Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  “Okay,” she said. She gave me her information and told me to call her anytime. We shook hands. For a few minutes more we stood there chatting. I asked what the protesters were there for, pleading ignorance—I’d just flown in from Moscow.

  “It’s all of that Abramoff stuff,” she said.

  “It’s funny,” I said. “In Russia, they can’t understand . . .”

  “They don’t understand why this is even a big deal with Abramoff, right?” she cut in.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  We parted; I moved through the crowd in the direction of Burns. Up close, the senator looks like little more than a big exhausted lump—like a sack of potatoes with a mushy, half-caved-in pineapple on top.

  “Senator!” I said, extending a hand. “Matt Taibbi, Dosko-Konsult. Happy birthday, sir . . .”

  “Yeah,” he snorted, half-assedly shaking my hand and quickly ditching me in favor of a crowd of telecom suits.

  Jilted, I stood there guzzling a beer for a moment. A friendly lobbyist/advertising guy came up and struck up a conversation. We talked about Abramoff.

  “I don’t know if everything he did was illegal, exactly,” he said. “But it was just too excessive, in bad taste.”

  “My clients want to drill for oil in the Grand Canyon,” I blurted out.

  “Well, as long as you’ve got the environmental-impact research, that won’t be too bad,” he said.

  “Our research shows that less than eleven percent of marine life will be affected,” I said, misquoting my own fact sheet.

  “Yeah, well . . .” he said.

  A few minutes later I was talking to a lobbyist and her schoolteacher husband, who were hanging around the periphery of the party. I spilled a very long spiel about our Grand Canyon project, railing against government regulation. The husband joined me in being angry about the obstacles.

  “The thing is, you come up with something like that, the first thing they’ll say is [here he changed his voice to a high-pitched whine], ‘Oh, the animals, the animals!’ Fucking New York ­liberals.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s like the spotted owl and all that shit.”

  “Totally,” he said.

  Later on, I met my Friend in Politics, who said, “Well, at least you learned something: it costs five hundred dollars for a meeting.” He paused. “And you’re an utter tool, too.”

  “I guess it would be a lot easier for a professional like Abramoff,” I said.

  “Yeah,” my friend said. “And he had a lot more than five hundred bucks. A lot more.”

  Meet Mr. Republican

  The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington

  April 6, 2006

  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 weight lifting 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 a symbol of his generation’s Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater were of theirs.

  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 antiapartheid 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, he lately 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, 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 such as 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 coexistence with the left.” The take-no-prisoners stance of the twentysome-thing 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 (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.

  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 onetime 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 reveals 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 Representative Dan Burton and Senator 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 anticommunist 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, Colonel 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 comin
g 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 anticommunist 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 onetime New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman at the request of Ronald Reagan, Abramoff helped organize a meeting of anticommunist 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 anticommunist 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.”