who is Ron Burkle anyway?
You may not have noticed 50-year-old Burkle at the Democratic convention last week. He didn’t speak, but his presence spoke volumes. He spent four days at the convention in a luxury suite, entertaining Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Cusack and Combs. Indeed, Burkle presided over the one and only meeting between Affleck and Combs, now members of the Jennifer Lopez Former-Fiancé-and-Husband Hall of Fame. (But, according to a source, many tried crashing the Burkle suite, including Christie Hefner, daughter of Hugh. “She just showed up and brought a lot of people,” says my insider. None of them were bunnies.) But Burkle, who’s given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrats over the last several years, seems to be, if not behind, then influential in Citizen Change. Burkle is, famously, the largest supplier of ingredients to McDonald’s through his Golden State Foods. He is also the largest grocer in the U.S., thanks to his ownership of Kroger. (Excerp
