Mike Galesi is a successful businessman and entrepreneur from the New York metropolitan area. He runs a commercial real estate business that began three generations ago. He and his partners now own and operate properties up and down the eastern seaboard where they redevelop strip shopping centers and office buildings. In addition, he is a musician/songwriter and producer of original music, which has always been one of the great passions in his life.

Another passion of his is nature – spending as much time as he can kayaking, wilderness camping, and scuba diving. For many years he has been actively researching and contacting various conservation groups that he could become involved with, and ended-up finding that many of these conservation organizations have very high overheads with little or no actual results. It was only after learning about Sea Shepherd and Paul Watson that he knew that this was the organization he could fully get behind. For years he has been committed to do whatever he could to keep the Sea Shepherd fleet in the water and help the organization meet the challenges in front of them.