"Trump knew he couldn't outbid the Canadians," Caputo recounted to me recently. Instead, Caputo explained, he would scare them off by turning Buffalo against them. Two days after we spoke, the president took the stage at a political rally in Alabama and began his smoldering feud with the NFL by calling any player who showed the temerity to kneel during the national anthem a "son of a bitch."

Having been publicly involved with abortive efforts to launch Trump into New York's gubernatorial race the year before, Caputo was too closely associated with the mogul to be the public face of the 2014 effort, so he recruited others. "I had it all set up with neighborhood guys who lived by the stadium," he explained.

"We weren't even allowed to mention [Trump's] name because of the agreement that he signed."

In a stroke of cunning, Caputo recruited Chuck Sonntag, a double amputee cancer survivor, to serve as the group's leader. Press coverage would occasionally identify Caputo as a "PR consultant" to the group, while reporting that it was founded by Sonntag as he lay recovering from his amputations in a rehabilitation center. "It was easier for Sonntag to lose his leg than his team," Caputo recalled.

(Astroturfing like this—covertly funding a supposedly grassroots group—was not a new tactic for Trump and his operatives. Back in 2000, Stone and Trump's Atlantic City casino business paid massive fines after they funneled $150,000 to a group called "the Institute for Law and Society" to run newspaper ads opposing the legalization of a Native American casino in the Catskills and failed to disclose the transaction to New York's lobbying regulators.)

Trump's involvement in the Buffalo scheme was short-lived. According to Caputo, not long after 12th Man Thunder was formed, Trump entered a $1 billion bid for the Bills, and as a condition of that offer, was forbidden from participating in public outreach efforts related to the sale. So, as Caputo recalls, Trump called him and told him that he had to break off contact with him and the fan group. "I can't talk to you anymore because of the NDA I signed," Caputo remembers Trump saying. "Have a good time."

"We immediately made it far more aggressive and anti-Toronto than the president ever envisioned, mostly because we didn't have to worry about getting him crossways with the NFL,"

Charlie Pellien, a Buffalo local who co-founded the group said that keeping a lid on Trump's involvement was a challenge. "It was all behind the scenes and we weren't even allowed to mention his name because of the agreement that he signed," Pellien told me. "I was bursting at the seams to tell people, 'Hey, this was Donald Trump's idea.'"

With Trump having removed himself from the picture, Caputo took the gloves off. "We immediately made it far more aggressive and anti-Toronto than the president ever envisioned, mostly because we didn't have to worry about getting him crossways with the NFL," he said.

The group gathered thousands of signatures for a petition demanding the team remain in Buffalo and started a "Ban Bon Jovi" movement to rid upstate New York of the New Jersey rocker's music. A local radio station, Jack FM, started playing a version of "Livin' on a Prayer" with new lyrics that went, "Johnny used to get played on Jack / Now he wants our Bills / But Buffalo just won't take that / He's wack."

It generated so much noise and color that Texas A&M, which has trademarked the phrase "12th man" took notice and sent a cease-and-desist letter to the group over its use of the phrase.

Unbowed, Caputo generated a raft of coverage of the dispute that amounted to: Texas A&M threatens double amputee cancer survivor with lawsuit.

The conflict caught the notice of Keith Olbermann, who in July of that year dubbed the university's then-president, Dr. Mark A. Hussey, "The World's Worst Person in Sports" for taking on Sonntag. "Screw you!" Olbermann declared in a segment about the controversy on his eponymous ESPN show. (Olbermann is now GQ's Special Correspondent and host of "The Resistance")

"It changed everything," said Caputo, recalling that immediately after the school landed in Olbermann's crosshairs, he received a call from one of its attorneys looking to broker peace. Feeling emboldened, Caputo said he wouldn't settle with the university unless they gave money to his group, to help them keep the Bills in Buffalo.