The Man Who Bought Washington

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

There were two qualities that Jack Abramoff looked for in a prospective lobbying client: naivete and a willingness to part with a lot of money. In early 2001 he found both in an obscure Indian tribe called the Louisiana Coushattas. Thanks to the humming casino the tribe had erected on farmland between New Orleans and Houston, a band that had subsisted in part on pine-needle basket weaving was doling out stipends of $40,000 a year to every one of its 800-plus men, women and children. But the Coushattas were also $30 million in debt and worried that renewal of their gambling compact would be blocked by hostile local authorities--and that their casino business would be eaten away by others looking to get a piece of the action. So tribal leaders were eager to hear from the handsome, dandily dressed visitor who had flown in from Washington with his partner on a private jet, shared some of their fried chicken in the council hall, then waited for them to turn off the tape recorder that they used for official business.

Abramoff told the tribal council he brought a special understanding to their plight. As an Orthodox Jew, "he understood how native Americans have been mistreated, been misled, because his people, the Jews, had also been done that way," William Worfel, then a member of the council, recalls him saying. If the Coushattas gave him enough money, Abramoff promised, he could make their problems go away. He and his partner Michael Scanlon, a onetime press secretary for congressional leader Tom DeLay who ran his own public relations firm, came through, attacking the tribe's political opponents, blitzing the state with television ads and tapping a grassroots operation of Christian conservatives to help stop any rival casinos. And by the next year, with elections rolling around, Abramoff had the Coushattas dreaming even bigger. "You can control Louisiana," Worfel recalls Abramoff telling the tribal leaders. "You could help elect Senators and Representatives and attorney generals in the state of Louisiana, and then they're going to remember that the Coushattas helped them. And they know that if you helped them, well, they know that you can come after them down the road if they don't help you, see?" The Coushattas went for it. On election night, they watched their chosen candidates with excitement and discovered that the $9.3 million they had given Scanlon had produced ... nothing.

That's probably because much of the $32 million that the Coushattas paid Abramoff and Scanlon over two years went not toward increasing the tribe's influence but toward lining the two partners pockets. Nearly $11.5 million in secret kickbacks was funneled by Scanlon back to Abramoff, according to court papers filed last week, as the man who was once one of Washington's highest-paid lobbyists pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and a conspiracy to bribe public officials. Abramoff's plea agreement admits to expansive schemes to defraud not just the Coushattas but also three other tribes and the lobbying firm Abramoff worked for, and it acknowledges buying off public officials, in part by laundering his clients' funds through legitimate-sounding think tanks and public-policy groups, some of which Abramoff and Scanlon themselves set up. The stocky figure in the black fedora who left the federal courthouse after telling Judge Ellen Huvelle of his "tremendous sadness and regret for my conduct" was barely recognizable as the flamboyant power broker who used to send lawmakers and their staffs on junkets around the world and entertain them back in Washington with golf outings, free meals at his expensive restaurant, and concerts and games enjoyed from the luxury skyboxes he maintained at nearly every arena and stadium in town.

The Abramoff scandal has already taken down the political player who invented the system that has helped keep Republicans in power for more than a decade. The once feared DeLay--whose office had been Abramoff's biggest claim to access and influence on Capitol Hill--announced he would resign as House majority leader. "I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land," DeLay wrote in a letter to his G.O.P. colleagues, but added, "I cannot allow our adversaries to divide and distract our attention." Because of his tightfisted regime that rewarded loyalists and punished detractors, his departure is sure to set off not just a fight for his old job but also some ugly score settling. No wonder House Speaker Dennis Hastert canceled a trip to Asia he had planned for this week so that he could return to Washington, begin sifting through the fallout and start planning for leadership elections the week of Jan. 31.

The Coushattas' tale is only a small piece of an investigation that, with the 46-year-old Abramoff's agreement last week to cooperate with federal prosecutors, could become one of the biggest corruption probes in U.S. history, possibly putting dozens of lawmakers in legal or political jeopardy. It has already netted Scanlon, 35, who pleaded guilty to similar charges in November and is also cooperating. In an internal e-mail obtained by TIME, the director of the FBI's Washington field office, Michael Mason, congratulated some 15 agents and 15 support staff members under him on the case for "a huge accomplishment" in squeezing Abramoff to make a deal after 18 months of investigation and negotiation, one that made "a huge contribution to ensuring the very integrity of our government." But he added that "the case is far from over."

Another official involved with the probe told TIME that investigators are viewing Abramoff as "the middle guy"--suggesting there are bigger targets in their sights. The FBI has 13 field offices across the country working on the case, with two dozen agents assigned to it full time and roughly the same number working part time. "We are going to chase down every lead," Chris Swecker, head of the FBI's criminal division, told TIME.

Just following the money that Abramoff spread across Washington should give them plenty to do. So toxic are any campaign donations tied to him that panicked lawmakers from Hastert ($69,000) to Republican Senator Conrad Burns ($150,000) to Democratic Senator Max Baucus ($18,892) can't give it away to charities fast enough. Even President Bush is giving the American Heart Association the $6,000 that he received from Abramoff, his wife and one of the Indian tribes he represented. (See accompanying story.)

Given the potential damage, it was no surprise that Republicans sought to make Abramoff a bipartisan stain, circulating a seven-page research paper titled "Jack Abramoff's Democrat Connections," which lists contributions and news stories associating the disgraced lobbyist with nine Democratic Senators and six Democratic House members. But the fact is that about two-thirds of Abramoff-related money went to Republicans, and that may have already begun to shift the political equation 10 months before the congressional election. In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Friday, respondents said they favored a generic Democrat for Congress over a Republican by a lopsided 49% to 36%.

All of which explains why it is likely to be a while before House Republicans regain the discipline they had in the days when DeLay was known as "the Hammer." His temporary replacement, whip Roy Blunt, wants the job but hasn't proved to be a stellar vote counter in the time he has been filling in. And his undisguised ambition has strained relations with what is left of DeLay's operation. Some of the Old Guard are rallying behind Ohio Congressman John Boehner as a replacement, while younger conservatives are talking up Indiana's Mike Pence. Also considered likely to run are Arizona's John Shadegg and Jerry Lewis of California, who has a formidable power base by virtue of his perch as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. As rank-and-file Republicans fight about who will lead them, it will be with an eye over their shoulder to see where the Abramoff investigation is going. Whereas they once had an almost blind faith in the judgment and invincibility of their leaders, "for the first time," says a Republican lawmaker, "members are looking at the whole thing and saying, 'I've gotta start protecting me.'"

o ABRAMOFF'S TANGLED WEBS

Bribery has always been a difficult thing to prove, absent a videotape of a crook stuffing the pockets of a politician with cash. But so large are the amounts involved--and so voluminous the evidence from a man who committed nearly every thought to e-mail--that prosecutors in the Abramoff case may even test the proposition that legally reported campaign contributions constitute bribery, if it can be proved they were given expressly in return for official actions. A high-level source tells TIME that prosecutors will also focus much of their energies on the lesser and easier-to-prove charge of "honest services mail fraud," for which they have to show only that a lawmaker has acted in his personal interest or that of another individual but not of his constituents in return for improper gain. That lowering of the bar for criminal-corruption cases is sending shudders from the Capitol to the lobbying corridor of K Street. And none of that even begins to address the question of whether those who dined, traveled and socialized with Abramoff might have violated Congress's own loophole-ridden rules that prohibit, for instance, lobbyists from paying for travel or taking gifts worth more than $50. All of which explains why lobbying and ethics reform suddenly seem so popular on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers vying to outdo one another, as they always do in moments like these, with proposals they insist would clean up the system once and for all. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has even suggested that Congress ban fund-raising in Washington and force disclosure of all contact with lobbyists.

Only one lawmaker--House Administration Committee chairman Bob Ney of Ohio, identified as "Representative #1"--is mentioned in the Abramoff indictments as having provided "official acts and influence" in exchange for gifts, travel, meals and campaign contributions. Ney has not been formally charged and denies he did anything wrong. But the investigation is also encircling the political operation of DeLay. And the probe may yet reach deeper into the Executive Branch. It has already yielded the indictment of former Bush Administration official David Safavian on five counts of lying about his dealings with Abramoff while he was a senior official at the General Services Administration, the procurement agency for the Federal Government. Sources at the Interior Department tell TIME that its inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, has been conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Abramoff's dealings with the Cabinet agency--which oversees many of the Indian-related issues Abramoff built most of his career around. In particular, the agency is looking into ties between Abramoff and former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, who has been accused of intervening in agency deliberations on behalf of the Coushattas. Griles has denied it, and his attorney says Abramoff was wildly exaggerating their relationship when he referred to Griles in an e-mail to lobying colleagues as his man at Interior.

The fact that the scandal is breaking at the beginning of midterm-election season promises that it will be amplified in political ads and coverage around the country. Even though he gave away the contributions he took from Abramoff and his clients, Montana Senator Burns, who heads the subcommittee that controls Interior's budget and is up for re-election, will continue to face questions about every move he made that helped the lobbyist. "I hope he goes to jail and we never see him again," Burns said in yet another interview on the subject with a Montana television station. "I wish he'd never been born, to be be right honest with you."

o THE MAKING OF A FIXER

Jack Abramoff's first venture into politics was probably a clue that the future superlobbyist had a rather flexible view of the rules: he was disqualified in his 1972 race for president of his Beverly Hills elementary school, after a teacher discovered he had violated the school's campaign spending limits by serving hot dogs at an election party. But Abramoff persisted, running again for student-body president in high school and failing. He later recalled those days in an interview with the Beverly Hills Weekly as "probably the last time I've really been involved in totally fair campaigns."

Where the short, thickset Abramoff did make his mark was on the football field and in the weight room. As a Beverly Hills High School senior, the Los Angeles Times reported last week, Abramoff became the first member of the school's 2700 Club, for lifting a combined total of 2,700 lbs. in the power squat, dead lift, bench press and clean and jerk. He was one of the North Side kids, from the more privileged side of the Santa Monica Boulevard line that separated the superrich from the merely wealthy. Abramoff's father Frank had transplanted the family from Atlantic City, N.J., when he became a top executive at the then exclusive Diners Club credit-card company and a protege of one of Ronald Reagan's closest friends, Diners Club chairman Alfred Bloomingdale.

While his parents were not particularly observant Jews, Abramoff's life took a pious turn when he was 12 and saw Fiddler on the Roof. He began to study Judaism, taught himself Hebrew and walked to temple on Saturday. It was something his parents never fully understood; while they have stayed close and visited him often as an adult, a former associate of Abramoff's tells TIME, they have always stayed at a hotel during visits, rather than following the strictures of the Orthodox household that Abramoff, his wife Pam and their five children keep in Silver Spring, Md.

Abramoff's politics were also conservative. As a student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, he and Grover Norquist, a Harvard Business School student who later became one of the most powerful G.O.P. antitax activists of the Bush era, undertook the challenge of trying to mobilize the state's famously liberal college students behind Reagan in 1980. Norquist recalls they scored a big political coup in winning over the Bostoner Rebbe, one of the nation's most influential Hasidic leaders, whose endorsement they figured was good for about 3,000 votes. That was just about the size of Reagan's upset victory in the state.

Their friendship and political partnership continued after the election, with Abramoff becoming national chairman of the College Republicans (a post once held by Karl Rove), Norquist serving as executive director and the two of them mentoring a baby-faced summer intern from Georgia named Ralph Reed, who would later turn the Christian Coalition into a political powerhouse. Abramoff and Norquist dreamed up plenty of headline-getting stunts--like an adopt-a-contra appeal, with posters imploring, ONLY 53 CENTS A DAY WILL SUPPORT A NICARAGUAN FREEDOM FIGHTER. But they also annoyed the Reagan team, to the point that they were barred from a White House reception for the medical students rescued during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, according to Gang of Five, author Nina Easton's chronicle of the conservative movement of that time. Soon after, Norquist and Abramoff also worked for and were later fired by drugstore baron Lewis Lehrman's conservative group Citizens for America, over what a source close to Lehrman told the Washington Post was "lavish spending."

As the Reagan years wound down, Abramoff drifted back toward Los Angeles, where he became a B-movie producer, remembered mostly for the 1989 anti-communist adventure Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren. Shortly before the film came out, Abramoff invited talk-show host and critic Michael Medved to lunch. "I thought he was interesting--a Reaganite, a fellow observant Jew--and I took a look at his movie," Medved recalls. "The film was awful, and I told him the best help I could give him was never to review it. He laughed and said, 'Yeah, it's pretty bad.' I said, 'No, Jack, it's worse than that: it's unreleasable.'"

Abramoff was undaunted. Despite losing major studio distribution and even enduring boycotts for having filmed in Namibia, which was administered during the Apartheid-era by South Africa--whose government is reported to have provided extras and military hardware--he produced not only that movie, but also its even lousier sequel, Red Scorpion 2. Still, politics, not movies, remained Abramoff's real passion, and as it happened, in 1994 a new kind of opportunity had arisen in Washington for a brash and entrepreneurial conservative who had the right connections.

o MOVING WITHIN THE INNER CIRCLE

There are different stories going around about how Abramoff first met Tom DeLay, the man who once referred to the lobbyist as "one of my closest and dearest friends." Some versions have it that they were introduced shortly before the Republicans regained the House in 1994 by their mutual friend Daniel Lapin, a Seattle-area rabbi who has long been active in conservative causes. But a former DeLay aide tells TIME that it happened during a fund raiser shortly after the election in which Republicans gained full control of Congress for the first time in more than 40 years. In this account, DeLay's then chief of staff Ed Buckham pulled an unfamiliar figure toward DeLay and told the new majority whip that he was an important lobbyist and fund raiser and that they would soon be working together a lot.

Buckham was almost as important a person to know as DeLay. He was not only DeLay's top staff member but also a licensed nondenominational minister who served as his pastor. He remained DeLay's closest political adviser even after Buckham left DeLay's staff to start his own lobbying shop in 1998, and DeLay rose to majority leader. Buckham was also the over-seer of the political operation known around Washington as DeLay Inc., a tight meshing of business and conservative interests that was granted a seat at the table in exchange for putting money and political muscle behind DeLay's favored causes and candidates.

No one was more amenable to the arrangement than Abramoff, who also showered DeLay's staff with sports and concert tickets. After Buckham left, Abramoff developed a close relationship with deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy. "For all intents and purposes, Tony worked for Jack," contends a former Abramoff associate, who tells TIME that Abramoff even bought Rudy a text-messaging pager so that they would never be out of touch. Prosecutors allege that Abramoff also funneled payments to Rudy's wife--10 monthly payments totaling $50,000--through a nonprofit. When Rudy left DeLay's staff in 2000, he joined Abramoff at the lobbying firm of Greenberg Traurig. Rudy now works for Buckham at Alexander Strategy Group, another lobbying operation. Rudy, Buckham and Rudy's lawyer did not return repeated phone calls and e-mails from TIME requesting comment.

"People were kind of raising their eyebrows," recalls a former DeLay staff member, who says he was unsettled by Abramoff's constant presence. "Who is this guy, and what is he doing?" What he was doing, it now appears, was getting his clients, including not just Indian tribes but also businesses and government officials in foreign countries, to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars, often by making the contributions to nonprofit foundations that would in turn finance junkets for DeLay and other lawmakers, as well as their staffs. That was meant to get around House rules forbidding lobbyists to pay for congressional travel directly.

Sources close to the investigation have told TIME that the FBI has been particularly interested in a trip DeLay and some of his staff members took to London and Scotland in 2000. At the time, Congress was considering legislation that would have restricted Internet gambling, and with it the livelihoods of some of Abramoff arranged for two of them--a Choctaw Indian tribe and the gambling-services company eLottery Inc.--to each contribute $25,000 to the sponsor of the trip, the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative nonprofit foundation on whose board Abramoff sat. They wrote their checks on May 25, 2000--the very day that DeLay departed.

But those numbers look trivial compared with what Abramoff's clients apparently were pouring into a little-known public-advocacy group, the U.S. Family Network, which Buckham organized in 1996 for the ostensible purpose of promoting conservative values and "moral fitness." Last month the Washington Post reported that nearly all its funding came from corporations linked to Abramoff--including a million-dollar payment that may well have come indirectly from corrupt Russian oil interests, which have never expressed much interest in moral fitness; half a million dollars from textile companies in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific that are known for their cheap labor; and a quarter of a million from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Abramoff's largest client. (See accompanying graphic.)

That was a lot of money to give to an organization that never had more than one full-time employee and spent little on public advocacy. But the U.S. Family Network did run ads attacking vulnerable Democratic lawmakers, and it owned the town house where DeLay's political-action committee rented its offices. The entity also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Buckham and his firm Alexander Strategy Group, which at the time was paying DeLay's wife Christine $3,200 a month to make lists of lawmakers' favorite charities--information that an intern could probably dig up in a week.

DeLay's lawyer Richard Cullen says that if those who worked for the former House majority leader were doing anything shady, their boss had no inkling of it. "Certainly he would be very, very sad and disappointed if it turns out any of his staffers did anything that was inappropriate--not just illegal but inappropriate," Cullen tells TIME. "He demands honesty and excellence from his employees."

But buying influence was only part of Abramoff's enterprise. All along, he was taking his cut and financing projects of his own, including a religious academy in Maryland where he sent his children and a sniper school for Israelis on the West Bank. His three Washington restaurants, now closed, were hemorrhaging money, and he was always working on a half-baked business idea, such as starting an indoor lacrosse league or a ferry service across the Potomac. "Jack lived pretty much right at his means," says a former associate who was familiar with his personal finances. "He never saved money. He lived check to check." In one of his 2003 e-mails to Scanlon, Abramoff even sounded desperate: "Mike!!! I need the money TODAY! I AM BOUNCING CHECKS!!!" Indeed, it was a business deal gone sour that might have finally forced his guilty plea in the Washington corruption case. He was scheduled this week to go on trial in Florida on charges that he and a business partner, Adam Kidan, falsified a loan guarantee as part of a $147.5 million deal to buy a fleet of casino boats. His plea deal in that case last week, which avoids that trial, is also contingent on his cooperation in the Washington investigation.

Worfel, the former Coushatta leader who was so dazzled by Abramoff five years ago, says he hasn't heard from him since around the time the first reports of the scandal broke and the lobbyist was fired by his firm, Greenberg Traurig. "Jack was calling and said, 'Man, I need help.'" Even after everything he had taken from the tribe, he still wanted more. Worfel turned him down, but Abramoff kept calling, leaving eight or nine more voicemail messages. Finally, Worfel did the only thing he could do against a man as persistent as Jack Abramoff. He got a new cell phone.

With reporting by Mike Allen, Perry Bacon Jr., Brian Bennett, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, MARK THOMPSON, DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON, Siobhan Morrissey/Miami, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Eli Sanders/Seattle