" -- have spent the convention largely out of sight.

 Unlike Koch, they have watched the parade of speakers at the convention podium from high above, in a vast luxury skybox on the fourth and fifth levels of the Tampa Times Forum. Their box was cordoned off by ropes and blocked from public view by a velvet curtain.

"It's where we are in American politics," Lewis said. "We have billionaires giving unprecedented sums and we have levels of secrecy never seen in the contemporary historic era."

 Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who has been tracking money in the 2012 elections, said he has calculated that 47 individual Americans have given 42 percent of the money in this year's presidential campaign. "We have never had an election, in the last hundred years, that has had this type of money," he said.

That phenomenon has been most evident with a group of $1 million supporters of the Romney campaign called the "Victory Council." While the Romney campaign has kept the identities of his top-level fundraising team a secret, ABC News has been able to track their movements throughout the convention, and has slowly begun to identify them

Among those spotted by ABC News was Wilbur Ross, a Palm Beach billionaire who oversees the private equity firm W.L. Ross and Co. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that Ross has given $470,000 in contributions in his time as a political donor.

 On Wednesday, the group gathered aboard a 150-foot yacht moored at St. Petersburg Municipal Marina. Those attending included Ron Weiser, the campaign's national finance chairman and the former ambassador to Slovakia under President George W. Bush, Virginia developer Bob Pence, independent oil and gas producer Charles Moncrief, Georgia-based investment advisor Greg Schwartz, Sr., and Richard W. Boyce, a former Bain colleague of Romney's.

The billionaire delegate from New York was equally restrained with his remarks around reporters on the convention floor. Earlier this year, Huffington Post reported that he (Koch) told a conservative gathering in California that he would commit $10 million to seeing President Obama defeated.