ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.

Fazal Fazlin has an American story. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he came to the United States in 1969 with an engineering degree and little else. Now he lives on a five-acre estate in the waterfront mansion that once belonged to Nelson Poynter, luminary of the newspaper business.

Poynter, who died in 1978, was the owner of The St. Petersburg Times, a bastion of journalistic excellence and liberal tradition.

Liberalism was never Fazlin’s thing. For most of his rags-to-riches American life, he was a Nixon Republican.

“I felt Nixon was a great President,” Fazlin, a dapper 58, told me. “He opened relations with China, and that’s what kept inflation down. He had a really good command of the world.”