He left Haiti at 21 and went on to build the largest black-owned business in Texas. He became a multimillionaire, wealthy enough to bring his brothers and sisters to the United States and fund their college educations.

Now he wants to return to Haiti as president, an ambition that has landed him in a fight to keep his name on the ballot and himself out of jail.

“This is not about Dumas Simeus,” he said from his hotel room in Port Au Prince, Haiti. “This is about getting the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere out of poverty, giving people hope and taking away their misery.”

In the country of about 8 million people, more than half the adults can’t read and the minimum wage is about $1.70 a day. Haiti’s lawlessness and corrupt government, beset by coups and street-level justice, has prompted the U.S. State Department to issue regular travel warnings.

Three months ago Simeus declared his candidacy, joining 33 others in the race. Critics challenged him, saying his campaign violated Haiti’s constitution, which requires candidates to have citizenship. Simeus, 66, said he never renounced his citizenship after moving to the United States.

The Haitian Supreme Court recently ruled that Simeus could place his name on the ballot, but he still faces election council challenges to his candidacy and a threat of prosecution alleging false candidacy claims on election papers.

In South Florida, where about 300,000 Haitians looking for a safer home have settled in the past 25 years, Miami radio host Ed Lozama said Simeus’s presidential pursuit has kept his station’s phone lines jammed, with people divided on his candidacy.

“To build what he has, I’m sure he is a man who can do the kind of consensus building that Haiti needs; I don’t doubt that,” Lozama said. “But here is a Haitian who made it happen for himself, someone we held in high esteem until he decided to do this. All I’m saying is let’s do it right, the way the constitution says.”

Simeus’s ascent in the business world began in the early 1960s when his family sold some land so he could fly to the United States to pursue a college education. He left a country that drew lines between light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks, marking them as privileged or poor, and arrived in the United States when the nation was steeped in civil rights struggles.

He attended predominantly black Howard University in Washington. Simeus, who speaks four languages, earned an electrical engineering degree, then an MBA from the University of Chicago.

While working his way up the corporate ladder with companies such as Atari Inc., Benedix Corp., and Hartz Pet Food, he brought his nine surviving brothers and sisters to the United States and financed their education.

In 1984, Simeus started working for TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc., the $2.1 billion, black-owned food processing and distribution company. He served as president for two years before leaving in 1992 to buy and run his own business.

With $55 million financing, Simeus bought Portion-Trol Foods from Flagstar Corp in 1996 and renamed it Simeus Foods International Inc. The food processing business, based south of Fort Worth, now generates $155 million a year.

Simeus established a non-profit foundation in 1999 to provide medical care, education and clothing to Haitians. Last year, he served on a Haitian advisory group for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. A group of about 40 U.S.-based Haitian business and civic leaders began to push him to run for president.

“My country is living in misery with no jobs, no health care, no potable water and hardly any school for the children,” Simeus said. “It’s a country which is destroyed by corruption and it needs my help to put together a team of qualified men and women to turn things around.”

Marie Bell, who led the advisory committee, grew to admire Simeus when they worked together, but she disapproves of his current efforts.

“We’ve been fighting for rule of law and he wants to make his own rules,” Bell said. “This is chaos. He is not helping.”

Others say it is a crucial step toward democracy.

“We didn’t just encourage him to run, we begged him to run,” said New York pathologist May Parisien, one of those who asked him to run. “He’s achieved a level of success in an unfriendly environment all of his life and he can do that in Haiti to get it started on the right track.”

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A7.