Guma Aguiar. Photo: Eli Segal.

Multiple interviews conducted by Matthew DeLuca at The Daily Beast shed more light into the life of Guma Aguiar, the Floridian millionaire who gave millions to Jewish charities and disappeared earlier this year after his boat washed ashore in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Aguiar’s investments in professional sports teams, his battle with bipolar disorder, and his strained relationship with his billionaire uncle, Thomas Kaplan, are all well featured in DeLuca’s piece.

Jerry Levine, a friend of Aguiar and a filmmaker who was working with Guma on a documentary before he disappeared said that part of Aguiar’s investments in professional sports teams, including a professional basketball club in Jerusalem, were aimed at becoming a force for good in a region full of conflict.

“Once you’re the owner of a team, people listen to you, and once you’ve got that platform, you’re a public figure,” Levine said. “His vision was to become an ambassador of goodwill using sports.”

DeLuca notes Aguiar’s struggle with bipolar disorder, which according to state documents in Florida, show that Aguiar suffered from “manic highs and deep depressive lows”.

Court documents seen by DeLuca state that Aguiar once believed “he has been poisoned, that he was shot in the back from a helicopter, that snipers have been following him and that the medical staff at an Israeli hospital were injecting him with poison in order to kill him.”

Aguiar’s relationship with his uncle, Thomas Kaplan, a billionaire investor and philanthropist is also well documented in DeLuca’s piece.  The relationship helped make Aguiar millions of dollars when the two invested in a natural gas field in Texas and then sold it for $2.55 billion.  After the sale, the relationship between Aguiar and his uncle soured, including multiple lawsuits between the two.

“His uncle is a ruthless man who would do anything to preserve a few dollars,” said Alan Dershowitz,  a friend and legal adviser to Aguiar, according to DeLuca.

According to Levine however, when stress related to his marriage or outstanding legal issues began to increase, Aguiar “would start slipping.”

Aguiar has not been found since his disappearance in mid-June.