An eccentric Republican billionaire contemplates his next move.

Recently, Foster Friess, a 71-year-old billionaire, was on a hunting trip in Tanzania when he heard that there was a 14-foot crocodile in the vicinity. “The natives had told us where it was,” Friess recounted to me over the phone. He and his party set out to track it down, but, when they approached the giant reptile on a sandbar, it caught their scent and slid into the water.

Friess and company piled into a tiny boat and searched the river. Hours later, they found the crocodile sunning himself on a bank. Friess aimed, fired, and killed it. A few days after we spoke, he sent me a picture of himself with the crocodile. It shows a white-haired man dwarfed by the massive animal, which is sprawled out on the dusty bank, its jaw propped open with a stick to reveal its jagged white teeth.

When Friess returned home to the United States, it was to a pursuit even more far-fetched than killing giant crocodiles—trying to get Rick Santorum elected president. Friess is responsible for $331,000 of the $730,000 raised by Santorum’s Super PAC, the Red White and Blue Fund. He has also kicked in a third of the $150,000 raised by Leaders for Families, another pro-Santorum Super PAC. Friess has promised to keep the spigot open until the February 28 Michigan primary, if not beyond.

Rich eccentrics are nothing new in politics. But, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the unlimited Super PAC donations it allows, these eccentrics can now sustain campaigns that would have otherwise dropped out of view long ago. Newt Gingrich has Las Vegas magnate Sheldon Adelson; Ron Paul has PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Santorum has Friess. And, no matter what ultimately happens in the GOP presidential primaries, Friess is already beginning to contemplate which races he might be able to influence next.

FOSTER FRIESS GREW UP in the small Wisconsin town of Rice Lake, where his father was a cattle dealer. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1962, Friess joined the Army and married college beauty queen Lynnette Estes. They kept a tight budget; Lynn sewed her own clothes and cut her husband’s hair.