Hedge-funder Louis Bacon (bottom right) is battling apparel magnate Peter Nygard over his over-the-top Bahamian estate, Nygard Cay. (Photo: Getty Images (top left), Patrick McMullan (bottom right), Privateislandsonline.com)

One is the Donald Trump of Canada: a billionaire known for seriously puffy hair, a penchant for plastering his last name on garish buildings, and the hurling of ruthless claims against any and all enemies.

The other is also a billionaire, a square-jawed and physically imposing hedge-funder who rarely gives interviews and wields power from the shadows.

For eight years now, the self-made apparel king Peter Nygard and the financial tycoon Louis Bacon have been locked in a wild battle over a strip of land on Nassau in the Bahamas — bringing in, along the way, Louis Farrakhan, Sean Connery, the Ku Klux Klan and claims of multiple homicide, drug trafficking, arson, insider training and terrorism.

In a complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court this year, Bacon demanded that a jury hear his case against Nygard. Both men’s companies are headquartered in New York, and in his filing, Bacon alleges that Nygard has spent the past four years engaged in a “systematic, reprehensible and outrageous” smear campaign.

Among the claims Nygard or his proxies have made, according to the filing:

•     Bacon has murdered several people and covered up all evidence.
•     Bacon belongs to the KKK and is a white supremacist.
•     Bacon has been charged in one of the biggest insider-trading cases of all time.
•     Bacon is the leader of an ­international drug cartel.
•     Bacon has stockpiled terrorist weaponry at his Bahamas estate.
•      Bacon burned down ­Nygard’s Bahamas estate.

According to court documents, the battle began in 2010 when Nygard wanted to expand his estate. Bacon objected.

And off they went, tearing at each other in ways large and small, complaints and grievances culminating in Bacon’s $100 million defamation suit against ­Nygard. Bacon declined to comment for this article, but a representative said the reclusive billionaire had no choice but to publicly refute “a smear campaign of this magnitude and intent.”

Bacchus in Bahamas
Nygard, 74, was born in Finland. His parents immigrated to Canada when he was a child, and he has often claimed he grew up in a 15-by-13-foot converted coal bin with no running water or electricity. He studied business at the University of North Dakota, then returned to Canada, where he bought a small women’s-apparel company for less than $10,000 and turned it into a near-billion-dollar business.

Nygard has eight children by five women, dated the late Anna Nicole Smith from 1998 to 2001 and has kept company with Pamela Anderson. In 2014, he told the Bahamas Tribune he was aging in reverse, thanks to the stem-cell treatment he was undergoing.

“The University of Miami is . . . looking at me,” he said, “and my markers have shown exactly that I have actually been reversing my age and getting younger.”

Nygard has lived in the Bahamas since 1987, building a 150,000-square-foot mansion replete with Mayan-inspired statues, a helipad, fake smoking volcanos, a glass ceiling weighing 100,000 pounds, a casino, a disco — with cameras under the dance floor to shoot women from below — and, according to a 2010 Forbes magazine article, a human aquarium. (A rep for Nygard denies there was ever a human aquarium.)

Visitors to the estate, renamed Nygard Cay, have included Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Robert De Niro, Prince Andrew and George H.W. Bush. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” devoted a segment to the house, and the billionaire became known for his regular Sunday-afternoon “pamper parties.” Nygard was often accompanied by topless women, here and on his private jet, which is emblazoned with his name.

“We have been running these parties for about 15 years,” ­Nygard said in a deposition cited by Forbes. “We start sports activities in the afternoon and play beach volleyball and have dinner and a bit of karaoke and dancing and massaging.”

These Nygard Cay bacchanals were hugely aggravating to ­Bacon, who bought the adjacent property in 2007.

After years of complaints about loud music yielded nothing, Bacon bought four Meyer Sound speakers in October 2009 and blasted ear-shattering music over the edge — sort of the way the US forced Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1990.

Nygard called police, claiming Bacon was in possession of terrorist-grade weaponry. The Bahamian anti-terrorist squad raided Bacon’s estate and, according to Bacon’s filing, cuffed his staff and confiscated items belonging to his wife and children. (No military-grade weapons were found.)

Lurid accusations
In court documents, Bacon cites a Canadian documentary that claimed Nygard turned his beachfront estate into a “mini-brothel” where he persuades ­underage girls to have sex with him. Allegations about his treatment of women and his business practices were also covered in that documentary and a devastating 2010 Forbes profile titled “Peter Nygard Answers to No One.”

In it, Nygard is portrayed as a draconian boss who fined low-level house staff $25 for being late or leaving dirty glasses outside. A stewardess on his private plane claimed the tycoon once threw a fit midair, his robe hanging open. “You are nothing!” he yelled at a crew member. “You are garbage! I am God! Do you not understand?”

Nygard has denied the incident.

He also settled three sexual-harassment suits in the 1990s, and in 1980 a Canadian newspaper reported that Nygard had been charged in the rape of an 18-year-old girl. The charges were dropped when she refused to testify. Nygard blames police overreach, the paper reported, though his representatives later claimed no knowledge of this accusation.

In 2008, an ex-girlfriend filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court. According to Forbes, she claimed Nygard intentionally slammed a door shut on her hand. He settled that case as well.

“These assertions are totally false,” a representative for Nygard tells The Post. “Mr. Nygard has never abused anyone.”

One year later, in November 2009, the bulk of Nygard Cay was destroyed in a fire. In his filing, Bacon alleges that Nygard planted stories accusing him of arson, citing a 2014 Daily Mail article that said Bacon told his groundskeeper, Dan Tuckfield, now dead, to “find a way to burn Mr. Nygard’s f- -king house down.”

Nygard maintains Bacon had something to do with it. “The burn was complete and instantaneous and of suspicious origin,” a Nygard rep tells The Post.

Nygard also claims Bacon hired Tuckfield to take Bacon’s cigarette boat and plant $67,000 worth of cocaine on Nygard’s beachfront — a plot foiled when the coke washed back up to Bacon’s residence. Bacon denies this, as well as Nygard’s assertions that Tuckfield’s death — he was found dead in Bacon’s pool — was “suspicious given that he was an expert swimmer who had previously survived a plane crash in the ocean, miles offshore.”

The coroner found Tuckfield, who had a history of coronary disease, died from a heart attack.

Bad neighbors
Bacon, 59, was born and raised in North Carolina, the son of a real estate exec. He got his MBA from Columbia and founded the hedge fund Moore Capital Management. Twice married and a father of seven, he is reportedly worth $1.75 billion.

But his own record isn’t spotless: In April 2010, Moore was fined $25 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission after one of its traders allegedly manipulated the metals market. (That trader was based in London, and Fortune magazine reported the trades were made from a personal account, not Moore’s.)

Bacon owns property on Robins Island in Long Island’s Peconic Bay, and in Panama, New Mexico and North Carolina. He also has a grouse moor in Scotland, a hunting estate in England and a $175 million ranch in Colorado.

It’s the property in the Bahamas — and his neighbor’s accusations — that remain Bacon’s bête noire. He believes Nygard has recklessly overbuilt and artificially extended his shoreline, causing ecological damage. Bacon is an environmentalist and supporter of the local group Save the Bays. In 2014, Sean Connery, also a Bahamian resident, joined a lawsuit to stop Nygard from rebuilding.

That year, Bacon says, Nygard staged hate rallies in the Bahamas, with dozens of people marching through Nassau carrying signs reading “Louis KKK ­Bacon.” Nygard even flew Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan down to the Bahamas on his private plane to give a speech ­denouncing Bacon.

Nygard insists Bacon is a white supremacist. “There is documentation that Mr. Bacon’s great-grandfather was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Wilmington [NC],” his rep tells The Post. “Unlike Mr. Bacon, Mr. Nygard has opened his home to black ­Bahamians for years.”

Other claims in ­Bacon’s court papers: Nygard altered CBS and ABC news footage to depict Bacon as guilty of insider trading; Nygard paid for billboards depicting Bacon as a racist; Nygard’s employees attacked one of Bacon’s lawyers and dismantled Bacon’s security gates.

No complaint is too small. Among the grievances in Bacon’s filing: In July 2012, “Nygard caused his agents to elevate the gradient of the roadway on Mr. Bacon’s property by laying an additional layer of asphalt without Mr. Bacon’s consent.”

Truce or dare
This past week, Nygard published an open letter to Bacon in two Bahamian newspapers. He asked for a “global resolution” to years of “bickering, fighting and suing” and said he would be happy to settle out of court. Bacon and his family, said a representative, no longer spend time in the Bahamas, but Bacon will not settle.

“Louis Bacon has no choice since his name has been dragged through the mud and Nygard is unrepentant,” the rep said.

Perhaps — but Nygard can admit one thing. He wrote that, without a settlement, the legal battle “could last for years to come because — if we are all being honest with ourselves. . . this is at least partially fueled by pride and a clash of egos.”

By: Maureen Callahan | NYPost.com