Red Scorpian

=http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/09/movies/south-africa-helps-us-film-makers-in-namibia-with-troops-and-trucks.html<h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 19px; line-height: 1.083em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">South Africa Helps U.S. Film Makers In Namibia With Troops and Trucks</h1><div class="byline" style="line-height: 1.2em; color: rgb(128, 128, 128); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By JAMES BROOKE, Special to the New York Times</div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 17px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 15px;">BRAZZAVILLE, Congo, Jan. 8— South Africa provided tanks, trucks, troops, jeeps and mortars for the filming of an American adventure movie scheduled for release next summer, South-West African publications have reported.Defying a boycott of South Africa by many United States artists, Americans wrote, directed, produced and starred in the film, ''Red Scorpion,'' the reports said.The movie was largely filmed in South-West Africa, a territory widely known as Namibia, which is administered by South Africa in defiance of the United Nations.Reports of the filming first appeared last month in The Namibian, an independent weekly newspaper published in Windhoek, the capital of South-West Africa.Gwen Lister, the editor of The Namibian, said in a telephone interview today that in addition to using South African soldiers and equipment, the American film makers used the studios of an army media center in Windhoek and hired two active-duty South African army officers as consultants. South African MaterielMs. Lister said that on several visits to film sets in Windhoek and at the coastal city of Swakopmund, she and other Namibian reporters had counted 30 to 40 South African Army vehicles, including Samil troop transports and Casspir and Buffel armored personnel carriers.She said some vehicles carried ''R'' license plates of the South African Defense Forces and some carried the insignia of Operation Crowbar, a South African counterinsurgency unit that roams through northern Namibia and southern Angola.The film unit also used Soviet-made T-54 tanks and mortars captured in northern Angola, she said.Today, the Republikein, a conservative Afrikaans-language daily in Windhoek, said the South African Army had confirmed the use of its men and materiel by the Americans.''A South African Defense Force spokesman in Pretoria has confirmed that vehicles, weaponry and other military equipment has been made available to the film makers,'' said an article published under the headline ''Scorpion Sting.'' ''This is equipment that could not be provided by the private sector. The film makers are paying for this assistance.''American journalists are rarely allowed to visit Namibia. The Politics of the PlotThe wealth of aid extended to the Americans probably stemmed from the politics behind the movie's plot.''Red Scorpion'' is loosely based on the life of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of a pro-Western guerrilla movement in Angola and a key regional ally of South Africa.From Namibia, South Africa supplies Mr. Savimbi, who in turn keeps his area - southeastern Angola -clear of Namibian guerrillas.Last November, South African troops invaded part of southern Angola to defend Mr. Savimbi's position. The United States gives about $15 million a year in military aid to Mr. Savimbi, largely because Angola's central Government is armed by the Soviet Union and defended by Cuban troops.In ''Red Scorpion,'' Dolph Lundgren plays the part of a Soviet agent sent to assassinate ''an African resistance leader'' named Sundata, according to Jack Abramoff, the film's American producer, who was quoted in an interview published Dec. 4 in The Namibian.A South African actor, Ruben Nthodi, plays the African guerrilla leader. Other leading roles are played by American actors with Hollywood experience: Emmett Walsh, Al White and Brian James.The film's screenplay was written by an American, Arnie Olsen. It is being directed by an American, Joe Zito, and an American company, Warner Brothers, has discussed distribution rights with the producers. [ In California, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, Rob Friedman, said the company had had no involvement with the film. ''Warner Brothers declined to be involved even before they decided to shoot in Namibia,'' he said. ] Visit by Grace Jones According to Ms. Lister, Grace Jones was on the set in Swakopmund in November and December. Ms. Jones does not have a role in the film, however, and Ms. Lister said she was on the set ''to patch up a relationship with Dolph.''John Carmen, Ms. Jones's New York agent, said in a telephone interview this week that he had never heard of ''Red Scorpion.''The production company, Moonrose Productions, advertised in Namibian newspapers last fall for ''light-skinned Namibians'' to work as extras portraying Cuban soldiers, according to the published reports.South African Army conscripts -including 20 army drivers - were also used as extras, according to a report by Mark Verbaan, another reporter for The Namibian, published in the issue of Dec. 18.Ms. Lister reported that the film's budget was $8 million, which included $3,000 a month rent for a villa occupied by Ms. Jones in Swakopmund.Asked if the South African Government had invested in the film, Mr. Abramoff replied in the Dec. 4 interview that the money had come from ''normal film investors.''Mr. Abramoff is executive chairman of the International Freedom Foundation, a conservative organization based in Washington. The group reportedly has branches in Israel and South Africa. Criticism of the FilmLast year, the foundation paid for advertisements in The Washington Times criticizing the visit to Washington of Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, and defending Col. Oliver North, according to Gwen McKinney, director of the Namibian Information Service. This privately supported news agency based in Washington seeks to disseminate information about Namibia.''Red Scorpion'' has already drawn criticism from anti-apartheid organizations in the United States and abroad. [ In New York, Arthur Ashe, a co-chairman of Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, was asked about the film. The tennis star said:''We would oppose any participation by an American, especially a black American, in a film project of which the South African Government is a part. If you have part of the South African Army as extras, its hard to see the film as anything less than an endorsement of South Africa's policies.'' ] Theo Ben-Gurirab, an official of the South-West African People's Organization, the main Namibian guerrilla group, said in Luanda, Angola, this week that the film should be ''condemned, boycotted and blacklisted.''''That this propaganda film would come to the American screen as legitimate entertainment is shocking,'' Randall Robinson, the executive director of TransAfrica, a privately financed black American lobby for African issues, said in a telephone interview yesterday from Washington.</div>Salon:WEDNESDAY, AUG 17, 2005 12:21 PM PDTThe tale of “Red Scorpion”The strange Hollywood interlude of the most scandal-ridden man in Washington.
Before fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff assumed his role as the most scrutinized man in Washington, he had a brief career as a budding Hollywood producer. He made just one movie, the 1989 Cold War bomb “Red Scorpion.” With its blatant propaganda, its collaboration with the apartheid South African government, and financial misdealing, it’s notable, even for Hollywood, for being one of the seamiest productions in recent memory.
Last week, Abramoff was arrested by the FBI after a grand jury indicted him and a partner on fraud charges (he’s out on $2.2 million bail). In Washington the Senate Indian Affairs Committee has been holding hearings on whether Abramoff, 46, bilked millions out of tribes he represented, and a joint task force is picking through his personal papers, including his credit card records, which show Abramoff purchased trips for members of Congress (including Tom DeLay). His days in the Capitol, it seems, are numbered. (Abramoff’s spokesman, Andrew Blum, responded to inquiries from Salon for this article with a written “no comment.”)
But long before he became the poster boy for the Beltway’s back door, the young Jack Abramoff was at a crossroads. It was 1987, he was in his late 20s, and the presidency of his political hero, Ronald Reagan, was winding to a tarnished close. The Iran-Contra hearings covered the front pages, and Oliver North, whom Abramoff knew and admired, was about to be indicted. The Republicans were disillusioned, and after years of service to the party — as chairman of the College Republicans from 1981 to ’85, he’d mentored Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, had worked for one right-wing think tank, and founded another — Abramoff apparently was no longer sure he wanted to go into politics full time.So he took a detour, doing what any other kid from Beverly Hills might when finding himself at a loss: He decided to try his hand at show business. Why not? Hollywood was no more than Washington for good-looking people, as the saying goes, and Abramoff, a student government officer and a football player at Beverly Hills High School, class of ’77 (he graduated from Brandeis University in ’81), was smart and charismatic and, if not actor handsome, at least physically imposing enough to be a producer. Through his father, a high-up executive at the Diners Club, he’d rubbed shoulders with some of L.A.’s elite.Abramoff moved back to Los Angeles from Washington after finishing Georgetown Law School, and he and his brother, Robert, formed a production company, Regency Entertainment. They set to work on an action picture, a story about a rogue Soviet Spetsnaz soldier who is sent to quell a rebellion in a fictional African country — one that very closely resembled Angola — only to find that he sympathizes with the rebels. “Red Scorpion,” starring Dolph Lundgren, would be released in April 1989. The Abramoff brothers raised $16 million for it — the sources of the funding remain unknown — an impressive sum for a B-picture with an unproven star. It made a poor impression on audiences and critics. “The movie’s reflective moments belong to Mr. Lundgren’s sweaty chest,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York TimesBut the story behind “Red Scorpion” is far more captivating. The film was to be a manifesto for Abramoff; a Rambo-like morality tale and a grand indictment of communism — his Reagan Doctrine parable in action-packed Technicolor. And in the process of conceiving of and making it, Abramoff helped groom an African despot, rose to high levels in the K Street food chain, and got to play international spy.“There was some indication even in those days that he was not the sort of person who would feel overly constrained by the rules,” said Jeff Pandin, who worked closely with Abramoff in the 1980s.The roots of “Red Scorpion” took hold in the early 1980s, when interventionist-minded folk in Washington had an array of global conflagrations to obsess over. The mujahedin were battling the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Contras were fighting the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. Some circles felt the United States was not doing enough to help them. The gripe heard in the office of CIA chief William Casey and among Oliver North’s cabal in the National Security Council was that Reagan was not fully Reagan when it came to foreign policy. A cottage industry of think-tank intellectuals and private crusaders sprouted up to build support for one or another set of freedom fighters. Abramoff was among the most active.In Angola, the rebel group du jour, the National Union of Total Independence for Angola, or UNITA, had been taking on the Soviet- and Cuban-backed government since the 1970s. UNITA’s leader, a savvy warlord named Jonas Savimbi, had become a darling of the right. Savimbi received millions in aid and had even retained Washington lobbyists to press his case. Abramoff was interested in Angola, too. So was Lewis E. Lehrman, the millionaire behind the Rite Aid drugstore chain and the founder of the right-wing group Citizens for America, who made an unsuccessful run for governor of New York in 1982. Through Republican circles, Abramoff met Lehrman at some point in the early ’80s, and in 1985 Lehrman hired him. Abramoff came to Lehrman with an idea: What about a convention of disparate anti-communist rebel leaders, put together and paid for by Americans? It screamed of Abramoff’s cartoonishly outsized ambitions and worldview, and Lehrman liked it.Jack Wheeler, a California entrepreneur and anti-communist activist who enjoyed deep entree in Washington at the time, had met Abramoff through the College Republicans in 1984. He immediately took to Abramoff, who had charmed him with a story about scandalizing fellow members of a Beverly Hills athletic club by wearing a T-shirt that read “I’d Rather Be Killing Communists.”Wheeler and Abramoff began discussing the idea of the rebel convention. “The whole point of the Reagan Doctrine was to fight the phenomenon of communism, and if one regime fell, they’d all fall,” Wheeler said. “No Afghan knew where Nicaragua was, and no Contra knew where Angola was.”Amazingly, they made it happen, and quickly. In the first week of June 1985, mujahedin, Contras and Laotian rebels joined Savimbi and his men in Jamba, Angola, UNITA’s jungle headquarters, for the Democratic International, as Lehrman had titled the event. For several days they commiserated and compared notes, huddling together in thatched huts and signing an anti-Soviet pact. Wheeler organized transportation, and Abramoff dealt with the money and logistics from Lehrman’s end. Lehrman himself read a letter of support from Reagan and handed out framed copies of the Declaration of Independence. It received some press coverage. Abramoff had pulled off his first far-right adventure.In the eyes of many in the administration, particularly in the State Department, Abramoff and groups like Citizens for America were only serving to subvert years of careful negotiation. “These people were trying to undercut and divert official policy,” said Chester “Chet” Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989. “Our policy worked because we got Castro to decide the jig was up and go home — not because of the conservative activists.” (Cuba began pulling out of Angola in 1989.)Loved or hated, Citizens for America was short-lived. Not long after the Democratic International — or the Jamboree in Jamba, as it was pejoratively known — funding for the group dried up. “Lehrman pulled the money out all of a sudden, and then Jack dropped out of it, and that was that,” Wheeler said. “Then Jack went to make his movie.”According to Pandin, who went to work for Abramoff in 1986, Abramoff and Lehrman had had a falling out. “He was always looking to push the envelope,” Pandin said. “It was seen among Jack’s friends as a coup — he got stabbed in the back by people who weren’t comfortable with him.” When contacted by Salon, Lehrman submitted a short statement via a representative: “I was recruited by President Reagan to set up Citizens for America in 1983. It was a voluntary, part-time position which I held for about three years. Among the paid staff, Jack Abramoff came in well after CFA was started, was there only for a short while, before his termination.”But Lehrman may have also gotten cold feet because it had become clear by the mid-1980s that Savimbi was not a paragon of democratic ideals. There were allegations of murderous purges in his own ranks. It is commonly agreed in Washington that it was Savimbi himself, and not the government of Angola, who in July 1991 had UNITA’s envoys to the United States and the United Kingdom, Tito Chingunji and Wilson dos Santos, and their families, killed.Crocker described Savimbi, who was killed in 2002, as “a brilliant military warlord who operated by the gun, lived by the gun, and died by the gun and ultimately had a failure of judgment, like warlords often do.”Others are less charitable. “He was the most articulate, charismatic homicidal maniac I’ve ever met,” said Don Steinberg, ambassador to Angola during the first Clinton administration.With Citizens for America disbanded, and law school done, Abramoff moved to Los Angeles. He came up with the premise for “Red Scorpion” and hired Arne Olsen, a young screenwriter with no credits to his name, to write it. The Abramoffs told Olson they wanted to base the fictional African country in the film, Mombaka, directly on Angola, and the rebel leader on Savimbi. Olsen said he churned out a baldly propagandistic script.“It definitely was an anti-Soviet thing,” Olsen said. “It was an easy target.”Of the Abramoff brothers, he said, “This wasn’t their profession, what they’d do for the rest of their lives. It was a lark. They wanted to get a message across, but at the same time they were going for exploitation and of course trying to make some money.”Initially, the movie was set to shoot in Swaziland, but at the last minute Abramoff moved the production to Namibia, which was occupied by South Africa’s apartheid government. Congress had passed (over Reagan’s veto) the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, making it very frowned-upon, when not illegal, to do business with South Africa or its proxies. This did not seem to bother Abramoff, who planned to use South African Defense Force vehicles and equipment on the set and soldiers as extras. By 1988, when shooting started on the film, Abramoff likely had connections in the South African government. For a decade, after all, South Africa had been Savimbi’s main backer, and according to Crocker and others, Abramoff would not have been able to put together the Democratic International without extensive help from the SADF.But Abramoff’s plan backfired: it was not long before anti-apartheid activists were protesting at the “Red Scorpion” set, and Warner Brothers, who had signed on to distribute the film, pulled out.James Glickenhaus, whose company, Schapiro Glickenhaus Entertainment, ended up distributing “Red Scorpion” after Warner Brothers jumped ship, said he was not aware of the help provided by the SADF, but he was aware of the controversy over the location. “Look, had the film been made in Nazi Germany, I wouldn’t have distributed it,” he said. “But I personally felt upon investigating that the Namibian government was more simpatico than the South African government.”The movie seemed like an opportunity to turn a buck — if not win any awards. “There’s some fish for eating and some fish for buying and selling,” Glickenhaus said. “This was a fish for buying and selling.” In typical Hollywood tradition, Glickenhaus threw a party for the film at Cannes, his feelings about its quality notwithstanding. The Abramoff brothers came, but, he said, they “looked totally out of place.”The actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the villainous Cuban colonel, said he knew that many of the men playing Russian and Cuban soldiers were actual SADF soldiers. There were also rumors going around the set that some of the funding for the film, not just props and extras, was coming from South Africa.“We heard that very right-wing South African money was helping fund the movie,” Argenziano said. “It wasn’t very clear. We were pretty upset about the source of the money. We thought we were misled. We were shocked that these brothers who we thought were showbiz liberals — Beverly Hills Jewish kids — were doing this.”But there was a lesser-known connection between the apartheid regime and Abramoff.In the late 1980s, some conservatives in Washington saw P.W. Botha’s apartheid government in Pretoria as the last bulwark against communism in Africa. Certain Reagan domestiques had even gone to work for it. “The South African government was the only one that was, shall we say, anti-communist,” said Stuart Spencer, who’d help run Reagan’s 1980 and ’84 campaigns and later became a lobbyist for Pretoria.Abramoff seems to have shared the sentiment. In 1986, he founded the International Freedom Foundation, whose stated goal was “to foster individual freedom throughout the world by engaging in activities which promote the development of free and open societies based on the principles of free enterprise.” More specifically, among the IFF’s aims were to oppose the Anti-Apartheid Act and other sanctions and to urge greater support in Washington for Pretoria and less support for the African National Congress, the party that would come to power in 1994 under Nelson Mandela. At its height, around the time “Red Scorpion” was released, the IFF employed about 30 young ideologues in offices on G Street in Washington, Johannesburg, London and Brussels. Churning out reports and presentations (for one such presentation on the Contras, it borrowed the slide show that North had used to raise money for his arms-deal network, according to Pandin), the IFF attracted notable members such as Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.“It was meant to be a way to institutionalize the contacts he’d made abroad — people who were interested in anti-communist stuff, democracy building, that kind of thing,” said Pandin, who held directorships at the IFF from its inception until it shut down in the early 1990s. “We were skeptical of the ANC,” he went on. “We did not want to see the U.S. imposing sanctions on South Africa.”The IFF, however, could not claim impartiality on the subject. It was, in fact, clandestinely funded by the SADF’s military intelligence arm, according to former U.S. officials, ANC documents, and reports published in U.S. and U.K. According to a 1995 Newsday report, the IFF received up to $1.5 million a year from the SADF from 1986 through 1992, as a part of Operation Babushka, a smear campaign meant to discredit Mandela and the ANC by portraying them as allied with communist regimes. An SADF intelligence chief also told the Newsday reporters that the SADF helped fund “Red Scorpion.”“We knew that the IFF was funded by the South African government,” Herman Cohen, who ran Africa operations for the National Security Council, told Salon. “It was one of a number of front organizations.”“I would not be shocked if some of the money they were raising in the Johannesburg office was coming from those kinds of channels,” Pandin said, referring to the SADF.Pandin recalled that Abramoff enlisted Russell Crystal, the head of the IFF’s Johannesburg office and an advisor to F.W. DeKlerk, to be an informal producer on “Red Scorpion” (whether this meant Crystal helped fund the film, Pandin did not remember). But Pandin says Abramoff refused to compensate Crystal afterward. “It wasn’t a good experience,” Pandin said of the film. “A lot of people didn’t get paid. Russell wasn’t entirely enamored of Jack after that.”“Jack was always looking for angles and ways to do interesting things until people slowed him down,” he said, obliquely, when asked whether Abramoff, who resigned from a day-to-day position at the IFF in 1987 but remained a chairperson and closely oversaw operations, knew of the connection to the SADF. “He needs somebody to cool him down sometimes. Left to his own devices he’d be inclined to go a little crazy.”
“Maybe he should have paid more attention in some of his law school classes and spent less time making movies.”
Peter Roff, who is listed as Abramoff’s personal assistant in the credits of “Red Scorpion,” said he worked for Abramoff out of the latter’s Washington office during the time of the production in 1987 and ’88. Roff, however, recalled doing more work for the IFF than for the film. Indeed, he only vaguely remembered the name Regency Entertainment. He never went to L.A. or to the set in Africa. But Roff, who worked on George H.W. Bush’s ’88 campaign, claimed he too was unaware of the source of the IFF’s funding.“I thought he was an exceptional person,” he said of Abramoff. “Creative, good person to work for, very encouraging of my ambitions to be part of something that helped make the world a better place.”The SADF stopped funding the IFF in 1992. Apartheid had come to an end. By 1994, the organization closed its doors.Asked by Newsday about the South African government’s connections to the IFF and “Red Scorpion” in 1995, the last time he seems to have entertained questions on the subject, Abramoff called the allegations “outrageous.”When, inevitably, “Red Scorpion” was released, it was no study in nuance. Directed by Joseph Zito, whose previous credits had included the Chuck Norris movies “Missing in Action” and “Invasion U.S.A,” the dramatis personae consist of scheming, cackling communists on the one hand — the Russians not only tear apart the rebel village with attack helicopters, but also randomly gas a band of peaceful Bushmen and their animals — and noble guerrillas on the other, and the barely intelligible Lundgren in between. The action sequences have all the panache of a subpar “A-Team” episode.There are some inspired moments, such as the climax, when Argenziano’s character, Col. Zayas, is left groping for his own dismembered arm, which clutches a live grenade (he doesn’t reach in time). There is also a rousing speech delivered by the token freewheeling American, a foul-mouthed, boozing journalist played by M. Emmet Walsh: “As a matter of fact, in America, an American can swear whenever, wherever and however much he or she fucking well pleases!” he yells at Lundgren. “A little something called freedom of speech, which I’m sure you Russians aren’t real familiar with!” In another nice touch, the closing credits roll over Little Richard’s “All Around the World,” remixed to include machine-gun and exploding-bomb sound effects.If only things were as jovial off the set. They weren’t. Actors went unpaid; Argenziano said that although he was paid his initial salary, he has never received a residuals check for “Red Scorpion.” The manager of one of the major cast members, who did not want to be named, said that, according to her client, many of the actors and crew were never paid at all.“I just wanted to get the hell out of there,” Argenziano said. “It was a very hard shoot. We were all worn out, so no one made a stink.”Glickenhaus, who knew of crew and cast going unpaid, claimed that despite its poor box office receipts, “Red Scorpion” did well in video, television and foreign sales. Nonetheless, at some point prior to its release in April 1989, the Abramoffs and Regency found themselves in enough debt that the film went into the possession of Performance Guarantees, a completion bond company.Abramoff also borrowed money from friends that he never repaid. During the production, he took a $50,000 personal loan from Ralph Nurnberger, a Georgetown professor and consultant. Nurnberger and Abramoff later worked together (from 1999 to the end of 2000) at Preston Gates Ellis. Abramoff has still not repaid the loan.Remarkably, there was a “Red Scorpion 2.” It went straight to video in 1994 and did not star Lundgren. Abramoff is listed as an executive producer, but he had only a nominal connection to the film, according to its other producers. But by then, Abramoff had decided politics and not political movies were his true calling, and he was back in Washington, a lobbyist at Preston Gates (the lobbying firm run by the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates). Now, of course, his decades-long ascent into Republican power circles is coming to a crashing end. Investigators are combing through every aspect of his life. He has become Washington’s summa persona non grata, disowned even by Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, for whom he is alleged to have purchased a trip to Scotland.After Jack returned to Washington, Robert Abramoff stayed in Los Angeles and continued to produce films. He is now a full-time lawyer. Reached at the offices of Burgee & Abramoff in Woodland Hills, he refused to speak about his brother or “Red Scorpion.” “It’s a family matter and I prefer not to comment on anything,” he said.
James Verini is a writer in Los Angeles.
http://www.salon.com/2005/08/17/abramoff_2/http://www.rawstory.com/news/2005/Before_he_became_lobbyist_Abramoff_abetted_0215.htmlBefore lobbying scandals, Abramoff group had hand in apartheid warsDanny SchechterPublished: February 15, 2006Lobbyist tied to group supporting apartheid South Africa; Spokesman vehemently denies
Picture the sceneIt was a quiet night in June 1985 in the equatorial heat of Jamba, a small town in the heartland of Angola, the oil and diamond-rich African nation that was divided by a bloody civil war for 30 years. Jamba at the time was a base for Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement, a tribal secessionist army bizarrely funded by Communist China and the CIA at the same time.A top-secret meeting was then underway between Savimbi and his boosters, led by a young American Republican activist named Jack Abramoff. He was there representing an organization he founded, the International Freedom Foundation. The group was codenamed "Pacman."Also present, a South African newspaper reports, "Leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, Nicaraguan contras, Laotian guerrillas and members of the Oliver North American right."UNITA's strongman, the late Jonas Savimbi, who fancied calling himself Dr. Savimbi, was a masterful guerilla fighter who became the darling of the American right wing as it rallied to the cause of UNITA's main ally, racist South Africa. Conservatives dubbed him a freedom fighter, heralding him as their Che Guevara. In the end 600,000 people, mostly civilians would die in this bloody conflict, many as a result of atrocities perpetuated by UNITA.Abramoff's trip to Angola had been paid for by right-wing New York financier Lewis Lehrman as part of an effort to create a global anti-communist alliance. (Lehrman later fired Abramoff, who would go on to become the most notorious lobbyist in America, for inflating his expense reports, a portent of practices to come.)Abramoff, an ultra-orthodox Jew recalled an incident when he left the meeting to pray in the bush. "When I went out to pray," he would later write, they thought he was a "mystic."There was nothing mystical about the U.S. policies Abramoff was then covertly advancing.Savimbi was invited by President Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1986, where Reagan spoke of UNITA winning "a victory that electrifies the world." The African strongman was also supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which sent analysts to to visit with Savimbi in his clandestine Angolan camps. They also offered the rebel leader political and military guidance in his war against the Marxist Angolan government.Savimbi's U.S.-based supporters ultimately convinced the CIA to covertly channel weapons to Savimbi's war, which kindled the conflict.This early period in Abramoff's career has been largely ignored in most of the American media. It was the period in which he began building relations with tribal people, a practice he would parlay into serving as a very well-compensated lobbyist for American Indian tribes in the lucrative gambling industry.His fascination with Africa would lead to a lobbying contract for the Congo's Mobutu Seso Seko, a Savimbi supporter and then the richest and most corrupt dictator on the continent. Mobutu's critics charged he ran a "kleptocracy" -- government by thieves -- based on the violent suppression of human rights while Abramoff represented him.Abramoff would later be accused of becoming a kleptocrat in his own right.South African training groundApartheid South Africa offered Abramoff the chance to make a big name and big money. At that time, the country was rocked by uprisings in the townships and challenged by the artists who backed a cultural boycott of South Africa's "Sun City," the top gambling resort and entertainment venue. South Africa's apartheid's rulers decided to fight back against the likes of activists like singer Little Steven Van Zandt by channeling state funds into media projects they could later deny they were linked with.Jack Abramoff had first visited South Africa in 1983, as head of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC). South Africa's Mail and Guardian reported on the International Freedom Foundation on February 10, 2006: "The IFF was officially headquartered in Washington, where the South Africans were given entrance into the American political establishment by Abramoff and the Young Republicans. But, it was effectively run from Johannesburg. Newsday reported that the Johannesburg office was "the nerve centre of IFF operations worldwide."In 1995, South Africa's Truth Commission revealed that the apartheid regime helped launch the IFF, funneling it $2.5 million a year to allay "image problems" and to smear Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.Abramoff enlisted in South Africa's cultural war and suddenly found himself sitting pretty as the head of a Hollywood movie studio called Regency Enterprises. The idea was to make anti-communist films that could denigrate the anti-apartheid movement. Jack became a credited screenwriter.The movie was "Red Scorpion" starring the very Aryan-looking Dolph Lundgren. It pictured African liberation fighters as surrogates for Soviet totalitarians. The plot: "A Russian KGB agent is sent to Africa to kill an anti-Communist black revolutionary." The tagline: "He's a human killing machine. Taught to stalk. Trained to kill. Programmed to destroy. He's played by their rules... Until now."
Abramoff's African work was now on the big screen.The movie, made in South African-occupied Namibia, was denounced by Hollywood supporters of the cultural boycott like Martin Scorcese, Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro for supporting apartheid. Other critics called it "homoerotic" and overpatriotic." Abramoff later was executive producer of a sequel, Red Scorpion 2.
Anti-communist movie 'got apartheid funds'For years, Abramoff publicly denied South African financing, but on January 24, 2006, the Mail & Guardian quoted one-time apartheid spy Craig Williamson as now admitting that the money came directly from the South African military.Wrote the Mail & Guardian, "Among Abramoff's South African projects was the anti-communist film Red Scorpion, made in South African-occupied Namibia and, according to Williamson, funded by the South African military."Why the military? The newspaper reveals: "The IFF was ostensibly founded as a conservative think-tank, but was in reality part of an elaborate South African military intelligence operation, code-named Operation Babushka. Established to combat sanctions and undermine the African National Congress, it also supported Jonas Savimbi and his rebel Angolan movement, Unita."The movie was modeled romantically on Savimbi's "War for Freedom" but was also riddled with stereotypes and crude propaganda.Sample exchange: "Colonel Zayas: Are you out of your mind?""Lt. Nikolai: No. Just out of bullets. [Burps]."Through his connections, Abramoff procured a Soviet-made WWII-era T-34 tank with a 76mm cannon for the final battle sequence.An amateur reviewer posted an insightful comment on a film website which may have foreseen the off-screen drama that Abramoff himself is now starring in. "Looking beyond the mindless action scenes (which, despite the countless guns and explosions), there is a good fable about the possibility of manipulating truth, and how appearance is not always truth."Spokesman calls claims of apartheid support 'defamatory'IFF sought to destabilize the African National Congress and took up the cause of discrediting Nelson Mandela. The African National Congress leader's freedom was demanded by millions at the time, with the exception of politicians like then-Congressman Dick Cheney, who voted against a Congressional resolution calling for Mandela's release from prison. (Cheney also opposed overturning Ronald Reagan's ban on sanctions against South Africa, a ban Jack Abramoff personally worked in Hollywood to support as a Pretoria-funded agent.)
Andrew Blum, a spokesman for Abramoff, denied that Abramoff had ever supported apartheid and called any such implications "false and defamatory.""It is untrue that Jack Abramoff ever supported apartheid," Blum said in an email to RAW STORY. "As the media at the time reflected, Mr. Abramoff's involvement in the Washington office of IFF occured in the mid-1980s, was short-lived, and was when IFF came out against apartheid and for the release of Nelson Mandella. In fact, Mr. Abramoff was criticized at the time in pro-South African government circles for these positions. Mr. Abramoff did no work to advance the agenda of the South African apartheid government.He added, "Mr. Abramoff's anti-apartheid positions were clear and never contradicted in any forum. Any suggestion, implication or reporting that Mr. Abramoff was ever pro-apartheid or working for the interests of the South African government are false and defamatory."Abramoff's spokesman and a second individual at the lobbyist's lawyer's office did not reply to a second inquiry seeking examples of Abramoff's anti-apartheid positions."News Dissector" Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He was the Executive Producer of the public television series "South Africa Now" and helped produce the Sun City album with 54 top musicians.
==Meet Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff

By Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone

24 March Issue

The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington.

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So this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack Abramoff - right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new American century - will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The End. There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and "Casino Jack" Abramoff will disappear for a few years of weightlifting and Talmudic study.

En route to his day of reckoning, Abramoff really did travel each and every right-wing highway, from Jo-burg in the old days to the Bush White House. But he's being sentenced for only the last few miles of that trip. It's almost an insult to a criminal of Abramoff's caliber that the charge he'll go to jail for is a low-rent wire-fraud scheme committed in a pickpocket capital like Miami Beach. In that one, Jack and his cronies claimed to have $23 million in assets when he didn't have a dime, and he persuaded financial backers to purchase a $147.5 million cruise-ship casino empire. A nice score for a Gotti child, maybe, but a bit gauche for the wizard of the Republican fast lane.

The other charges are a little more respectable. He took tens of millions from Indian tribes that sought relief from Washington on gaming-industry questions, illegally pocketed millions in lobbying fees and evaded taxes on his ill-gotten gains. He also used their money to provide, in exchange for favors, a "stream of things of value" to elected officials, including golf junkets to Scotland, free meals and other swag.

It's that last bit that made Abramoff a national celebrity, the poster boy for the way the Bush administration does business and the most feared name around in a Washington political society that is still waiting with bated lizard breath for the other shoe to drop. To most Americans, Jack Abramoff is the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came through the window in the middle of the night and stole their voice in government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much of a symbol of his generation's Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater was of his.

He was an amazingly ubiquitous figure, a sort of Zelig of the political right - you could find him somewhere, in the foreground or the background, in almost every Republican political scandal of the past twenty-five years. He carried water for the racist government of Pretoria during the apartheid days and whispered in the ear of those Republican congressmen who infamously voted against anti-apartheid resolutions. He organized rallies in support of the Grenada invasion, showed up in Ollie North's offices during Iran-Contra, palled around with Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi and the Afghan mujahedin.

All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.

He is a living museum of corruption, and in a way it is altogether too bad that he is about to disappear from public scrutiny. In a hilariously tardy attempt to attend to his moral self-image, lately he has been repackaging himself as a fallen prophet, a humbled super-Jew who was guilty only of going too far to serve God. He was the "softest touch in town," he has said, a sucker for causes who "incorrectly didn't follow the mitzvah of giving away at most twenty percent." Then he shows up a few weeks before sentencing with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter, claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to "save the world."

There is no evidence yet that anyone is going to call him on any of this bullshit, and we can see where all of this is going. He'll go away now for his Martha Stewart fitness tour, and a few years from now he'll slide straight into his own prime-time family show for cable's inevitable Orthodox Channel and a $14 million deal from HarperCollins for his 290-page illustrated manual of marriage and intimacy for devout Jewish couples.

No other outcome is really possible, given the logic of the American celebrity world. What is unknown, as yet, is whether America will learn any lessons from the here-and-now of the Jack Abramoff story. For that to happen, we would all have to take a good, hard look at the remarkable life story he is now temporarily leaving us to consider.

Abramoff is a man defined by his connections. As an individual - as a lone dot on a schematic diagram, an intersection of crossed strands in a web - Jack Abramoff is a nobody, just another pompous Washington greedhead distinguished only by the world's silliest Boris Badenov fedora ("That was between me and God," Abramoff now says of the infamous hat). But let him loose in society, and magic happens. Jack Abramoff's instinctive political talent was for first locating and then inveigling himself into the disreputable backroom deal of the hour. He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history.

The story about Jack Abramoff and the elementary school election, the one first reported by The Los Angeles Times, is true. It only seems like apocryphal bullshit. Born in Atlantic City to Frank Abramoff, an affluent Diner's Club executive who would go on to represent golfer Arnold Palmer, Jack moved with his family to Beverly Hills as a boy and grew up attending one of the more prestigious elementary schools in the country, the Hawthorne School. And it was here, at this same fancy-pants school that would one day be home to a chubby girl named Monica Lewinsky, that Jack got his start in politics by being disqualified from a race for student-body president for cheating.

"Jack was a very, very, very smart boy with a straight-A average," recalls Milton Rowen, the then-principal of the school. "We had certain rules about the amount of money that could be spent, and there was no electioneering outside of the school . . . He had his mother come up with hot dogs in her car and give them out to the kids.

"He was a very nice boy," the eighty-seven-year-old now says, laughing. "But he hot-dogged it."

Still, even with that setback, Abramoff was already off and running on a course that would lead him straight to the political underworld. Like Watergate vets Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Gordon Strachan [HR H aide]and Ron Ziegler before him, Abramoff throughout his youth would be drawn to student politics, running (and losing) again for student-body president at Beverly Hills High before becoming head of the Massachusetts College Republicans while at Brandeis University in the Boston suburb of Waltham.

Abramoff was part of the first wave of young people who came back to the Republican Party en masse during the so-called Reagan Revolution. The year 1980 was a time of resurgence for a party that just four years before had been in a post-Watergate death spiral; the Moral Majority had just been founded, and new-right prophets like Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie were attracting a fresh generation of young people to the brash, piss-in-your-face, fuck-the-poor ideas emanating from places like the Heritage Foundation and Bill Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom. Among their other converts at this time were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, a pair of ambitious students from Harvard and Emory University, respectively.

After Reagan's 1980 landslide win, those two, along with Abramoff, would work together at the College Republicans National Committee, and when Abramoff succeeded Norquist as CRNC chief he would win a national reputation as a hard-liner with his Lenin-esque pronouncement that it wasn't the job of young Republicans to "seek peaceful co-existence with the left." The take-no-prisoners stance of the twentysomething student leader: "Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

All accounts point to Abramoff as the prototypically humorless Animal House campus villain. A thick-necked champion weight lifter (he still holds the Beverly Hills High bench-press record) with a square jaw and exquisite hygiene, the man-child Abramoff also had the kind of sadistic jock temperament that impresses coaches and corporate recruiters alike. "The football coach was always afraid that Jack was going to kill somebody if he hit him head-on," Rowen says. By the time he went away to Brandeis, he'd already undergone a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, having found religion at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles [Westwood, 1956] (after seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a youngster, Abramoff says), and so he arrived in 1970s Massachusetts the rarest of East Coast campus creatures: a moralizing weight lifter with short hair and a passion for Republican politics.[mgm was wilshire http://www.wbtla.org/inthenews 10400 Wilshire Boulevard ]

The Abramoff story, in fact, confirms in the most dramatic way every vicious popular stereotype about campus conservatives. Kids who get involved with lefty politics on campus almost always graduate straight into some degrading state of semi-employment - the defining characteristic of lefty student movements is how few doors they open for you. Another defining characteristic of the student left is its persistent, unquenchable and irrational suspicion that the campus Republicans hold their meetings in the offices of someplace like the Rand Corporation, where they have their buttocks branded with Sumerian symbols in secret ceremonies that upon graduation will gain all of them entrance to the upper ranks of corporate and governmental privilege.

That was Jack Abramoff. Like those famed USC student "ratfuckers" who went on to hold the ultimate panty raid in the Watergate Hotel, Abramoff and his close friends Norquist and Ralph Reed (the one-time head of the Georgia College Republicans used to sleep on Abramoff's couch) never really abandoned the laughable training-wheel secrecy and capture-the-flag gamesmanship of student politics. His buttocks freshly branded, Abramoff in 1983 traveled to Johannesburg on behalf of the CRNC and immediately parlayed his student experience into a real job as a sort of frontman for South African intelligence services. He was the young progressive's paranoid nightmare come shockingly true: absurd campus Republican proto-geek effortlessly transformed at graduation into flesh-and-blood neo-Nazi spook.

It is not easy to find anyone who actually encountered Abramoff during his South Africa experiences, although one source who was involved with South African right-wing student politics recalled "Casino Jack" as a "blue-eyed boy" who rubbed people the wrong way with his arrogant demeanor. On his first trip to Johannesburg in 1983, Abramoff met with leaders from the archconservative, pro-apartheid National Students Federation, which itself is alleged to have been created by South Africa's notorious Bureau of Security Services. Together with NSF member Russel Crystal - today a prominent South African politician in the Democratic Alliance, an anti-African National Congress party - Abramoff subsequently, in 1986, chaired the head of a conservative think tank called the International Freedom Foundation.

The creation of the IFF officially marked the beginning of the silly phase of Abramoff's career. According to testimony before Democratic South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, the IFF was not a conservative think tank but actually a front for the South African army. Testimony in sealed TRC hearings reportedly reveal that the IFF was known by the nickname "Pacman" in the South African army and that its activities were part of a larger plan called "Operation Babushka," designed to use propaganda to discredit the ANC and Nelson Mandela at home and abroad. Among other things, Abramoff managed during this time to funnel funds and support from the IFF to a variety of stalwart congressmen and senators, including Rep. Dan Burton and Sen. Jesse Helms, all of whom consistently opposed congressional resolutions against apartheid. These members of Congress would deny knowing that the IFF's money came from the South African government, because that, of course, would have been illegal; Abramoff himself denied it too, although he has been largely quiet on the subject since the TRC testimony in 1995.

In a hilarious convergence of ordinary workaday incompetence and pointlessly secretive cloak-and-dagger horseshit, Operation Babushka's grand opus would ultimately turn out to be the production of the 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Red Scorpion, in which American moviegoers were invited to care about an anti-communist revolutionary targeted for execution by a sweat-drenched jungle version of Lundgren's overacting Ivan Drago persona. The film, which Abramoff wrote and produced, was instantly derided by critics around the world as one of the stupidest movies ever made.

Veteran character actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the heavy, Col. Zayas, in Red Scorpion, recalls the "Cimino-esque" film shoot in Namibia as one of the most surreal experiences of his career. "It was pretty weird," he says. "What was going on was fishy, and then in the middle of production the word spread that there was some kind of weird South African/CIA connection. And that bummed everyone out."

Argenziano, whom history will likely absolve for being, with Lundgren, one half of the film's only memorable scene, which also perhaps represents the apex of Jack Abramoff's literary career (Argenziano: "Are you out of your mind?" Lundgren: "No. Just out of bullets"), laughs almost nonstop as he recalls his Namibia experiences.

"We were all staying in this hotel called the Kalahari Sands in Windhoek, the capital," he says. "There was this huge new escalator in the hotel. I guess it was the only one in the country, because little African kids kept coming in to stare at it. But the South Africans we had on the shoot [Abramoff was reportedly provided free labor by the South African army] kept shooing them away, literally pushing kids off the escalator, shouting these racist words at them. Wasn't exactly good for morale."

The Eighties show Abramoff involved in a series of almost comic backroom escapades, the most famous being the organization of a sort of trade convention for anti-communist rebel leaders in Jamba, Angola. There are not many facts on the record about this incident, but what is known smacks of an articulate young Darth Vader putting out scones and lemonade at a sand-planet meeting of the leading bounty-hunter scum in the universe. Under the auspices of the Citizens for America, a group founded by Rite Aid drugstore magnate and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman at the request of Ronald Reagan, Abramoff helped organize a meeting of anti-communist rebels that included Angolan UNITA fighters, Afghan mujahedin, Laotian guerrillas and Nicaraguan Contras.

Some reports speculate that the meeting was convened so that one of the Americans - perhaps Abramoff or Lehrman - could pass along a message of support from the White House. But it's more likely that this will be just another Abramoff episode to remain shrouded in mystery. Twenty-one years later, Lehrman won't say what it was all about, noting that "I do not recall if there was a White House message discussion" and adding only that "there were very many anti-communist individuals present in Jamba."

Abramoff's CFA experience was extensive enough, however, to make him a character in the Iran-Contra scandal. His ostensible role was to raise support for the Contras through the CFA. "Abramoff was a bit player in Iran-Contra," says Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who served as a special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iran-Contra investigation. "That's where he learned that the money wasn't in the ideological skulduggery world. It was in the go-buy-the-government world." But, Blum adds, Abramoff's experiences with various conservative foundations and nonprofits during this period proved valuable later on. "This is when he made all his connections," he says. "It was through them that he learned that it was much more lucrative to work in the commercial end of politics."

Abramoff, Norquist and Reed were all in their mid-to-late twenties, and all were experiencing paradigmatic life changes. While Abramoff was joining such groups as the Council for National Policy, the CFA and the United States of America Foundation, Norquist was founding Americans for Tax Reform, the organization he would later ride to prominence as a fat, hygienically deficient tax-policy oracle.Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington - and by 1985 he, too, had found his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.

There is a common thread running through almost all of Abramoff's activities during this tadpole period of his in the Eighties. Suggested in his every action is an utter contempt for legal governmental processes; he behaves as if ordinary regulations are for suckers and the uncommitted. If the government won't step up to the plate and sign off on support for the Contras, you go through channels and do it yourself. If you really want to win an election, you find ways around finance laws and spending limits. And if you want to oppose a national anti-apartheid movement on the country's campuses, don't waste time building from the ground up; go straight to Pretoria and bring home a few million dollars in a bag.

One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff's obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious dealmaker" Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation - as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them - not even good at being criminals.

All of Abramoff's late-career capers - the inner-city youth charity that actually bought sniper scopes for Israeli settlers, the academic think tank that turned out to be a lifeguard in a shack on Rehoboth Beach, the "check's in the mail" fleecing of his own tailor out of a bill for suits - they all exude the same infuriating "Check out the brains on us!" vibe.

Take the infamous Naftasib scheme of 1997-98. The short version of this story is that Abramoff and Tom DeLay met with a bunch of shady Russian oil executives in 1997; the Russians then sent $1 million to a British law firm called James and Sarch; James and Sarch then sent a million to the pompously named nonprofit "U.S. Family Network," which in turn sent money to numerous destinations. It went to a lobbyist agency called the Alexander Strategy Group that was run by DeLay's ex-chief of staff, Edwin Buckham; the agency would subsequently hire DeLay's wife at a salary of $3,200 a month. It went toward the purchase of a luxury D.C. town house that DeLay would use to raise money. And it went toward the purchase of a luxury box at FedExField, which Abramoff used to watch the Redskins. If you follow the loop all the way around, the quid pro quo probably involved DeLay's 1998 decision to support an IMF loan to Russia, whose economy collapsed that year and would rely on an IMF bailout to survive. A Maryland pastor named Christopher Geeslin, who briefly served as the U.S. Family Network's president, would later say that Buckham told him that the $1 million from the Russians was intended to influence DeLay's decision regarding funding for the IMF. DeLay ended up voting to replenish IMF funds in September of that year, right at the time of the bailout.

Is this smart? Sure, if you're fucking ten years old. If your idea of smart is turning an IMF loan into Redskins tickets, then, yeah, this is smart. But another way to look at it is that these assholes got themselves Redskins tickets by giving $18 billion to one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. I'd call that buying at a premium.

That's the most striking characteristic of Abramoff and his crew of ex-student leaders; nearly thirty years out of college, no longer young at all, the whole bunch of them are still Dean Wormer's sneaky little shits, high-fiving one another for executing the brilliant theft and pre-dawn public hanging of the rival college's stuffed-bear mascot. That whole adolescent vibe permeates the confiscated Abramoff e-mails, the best example of which being this exchange between Jack and his "evil elf" aide Michael Scanlon regarding their lobbying fees for the Coushatta Indian tribe:

Scanlon: Coushatta is an absolute cake walk. Your cut on the project as proposed is at least 800k.

Abramoff: How can I say this strongly enough: YOU IZ DA MAN

Again, these assholes affirm every stereotype about campus conservatives. They don't spend enough time being kids when they're supposed to, so they do it when they're balding, middle-aged men with handles and back hair - using Washington and Congress as their own personal sandbox.

They figured out how to beat everything. Everything about the Abramoff story suggests that at some point, he and his buddies Norquist, Reed and DeLay took a long, hard look at the American system, war-gamed it and came up with a master plan to strike hard at its weakest points. In the end, almost all of the Abramoff scams revolved around the vulnerability of the national legislature to outside manipulation. Once Abramoff and his cabal figured out how to beat Congress, everything else fell into place.

Case in point: Abramoff's remarkable success in defeating H.R. 521, a 2001 House bill that would place the Guam Superior Court under the control of a federally controlled Supreme Court. Led by Judge Alberto Lamorena, Guam Superior Court justices hired the lobbyist to defeat the bill, which would have unseated them as the chief judicial authorities of the island. It says something for Abramoff's ability to bring out the worst in people that he managed to get a group of sitting judges to pay him $324,000 in public funds in $9,000 installments so as to avoid detection.

Despite the $324,000 fee, Abramoff could not prevent the House Resources committee from unanimously recommending H.R. 521 for passage. Would the superlobbyist finally fail? No, of course not. Given what we know about Abramoff's tactics, we'd be naive not to conclude that he could lean on DeLay and then-Whip Roy Blunt to stall the bill in the congressional machinery. On May 27th, 2002, just five days after the Resources committee made its recommendation, an Abramoff-linked PAC wrote two checks for $5,000 - one to Blunt, one to DeLay. H.R. 521 never reached the floor.

The Guam incident certainly shows how easily the whole Congress was controlled by a small gang. The DeLay Republicans, along with Abramoff, were apparently the first to recognize the opportunities for corruption presented by the House leadership's dictatorial control over key committees, in particular the Rules committee. Now, a single call to a lone Tom DeLay could decide the fate of any piece of legislation, pushing it through to a vote or gumming it up in the works as needed. The other 430-odd congressmen were window dressing.

I asked Rep. Louise Slaughter if the Guam case, which showed that just two men could quash a bill, proved that Congress was especially vulnerable to manipulation by the likes of Abramoff.

"Absolutely," she said. "And the thing is, we have no idea how many incidents like that there were. What else didn't get to the floor? We have no idea. No way of knowing."

Even more ominously, Abramoff would eventually come under fire in Guam following the mysterious removal of Guam Attorney General Frederick Black, who had seen the fate of H.R. 521 and decided to investigate Abramoff's role in it.

"The thing that really worries me about Guam is the prosecutor who was plucked off the case," says Slaughter, a New York Democrat who has spearheaded her party's lobby-reform drive. "It makes you wonder what really went on there."

At the very least, Abramoff's relationship with White House procurements officer David Safavian shows that he made at least some inroads into the world of White House patronage. Abramoff took Safavian on one of his famous Scotland golfing junkets and reportedly was receiving help from Safavian in leasing government property. Safavian was working on the distribution of millions in federal aid to Katrina-affected regions when he was arrested, which raises all kinds of questions about what else might have been going on.

"There were so many contracts, from Katrina to Iraq - God knows what really went on in there," says Slaughter.

[Protection Racket:]

Once Congress was conquered, Abramoff, Norquist, et al., apparently discovered a means for turning it into a pure engine for profit. The game they may have discovered worked like this: One lobbyist (Abramoff, say) represents one group of interests - for example, the Malaysian government. Then, a lobbyist friend of Abramoff's (say, Norquist) represents an antagonist to Abramoff's client, in this case, let's say dissident leader Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim asks Norquist to press his case against the Malaysian state in Washington; Norquist complies and uses his contacts to raise a stink on the Hill. Abramoff's client, unnerved, turns to Abramoff to make the problem go away. Abramoff dutifully goes to the same friends Norquist applied to in the first place, and the problem does indeed go away. In the end, everyone is happy and both lobbyists have performed and gotten paid. Abramoff apparently pulled this kind of double-dealing scheme more than once, as he and Ralph Reed appear to have run a similar con on the Coushatta and Tigua Indian tribes, who were on opposite sides of a gaming dispute.

An idiot might call a scheme like this clever. But that's only true if you don't consider what really happened here: Dozens of people conspiring to reduce the U.S. Congress to the level of a Belarussian rubber stamp for the sake of . . . what? A few million dollars in lobbying fees? And not even a few million dollars apiece but a few million dollars split several ways. Shit, even Paris Hilton can make a million dollars in this country without blowing up 200 years of democracy. How smart can these guys be?

Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and many others in the House, to lie back and open their legs all the way for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions. In the Third World, corrupt politicians at least get something for selling out the people - boats, mansions, villas in the south of France. If you offered the lowest, most drunken ex-mobster in the Russian Duma $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 in soft money for his vote, he would laugh in your face; he might even be insulted enough to shoot you. But Jack Abramoff apparently got any number of congressmen to play ball for the same kind of money.

They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America's journalists like Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

They targeted Congress, the courts, the integrity of elections, and the free press, and in every corner they found willing partners who could be had for a few bucks and a package of golf tees. That doesn't mean Jack Abramoff was so very smart. No, what that says is that America is no longer trying very hard. And when Jack Abramoff hears his sentence, ours will certainly be made plain soon after. Jack Abramoff was the Patient Zero of Washington corruption. He's the girl at school that everyone got a piece of, including two janitors in their forties. It strains all credulity to think that he's been talking to the Department of Justice for months and yet prosecutors still have to "encircle" a lone congressman, Bob Ney, as has been reported. If Ney is the big target the government made a deal with Abramoff for, we'll know we've been had again.

"If you're venal and cunning enough, like him, you can do it," says Slaughter, when asked if the American system has become easy to beat. "But he had a lot of help."

===

<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/04/abramoff200604"> http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/04/abramoff200604</a>
invisible man (matt t not complimentary?)POLITICSApril 2006CORRUPTIONWashington’s Invisible ManAs the lobbyist who has ignited what might be the biggest government scandal since Watergate, Jack Abramoff became notorious for tossing around money, much of it from the casinos of his Indian-tribe clients, to influence key lawmakers. Now, as he talks (and talks) to the feds, Washington is waiting to see whom he’ll take down with him.by David Margolick
By now, Jack Abramoff is known in just about every home and Grange hall and shopping mall, every Middlesex village and farm, in America. He’s the Washington lobbyist who bought all those senators and representatives, the man who ripped off all those Indian tribes he represented, the butt of all those late-night-TV jokes. He’s the fellow responsible for what might be the biggest government scandal since Watergate, the man whose sullied example could maybe, possibly, help clean up Washington. He’s the guy who wore that infamous black hat on the day he admitted it all.<div id="pageContainer1" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff is known everywhere but in two buildings, that is: the United States Capitol and the White House. Sure, he spread around millions of Indian-tribe dollars, to say nothing of golf trips to Scotland and free meals at Signatures, his own fancy restaurant, and luxury-box seats at sporting events—American Indians, of all people, paying for Redskins tickets—among roughly 270 members of Congress. Sure, a few senators and representatives admit to having brushed up against Abramoff, but only long enough for him to have “duped” or “misled” them. And President Bush can barely remember him: for a couple of Hanukkahs, Abramoff apparently stood on grip-and-grin lines at the White House to be photographed with the president, but almost anybody can do that.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Being airbrushed out of a whole community in which he cut so wide a swath for the past 10 years, where he helped revolutionize lobbying, where he was very nearly ubiquitous and invincible—it’s enough to hurt someone’s feelings. On other matters related to his situation he tiptoes, as would anyone whose fate—the amount of time he will languish in prison—lies in the hands of prosecutors and the judge. But for someone who has fought his whole career to be acknowledged and respected and feared, being treated like a nonperson is simply too much to take. “For a guy who did all these evil things that have been so widely reported, it’s pretty amazing, considering I didn’t know anyone,” Abramoff says sardonically. “You’re really no one in this town unless you haven’t met me.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Just to cite one typical example, the head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, said in an interview, “Abramoff is someone who we don’t know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper,” even though, according to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, Mehlman exchanged e-mail with Abramoff, did him political favors (such as blocking Clinton-administration alumnus Allen Stayman from keeping a State Department job), had Sabbath dinner at his house, and offered to pick up his tab at Signatures. (According to a spokesperson, Mehlman does not recall the e-mail exchange, “because he was often contacted by political supporters with suggestions and ideas,” or the Sabbath dinner.) The newly elected House majority leader, John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, also doesn’t know Abramoff, but Abramoff’s clients gave him $30,000 over the past few years, and ate many meals at Signatures. (For a couple of years, Abramoff’s principal liaison with Boehner was David Safavian—a former member of “Team Abramoff” and later head of procurement for the White House Office of Management and Budget—who has been indicted for lying about his Abramoff ties.)<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Then there’s presidential adviser Karl Rove. He has not spoken of his relationship with Abramoff, but the White House insists Rove, too, barely knew him, acknowledging only that they met at a political event in the 1990s. “He would describe him as a casual acquaintance,” a White House spokesman said. But Abramoff was Rove’s spiritual heir at the College Republicans in the 1980s; both men headed the group, and the two met from time to time in connection with it. After George W. Bush took office, Susan Ralston, Abramoff’s administrative assistant, took the same position with Rove at the White House, where Abramoff met with Rove at least once. (An eyewitness also recalls seeing Abramoff emerge from a car near the White House and have what looked like a pre-arranged, street-corner meeting with Rove; Abramoff says he can’t recall that.) Rove dined several times at Signatures and was Abramoff’s guest in the owner’s box at the N.C.A.A. basketball playoffs a few years ago, sitting for much of the game by Abramoff’s side. Recently, three former associates of Abramoff’s have told how he frequently mentioned his strong ties to Rove, and one described being present when Abramoff took a phone call from Rove’s office.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Then, most important, there’s President Bush. “I, frankly, don’t even remember having my picture taken with the guy,” he has said. But how about those 10 or so photographs of him with Abramoff, or with Abramoff’s sons, or of Laura Bush with Abramoff’s daughters, apparently taken during all of those meetings that never took place? And the time when the president joked with Abramoff about his weight lifting: “What are you benching, buff guy?” How about the invitation to the ranch in Crawford, where Abramoff would have joined all of the other big Bush fund-raisers? Abramoff didn’t go to that—it fell on the Sabbath, which, as an Orthodox Jew, Abramoff observes—but how about that speech Bush gave to big donors in 2003, when Abramoff sat only a few feet away, between Republican senators George Allen (Virginia) and Orrin Hatch (Utah), and was the only lobbyist on the dais?<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“He has one of the best memories of any politician I have ever met,” Abramoff wrote of the president in yet another of his notorious e-mails, which have evolved from his principal means of communication to the rope with which he has hanged, and continues to hang, himself. “Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">There are other people from Abramoff’s more distant past who also never knew him, such as former Republican House Speaker (and rumored 2008 presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, who first never met Abramoff during the latter’s firebrand days atop the College Republicans. “Before his picture appeared on TV and in the newspapers, Newt wouldn’t have known him if he fell across him. He hadn’t seen him in 10 years,” Gingrich’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, tells me. That this especially rankles Abramoff becomes clear as he rummages through a box of old memorabilia with me. “Here’s [former Republican Texas congressman and House majority leader] Dick Armey,” he tells me. “Here’s Newt. Newt. Newt. [Former president Ronald] Reagan. More Newt. Newt with Grover [Norquist, the Washington conservative Republican Über-strategist and longtime Abramoff friend] this time, and with [Seattle arch-conservative Republican] Rabbi [Daniel] Lapin. But Newt never met me. [Indicted Iran-contra figure and longtime Abramoff friend] Ollie North. Newt. Can’t be Newt … he never met me. Oh, Newt! What’s he doing there? Must be a Newt look-alike. I have more pictures of him than I have of my wife. Newt again! It’s sick! I thought he never met me!”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">After a public evisceration unlike any in recent history, and facing a decade or more in jail, Jack Abramoff, the 47-year-old father of five, who spent 10 hyperkinetic, largely introspection-free years as both Washington’s most powerful lobbyist and a key Republican activist, is contrite and humble. He is trying to salvage for himself a modicum of self-respect, along with some mercy and understanding from the judge who holds his fate in her hands. He admits that he stepped over ethical lines, insulted and misled his clients, offended the God to whom he regularly prays. By court decree, he owes the Indian tribes approximately $25 million in restitution, and he owes the I.R.S. at least $1.7 million. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, when Orthodox Jews beat their breasts for their sins, he can flagellate himself with great conviction. But for Jack Abramoff, the time for on-the-record rancor is over. However angry he may be with former cronies who supped at his trough and accepted his favors but who now call him a “sleazebag” or a “creep” and wish he’d never been born, he bites his tongue. What really upsets him is all this revisionism, all these people pretending he never existed.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn’t know me is almost certainly lying,” he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. “This is not an age when you can run away from facts,” he declares. “I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs.”</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer2" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">On January 3, Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Court documents describe how he encouraged at least four Indian tribes to hire his former associate Michael Scanlon, who had his own public-relations company, for grassroots work—largely political campaigning in the field, such as letter writing, phone banks, and media advertisements—without disclosing that Abramoff himself was getting kickbacks of almost half of Scanlon’s profits. Both Scanlon’s fees and Abramoff’s take were enormous: $30,510,000 from the Louisiana Coushattas, of which Abramoff received $11,450,000; $14,765,000 from the Mississippi Band of Choctaws ($6,364,000 to Abramoff); and $3,500,000 from the Saginaw Chippewas of Michigan ($540,000 to Abramoff).<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Similarly, Scanlon received $4,200,000 from the Tiguas of Texas, who were seeking to reopen a casino in El Paso. Abramoff had assured the Tiguas that he would work for free, but under his arrangement with Scanlon he surreptitiously pocketed $1,850,000. In this instance, compounding the deceit was a conflict of interest: Abramoff failed to disclose that, on behalf of another tribe, he had helped shut down the Tiguas’ casino to begin with, then aided in killing legislation that might have allowed them to start up again.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“I think Jack is the ultimate con man,” said Marc Schwartz, a former consultant to the Tiguas, who watched Abramoff win over tribal members in 2002 with his chartered jet, his wireless laptop and BlackBerry, and what appeared to be his dazzling accomplishments for other Indian tribes. To Schwartz, who became friendly with Abramoff, subsequent revelations about his dishonesty and bribery of public officials have made him the Mark McGwire of lobbyists, a man whose cheating has tainted whatever good he accomplished. “Greed and avarice got to Jack, and his constant references to his Orthodoxy and his self-described passion for righting wrongs made the betrayal I felt so much greater,” says Schwartz.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The plea agreement also charges Abramoff with “corruption of public officials,” in particular “Representative #1,” universally understood to be Republican congressman Bob Ney of Ohio. It states that in exchange for “a stream of things of value”—foreign and domestic travel, golf fees, food, jobs for relatives, and both campaign contributions and a contribution to the National Republican Campaign Committee at his request—Ney became Abramoff’s fixer on Capitol Hill.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The offenses don’t stop there. Abramoff ripped off the law-and-lobbying firm he worked for by essentially lobbying behind its back. He misused tax-exempt charities such as his own foundation, the Capital Athletic Foundation, in one instance using $50,000 donated to it by a tribal client to help fund an August 2002 golfing trip to Scotland for himself, members of his staff, Ney, Ney staffers, and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff also funneled $50,000 through a charity to the wife of Tony Rudy, a top aide to former House majority leader Tom DeLay (Republican of Texas), in exchange for Rudy’s help in obtaining legislation to block Internet gambling and in opposing postal-rate increases. Rudy subsequently went to work for Abramoff, as did Ney’s former chief of staff Neil Volz, who lobbied his former employer within less than a year of his departure—yet another violation of the law. As if that weren’t enough, Abramoff in a separate case has pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy in the 2000 purchase of SunCruz Casinos, a Florida casino-boat company. That transaction ended in a bankruptcy and a Mob rubout, though no one, including the prosecutors in Miami, has ever linked Abramoff directly to the murder.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">In return for what he hopes will be a shorter sentence, Abramoff is spilling his secrets to the Justice Department. In the past 19 months or so, prosecutors and investigators have spent something approaching 200 hours pumping him for information. Allegedly as many as 15 people—from various branches of the Justice Department (including the F.B.I.), the Department of the Interior, the Internal Revenue Service, and other federal agencies—are listening. It is an evolving process, for, with prosecutors (as with reporters), Abramoff has been a work in progress, moving from defiance to denial to self-justification to contrition. As time has passed and the parties have grown accustomed to one another, the information has grown more solid and specific. For Abramoff, unemployed and unemployable, talking with the authorities is as close as he gets these days to a full-time job. Once, his stock-in-trade was whom he knew. Now it is what he knows. “In a different era I’d be killed on the street or have poison poured into my coffee,” he says.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">What they are all interested in is the nearly $4 million—largely gambling revenues from the casinos of his tribal clients—that Abramoff spread around Washington. Two-thirds of that went either to the Republican Party, his ideological home since college, or to individual Republicans, many of whom could dole out appropriations, move along legislation, or perform a host of other chores that the tribes wanted. Democrats, too, mainly in the Senate, could do Abramoff favors, and, while they may have abhorred his politics, his money still smelled good. They got more than a million dollars.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The other shoe seems poised to drop in Washington, implicating perhaps a handful of senators and congressmen, as well as their staffs, relatives, and other public officials. The most obvious target is Ney. In their heyday, he and Abramoff played golf together, traveled together, philosophized together. Ney was one of the few elected officials Abramoff invited to the Bar Mitzvah of one of his three sons. Now Ney says that Abramoff “duped” and “misled” him. But, according to the plea agreement, Ney threw a lucrative contract to an Abramoff client, intervened with agencies and offices to seek favors for other Abramoff interests, helped a relative of one of Abramoff’s Russian clients obtain an American visa, agreed to introduce legislation that would help reopen the Tigua casino, and, to assist Abramoff in buying the SunCruz line, read two statements into the Congressional Record, one in which he described Abramoff’s main partner in that deal, Adam Kidan—a man who’d been disbarred, declared bankruptcy, and had Mob ties—as a man of the utmost integrity.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">For such services, Ney, according to the plea agreement, got “a stream of things of value” from Abramoff and those he represented: a “lavish” golf trip to St. Andrews, seats in Abramoff’s sports boxes, freebie dinners at Signatures (Ney was a “sushiholic,” one eyewitness recalls), and at least $37,500 in donations to various political-action committees on his behalf. Rather than go for Ney immediately, prosecutors appear to be encircling him, possibly striking plea deals with frightened staffers, themselves desperate to stay out of jail.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Also in the prosecutorial crosshairs may be Republican senator Conrad Burns, of Montana, one of the largest single recipients of Abramoff loot. As head of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior, which handles Indian affairs, he was Abramoff’s point man in the Senate for federal goodies.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Burns told a reporter he wishes Abramoff had never been born, and, more recently, has blanketed the airwaves in Montana with ads claiming that Abramoff “lied to anybody and everybody” and “ripped off his Indian clients,” but that “he never influenced me.” Abramoff won’t comment specifically on the ads, clearly tempted as he is. “Every appropriation we wanted [from Burns’s committee] we got,” he says. “Our staffs were as close as they could be. They practically used Signatures as their cafeteria. I mean, it’s a little difficult for him to run from that record.” As for Burns’s wishing he’d never been born, Abramoff remarks, “That’s quite a statement, coming from a pro-life Republican.”<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Burns, however, ranks only fourth on the list of Abramoff’s recipients, having taken $55,590, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (though even Burns’s own people put that figure at closer to $150,000). The other four of the top-five largest individual recipients, all Republicans, were: Representative J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, co-chairman of the Congressional Native American Caucus ($69,620); Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi ($65,500); House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois ($58,500); and Representative John T. Doolittle of California ($45,000). Several of them are reportedly targets of the Justice Department’s investigation, as is the man who was Abramoff’s main liaison at the Interior Department, former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles, a onetime mining-industry lobbyist who a high-ranking colleague told the Senate was Abramoff’s water carrier in the department.<p style="color: black; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The Democrats insist that the Abramoff scandal is strictly a Republican affair. Of the more than $200,000 he gave away of his personal money, not a dime went to the Democrats. He always stipulated that his lobbying activities accord with his staunchly conservative beliefs. But Democrats received money from Abramoff’s tribal clients, including: Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada ($30,500); Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota ($28,000); Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa ($14,500); and Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island ($31,000).</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer3" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent;">Bribery prosecutions are notoriously tough to make; while there was plenty of quid floating around, it can be very hard to prove the quo, at least without smoking guns like wiretapped conversations. Clearly, the voluminous e-mail trail will help. Along with evidentiary problems, there’s also the question of political will. Perhaps after a few examples have been made, the Bush administration will declare victory and walk away from further prosecutions, especially if, should Democrats also be implicated, the opposition lets them. In another sense, though, the Abramoff scandal now transcends Abramoff. With congressional staffers and, perhaps, some congressmen willing to say anything to save their own skins, the fire could spread unabated.For Abramoff’s crimes, the statutory maximum is 30 years. But, as calculated in the plea agreement under the federal sentencing guidelines, he is subject to somewhere between 108 and 135 months in prison. That can be substantially reduced for cooperation, though given the notoriety of the case, everyone agrees, Abramoff is certain to do substantial jail time. The best guess is that Abramoff will be sentenced in a year or two, and spend at least a few years behind bars. It all rests with Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who took Abramoff’s plea and heard his abject apology.Ever since his days as an undergraduate at Brandeis University in the late 1970s, Abramoff has been a right-wing conservative zealot—a “Republican warrior,” as he puts it. He has never voted for a Democrat in his life (and now, as a convicted felon, he probably never will). Paradoxically, it was Republicans who did Jack Abramoff in. According to an insider, Abramoff believes his downfall began with competing Republican lobbyists who coveted his clientele and fed damaging information about him to The Washington Post. And it continued with Senator John McCain (Republican of Arizona), whose hearings into Abramoff’s dealings with the Indians ran for five gory, highly publicized sessions in 2004 and 2005.At the top of his game, Abramoff was master of his domain. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal did glowing front-page profiles of him. He had his “Team Abramoff,” the cadre of young, hungry associates, many fresh recruits from the Hill, in whom he inculcated his scorched-earth, win-at-all-costs mentality. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” he tells me. Few lobbyists in Washington generated more business; in one year, he brought in $12 million. He presided over his empire at Signatures, which he opened in February 2002, between the Capitol and the White House, and which became a kind of command center for him. Abramoff’s perch was Table 40, where the movers and shakers of official Washington came to him. “It was like Frank Sinatra,” recalls Monty Warner, a Republican media strategist who remains friendly with Abramoff. “I can remember Ney coming up and groveling, saying how much he enjoyed a golf outing or skybox or ball game, and really appreciated Jack’s support.”These days Signatures is locked up. And Abramoff, the ultimate lobbyist, now has his most challenging client: himself. In the past couple of years, he has become a cartoon-character bad guy, as he puts it. The image peaked on the day of his plea deal, when he wore the now infamous black hat. He had put it on because Orthodox Jews are supposed to cover their heads, but he feared that the yarmulke he would normally have worn would invite charges of false or newly minted piety. Besides, the forecast had called for rain. But he had unwittingly stepped right into a stereotype: Meet Jack Abramoff—the Fat Cat in the Hat.RRehabilitation is a delicate maneuver. How do you prostrate and stand up for yourself at once? When Abramoff speaks to a reporter these days, he veers between the cathartic and the strategic. He says something, then thinks better of it. Ultimately, he is savvy enough to know that at this point in his saga the smart money lies with accepting his fate; no one who matters to him now is much interested in his self-pity or rage. When it comes to speaking freely, then, Abramoff’s sentence has already begun. For public consumption, he has become something his friends and enemies would never recognize: cautious and conciliatory. He was getting to be too nice, unconvincingly so, I told him at one point. He laughed knowingly. I’d better hurry up and finish, he said; pretty soon, he’d turn into a saint.For Abramoff, his is not a story of theft or greed; it is a colossal misunderstanding. He still sees himself as an idealist, a philanthropist, a visionary—someone who, as he puts it, “flies at 30,000 feet,” too preoccupied with larger, weightier issues to deal with quotidian details, like contractual arrangements or his choice of business partners or the finer points of the law. His corner cutting and legerdemain, he says, were not only never venal, but had a higher purpose. As an Orthodox Jew, Abramoff will not even write out God’s name, but he saw himself as his instrument.Abramoff’s orbit now consists largely of his home, his lawyer’s office, and the F.B.I. Gone are the skyboxes; he still has Wizards tickets—a remnant of his prior life, expiring at the end of the season—but he doesn’t go. From the suite that was his office at the lobbying-and-law firm of Greenberg Traurig—the biggest on the premises, big enough to drive foam golf balls in—and a team of 30, he’s been reduced to a cheerless, windowless room not far from the White House (it looks like, well, a cell) and a part-time secretary. He rarely goes there.Clearly, part of Abramoff feels that he has been unfairly targeted, that he did not invent all of the abuses with which he was charged. He was not the first lobbyist to spread money around, or to throw fund-raisers, or to treat congressmen to exotic trips. He did what other lobbyists did, only more so: more intelligently, more aggressively, more effectively, more unrelentingly, more ruthlessly. Other people surely wrote e-mails every bit as embarrassing as his, in which he called his Indian clients “troglodytes” and “morons” and “monkeys,” “the stupidest idiots in the land.” In one particularly damning e-mail he counseled Scanlon, “The key thing to remember with all these clients is that they are annoying, but that the annoying losers are the only ones which have this kind of money and part with it so quickly. So, we have to put up with this stuff.”Abramoff has apologized profusely for those e-mails. They were not meant as racial slurs, he says; he claims he’s never made a racist comment, at least consciously, in his life. Most of them, he has pointed out, were written to Scanlon, with whom he spoke a kind of vulgar patois, part locker room, part drill sergeant, part gangsta rap. I ask him whether what he wrote about a tribe in another e-mail—“Oh, well, stupid folks get wiped out”—could be applied to him, the author of all those self-incriminating statements. “Well, here I am,” he replies.He also maintains that whatever he charged the Indians they more than earned back on his results. And it is absolutely true that in the bizarre world of Indian gaming a few strategic moves with the right politicians or bureaucrats are worth millions, billions. It is also true that the very documents that show Abramoff’s ridicule of the Indians also illustrate how indefatigably he pushed their interests. So, too, did the final two days of McCain’s Senate hearings, which chronicled his extraordinary influence over the Department of the Interior. Now, though, he’s been turned into some kind of predator, worse for Native Americans than Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer. “The entire Indian country has come together in a big kumbaya of hatred for me,” he says. “It just tears at my soul.”“I was moving a mile a minute and didn’t conceive that I could be doing something wrong, and as I got near to the edge I either concealed it or I convinced myself that I wasn’t having a problem,” he explains. “I was basically so busy winning that I didn’t see what I was doing. They say, ‘Stop and smell the roses’? I didn’t stop and smell the dung heap. Unfortunately, now I’m paying for it dearly.”‘You can take one of two points of view about Abramoff,” a man familiar with the Senate investigation tells me. “Either he’d always been a bad egg and he was put into a position where he could really flourish, or he was a classic Greek tragic hero: someone who was charismatic, diligent, effective, and a movement conservative adhering to the principles while serving his clients’ interests, but who got caught up in the Master of the Universe syndrome.” This man subscribed to the first theory. But Abramoff has a third: It’s all divine will. God is punishing him for his misdeeds. He’s sometimes tempted to complain.</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer4" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“I could say to God, ‘How dare you do this?’ ” he says. “ ‘I became religious, against every influence in my environment. I fought to be kosher; there were times I didn’t eat. There were times I walked to synagogue in bloody feet.’ I could say that very easily, but I don’t say it for a second. Why? Because I am the bearer of many transgressions, from stuff that is known to all the stuff known only to me.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">He remains radioactive. Tom DeLay, who once called Abramoff “one of my closest and dearest friends,” no longer talks to him. Nor does Scanlon, who struck a plea deal before he did. “Anyone who is anywhere near anything that has to do with me has been advised by their lawyers not to talk to me,” Abramoff says.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Ralph Reed’s race for lieutenant governor of Georgia has foundered since it was disclosed that Reed, who says he opposes gambling, accepted gambling money from Abramoff on a lobbying job, then insisted he hadn’t known about it. The two are now estranged; when Norquist got married last year, Reed steered clumsily clear of Abramoff’s table. And, Abramoff says, Newt Gingrich sneered at him. Doug Bandow, a conservative whom Abramoff paid to write newspaper pieces favoring Abramoff positions, was drummed out of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, and lost his syndicated column. Some think Abramoff’s politically ambitious lawyer, Abbe Lowell, was crazy for taking on a client who seems to blacken whatever he touches.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff’s friends—and some still do exist, despite the hordes who have run for the hills—marvel at the vituperation he generates. “Jack wasn’t that great when he was on top and he’s not that bad now that he’s fallen from grace,” says Laurence R. Latourette, former managing partner at Abramoff’s first lobbying firm and now a headhunter in Washington. “He was an aggressive, occasionally ruthless, and largely effective hired gun. He didn’t reach out and screw people because he liked to hurt them. At the same time, he didn’t let much stand in the way when pursuing his goals. Jack’s not intentionally immoral. He can be amoral.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“In everything he did he was over the top, and not everything he did was bad,” said another close friend, a rabbi who asked not to be identified. “He was good over the top and bad over the top.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">When I began writing about Abramoff, I assumed he’d hunkered down. That’s what most lawyers have their clients do, even when, as in Abramoff’s case, silence only exacerbates their problems. I made the obligatory call to Abramoff’s law firm and was told, unsurprisingly, that there’d be no interview. Imagine my surprise, then, when an e-mail from him arrived. Very belatedly, he was taking no chances. “This email is off the record and must not be used or forwarded by you to anyone,” it unceremoniously began. “If that is agreeable, please continue reading. If not, please delete. Thanks.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff went on to say he’d heard of my article-to-be, and asked whether it would be “just another in the long line of slam pieces” he’d endured over the previous two years or whether I was “an out of the box thinker/writer who might actually be the one to write the other side of this saga.” He went on: “Of the usual slam pieces, there are over 2,100 so far—including a few written by excellent writers who misrepresented to me that they wanted to ‘tell the untold story’ and ‘give me more of a human face’ etc., etc.” If I could convince him otherwise, he said, he’d consider talking to me.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“I have long prayed for that one chance to have my side told, unblemished by the cartoon image I have been assigned,” he went on, “but I am also prepared to have this prayer remain unanswered.” I replied that writing the 2,101st “slam piece” didn’t interest me, as a journalist or a human being. I also, at his request, presented my bona fides as a Jew. He agreed to meet me a few days later at Eli’s, one of only two kosher delicatessens in Washington now that Abramoff’s own, short-lived effort, Stacks, had closed. Eli’s had the usual bedraggled look of kosher delis in the flyover states. But Abramoff himself surprised me.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">He was shorter and stockier than I’d anticipated, with a black felt yarmulke on his head, something I’d not noticed in the pictures. Dressed casually and out of his usual power suits, he was a bit of a zhlub, far less scary than the man who had threatened in his e-mails to crush rival lobbyists “like bugs.” He was also far more soft-spoken, polite, friendly, self-deprecating, and funny than I’d have ever expected. At adjacent tables people cast furtive glances at him, then talked into their hands as he passed. He saw it, as did I, but he was not fazed. Abramoff spoke continuously—so much so that I filibustered a bit before his hamburger got cold. He then ate it ravenously. To his acute embarrassment, he’s put on 50 pounds. It’s all the stress, he says.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><span class="dc" style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(224, 0, 0); float: left; line-height: 90px; display: inline-block; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">‘He always had a very vaudevillian, bombastic, exaggerated personality,” a classmate of Abramoff’s from Beverly Hills High School remembers. “There was clearly some insecurity deep within him that made him have to prove himself in all kinds of ways. There was a side of him that kind of came from the Borscht Belt. He seemed a little out of place in California.” In fact, Abramoff was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1959; his father, Frank, headed golf legend Arnold Palmer’s sports marketing company. (Once an 11-handicap golfer, Abramoff took his first lesson from Palmer.) When the elder Abramoff assumed a position with Diners Club, the family moved to Los Angeles. In high school, Abramoff set weight-lifting records and played center on the football team. The family was already Republican but only mildly religious; Abramoff’s road to Damascus was Wilshire Boulevard, where he saw the 1971 movie <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Fiddler on the Roof, then vowed to reclaim his Jewish heritage and headed into Orthodoxy.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">At Brandeis—he says another famous family friend, prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson, helped get him in—Abramoff was a straight arrow who walked out when people began smoking marijuana. There, as in several later incarnations, he became the charismatic center of a loyal entourage, people who enjoyed his company and did his bidding. At this largely Jewish campus in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, there was little competition for the post of Republican big shot. He went on to head the Massachusetts College Republicans, and in 1980 helped Ronald Reagan carry the state George McGovern had won only eight years before. His partner in that effort was Grover Norquist, then a Harvard graduate student and now, as head of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the most important Republican operatives in Washington. (Norquist, whom Abramoff calls “the great unknown genius of politics,” is one of the few people who publicly stood by him initially, though he refused to speak with <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Vanity Fair. “Grover’s one of the most brave political strategists, one of the most important political figures in the early part of this century,” Abramoff says. “He is also a very decent person. He’s been nothing but friendly and sympathetic.”)<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">From Massachusetts, Abramoff and Norquist took the top posts in the College Republican National Committee. Ralph Reed, then the baby-faced state chairman from Georgia, became Abramoff’s projects director. To both the exhilaration and, occasionally, the discomfort of Republican grown-ups, Abramoff electrified the once sleepy organization, largely through imaginative right-wing street theater: burning Soviet flags, building and destroying mock Berlin Walls, re-assembling the American medical students who’d been rescued during Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. “That’s when I first didn’t meet Newt Gingrich,” he recalls.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">IIf Reagan had a favorite designated “young person,” it was surely Jack Abramoff. Accustomed, from his time as governor of California, to dealing with bearded Berkeley rabble-rousers, the president found this clean-cut, earnest young man a breath of fresh air. In the College Republicans’ annual report for 1983 is a picture of the two in the Oval Office, with radiant beams emanating from chairman Jack Abramoff’s 24-year-old eyes. “It was like meeting the king,” he now recalls. At a birthday party the College Republicans threw for Reagan in the early 1980s Abramoff met his wife, Pamela, who knew Ralph Reed.</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer5" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff and Norquist left the College Republicans in 1985 to take over Citizens for America, an organization designed to push Reagan’s political agenda. But Abramoff soon crossed swords with the co-founder of the group, former New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman—Abramoff and his staffers had “gone hog wild” on their spending, a Lehrman aide told <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The Washington Post—and was fired. Abramoff then turned to producing films. From 1986 to 1994 he made a few stinkers, most notably <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Red Scorpion, an anti-Communist parable filmed in Namibia that everyone hated, Abramoff included. But shortly after that, he abandoned show business. It was 1994, and the Republicans now ran Congress. It was time to get back into politics.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Right after the election, Jonathan Blank, Abramoff’s next-door neighbor and a senior partner at the Washington office of the law-and-lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, ran into him in synagogue and offered him a job. Like all such firms, Preston Gates (the Gates is Bill’s father), based in Seattle, was in sudden, desperate need of Republicans. Abramoff hesitated. To him, lobbying sounded dull, and lobbyists were mainstream, cautious, unimaginative types, very much in the box, anathema to true conservatives. He accepted the offer, but only on his terms: His practice would be ideological, an extension of his conservative Republican activism. Anything politically uncongenial he simply would not do. The firm was just as ambivalent. The parties agreed to a six-month trial marriage.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><span class="dc" style="border: 0px; margin: -4px 8px -18px 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(224, 0, 0); float: left; line-height: 90px; display: inline-block; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">AAbramoff quickly brought in clients such as the government of Pakistan and, most important, the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific whose exemption from certain American labor laws—factories there could pay their workers a pittance but still label their products “Made in the U.S.A.”—was for Abramoff a classic case of free enterprise at work. So, too, he felt, were the Indian reservations. The Indians had always been Democrats, for Democrats were more sensitive to their social-welfare needs. Abramoff landed the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and promptly made their agenda mesh with that of the conservatives, most spectacularly by re-framing a Republican proposal to tax gaming revenues as a tax increase, then helping to kill it. The Choctaws saved hundreds of millions in taxes over the next decade. That paid a lot of bills. In five years, the tribe paid an extraordinary $7 million to Preston Gates, but they weren’t complaining.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">A key ally in that effort had been DeLay, whom Abramoff met in 1994. “I have admired Tom DeLay and his family from the first meeting with him, and I still do to this day,” says Abramoff. I mentioned that DeLay once referred to him as one of his closest friends. “I am honored that he ever thought that of me,” he says. “We would sit and talk about the Bible. We would sit and talk about opera. We would sit and talk about golf. I mean, we talked about philosophy and politics.” He adds, “I didn’t spend a lot of time lobbying Tom for things, because the things I worked on were usually consistent with the conservative philosophy, and I knew Tom would be supportive.” Still, whether he was lobbying DeLay or not, his $450,500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee must have made DeLay very happy.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Beginning in the late 1990s, Abramoff hired several DeLay staffers and others closely connected to important congressmen. Mostly, they were long on enthusiasm and deference, short on wisdom—too young, as someone who came to know Abramoff well put it, “to have hair on their nuts.” The template was Michael Scanlon, a top aide to DeLay whom Abramoff hired at Preston Gates. Lots of people didn’t like him, with all his swagger and football metaphors and cheesy smoothness. But to Abramoff he was creative and tactical and ingenious: “out of the box,” to use his highest encomium. Scanlon was “Abramoff’s evil elf,” as someone calls him.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">At Preston Gates, Abramoff remained a divisive figure. The firm didn’t like his clients—representing sweatshops made for bad publicity back in liberal Seattle—or his associates: the day he brought in Ralph Reed “all of the liberal Democrats went absolutely fucking nuts,” an eyewitness recalls. Nor did they always appreciate his take-no-prisoners style. A former Clinton administration official blames Abramoff for going at him so relentlessly—having him subpoenaed, investigated, fired, and attacked in <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The Washington Times—that he finally called a mutual acquaintance of theirs. “Isn’t this guy ever going to let up and get a life?” he asked this friend. “He’s relentless and he’s vindictive and he’ll never let up,” the friend replied. “He sees the world as friends and enemies, and you destroy your enemies.” At the rate he was going, one of the firm’s heads once warned him, Abramoff would wind up “dead, disgraced, or in jail.” But Abramoff persisted.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“Most lobbyists meet with a committee chairman, staff, a few members,” Abramoff recalls. “We’d meet with the whole leadership of the House and Senate, the entire committee on both sides, then create a roster of who might ideologically support the idea and get them in the war. Then we’d activate people from the district where the client was. We’d get people firing constantly on the decision-makers. And we’d outwork everyone in the media, pay think-tank people to rile them up in the press. Most Washington lobbyists are lazy, people of limits, people who move glacially slow. For better or worse, I’m a very driven person. I felt my job was to go out there and save the world…. I thought it was immoral to take someone’s money and not win for them. And we basically didn’t lose.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Still, he felt underappreciated and restless. He was skeptical when Greenberg Traurig, a Miami-based firm with an unremarkable lobbying practice, came courting, but was gradually won over. What clinched the deal was something Abramoff recalls the firm’s president, Cesar Alvarez, said: “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” That suited him fine. He bolted to the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, along with all 11 of his acolytes, and a reported $8 million in business.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Here, too, “Team Abramoff” met resistance. Wearing conservative suits and ties in a place that favored more casual wear, they “looked like a cult,” said a lobbyist there. But, overnight, Greenberg became the fourth-largest lobbyist in town. Much of that money came from Indian tribes. The Mississippi Choctaws were joined by the Louisiana Coushattas, the Saginaw Chippewas, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the Sandia Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and the Tiguas, among others. Most had, essentially, the same problems: averting efforts to tax the tribes or reduce their sovereignty; securing favorable legislation on health, housing, education, and other services; winning appropriations and grants of land in trust; and protecting their casino licenses against political vicissitudes and rival Indian tribes hoping to open casinos of their own.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff delivered on these fronts, especially in beating back rival casinos. Several tribes also got visits with President Bush at the White House, or dinner with Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Indeed, with George Bush in the White House, Abramoff had the Interior Department wired. His point man was former deputy secretary J. Steven Griles; various Abramoff e-mails, along with former department legal counsel Michael Rossetti’s testimony to the Senate committee, show how faithfully Griles did Abramoff’s bidding. (Griles denies any wrongdoing.) “There was a swagger to [Abramoff’s] walk,” Wayne Smith, deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Interior Department during Bush’s first term, recalls. “He was very clear that he was very well connected. He mentioned that he was a major fund-raiser, very tight with Rove. The impression was ‘Hey, I am a force to be reckoned with.’ ”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff charged in a variety of ways. There were his fees. There were the contributions he had the tribes make, to his foundation and other organizations, which he would then funnel to politicians or his pet charity. Then, most fatefully, there was his take of the colossal fees that Scanlon (who had opened his own public-relations firm in 2001) charged for services rendered, under-rendered, and unrendered between 2001 and 2004. Greenberg Traurig knew nothing about that, but that was all right by Abramoff, who considered his grassroots work with Scanlon moonlighting that didn’t constitute lobbying. The Indians were never explicitly told about the deal, either, Abramoff concedes, but that was also all right because, to him at least, the work he did was so valuable.</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer6" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“Their casinos were going down the tubes, so it was not an issue of ‘Jack, what are you doing?,’ it was ‘Jack, win, win, win,’ and it was Jack saying, ‘We’re going to win,’ ” Abramoff says. “Their response was ‘If you win, it’s worth it. If you lose, it’s not worth a dollar. Just go win.’ Yes, I did wrong, but I did a hell of a lot right too. Basically, I was the best thing they had going. I knew it, they knew it. My mistake was not informing them [about Scanlon].”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">In April 2002, The New York Times ran a front-page profile of Abramoff. “I call Jack Abramoff, and I get results,” the vice-chairman of the Coushattas, William Worfel, told the newspaper. Never one to rest on his oars, as Reagan had observed of him, Abramoff cast about for still more Indian clients. But without knowing it he had hit his high-water mark. Rival tribal officials, dismayed by the huge payments to Abramoff and Scanlon, got word to lobbyists eager for some of Abramoff’s Indian business, who in turn reached the press.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">On the front page of <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">The Washington Post for February 22, 2004, Susan Schmidt broke the story of Abramoff’s astronomical fees. His underlings were horrified by what they read. “Lots of damning things in there,” one of them e-mailed. “I know more than [the] article and the truth is worse.” But Abramoff himself was initially sanguine: the <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Post was really accusing him of no more than making lots of money. He even weighed posting the piece on his Web site. Two tribes quickly rose to Abramoff’s defense, faulting the <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Post for suggesting that the Indians were either too dumb to protect themselves or too poor to deserve first-class representation. The chief of the Mississippi Choctaws, Phillip Martin, said that Abramoff had done a “fantastic job” and was “definitely worth the money” (though Martin would recant six months later). “Sure, the new lobbyists are 1/10 the cost,” the former chief of the Saginaw Chippewas, Maynard Kahgegab Jr., wrote of Abramoff’s replacements, “but they are 1/10 the lobbyists.” The <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Post never printed either letter, or, Abramoff says, anything else ever written on his behalf. (The <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Post’s Susan Schmidt, citing materials released by the Senate committee, maintains that Abramoff’s team wrote the two chiefs’ letters. Both Martin and Kahgegab declined to comment.) But within a week, Greenberg Traurig fired Abramoff. Soon investigators from the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department, and the F.B.I. were all over the case. So, too, was the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, which began its hearings in September 2004 into allegations of misconduct by Abramoff made by the Indian tribes.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff believes the hearings were unfair and blames McCain, with whom he says he has long had a contentious relationship: Abramoff raised money for Bush in 2000 and urged tribes not to contribute to McCain. McCain staffers deliberately humiliated him, he says, doling out to the press embarrassing e-mails that the Senate committee had subpoenaed—like the one in which he attempted to fabricate a Talmudic scholarship award from a Jewish organization to fortify his application to Washington’s prestigious Cosmos Club.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“Mr. Abramoff flatters himself,” said Mark Salter, the senator’s administrative assistant. “Senator McCain was unaware of his existence until he read initial press accounts of Abramoff’s abuses, and had never laid eyes on him until he appeared before the committee.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“As best I can remember, when I met with him he didn’t have his eyes shut,” replies Abramoff. “I’m surprised that Senator McCain has joined the chorus of amnesiacs.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Even some other Indian lobbyists concede that McCain’s hearings presented a distorted picture of Abramoff and his clients. “The Mississippi Choctaw, the Louisiana Coushatta, the Saginaw Chippewa—they are very wealthy tribes with big casinos,” says one. “They knew they were spending money on him and they had an agenda which was to shut down other, poor tribes. They were getting ripped off, but the idea that they didn’t know they were spending $30 million to kill a rival’s casino … Well, let’s not pretend the Indians are stupid.” McCain’s solicitude toward these tribes and their willingness to play victim for him, this lobbyist says, “makes me want to puke.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff was in Los Angeles when he turned himself in to federal authorities in August 2005. He was handcuffed, held overnight, and brought into court in leg irons and chains to face charges of bank fraud in his purchase of SunCruz Casinos. He and Adam Kidan had led a group of investors in buying SunCruz for $147.5 million in 2000, after long and hostile negotiations with Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, the owner since 1994. Boulis never saw his money, however: Abramoff and Kidan had faked the wire transfer of $23 million which was supposed to be their down payment, and Boulis was shot dead in his car in February 2001. Two of the three men currently on trial for the murder were associates of Kidan, who himself pleaded guilty to the fraud charges in December 2005, tightening the noose around Abramoff. Once Scanlon had pleaded on the Indian-lobbying front, it was only a matter of time before Abramoff did, too.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff says he’d be saddened by any further indictments. But would he feel responsible for them? “I don’t want to answer that question, if that’s O.K.,” he replies. I asked whether he felt he’d harmed his country. “There were times when I helped the country and the causes that I love and obviously times when I hurt them,” he says. “The exposure of my lobbying practice, the absurd amount of media coverage, and the focus—for the first time—on this sausage-making factory that we call Washington will ultimately help reform the system, or at least so I hope.” The real problem, as he sees it, is big government: “The only thing that a clever lobbyist cannot manipulate is the absence of something to lobby for or fight against.” Thus, to keep future Jack Abramoffs from popping up, government has to slim down. It’s what he’s been saying all along.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">AAfter paying or owing a couple million dollars in legal fees, Abramoff says, he’s now living off “the fumes of my savings.” Hiding his assets would be incredibly foolhardy, given the consequences at sentencing were he found out. He’s dabbling in a few projects—energy businesses, property development—and doing some screenplays, written under pseudonyms. A real job is out of the question. “People don’t want to be in pictures with me, let alone business,” he says.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff has one potential short-term source of funds: the photographs of him with Bush, which became much coveted once Time reported their existence. Publications started sending Abramoff offers, and there was frenzied bidding that quickly rose to the low seven figures. For a time he entertained them; he says he thought he could begin to reimburse the Indians. But he ultimately decided against it, in part because the Democrats had announced—stupidly, to his mind—that they’d exploit them. But to him that’s not the only stupidity in evidence. He blames the Bush administration for the fuss. “My so-called relationship with Bush, Rove, and everyone else at the White House has only become important because, instead of just releasing details about the very few times I was there, they created a feeding frenzy by their deafening silence,” he says. “The Democrats, on the other hand, are going overboard, virtually insisting I was there to plan the invasion of Iraq. This is why this non-story grabbed headlines for weeks.”<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Abramoff says he hopes one day to pay back the Indians in full, and to visit them and ask for forgiveness. He also says he’s happy so much of his tainted money is being given by embarrassed politicians to charity. “If it makes one kid’s day better in some tenement somewhere, then that’s good,” he says.<p style="border: 0px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">He says he is not really readying himself for prison. “How does one prepare?” he asks. “I don’t have a grand plan for how to survive. I’m putting myself in God’s hands and trusting it will be fine.” In fact, it will be excruciating: One can’t spend more than a few minutes with him before one of his children, ranging in age from 12 to 18, calls or pops in. Apart from the Sabbath and holidays, he has spoken to his parents every day since he left college. “Hey, Dad, everything O.K.? Apart from everything that’s going on?” is how one call began. To his mind, prison for him is pointless. “I can’t perpetrate anything, so what does putting me in a prison do?” he asks. “Put me to work as a teacher in an inner-city school. Let me teach English, history, music. Or let me sweep floors at the reservation. Instead you’ll be paying to feed me to sit in a jail. It’s stupid.” It sounds suspiciously liberal, and tardy too, coming from a law-and-order conservative. But he insists it’s how he’s always felt.</div></div></div><div id="pageContainer7" class="pageContainers showPage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; left: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="parbase cn_text" style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="body " style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><p style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Downstairs from his office, Abramoff handed the parking-lot attendant a $100 bill. It was one of his last, he joked: the rest had gone to all those senators and congressmen. As the men fetched his car, he offered the latest late-night Jack Abramoff jokes. Conan O’Brien had just told a joke about how impressed George Bush was that Abramoff would soon name 20 congressmen; Bush could name only 3. Abramoff laughed heartily at each, though one has to wonder what combination of elements—bitterness, anger, disgust, self-loathing, or maybe even genuine pleasure—made up the mirth. He’s the first to admit how peculiar it has all become. “This whole thing is one bizarre movie about some guy named Jack Abramoff,” he tells me.<p style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">We set out into the solemn, dark, quiet streets of the capital, whose epic empty spaces make it a bleak place on a winter night, chillier than meteorologically colder places to the north. He turned right on 17th Street, passing the Old Executive Office Building and the White House beyond, then continued down toward the Washington Monument. By now the unnaturally enormous Capitol, bathed in an eerie lunar light, loomed in front of us, and I almost asked whether, in his newly humbled state, he felt sufficiently tortured by Washington’s enduring landmarks to flee. Then I remembered that he would be leaving soon enough.<p style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">We turned down Louisiana Avenue, and he described how, on Christmas Eve, he’d taken in It’s a Wonderful Life with his family, and how, by trying to die, the Jimmy Stewart character, George Bailey, learned just how loved he was. But George Bailey was someone without flaws, he said, something that could certainly not be said for himself.<p style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">“I was a killer,” he said as we pulled into Union Station. “I killed for my clients, and it eventually killed me.” He paused, as if he knew that this was no longer enough. That was the old Abramoff, the defiant, zealous, self-righteous Abramoff, and he could not stop there. “Or <i style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">I eventually killed me,” he continued. “And there were a lot of other hands on the knife.”<p class="caption" style="border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 10px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.4; color: black; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">David Margolick is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His latest book is Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (Knopf).</div></div></div>===

<div class="print-site_name" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Published on The Weekly Standard (<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/" style=" text-decoration: underline !important;">http://www.weeklystandard.com</a>)</div>

<br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" />  My Dinner with Jack<div class="print-breadcrumb" style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;">

<h2 class="print-subtitle" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;">The Jamboree in Jamba, the making of 'Red Scorpion,' and other tales of the Abramoff era.</h2>

<h3 class="print-author" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;">Mark Hemingway</h3>

<div class="print-date-issue" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;">April 3, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 27</div>

JACK ABRAMOFF NEEDS MY HELP. Facing a March 29 sentencing deadline for fraud, tax evasion, and conspiring to bribe public officials, the disgraced lobbyist sent out a blast email, which says, "My attorneys have advised me to seek help from friends in the form of letters to the judge on my behalf." Abramoff says this will help counteract the "harsh media caricature" of him--he claims 2,100 negative articles have been written about him--and will encourage lenience from the judge presiding over his trial.

Jack probably doesn't remember me, but I met him three years ago. I'll try my best to help salvage his reputation, but even he must realize that's not an easy thing to do. Take this classic remark from Ed Rogers. The GOP lobbyist appeared on Hardball in January to defend his profession and downplay Abramoff's misdeeds, almost forgetting that one of Jack's business partners is connected to a mob hit down in the Sunshine State:

<blockquote style="font-weight: normal;">Look, this is going to come out. Nobody is going to keep it a secret. Jack Abramoff is so radioactive--I've got Jack Abramoff fatigue already. I mean, good grief, he didn't kill anybody. Maybe that one guy in Florida. [emphasis added]</blockquote>

Oops. Of course, thus far Abramoff doesn't appear to be directly linked to the murder, even if he's certainly guilty of being so drunk with greed that he wasn't at all discriminating about who he did business with. Unfortunately, the one image the public holds of Abramoff is the infamous photo of him leaving the federal courthouse--a shifty-eyed crook clad in trench coat and black hat, bridging the sartorial divide between Al Capone and Boss Tweed. But calling a smooth political operator such as Abramoff a gangster is just too easy.

Unlike the hordes of politicians rushing to disavow their relationship with him, I have no problem saying I knew Abramoff. For three glorious hours, I was his captive private audience at his now-defunct restaurant, Signatures. And I can tell you, he is handsome, hugely entertaining, and even self-deprecating at times. I'd wager Abramoff's success was largely the result of his charm (though as Saul Bellow warned, charm is always a bit of a racket). He's likable and inspires those around him, and given that, most everyone in Washington who denies their association with him was probably a willing accomplice.

I know because I was almost one of them.

THREE YEARS AGO I received a totally unexpected phone call.

"Hemingway! You have a clean suit?"

I was a little embarrassed, really. I barely knew "Frank"--as we'll call him--and he'd already sized me up as one of a few dozen professionals in town that would have to think before answering that question. Frank was a "Republican media strategist"--one of those unique Washington creatures who draw a paycheck out of the ether without anyone having a clear idea of what they actually do.

Such people usually make me wary, but I liked the guy, and given my asymptotic career trajectory I was happy to take his call. I was even happier to find out he was offering me work. I just had to print out a résumé and clips and be at some restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue later that night to meet with Jack Abramoff.

I had no idea who he was, much to Frank's incredulity. Abramoff wasn't just a lobbyist. He was The Lobbyist. He was rich. Really rich. Frank wasn't sure, but he thought he might be worth $100 million or so. In retrospect I think it says a great deal about Washington that I did not immediately wonder how a lobbyist could become that wealthy. Instead, I went home and ironed a shirt.

When I arrived at Signatures, Frank was already there. It was a weeknight, and the restaurant was almost empty. Frank and I exchanged pleasantries, but he was most concerned with making me understand how big a deal this meeting was. That made me feel slightly nervous, worried that some ill-timed wisecrack on my part would deflate Abramoff's ego, and I'd never work in this town again.

When Abramoff finally did arrive, every employee in the place snapped to attention. He couldn't have better embodied any notions I had about what fat-cat lobbyists look like. He was immaculately groomed and wearing a shiny suit worth about twice my monthly salary. The outfit seemed calculated to project an image of power rather than style. What was impressive was the way he filled out his suit. Abramoff has gained 50 pounds or so since then, no doubt from the stress of his legal difficulties. It was a slimmer Abramoff I met that evening, but it was obvious he had been something of a weightlifter when he was younger. Beverly Hills-bred fat cat or not, he had the strong presence of someone you can count on in a bar fight. That is truly an oddity in Washington, where weaselly countenances are as common as calluses and scars are rare.

As he shook my hand and sat down, the tension dissipated. He started talking and was friendly and interested in me. The staff was understandably attentive, but he hardly bossed anyone around. As relaxed as he seemed, though, it was his joint and he knew it. Frank and I ordered off the menu, while Abramoff waited until the sushi chef came to the table. The chef stood to the side and offered up his recommendations, explaining the varying degrees of freshness of the available fish. Jack listened intently while the chef awkwardly tried to avoid too much eye contact with the boss man. He warmly accepted the sushi chef's suggestion, and as the food arrived, we got down to business.

"HAVE YOU EVER SEEN the movie Red Scorpion?"

Now a lot of people might have stared blankly when Abramoff asked that question, but I had actually seen the movie one bleary night in high school. I think TBS aired it as a chaser to its 10,000th showing of The Beastmaster. It was a bottom of the barrel Rambo rip-off, mildly redeemed by its novel conceit:

Dolph Lundgren--a six-foot-five Swedish B-movie action star, best known for his role as the evil Ivan Drago in Rocky IV--plays an elite Soviet Spetsnaz officer named Nikolai. Nikolai is sent on a mission by his superiors to infiltrate rebel forces opposing the Soviet occupation of a fictional African country, clearly modeled after Angola.

After his infiltration attempt is thwarted by the African rebel leader (a character based on Jonas Savimbi, the anti-Communist cause célèbre who spent much of the '70s and '80s fighting the Soviet-backed Angolan government), Nikolai is brutally tortured by his Soviet superiors for his failure. He escapes to the desert, where he nearly dies, before being nursed back to health by an African bushman who teaches him how to survive in the unforgiving landscape. His eyes are eventually opened to the Soviets' heartless slaughter of whole African villages, and he joins the rebels to destroy the Soviet base of command and drive them out of the country.

The movie is mostly a series of mindless explosions, but it does contain this classic exchange after Lundgren indiscriminately shoots up a bar: "Are you out of your f--ing mind?" "No, just out of bullets." Red Scorpion has all the standard '80s action film trappings, and it hardly occurred to me when I first saw it that the film was really an anti-Communist tract masquerading as a shoot-'em-up.

So when Abramoff told me he was the writer and producer of Red Scorpion, I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. What's more, he wanted to write a book about the making of Red Scorpion and was looking for a ghost-writer. I almost laughed again. Abramoff was piling vanity on top of absurdity. A book about a forgotten action flick? Surely he was joking. I reached for my tape recorder, but it was politely refused, so I hope Jack will forgive me if I don't get the details precisely right or do the story the justice it so richly deserves.

ONE OF ABRAMOFF'S REDEEMING QUALITIES is that he was an unrepentant Cold Warrior. His story that night began when he was a young activist obsessed with ending communism. According to another unrepentant Cold Warrior, former Reagan speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher, who now represents Orange County in Congress, Abramoff back in those days was "a young idealist with so much energy that it just bubbled over. He was irrepressible during the Cold War and in trying to end the threat of communism."

In the summer of 1985 Abramoff helped plan and organize an event that, as Abramoff told me, inspired Red Scorpion. Abramoff joined forces with Jack Wheeler, another anti-Communist activist, to create the "Jamboree in Jamba"--known more formally as the Democratic International. The pair approached Lewis Lehrman, a conservative benefactor who made a fortune off his Rite-Aid drugstores, with the idea: For years the Soviets had been sponsoring what amounted to supervillain summits, where Sandinistas, African Communist insurgents, and representatives of the PLO and Cuba convened presumably to stroke their fluffy white cats and update their arms-dealer Rolodexes.

Abramoff convinced Lehrman that this put the "good guys" at a comparative disadvantage--the Nicaraguan contras, the Afghan mujahedeen, Savimbi's rebels in Angola, and other freedom fighters needed a meeting of their own. Congress was in the process of cutting off aid to the contras, and anything that could be done to bolster the group's public reputation would be politically helpful to Reagan. Lehrman agreed to fund it, and Rohrabacher was brought in to help muster support from inside the White House. Abramoff and Wheeler would handle the details on the ground.

According to Abramoff, the event was a goat rodeo from the start. Hardly a government in the world was enamored of the idea, and simply deciding where to hold the event was no small affair. Only two governments were publicly supportive: South Africa and Israel, and for PR reasons it was quickly decided that neither country was a suitable venue.

So they settled on Jamba, Angola, the home base of Savimbi's UNITA movement (National Union of Total Independence for Angola), which was fighting the Cuban troops that propped up the Soviet-backed Angolan government. Not exactly the most hospitable locale.

Logistically, the event was a nightmare. Simply trying to get the attendees into the Angolan hinterland provoked international incidents. Pakistan blocked some Afghan rebels from leaving, and skittish Thai officials almost stopped Laotian anti-Communist leader Pa Kao Her from departing Bangkok.

Facilities consisted of little more than grass huts and an airstrip, and managing the various cultures and egos proved challenging, as demonstrated by Abramoff's deft and hilarious impersonation of a frenzied Afghan warlord who insisted on ranting and raving for 45 minutes, long after the translator who had been procured on his behalf proved worthless. Not only was Abramoff's mimicry compelling, he gestured wildly with his hands in a way that caught me totally off guard, making me laugh harder. He clearly wasn't afraid to embarrass himself, a quality that was endearing, considering I had started out the evening somewhat intimidated. I also became aware of how carefully he was gauging my reaction to his tale. He didn't care about impressing me; it was obvious he had little to prove. But he did tell his story in a generous way--he wanted me to enjoy it, and I did.

The final insult in Jamba was running out of food. Abramoff, who keeps kosher, had packed all his own provisions into the African jungle. Upon leaving the event early, he stood on the stairs of the plane auctioning off his remaining cans of tuna for as much as $20 to ravenous members of the press who had yet to leave.

The jamboree itself ended up being largely ceremonial. Everyone pledged to share intelligence, and Lehrman read a letter Rohrabacher had drafted on Reagan's behalf, expressing solidarity with those struggling against the Soviet empire. The Time reporter on the scene concluded that the meeting marked the beginning of "a new lobby to urge Congress to support the Nicaraguan contras and other anti-Communist guerrillas." Considering the improbability of the thing coming together at all, everyone involved considered it a success.

But for Abramoff, the pivotal moment in Jamba came when he was approached by someone trying to secure funding for a documentary about Savimbi. Abramoff scoffed. Rambo: First Blood Part II had just been released in theaters three weeks earlier, becoming the first film to open on more than 2,000 screens. "Why would you want to make a documentary? Nobody watches documentaries," he told me. "I said to the guy, 'You should make an action film.'"

YOU CAN ALSO SAY THIS for Abramoff--the man has a gift for making wild ideas a reality. Jack revisited his movie idea in an entertainment law class he took while finishing his degree at Georgetown a few years later. He sketched out a story based loosely on what he knew about Savimbi's plight and the Soviet operations in that part of Africa.

After graduating, Jack moved home to Beverly Hills and enlisted his brother in the movie project. Things started falling into place. With Lundgren attached to star, they secured a few million in funding. They scouted locations in Africa, figuring they could film cheaply over there, eventually settling on Swaziland. What Jack didn't tell me was that he had strong ties to South Africa's apartheid government at the time, and was counting on using tanks and helicopters from their defense forces in crucial battle scenes.

As in Jamba, Abramoff's plan got off to a rocky start. Shortly after he'd dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into sets and pre-production in Swaziland, the once cooperative and enthusiastic government suddenly decided to kick them out of the country.

According to Jack, this was because someone in the government was told that a Western camera crew had been involved in a coup attempt in another African country some years earlier, and they balked at allowing the film to continue. I'd also conjecture that a plan to invite South African tanks and helicopters into the country, even as props, might have made them a wee bit nervous.

Abramoff made a last-ditch attempt to keep the film from being ejected from Swaziland, a move that would cause the investors he had lined up to pull out. He had a series of absurd encounters with different government ministers that were straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Each kept referring him to a different minister they said was responsible for the matter, and yet somehow each minister was physically related to the previous one.

Again, he told this tale employing dead-on impersonation, nailing the heavily accented patois of the African bureaucrats. Considering how Abramoff put himself at the center of every story that evening, he struck me at the time as being very self-aware--not exactly something he has subsequently been well known for. He told the story with an understanding of the futility of attempting to get anything done in corrupt African ministries. Of course, that only made it more amusing. He understood that the Swaziland officials' "What, me worry?" attitude was likely a more rational response at the time than the young Jack Abramoff's desperation to protect his investment. And he didn't mind your laughing at him because of it.

His attempts to pacify the government of Swaziland were to no avail. They were kicked out, and the film's investors pulled out. So Abramoff threw a Hail Mary, and it worked.

The film was still being written, and there wasn't so much as a script to show potential backers. They didn't even have a title. (Jack and his brother--being first and foremost politicos--would commission a poll; Red Scorpion emerged as the winner.) They had one ace in the hole, though. Dolph Lundgren was still attached to star and, as improbable as it sounds today, was still a bankable name in the action-film heyday of the 1980s. So Abramoff mocked up a poster of Red Scorpion with Lundgren's picture on it and took off for the Venice film festival. In an impressive feat of salesmanship, he returned to Africa with $16 million in funding from various distributors.

They were now filming in Namibia, but things hadn't gotten any easier. They had star trouble. Lundgren was wildly erratic on the set. Abramoff and the other producers felt physically intimidated by the onetime karate champ. Lundgren spent his downtime carousing up a storm in Johannesburg, and he did not want his girlfriend back home to find out. It became the producers' responsibility to keep him out of the South African tabloids. (For bonus points, Abramoff casually let it drop that the girl back home whose delicate sensibilities Lundgren sought to protect was none other than Paula Barbieri, the Playboy Playmate who moved on to dating O.J. Simpson, only to break up with him the day Nicole Brown was murdered.)

Then there was the problem of the film's other star--the authentic African bushman they had cast in a pivotal role. In Jack's opinion, he's the best actor in the film. Most people who've seen the film agree. Regopstaan, the very spry 95-year-old bushman, agreed to do the film only if his entourage, er, tribe was allowed to follow him around. Then there was the small matter of payment. Regopstaan's terms included the condition that the producers find him a wife. By this point in my evening with Abramoff, I was expending all my energy keeping my jaw off the floor, so I never did hear how that particular problem was solved. But I trust Jack found a way.

Red Scorpion was finally released in 1989, the same year the Cubans withdrew their last soldiers from Angola and the Soviet Union collapsed. It made $40 million on its $16 million investment. In one fell swoop, Jack had done his part to win the Cold War and made himself a millionaire. Nobody would call Jack a visionary artist, but he didn't care. He took his money and moved back to Washington to become a lobbyist shortly afterward.

BY THE END OF THE EVENING, I was trying to maintain my composure while I did everything short of shoving my résumé down Abramoff's throat. I wanted to write this book. It would be a pleasure to write, and it was obvious Abramoff could pay me handsomely for it. But more than that, I wanted to work with him. For a guy whose two most visible writing credits are a B-movie screenplay and a series of subpoenaed emails (e.g., "lets get some more $ from those monkeys!!!"), the man could tell a story like few people I have encountered. Of course, I have no way of knowing how much of what I heard that night was exaggerated. But I never got the sense that anything Abramoff told me that evening was strictly for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. Little did I know that Abramoff's legend was already secure, and it would have nothing to do with the incredible story he told me that evening.

Alas, I was dispatched with a handshake and a nod while Frank and Jack stuck around to talk more business. I called Frank repeatedly over the next couple of weeks and was told Jack had decided he was just too busy to write the book. What seemed like the story of a lifetime to me was business as usual for Jack.

From that point on in my nascent career, I viewed the encounter with Abramoff as The One That Got Away. Unlike a lot of his clients, I count myself richer for the experience of having met him. I learned more about how Washington works in a single evening with him than some people pick up in a lifetime. Of course, friends have suggested that I was lucky not to get tangled up with Abramoff, but to them I say he's going to have a lot of time on his hands in prison, and I hope he still has my résumé.

So if Jack is going to petition the press for more positive media portrayals, let me throw in my two cents. And if the judge presiding over his trial reads this, let me say on his behalf that Jack Abramoff is highly charismatic and I doubt any of his crimes were committed by unfairly twisting the arms of others. And for what it's worth, he's a gracious host and excellent storyteller. Anyone would feel lucky to sit down and have dinner with him.

Well, except maybe that one guy in Florida.[dead?]

Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington.

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<p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal;"> ===wreckcrew
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/3/thomas frank
Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular individuals. We Are the Government, insisted the title of a civics primer published in the earnest year of 1945. “The White House belongs to you,” its dust jacket told us. “So do all the other splendid buildings in Washington, D.C.” This idea runs so deep in the American grain that many of us can’t bring ourselves to question it, even in this disillusioned age. Republicans and Democrats may fight over how big government should be and exactly what it should do, we tell ourselves, but surely everyone shares those baseline good intentions, that simple devotion to the public interestWe continue to believe this despite such massive evidence to the contrary as the career of Jack Abramoff, the conservative lobbyist whose feats of corruption have been unreeling in newspaper and congressional investigations for years. On January 3, 2006, Abramoff pled guilty to bribing a member of Congress, evading taxes, and defrauding his clients, but what made his case memorable were the incredible details: the millions of dollars Abramoff and his confederates casually squeezed out of clients, the luxury restaurant he opened in order to hand out the goodies more efficiently, the golf trips to Scotland, the gleeful contempt he expressed for nearly everyone in his voluminous emails, and, later, the desperate wriggling of prominent Republicans as they tried to deny their old palJournalistic coverage of the Abramoff affair has clung reliably to the “bad apple” thesis, in which the lobbyist’s sins are carefully separated from the movement of which he was once a prominent part. What Abramoff represented, we read, was “greed gone wild.” He “went native.” He was “sui generis,” a one-of-a-kind con man, “engaged in bizarre antics that your average Zegna-clad Washington lobbyist would never have dreamed of.”In which case, we can all relax: Jack Abramoff is in jail. The system worked; the bad apple has been plucked; the wild greed and undreamed-of antics have ceased.[jrnl fail:]But the truth is almost exactly the opposite, whether we are discussing Abramoff or the wider tsunami of corruption that has washed over the capital in recent years. It is just this: Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington.
The correct diagnosis is the “bad apple” thesis turned upside down. There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the past few years. Hang around with grassroots conservative voters in Kansas, and in the main you will find them to be honest, hardworking people.
But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the “values” that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities—priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.
Let us start with conservatives’ sense of their own exclusion. This idea may strike you as peculiar, but to conservatives it is fundamental; it predicates everything they do, say, and enact. The government is never theirs, they believe, no matter how much of it they happen to control. “Even when conservatives are in power they refuse to adopt the psychology of an establishment,” marveled the journalist Sidney Blumenthal during the Reagan years. George W. Bush, who has grabbed more power for the executive branch than anyone since Nixon, actually sees himself as a “dissident in Washington.” One of his more worshipful biographers calls him the nation’s Rebel-in-Chief: he “operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of insurgents. . . . He’s an alien in the realm of the governing class, given a green card by voters.”
The hallucination is dazzling, awesome. For most of the past three decades these insurgents have controlled at least one branch of government; they were underwritten in their rule by the biggest of businesses; they were backed by a robust social movement with chapters across the radio dial. Still they remain the victims, the outsiders; they fight the power, the establishment, the snobs, the corrupt. John McCain rails against Washington as the “city of Satan”—which in any sober theology would make him Lucifer’s lieutenant. Fred Barnes, the author of Rebel-in-Chief, is such a well-known Washington fixture that he hosts a TV show called The Beltway Boys. Karl Zinsmeister, the editor of a magazine published by the ultra-insiders at the American Enterprise Institute, reviled the people of the capital in 2004 as “morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.” Soon afterward he was rewarded for his adherence to the fantasy by being appointed chief domestic-policy adviser to President Bush.
Conservatism-as-revolution was not always such a ridiculous idea. In the Fifties and Sixties, conservatism was widely regarded as a deluded relic of an earlier age. The Republican Party itself was dominated at that time by its moderate faction, which conservatives defeated only after a titanic struggle spanning many years. Then, in the Seventies, right-wing insurgencies spread across the country: conservative cliques took control of the Southern Baptists and the National Rifle Association, and in 1978 the first of a wave of tax revolts shook California. In 1981 came the turn of the College Republicans, where the right-wing takeover was led by none other than the future supercorruptionist Jack Abramoff. This uprising holds special significance for the historian, since it not only introduces us to the cast of characters who went on to dominate Washington during the Gingrich and Bush eras but also provides a window into the conservative soul.
The story begins in 1980, the year of the “Reagan Revolution,” when there appeared on the national scene a phenomenon that bewildered political observers: legions of politicized, energetic college students who were conservatives rather than liberals or radicals, as had been typical in the two decades previous. And not only were their politics deeply square but the idol of this unlikely youth craze was the oldest president ever. Reagan’s entire Pennsylvania campaign, for example, was run by a lad of twenty. In 1984, the aged actor won 60 percent of the college-student vote. The historical turnabout was irresistible, and Reagan Youth became one of the great journalistic clichés of the period, powering hundreds of newspaper columns and at least one beloved TV sitcom.
These sons of Reagan had a strong sense of generational self-awareness, and they loudly told the world how they had come by it. In the midst of the interminable Iran hostage crisis, a crowd of them at one college campus were supposedly so moved by a showing of Patton that they demonstrated spontaneously in favor of a nuclear attack on that country, shaking the ivory tower with chants of “First strike now!” Another well-known story of the era was how a bunch of privileged kids at Dartmouth College, a traditional fortress of privilege, decided that embracing the traditional politics of privilege and mimicking the traditional manners of the privileged were actually acts of great daring, exposing them to persecution by tyrannical liberals. Then there was Jack Abramoff, a College Republican leader in the Boston area who gained, according to the John Birch Society’s Review of the News, a “reputation as one of the most innovative of the national Conservative youth leaders” after he mounted such a massive grassroots push for Reagan in 1980 that he almost single-handedly shifted Massachusetts into the Republican column.
Abramoff, a burly fellow from Beverly Hills, came to Washington in 1981 to assume the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee. Back in the Vietnam days it had been leftists who fought the power, he explained to reporters. But “now we’re the campus radicals.” His newly energized College Republicans (CRs) fanned out across the nation, instructing clean-cut kids on how to use the tactics of the Sixties left for their own causes. A snapshot of Abramoff using a bullhorn to rally a conservative throng was proudly reproduced in the CRs’ Annual Report for 1983, just across the page from a photo of Ralph Reed, who was then Abramoff’s right-hand man, pumping his fist at the head of a swarm of angry, sign-waving conservatives. In both instances the young men had gone into action wearing neckties.
It was Abramoff’s friend Grover Norquist, then a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, who came up with a plan for changing the very nature of the College Republicans. Norquist made a study of the CRs, developing a scheme to transform them from “a resume-padding social club,” as one account puts it, into “an ideological, grassroots organization.” Abramoff made Nor-quist the College Republicans’ executive director, and the two put Norquist’s theory into action. They purged the “old guard.” They amended the group’s constitution, establishing a structure that made the Washington office more powerful, and rewarded proselytizing on campus.
What the rising conservative sensibility of those years treasured above all else was “confrontation” with the left. It called for a quasi-military victory over liberalism; it would have no truck with civility or fair play; and it made heroes out of outrage-courting lib-fighters like Reagan’s communications director Pat Buchanan, the organizer Howard Phillips, and the young Jack Abramoff.
The first and most noticeable characteristic of this new militancy was an air of swaggering truculence. There are, of course, bullies from every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two of the movement’s greatest heroes—Tom DeLay and Oliver North—had the same nickname: “the Hammer.”
Jack Abramoff filled this bill perfectly. He had reportedly been something of a bully in high school and had now grown into a “hard-charging” and “dynamic” leader, in the assessment of conservative magazines, an ass-kicking weight lifter who could quiet the commies with his fists if they got out of line. The gangster fetish of his later years is by now familiar to the whole world—his constant references to The Godfather, his black trench coat and fedora, his Meyer Lansky memorabilia, the murderer argot that will no doubt serve him and his friends well during their prison years.
Abramoff himself derided the moderates he had ousted from control of the CRs as “wishy-washy country-clubbers” and insisted that he had transformed the organization into an “ideological, well-trained, aggressive, conservative” outfit. “Fighting the Left with a goal of victory” became the official, stated purpose of his College Republican cadres, according to an essay Abramoff wrote for the group’s 1983 Annual Report. The CRs were “fighting America’s last stand,” he blustered; they would “defund the enemy wherever possible,” one of his lieutenants added. According to the journalist Nina Easton, CR officers had their underlings memorize the gory opening monologue from the movie Patton, only with the word “Demo crat” standing in for the word “Nazi.” Other young rightists of the period went a step further. J. Michael Waller, the editor of the Sequent, a student paper at George Washington University, actually took breaks from red-baiting professors in order to zip down to Central America and hang out with the Nicaraguan Contras and the death-squad faction in El Salvador.
War was the order of the day, from President Reagan’s fight with the air-traffic controllers right down to the college campus, where Abramoff became famous for his declaration: “It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently.” War plus revolution, actually. Abramoff liked to describe his CRs as “the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution,” and in 1984 the young firebrand used his moment at the rostrum of the G.O.P. convention in Dallas to lecture the assembled small-business types on revolutionary theory.
Whether the small-business types grasped it or not, a revolution was indeed under way. Conservative politicians had long served business interests, and so businesspeople had long tended to be conservatives, but now would come a new turn: conservatism as business, conservatism as a source of profit for the people Jack Abramoff once referred to as “political entrepreneurs.”
In its embryonic form, conservatism-as-industry consisted mainly in peddling right-wing grievances to the like-minded. In those days there were dealers in precious metals who used a towering contempt for liberalism as a sales pitch for gold coins. There were outfits raising money to help beleaguered conservative politicians who were in fact not beleaguered and had not asked for the help. There were anti-union charities and even fake anti-union charities, all of them capitalizing on the keen hatred for labor shared by so many businessmen. “There was so much money ready for conservative organizations in the United States,” said Spitz Channell, a freelance conservative fund-raiser later involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, that the problem was finding “ways to spend that money.”
Abramoff quickly established himself as an entrepreneur with promise. When the “campus radical” took over as the CRs’ chairman in 1981, the group’s budget came directly from the Republican National Committee. That had been sufficient for the old CRs, who liked to party and aimed to anger nobody. But Abramoff started to complain about the arrangement in his first year. And he schemed to achieve autonomy. He didn’t want “to be the youth arm of the Republican National Committee,” his onetime lieutenant David Miner remembers. He wanted a very strong, viable organization. And instead of once a year sitting down with the budget director and the political director of the RNC and making a twenty-minute case about why they should donate $100,000 a year to the College Republicans, Jack decided he was going to run the College Republicans just like the Republican National Committee was run: he was going to have his own direct mail list, he was going to have prominent members of Congress sign letters for him, and he was going to raise his own money. That’s a pretty bold statement for someone to do at twenty-two years old.
It was so bold, in fact, that it infuriated the RNC officials charged with supervising the college auxiliary. They kicked the CRs out of their building.
No matter. Under Abramoff’s leadership, enthusiasm was high, membership soared, and revenues quintupled; what’s more, fully 70 percent of that income came from individual donors, dwarfing contributions from the RNC itself. “Jack was a very creative, smart executive,” Miner told me. He was “a hell of a CEO.”Before Abramoff’s name became so poisonous, most College Republicans regarded this era as their finest hour. In 2001, then-chairman Scott Stewart introduced the lobbyist to the CRs’ convention as “probably the best national chairman we’ve ever had.”
As entrepreneurs are supposed to do, Abramoff and Norquist opened themselves to the market, setting up incentives for growth and looking for investors outside the parent organization. And what did the College Republicans have to offer these investors, these donors? Outrage. Activism. The right-wing position rammed home with force. To see college kids in the street, chanting the slogans of the hard right—this was a spectacle for which older Republicans, angered by what they had seen in the Sixties, were willing to pay a great price. And Abramoff’s CRs delivered, with constant protests in Washington and a series of insulting posters, the most famous of which slyly implied that liberals were communist dupes.
I have managed to unearth a single specimen of direct mail from the CRs’ Abramoff period, and it is typical of the genre circa 1983: by turns chummy, frightening, confiding, and apocalyptic. As was common in those days, the letter is signed by an elected official—in this case by New York Representative Jack Kemp, then the best-known conservative in Congress. (Today Kemp advises John McCain on economic policy.) It pleads with the recipient to “dig down deep” for the College Republicans, led by “my good friend Jack Abramoff.” And why should Mr. and Mrs. America give to Jack Abramoff’s CRs, of all groups? Because, according to Kemp, they are “the most important Republican organization in America today,” prepared to do all manner of grassroots electioneering in the upcoming 1984 contest. And why should the reader care about that? Because “our nation is in grave danger of sliding into another depression” should liberals be permitted to resume their tax-and-spend ways. “That’s right,” Kemp warned. “A depression worse than the so-called Great Depression.” Thankfully, though, Jack Abramoff and his “dedicated group of young leaders . . . understand what must be done to return economic prosperity to America.”
The larger mechanism CEO Abramoff used to break free from his stodgy, moderate Republican elders was a tax-exempt fund-raising group called the United Students of America Foundation (a.k.a. the USA Foundation, or sometimes just USAF), which was technically nonpartisan but in reality simply added its voice to whatever cause the CRs happened to be pushing. While direct mail solicited funds from individual conservatives, the USA Foundation allowed Abramoff and his crew to go after hefty contributions from the real powers of American conservatism: corporations. And with the support of corporate money came, wouldn’t you know it, support for corporate-friendly causes in the world at large.
Going freelance, as Abramoff did with the USA Foundation, soon became a popular career move among the sons of Reagan. Ralph Reed launched a group called Students for America, a Southern outfit designed to bring evangelicals into the conservative mix. Students for a Better America, which warred on liberal professors, was set up by Steve Baldwin, also a onetime Abramoff lieutenant. The Conservative Youth Federation of America was launched by Amy Moritz, yet another Abramoff associate. And let us not forget the Conservative Action Foundation, the Conservative Student Support Foundation, and the mysterious Young Conservative Foundation, “America’s premier Human Rights organization.”
It was through the USA Foundation that Abramoff seems to have discovered the profitable side of politics. The occasion for this discovery was the College Republicans’ ongoing war with Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), student-activist outfits that were set up in the Seventies and funded at most colleges by “activity fees” that all students were required to pay unless they checked a box on a form. This was the point on which the CRs challenged them, insisting on campus after campus that it was “sinful and tyrannical” to compel students to fund an obviously political organization.
Like other Nader groups, the student PIRGs were something of a nuisance for business, and at some point it apparently occurred to Abramoff or Norquist that defunding and thus “killing” campus PIRG chapters was a service for which the targeted businesses ought to be paying. So the young entrepreneurs of the USA Foundation got out there and sold themselves as political hit men. According to one 1986 study, by the journalist Allan Nairn, the group managed to collect tribute from canning and bottling companies, two oil companies, an electric company (PIRGs were then working to set up utility watchdog groups), Amway, Coors, an assortment of San Francisco landlords worried about the possibility of rent control, and the Campbell Soup Company, which paid the USA Foundation to undermine a campus support group for a migrant farmworkers’ union. It was pugnacity for pay.
The USA Foundation’s motto was “Promoting a free market of ideas on the nation’s campuses,” and here we encounter yet another of the Washington right’s signature lines. Like so many conservative ideas—anticommunism, for example—it sounds fine at first. A “free market of ideas” sounds like “free inquiry” or a “free exchange of ideas,” an environment in which hypotheses are tested and bad ones are weeded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which is to say, their merit in the eyes of large corporations and the very wealthy.
The point, and the profit, was in getting the people with money to understand which ideas served their common interests, which ones didn’t, and then to act together as a class—supporting the good ideas and crushing the liberal ones. This was a plan with legs: When I spoke to Grover Norquist in 2006, he was still insisting that businesses had to be instructed on big-picture thinking, on the amazing returns to be realized through funding conservatism. By then, of course, Grover Norquist was no longer some campus activist; he was the architect of the most effective defund-the-left program Washington has ever seen. And his old friend Jack Abramoff was on his way to jail.
Side by side with the Entrepreneur in those days stood another great conservative hero: the Freedom Fighter, a ragged warrior who had, according to myth, spontaneously taken up arms against communism in Third World countries around the globe. American conservatives came to love these freedom fighters intensely, and for a simple reason. These tough anticommunists in faraway lands validated the conservatives’ most cherished fantasies of the Sixties turned right-side up. The freedom fighters proved it: Reagan’s revolution was for real.
Traditional conservatives had generally regarded anticommunist guerrilla movements as necessary evils, doing important if ugly work. The transforming fire of Reaganism, however, turned all such cutthroats and mercenaries into patriots. It was our guys who were the heroic underdogs now, disrespected and ill-supplied, going up against the high-tech, organization-men monsters of the Soviet Union—and, of course, its liberal proxies here in the United States.
The peerless darling of the freedom-fighter fan club was Jonas Savimbi, the charismatic Angolan guerrilla leader whose every utterance seemed to strike young Eighties conservatives as a timeless profundity. Angola had been one of the very last countries in Africa to be freed from colonial domination, but, unlike seemingly every other “national liberator” in the preceding decades, Savimbi was not a communist. In Angola, the communists were the ones who grabbed power in the capital as soon as the Europeans left; Savimbi, who fought them with the backing of the apartheid government in South Africa, supposedly believed in free enterprise and balanced budgets.
Conservatives were smitten with this self-titled general who struggled for free markets in his remote land. They fell for Savimbi as romantically, and as guilelessly, as Sixties radicals once did for Che, Ho, and Huey. Savimbi was “one of the few authentic heroes of our time,” roared Jeane Kirkpatrick, queen of the neocons, when she introduced him at the 1986 Conservative Political Action Conference. Grover Norquist followed the great man around his camp in Angola, preparing magazine articles for Savimbi’s signature. Jack Abramoff made a movie about Savimbi, depicting him as a tougher, African version of Gan- dhi. Even Savimbi’s capital—the remote camp called “Jamba”—was described in conservative literature with elevated language such as “Savimbi’s Kingdom.”
In truth, Savimbi’s main achievement was to keep going, for nearly thirty years, a civil war that made Angola one of the worst places on earth—its population impoverished, its railroads and highways and dams in ruins, its countryside strewn with land mines by the millions, even its elephant herds wiped out, their tusks hacked off to raise funds for his army.
This was the man the rebel right chose for the starring role in one of the strangest spectacles in American political history, a media event designed to cement conservatism’s identification with revolution. The organizer was Jack Abramoff; the place was Jamba; the model, I am told, was Woodstock—only a right-wing version, with guerrillas instead of rock bands. Every kind of freedom fighter was there, joining hands in territory liberated by arms from a Soviet client regime. There were Nicaraguan Contras, some Afghan mujahedeen, an American tycoon—and they all got together at Savimbi’s hideout.
This “rumble in the jungle,” as skeptics called it, came to pass in June of 1985. Of course, bringing it off required considerable assistance from Savimbi’s South African patrons. Nobody else even knew how to find Jamba.
Since these freedom fighters had no actual issues to discuss—no trade agreements or mutual-defense plans or anything—they signed the Jamba Declaration, a bit of high-flown folderol written by Grover Norquist that aimed for solemnity but sounded more like the work of a fifth-grader who has been forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence and has got them all jumbled up somehow.
Jamba was meant as a celebration of freedom, a word revered by Americans generally and a term of enormous significance to conservatives in particular. Yet as freedom’s embodiment Abramoff had chosen a terrorist: Jonas Savimbi, the leader of an armed cult. To fill the main supporting role in this great freedom-fest, meanwhile, the organizers turned to apartheid South Africa, a place where only a small, correctly complexioned percentage of the population possessed even the most basic democratic rights.
And here we encounter one of the right’s great lost causes. You don’t have to dig very deep into the conservative literature of the Eighties before you hit apartheid South Africa. Today the issue makes conservatives uncomfortable, naturally, and few of them will own up to the passion with which they once worked to rationalize that government or to vilify its foes. But in those days, South Africa’s agonizing racial problems, its prosperous but beleaguered business community, and its stout defiance of all things communist made it a potent symbol for American conservatives: South Africa was essentially like us, and yet the liberals, with their sanctions and divestment strategies, with their airy do-gooder moralism, were prepared to sell out this loyal friend, just as they had sold out so many others.
As it happened, Jack Abramoff had visited South Africa in 1983 to meet with student leaders, presumably including Russel Crystal, who headed an energetic right-wing outfit on that nation’s campuses. Crystal was a sort of South African doppelgänger to Abramoff, echoing not only the American’s tactical thinking but his combative style as well. In the early Eighties, Crystal’s group declared “all-out war” on its campus adversaries, who, he said, were “undermining the will of the Western world”; on one occasion his followers reportedly threatened a peaceful left-wing demonstration with baseball bats. Just like the College Republicans, Crystal’s student organization spent heavily, and Crystal boasted about its financial “support from the business community.”
One month after Jamba, Crystal’s student group hosted a second right-wing Woodstock, bringing together conservative college students from around the world. The event was called “Youth for Freedom,” and a “Dear Delegate” letter given to each participant explained its purpose: It was 1985, the U.N.’s “International Youth Year,” and high-minded youth congresses were happening all over the world—most of them “under the leadership of . . . communist front organisations . . . to propagate their own marxist/leninist agenda.” The duty of the righteous was obvious: “to gather the true defenders of liberty and freedom”; to ponder “the security and prosperity of the free world”; and to draft a statement to which “conservative students worldwide” might rally. Norquist, Abramoff,Although Abramoff is listed as the very last speaker on the official “Youth for Freedom” program, none of the attendees I talked to remember seeing him there. and a gaggle of College Republicans made up the American contingent. Color was added by a representative of the German extreme right. (Bonus points: he had been a U-boat captain during World War II.) The delegates listened to a denunciation of divestment. They received an expensively printed booklet about the martial and philosophical achievements of Jonas Savimbi. After the conference, the kids were given a treat: some of the “youth for freedom” got to go to a military base to see a riot-control demonstration.
Coverage of the conclave in the South African press focused on the lavishness of the proceedings and the great expense involved in flying everyone to Johannesburg. The participants stayed in the finest hotel in the city, and the conference provided a squad of interpreters and a video crew to document it all. Obviously, Russel Crystal’s tiny student group couldn’t have paid for all of this by itself, and Crystal himself kept mum about the financing. But other freedom-youths confirmed that the gathering had been at least partly funded by South African corporate concerns, in the now-familiar political-entrepreneur pattern: “The business community in South Africa is very enthused about any face-lift possibility that they can gain,” one of the organizers told Allan Nairn.
Out of the Youth for Freedom conference came an organization called Liberty and Democracy International, which didn’t last long, perhaps because of the neck-snapping contradiction between its dreamy title and its South African reality. Out of that organization, in 1986, came the International Freedom Foundation—the IFF—the strangest scheme hatched to that point by the sons of Reagan for bringing the power of money to bear on politics and the world of ideas.
Not one of the many former IFFers I contacted, either in the United States or in South Africa, would consent to an interview, but we do know the most basic facts about the group. According to the official report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the duties of the IFF included supporting Jonas Savimbi and fighting trade sanctions against South Africa. The IFF’s head office was in Washington, where Abramoff served as executive director. But the shots were called by the organization’s South African branch, headed by Russel Crystal. There was an office in London and, eventually, one in West Germany. We also know that the IFF was an expensive proposition and that the apartheid government spent millions of dollars propping it up. The group hosted speakers, conferences, and presentations; it published several magazines and a flock of newsletters; its principals constantly traveled the globe, spreading their toxic trinity of “Liberty, Security, Prosperity.”
The Washington branch of the IFF, it seems, was particularly successful at courting politicians. The group’s “advisory board” listed, among others, Senator Jesse Helms and Representatives Phil Crane, “B-1 Bob” Dornan, James Inhofe (a stout family-values supporter), and “Buz” Lukens (an egregious family-values violator). The group also tried their hand at influence-buying. In 1987, the IFF’s Washington office requested $450,000 from South Africa in order to buy a jet plane for the presidential campaign of Jack Kemp, then the idol of the conservative movement. According to internal IFF documents, this bauble would be an investment sufficient to make Abramoff’s gang “the ‘kitchen cabinet’ types of the Kemp administration.” The South Africans turned the proposal down, realizing even then what a long shot Kemp was.
The IFF made no direct attempt to justify apartheid, for the simple reason that racism as a philosophy of government was flatly irredeemable in the West. Instead the IFF aimed to tarnish apartheid’s enemies, “to paint the ANC as a project of the international department of the Soviet Communist Party.” This was merely a large-scale replay of the political entrepreneurship we saw at the USA Foundation, with Jack and the gang yet again hiring themselves out to a wealthy client to perform a hit on a troublesome left-wing group. High points in this campaign included hearings by the House Republican Study Committee in 1987 to blame “the plight of the children of South Africa” on the commie-terrorist ANC; reports playing up the ANC’s commie-derived taste for atrocities against kids; newspaper ads designed to throw cold water on Nelson Mandela during his triumphant visit to America in 1990; and an endless war on Ted Kennedy, a leading proponent of the 1986 sanctions against South Africa.
The real, confessed éminence grise behind the IFF was South Africa’s infamous “superspy” Craig Williamson, a man whose bloody escapades deserve an entire volume in the annals of Cold War espionage. Williamson infiltrated South Africa’s main leftist student group in the Seventies and rose to its leadership; he used the connections thus made to assist in the imprisonment and murder of the movement’s other leaders. A respected South African historian, asked for his opinion of the man, said simply, “Craig Williamson was the scum of the twentieth century. He murdered friends of mine. I spit on the ground he walks on.”
When the IFF’s true identity was exposed in 1995, the Americans questioned by the media denied any knowledge of its ugly provenance. In most cases this was plausible enough; after all, the basic principle of a clandestine operation is secrecy. But Jack Abramoff almost certainly knew. Still, he denied it—“categorically,” he exclaimed—when the truth came out. Plus, he had an explanation for all the bad press: “It’s pay-back time in South Africa.”
The single biggest scandal of the Eighties resulted from a confluence of the two great conservative themes I have been describing: the “freedom fighter” mentality and the cult of political entrepreneurship.
The outlines of the Iran-Contra story are well known. President Reagan’s CIA was waging a “secret” war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua; the Democratic Congress understandably objected, as we were technically at peace with that nation, and, in 1983, cut off funds to the CIA-backed Contras. Over at the National Security Council, however, Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North came up with a scheme to get money to the Contras anyway, using a network of private donors, weapons sales to Iran, and private supply operations. He also organized behind-the-scenes efforts to lobby Congress to change its mind.
Quite early on in the annals of Iran-Contra our pioneering political entrepreneurs make their inevitable appearance. Jack Abramoff crops up in North’s notebook for February 14, 1985, his name misspelled but the beginnings of a great lobbyist unmistakable. On March 26, Abramoff showed up on a list of people helping North to influence the upcoming Contra-aid vote in Congress. Later that day, Abramoff phoned North and told him that a number of “votes” were available in exchange for some or other favor.
We do not ordinarily remember Iran-Contra for the business opportunities it generated, but in the long, winding history of conservatism-as-industry it remains a particularly instructive chapter. The aforementioned political entrepreneur Spitz Channell, for example, sensed the Contras’ potential early on and used them to become the most successful fund-raiser in all of Washington, circa 1985. Channell’s marks were conservative widows; he made his pitches in person, often using a scary slide show put together by Oliver North about the dangers of Nicaraguan communism. Not only did his donors reap tax write-offs by giving to one of the “nonprofit” groups Channell had set up but they sometimes got to meet President Reagan too, a favor the fund-raiser arranged simply by throwing some change to one of the president’s former aides.
None of this put much money into the pockets of the Contras, though. On the right, the fund-raiser typically prospers, even if the cause does not. And Channell was a professional; he later admitted that he became interested in Nicaragua only after he noticed how the subject ticked off rich folks. He proceeded to take the customary profiteering to dizzy entrepreneurial heights. Of the $12 million raked in by Channell’s empire of fund-raising organs in 1985 and 1986, it is estimated that only $2.7 million actually made it to the Contras. Huge sums were diverted to Channell’s friends, his lover, and his friends’ lovers. All the middlemen between here and Managua took a cut, too.
Iran-Contra was the scandal with the Midas touch, and it continued to rain money on the faithful even after the whole rotten operation had been rolled up. One day in July 1987, as the Dem ocrats in Congress screeched hysterically about the White House and its illegal foreign policy, Ollie North put on his uniform, stood before the cameras, raised his hand, and summoned up a backlash that ultimately crushed the liberals and brought a flood of prosperity to the political entrepreneurs of the right.
Jack Abramoff’s IFF, for example, started selling copies of an Ollie North videotape made up of a slide show that was almost certainly the one Spitz Channell had used to scare his dotards, advertising it with a photo of the stern-faced Marine testifying before “the so-called Iran/Contra congressional committee.” Oliver North videotapes eventually became something of an industry unto themselves, but the one made by Abramoff, titled Telling It Like It Is, is almost certainly the only bit of filmed entertainment ever to be dedicated “to the memory of William J. Casey,” the CIA director made famous by his unabashed contempt for Congress.
The trade in Olliana boomed for years, as the persecuted patriot was indicted for his crimes and came to require a legal-defense fund (and also, apparently, a host of fake legal-defense funds). Jerry Falwell compared Ollie to Jesus Christ. There were Oliver North keychains and pocketknives and T-shirts and eventually even a TV show in which Ollie told America the secrets of war. There was the usual round of plunder, as funds raised to help Ollie stayed with the fund-raisers instead. And inevitably there was “Ollie, Inc.,” as the man himself went into the nonprofit direct-mail business. By 1994, when he ran for a Senate seat in Virginia, Oliver North had become the most successful political fund-raiser in the land, bringing in some $20 million over the course of his campaign. Remarkably, he lost anyway.
Prodigious though they may seem, these acts of retail profiteering were minuscule compared with the colossal entrepreneurial gambit that the Iran-Contra investigation revealed. The insiders called it “the Enterprise”: private money, raised through the sale of government favors and property, would go to fund private armies of “freedom fighters” operating overseas. The ultimate aim of the Enterprise, as envisioned by CIA Director Casey, was privatization on the grandest scale imaginable: the construction of a foreign-policy instrument that was free from the meddling of Congress, financed by sales of weapons and another precious commodity that government had in abundance but had hitherto been reluctant to market—access. [see Legacy Ashes book, casey escaped indictment by dying of brain cancer?]
The Enterprise eventually fell apart under congressional scrutiny, but fifteen years later this very bad idea was back again in even more grandiose form: a vast selling-off of government favors to those willing to fund the conservative movement, a wholesale transfer of government responsibilities to private-sector contractors, and even private armies, unaccountable to Congress or to anyone else.
Today industry conservatism includes specialists in dozens of fields. There are professionals and amateurs; those who do it because they’re paid to do it and those who do it because their eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Entrepreneur. It includes establishment firms and feisty start-ups, megacontractors taking billions to do work that the government used to do itself for far less, young men with a nice smile and a single client— who just wants to do a little clear-cutting out West somewhere. In conservative circles you encounter entrepreneurs both formally and casually, at carefully programmed events laying out the opportunities for profit opened up by Hurricane Katrina, or in conversation at a banquet celebrating some right-wing anniversary or other. At one such event in 2004, waiting for the presentation of a “Charlton Heston commemorative firearm,” I made the backslapping acquaintance of a freelance motivational speaker who, upon discovering that one of my tablemates was an officer of the Transportation Security Administration, immediately sought his confirmation that “we’re gonna privatize that, right?”
For some in winger Washington this is an idealistic business, but what gives it power and longevity is that it is a profitable business. I mean this not as polemic but as a statement of fact. Washington swarms with conservative ideologues not because conservatives particularly like the place but because there is an entire industry here that supports these people—an industry subsidized by the nation’s largest corporations and its richest families, and the government too. We are all familiar with the flagship organizations—Cato, Heritage, AEI—but the industry extends far beyond these, encompassing numerous magazines and literally hundreds of lobbying firms. There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.
There are political strategists, pollsters, campaign managers, trainers of youth, image consultants, makers of TV commercials, revolutionaries-for-hire, and, of course, direct-mail specialists who still launch their million-letter raids on the mailboxes of the heartland. Remember the guy who wrote all those sputtering diatribes for your college newspaper? Chances are he’s in D.C. now, thinking big thoughts from an endowed chair, or churning out more of the brilliant usual for one of the movement’s many blogs. The campus wingnut whose fulminations on the Red Menace so amused my friends and me at the University of Virginia, for example, resurfaced here as a columnist for the Washington Times before transitioning inevitably into consultancy. A friend of mine who went to Georgetown recently recalled for me the capers of his campus wingnut, whom he had completely forgotten until the guy made headlines as the lead culprit in a minor 2004 scandal called “Memogate.” Later he worked for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, teaching democratic civics to Iraqi politicians.
There is so much money in conservatism these days that Karl Rove rightly boasts, “We can now go to students at Harvard and say, ‘There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives.’” The young people who, like Jack Abramoff before them, have answered conservatism’s call over the past three decades were obeying their conscience, perhaps, but they were also making a canny career move.
Canny career moves are just about all we can expect from conservative government these days: tax breaks for wealthy benefactors, wars started and maintained for the benefit of American industry, fat contracts granted to the clients of the right consultant. Like Bush and Reagan before him, John McCain is a self-proclaimed outsider, but should he win in November he will merely bring us more of the same: an executive branch fed by, if not actually made up of, lobbyists and other angry, righteous profiteers. Washington itself will remain what it has been—not a Babylon that corrupts our pure-hearted right-wingers but the very seat of their Industry Conservatism, constantly seething and effervescing, with tens of thousands of individuals coming and going, each avidly piling up his own tidy pile but between them engaged in an awesome common project.
Take a step back, reader, and see what they have wrought.---

<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-weight: normal;"> The name, Grover Norquist, is by now a familiar one to most Americans. He made a name for himself by crusading against taxes. Though he has never been elected to political office, his influence in the Republican party has made him a fixture in every election.<div>Yet, most people are unaware that the man has a long and colorful history in conservative circles. Most controversial is his support for Angolan leader Jonas Savimbi, rebel fighter who led child soldiers into war and who "killed, abducted, and terrorized civilians with impunity."</div><div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Michael Grunwald of Time’s Swampland once called Grover Norquist <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/28/in-defense-of-grover-norquist-idealistic-advocate-of-bad-ideas/" style="text-decoration: none;">“an idealistic advocate of bad ideas.</a>" His ideals, however, haven't always been confined to thoughts alone. When they have led to action, the results, at least, for one African country death and misery of the innocent for the sake of his principle. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Most of us are familiar with his bad idea of “<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fatr.org%2Fcurrent-list-taxpayer-protection-pledge-signers-a5597&ei=32IrUaOUGoSn4ATRkIHoDA&usg=AFQjCNE8gkYiVYh2GFrGmuN7b6JMfwCC3w&sig2=BUUGe_5fi6qRIZe-kgJ1fA&bvm=bv.42768644,d.bGE" style="text-decoration: none;">Taxpayer Protection Pledge</a>" to oppose all tax increases and under all circumstances. We all know how he has bullied Republicans after they foolishly committed themselves to the poorly-conceived notion.</div></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However there’s another less publicized bad idea hidden in Norquist’s background that has failed to get a lot of attention in the mainstream media. Actually that’s a shame because his famous war against tax cuts represents a small part of the colorful Norquist biography. In this post, we will take a closer look at his Angolan connections. 

What sparked my interest was this remark. Norquist once told an interviewer: </div><blockquote class="tr_bq">"During the eighties, l was very active with the Afghan resistance, and in Mozambique and Angola.” </blockquote>That intriguing remark, (confirmed by his own mother), is worth a closer look. 


<div style="text-align: justify;"><a name="more">The statement most likely refers to his work as research director for a "grass-roots" conservative 501 (C) (3) and (4) non-profit organization called </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_for_America" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Citizens for America</a> (CFA). To call it a grass roots organization is a big stretch unless the grass is on the White House lawn. Its own website states that the group was "founded in 1983 at a White House meeting between Lewis Lehrman and <a href="http://www.zoominfo.com/#!search/profile/person?personId=16764574&targetid=profile" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jack Hume</a>, [CEO of Basic American Foods], to promote the Reagan agenda."

Nowadays grassroots organizations are started by corporate heads and investment bankers. A good example is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Lehrman" style="text-decoration: none;"> Lewis Lehrman</a>, a former president of Rite Aid drugstores, a board member of various right wing groups like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century" style="text-decoration: none;">Project for the New American Century</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute" style="text-decoration: none;">American Enterprise Institut</a>e and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Foundation" style="text-decoration: none;">Heritage Foundation</a>. Later, in the late 1980s he would become the managing director of Morgan Stanley. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lehrman also happened to be an unfortunate investor in George W. Bush’s first oil company, Arbusto). 
To understand how Norquist could have found himself on a plane to war-torn Angola we have to take a brief side step.

Enemies of my Enemies</div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Reagan Cold War policy was a simple one; Any rebel group fighting the Communist threat in the developing world- freedom fighters was the term the president liked to use- deserved American support. But it required a hard sell in Washington. Congress was understandably dubious about any direct support and repeatedly put roadblocks in the Neo-conservatives way.

Outside of the fact that many saw arming insurgents (as the Reagan administration did in Afghanistan) inside a sovereign nation was a breach in international law, this simplistic approach was both short-sighted and dangerous. For one thing, one problem was that the type of rebel leaders that drew support tended to be hardly any better than the communists they were replacing. In many cases they were worse. Whether you could call them terrorists or not, the only thing going for them was that they were our terrorists. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://image1.findagrave.com/photos250/photos/2010/52/7422368_126686773298.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://image1.findagrave.com/photos250/photos/2010/52/7422368_126686773298.jpg" height="200" width="144" style="border: none; position: relative;" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One confidential and distinctly unofficial event was held in 1985 in Jamba, Angola, which brought together an international collection of anti-communist rebel leaders. Nicaraguan, Laos, Afghanistan. The meeting, named Democracy International, was staged in the rebel headquarters of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)  and was hosted by the Angolan rebel leader, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FJonas_Savimbi&ei=H2ErUd-yB9DFtAbnn4Ag&usg=AFQjCNE6lOMBMgnmWWsX7KkGNWrumCFtHg&sig2=f6Tfl27W-SpWZt8yR0heg&bvm=bv.42768644,d.Yms" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Jonas Savimbi</a>. From the CFA side, Republican lobbyist <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FJack_Abramoff&ei=-GArUZ6-DYWK4gSxj4CQAg&usg=AFQjCNGMN5hF-90Zun60jH_bYRVRP3TzcA&sig2=g0geP_r8neZQni7YzxgtpA&bvm=bv.42768644,d.bGE" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Jack Abramoff</a> - later to be convicted in a lobbying scandal--helped Norquist organize the meeting. Lehrman was also in attendance. Exactly how many CIA operatives were already in Angola at the time is not known.</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>Paling Around with Norquist</div><div>Very early in his career Norquist made a lot of influential friends in the conservative movement. His positions give some us some idea about his reach: 
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><ul><li>Former executive director, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=College_Republicans&action=edit&redlink=1" style="text-decoration: none;">College Republicans</a>, 1981-83</li><li>Former executive director of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Taxpayers_Union" style="text-decoration: none;">National Taxpayers Union</a>, 1981-83</li><li>Former economist and chief speechwriter, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S.Chamber_of_Commerce" style="text-decoration: none;">U.S. Chamber of Commerce</a>, 1983-1984</li></ul></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Norquist preferred to work behind the scenes and instead of entering into politics with all of the scrutiny that that entails, Norquist became a powerful lobbyist. In addition to his domestic causes, he also found time to lobby for foreign entities as well. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/grover-norquist-field-marshal-bush-plan?page=0,0" style="text-decoration: none;">The Nation magazine</a> provides more information about Norquist’s activities during those days:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">“During the second half of the 1980s, Norquist detoured from his tax work to engage in a series of safaris to far-off battlegrounds in support of anti-Soviet guerrilla armies, visiting war zones from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to southern Africa. Working alongside Col. Oliver North's freelance support network for the Nicaraguan contras and other Reagan Doctrine-allied insurgencies, Norquist promoted U.S. support for groups like Mozambique's RENAMO and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, both of which were backed by South Africa's apartheid regime (Norquist represented UNITA as a registered lobbyist in the early 1990s).”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, Norquist reportedly admitted to being the voice of Savimbi by ghost-writing some op-ed articles, promoting the freedom fighting benefits of UNITA. On one occasion, Norquist allegedly donned a UNITA uniform while on a visit to Angolan rebel-held zones.( He stripped down quickly when actual fighting broke out.) </div><div style="text-align: justify;">So much for the patriot.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">A year after the Democracy International meeting, in 1986, Savimbi was invited to the White House. The meeting was, as we have seen, superfluous since by that time, lobbyists like Norquist and right wing organizations, like The Heritage Foundation, had paved the way beforehand. After the one-on-one, Reagan spoke of UNITA in glowing terms, saying that the group was winning “ victory that electrifies the world." </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Interestingly, despite the questions about Savimbi, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Angola" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Wikipedia has one positive quote</a>- which appears in several wiki entries on Angola, Savimbi and CIA activities there. That enthusiastic quote comes from a missionary, Dr. Peter Hammond, who lived there at the time. And what a time it was. Angola had become another one of the many Cold War battlefields, with imported Cuban troops on one side (sent by Castro without Soviet permission) and Western-backed rebel insurgents on the other (with the full support of Washington.).</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">"There were over 50,000 Cuban troops in the country. The communists had attacked and destroyed many churches. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-23" style="text-decoration: none;">MiG-23s</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil_Mi-24" style="text-decoration: none;">Mi-24 Hind</a> helicopter gunships were terrorising villagers in Angola. I documented numerous atrocities, including the strafing of villages, schools and churches. In 1986, I remember hearing Ronald Reagan's speech – carried on the BBC Africa service – by short wave radio: "We are going to send <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger" style="text-decoration: none;">Stinger missiles</a> to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola!" ...Without any doubt, Ronald Reagan's policies saved many tens of thousands of lives in Angola."</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">A little further research reveals something more about this quote. Hammond’s credentials as a missionary have repeatedly been called into question since, according to some sources, he "was granted an honorary doctorate in missiology,” also known as “<a href="http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/ChatAfriK/message/6867" style="text-decoration: none;">Mailorder Missionaries.”</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/12/2/65451/3761" style="text-decoration: none;">As this link demonstrates</a>, Dr. Hammond is certainly not the simple missionary that Wikipedia quote suggests. If his website is any indication, Hammond inhabits a world in which missionaries can become fighters. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Apologies, I digress.

Norquist, UNITA and Child Soldiers</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Let’s turn back to back to Norquist and his relationship with UNITA. That Democracy International meeting was not the only jaunt Norquist made to Africa. In fact, Norquist made repeated trips to rebel controlled territory in Angola in the 1980s. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">A little backtracking is necessary here. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">UNITA and the USA had an on-off affair throughout the 1970s and 80s. In 1975, President Ford had warmed up to UNITA. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, supported the intervention into Angola by South African troops in support of UNITA.. President Carter on the other hand cut off ties with Savimbi and during that time, the US State Department considered UNITA a terrorist organization. As we have said, Reagan renewed the American relationship. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">There was plenty of red flags about UNITA- all of which American conservatives ignored.. It was described by <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">one human rights organization</a> as:  <a href="http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html">http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/africa1.html</a></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">“a rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi, [that] killed, abducted, and terrorized civilians with impunity.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Another organization, <a href="http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr991012.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;">the </a><a href="http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr991012.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;">United States Institute for Peace</a>, said of the former Marxist turned freedom fighter: </div><blockquote class="tr_bq">“Savimbi is indeed responsible for a litany of crimes against humanity.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In his previous incarnation, the guerilla leader had been schooled in classic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maoist" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Maoist</a> approaches to warfare before rejecting all things Communist. Human Rights campaigners charged that UNITA used child soldiers during the Angolan Civil War. This was the same time that Norquist was a registered lobbyist for the organization. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/the-nras-biggest-gun-grov_b_1107271.html" style="text-decoration: none;">Josh Horwitz, writing for the Huffington Post</a> describes Norquist’s early activities like this:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">During the 1980s, he supported anti-Communist movements even when "Freedom Fighters" were perpetrating human rights abuses against the very countrymen they were "liberating." Two of the organizations Norquist backed were <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=G7IfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W9cEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3366,6135733&dq=norquist+angola&hl=en" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">UNITA</a> and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Gqw1rBTtYSoC&pg=PT133&dq=janus+merritt&hl=en&ei=G6ydTqnoL9Oy0QGt4aSYCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=janus%20merritt&f=false" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">RENAMO</a>. RENAMO has been accused of <a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O46-RENAMO.html" style="text-decoration: none;">killing over one million civilians in Mozambique</a>. UNITA employed child soldiers throughout the Angolan Civil War, <a href="http://www.wri-irg.org/node/2284" style="text-decoration: none;">including during the time that Norquist was a registered lobbyist for the organization</a>.</blockquote>But Norquist didn’t limit his lobbying coverage just to Angola and Mozambique. </div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">Norquist also lobbied for the interests of a number of African dictators in the United States, including <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Gqw1rBTtYSoC&pg=PT217&lpg=PT217&dq=grover+norquist+omar+bongo&source=bl&ots=6nxEeTerRe&sig=Tqbkm5DL0LbO1rKBOHbOaSZ5z0w&hl=en&ei=1MK6TuSfLuie2AWo4LTBBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=grover%20norquist%20omar%20bongo&f=false" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Omar Bongo</a> of Gabon, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=L2eSq-e0aAUC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=grover+norquist+pascal+lissouba&source=bl&ots=HDvNsneRBF&sig=WGv_5JIRr7lQgtmq9Q5yeSS-w0E&hl=en&ei=QcO6TsiKOOWq2QWvvcHGBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=grover%20norquist%20pascal%20lissouba&f=false" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pascal Lissouba</a> of the Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko of (then) Zaire, and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Gqw1rBTtYSoC&pg=PT127&dq=norquist+seychelles&hl=en&ei=HMS6TsndAsn20gHRqZjeCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=norquist%20seychelles&f=false" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">France-Albert René</a> of Seychelles.</blockquote><div>Norquist also worked with Hamas and Hezbollah. (Talk about paling around with terrorists)
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">Norquist's firm also represented <a href="http://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&filingID=D8914334-1D61-41D3-9B5A-0E72C9BB9B9E" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">a Hamas and Hezbollah supporter</a> now serving a 23-year prison sentence for his role in a terrorist plot. Norquist was candid about the anti-democratic character of these tyrants, even describing René as "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Gqw1rBTtYSoC&pg=PT127&dq=norquist+seychelles&hl=en&ei=HMS6TsndAsn20gHRqZjeCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=norquist%20seychelles&f=false" style="text-decoration: none;">a guy who preferred not to have elections for a number of years</a>."</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Clearly Norquist doesn’t put a lot of faith in the beauty of democracy. After all, for a man who has never held any elected office, Norquist certainly wholeheartedly enjoys the trappings of power. The entire Republican party seems afraid to cross him.

The Reckoning of Norquist's Bad Ideas</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Reagan doctrine, which Norquist and the other Neo-conservatives so strongly supported, was a very mixed success-even in the short term. Despite all of Norquist’s lobbying and hands-on interference, Savimbi’s UNITA, like the Contras in Nicaragua, like the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, were all about manipulating the American foreign policy for the sake of power. 
For some impartial outsiders, America's willingness to break the UN Charter, along with its extreme naivety when it came to insurgent leaders, brought it down to the same level as the Soviet Union.  In some ways, American prestige has never completely recovered.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/11/opinion/oe-gleijeses11" style="text-decoration: none;">According to his obituary in Los Angeles Times</a>, Savimbi was quite willing to work with Angola’s former colonial masters, the Portuguese to eliminate any rival rebel movement.,</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">By 1977, the story of Savimbi's betrayal of the Angolan independence movement was public knowledge in Western Europe. In 1979, the mainstream Lisbon weekly Expresso concluded: "The fact that Savimbi collaborated with the Portuguese colonial authorities has been so amply proven that no one can question it in good faith."</blockquote>Later the same held true when it came to utilizing the help of Pretoria. Then came Washington’s turn. </div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">He was a warlord whose overriding principle was absolute power, and if this required an agreement with Portuguese colonial authorities first, and then a dalliance with apartheid, so be it.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Power, weapons and international recognition were the things which, through intense lobbying of Washington politicians, Grover Norquist supplied in full. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the early 1990s, after the Cold War had ended, Savimbi lost his importance in conservative circles. The Angolan government held free elections and Savimbi lost. This demonstration of democracy in action didn’t discourage the rebel leader. He continued fighting up until his assassination by the Angolan military in 2002 </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">We all know what the good book says about those that live by the sword, so his fate was no great surprise. However, the Bible says nothing about what happens to the people who furnish them the swords. Or in this case, the stingers missiles. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Following Savimbi’s assassination, editor Jeremy Harding in <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/jeremy-harding/the-late-jonas-savimbi" style="text-decoration: none;">a piece written for the London Review of Books</a>, back in 2002 wrote:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">Jonas Savimbi stole just about everything and he should not be pitied. ... In the attempt, which lasted roughly thirty years, he robbed Angolan peasants of just about everything and several well-known politicians of their plausibility. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reagan Administration’s henchperson at the UN, described him as ‘one of the authentic heroes of our time’, and Reagan himself is reported to have likened him to Abraham Lincoln. Even as he ceased to serve the purposes of Washington and Pretoria at the end of the Cold War, he continued to persuade Western right-wing lobbyists and anti-Communist crusaders to part with their money: ‘hearts, minds and purses’ was the Savimbi strategy on this front and it paid off handsomely.</blockquote><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><div style="text-align: justify;">That reference to right-wing lobbyist definitely included Norquist whose job it was to separate the politically-minded conservative fools from their money. another note: the fact that Reagan compared Savimbi to Lincoln- besides being a calumny to history- has CFA's Lehrman's fingerprints all over it. Lehrman has had a life-long passion for the 16th president and later would write and lecture about Abraham Lincoln's legacy in American history.

The Ironic Twist</div></div><div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/cb20121016195159/callofduty/images/a/a4/MM1_Grenade_Launcher_Third_Person_BOII.png" imageanchor="1" style="text-decoration: none; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; display: inline !important;"><img border="0" src="http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/cb20121016195159/callofduty/images/a/a4/MM1_Grenade_Launcher_Third_Person_BOII.png" height="275" width="320" style="border: none; position: relative;" /></a>Today, Jonas Savimbi, the guerrilla famous for his Angolan child army, is ironically a familiar face with American children who probably have have no idea who he might be. 
Rendered as a grenade-launching comic book character, the warlord’s likeness appears in a popular computer game, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops_II" style="text-decoration: none;">Call of Duty-Black Ops II </a>a first person shooter game. The plotline of the game is interesting to read; it uses a mash-up of a Neo-con false-narrative history as background material. Norquist could have written it himself. 

<a href="http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/06/army-eyes-new-first-person-shooter-game-train-soldiers/56338/" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The US army </a>took a look at these types of simulation games and liked what they saw. With its high degree of realism, officials considered them to be wonderful training for soldiers in the battlefield. 

On the other hand, the <a href="http://www.complex.com/video-games/2013/02/10-video-games-the-nra-blames-for-real-life-violence/call-of-duty" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">NRA has cited the marketing of these games</a>- rather than guns- to be the true cause of these massacres. There’s some (but not much) support to that idea. Adam Lanza, the armed attacker of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2249854/Sandy-Hook-school-shooting-Adam-Lanza-spent-hours-playing-Call-Duty.html" style="text-decoration: none;">reportedly </a>spent hours playing the game in his basement.

The irony doesn’t stop there. When the National Rifle Association (NRA) leader LaPierre suggested that the real problem with school attacks was there simply wasn’t enough armed protection at the facilities. Norquist’s response to the suggestion was:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">“This is an idea that seems fairly reasonable.”</blockquote>He also added: </div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">“The gun-control advocates, for a long time, have jumped on every tragedy and tried to exploit it in unhelpful ways.,I think the NRA did well to hold off for awhile in responding. We ought to calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">As we have seen in his Angolan connections, Norquist is an authority on exploiting tragedies for political purposes. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, his stand on the proposal shouldn’t surprise anybody. Grover Norquist, after all, sits upon the board of directors of the NRA. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So I suppose the question is whether to expect another of Grover Norquist's bad ideas. That is, whether he is actually finished arming child soldiers for an insurgent army yet.</div></div>- See more at:</div><div class="print-created" style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;">
</div><div class="print-created" style="orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;"> http://nomadicpolitics.blogspot.com/2013/02/inside-grover-norquist-jonas-savimbi.html#sthash.YwIqUASo.dpuf

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