The Mansurs sponsored the Marlboro Red Tigers baseball team as well as the Aruban People's Party (Arubaanse Volkspartij, AVP) of former Prime Minister Henny Eman.
For over 50 years, Philip Morris' main distributor in Latin America was the Mansur Free Zone Trading Company, NV.
One of Philip Morris' main distributors within Colombia was Samuel Santander Lopesierra, at one time a senator in the Liberal Party.
Dubbed "the Marlboro Man" by the Colombian media, in reference to his alleged cigarette smuggling activities, Lopesierra is named in a U.S. federal court affidavit filed in conjunction with the Mansur money-laundering indictment.
[3][6][7] In that affidavit, an FBI agent working undercover says he was told by one of the original defendants in the Mansur indictment, that Lopesierra was part of a scheme to convert narco dollars into shipments of goods bound for Colombia.
Lopesierra and his group were responsible for smuggling shipments of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into the United States, and for laundering the proceeds so they could be repatriated through Puerto Rico, New York, and Miami back to Colombia.
The Mansurs subsequently were awarded a monopoly for Colombian gambling, which was canceled in 1997 by a government watchdog agency that smelled impropriety.
A source close to the family said the two sides agreed to a $422 million settlement and that the Mansurs continue to work with Philip Morris' non-tobacco product lines.
[19][20] As a writer, editor and translator Mansur was involved in a number of publications over a 35-year period ranging from an English–Papiamento dictionary to a History of Aruba to psychological historical romance and fiction, to Aruban republications and Papiamento translations of classics of English and world literature, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Hans Christian Andersen and Alexandre Dumas.