Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  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 antiapartheid 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. To a man, however, 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 predawn 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 27, 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 Representative 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 m
e 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.

  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 two hundred years of democracy. How smart can these guys be?

  Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Representative 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.”

  How to Steal a Coastline

  The Gulf is still in ruins—but Bush has opened the door

  for the casinos and carpetbaggers, and now there’s

  a cutthroat race to the high ground

  April 20, 2006

  New Orleans, Ninth Ward, near the infamous levee, the last Tuesday in March. I’m in the passenger seat of a spiffy black Volkswagen, staring out my window in shock. Only one word comes to mind: Hiroshima. Houses all sideways and blown to bits, cars flipped over, ground covered with glass and wire and dismembered dolls’ heads. No water, no electricity, no civilization.

  Katrina might as well have hit yesterday. Almost nobody has come back. Goateed white college volunteers living in tents seem to outnumber actual residents ten-to-one. On any given street, anything moving is probably either a rat or a CUNY sophomore. The death smell still hangs everywhere.

  The VW stops and I’m staring at a nearby car crushed ­under a house. Next to it is a half-crumpled shack with a message written in spray paint: “Possible child body inside.”

  “Holy shit,” I whisper.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet, dude,” says the man beside me.

  I last saw the Reverend Willie Walker when we went out in rescue boats together just after the storm. The affable black pastor’s cell phone and BlackBerry are constantly buzzing; he’s always making new contacts, trying to get something organized. The good reverend is a hustler for God. I like Willie a lot. He’s sincere without being a bore. And another thing. When he’s my tour guide, I always seem to end up interviewing a lot of pretty girls.

  Back in September, Willie had told me while standing in his ruined church, the fatefully named Noah’s Ark Baptist, that he feared what lay ahead.

  “They’re going to take it all,” he had said. “They’re going to bring in the developers, and this neighborhood is going to be gone.”

  Willie foresaw that some combination of post-disaster zoning, forced property condemnations, infrastructural inattention, and carpetbagging real estate vultures would turn Katrina into one giant gentrification project. “They’re hoping that you take the money and move,” he had told people on the street.

  Now Willie is leading me on a tour of the ruined city. Willie is usually a chatty guy, but now, here in the Ninth Ward, neither of us is talking. New Orleans is not a conversation. It’s an image. You have to see it in person to comprehend it. It’s a Grand Canyon of continuing misery and failure.

  “Jesus,” I say, staring at the wreckage. “What the hell have they been doing all this time?”

  Willie laughs morbidly. “Nothing, dude,” he says. “Absolutely nothing.”

  The wreckage on the ground is, pointedly, the only thing about New Orleans that hasn’t changed since the storm. Without actually fixing much, everyone seems to have done a lot of moving on. On a national level, the city’s official return to normalcy has been preposterously celebrated with the triumphant return of the NBA’s Hornets. Even Mike Brown, the disgraced ex-FEMA chief, is enjoying an improbable Leslie Nielsen–esque career recycling, recently making a revoltingly self-flagellating appearance on The Colbert Report. Only in America can you destroy a major city and within six months be using your own incompetence to launch a second career in self-parody.

  Here in New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin has been playing Hamlet, only without the intellect and eloquence. His first plan was to recommend turning some of these ruined black neighborhoods into parks, but then he quickly changed his min
d when residents responded with impassioned calls for his oblong head. In the current vacuum of leadership, no one really knows what the plan is. Sitting in the Ninth Ward, I find it hard to believe that there’s any plan.

  “All this is a test,” says Willie, waving his hand in front of the wreckage of the Ninth Ward. “We’re being tested. If we keep this up, in a few years there won’t be any America left at all.”

  One part of that test comes in the next few weeks, when the federal disaster agency FEMA is expected to settle on its new flood-zone guidelines for fallen New Orleans. Behind this seemingly innocuous decision lurks a hornets’ nest of vicious racial politics that could be the final undoing of Mayor Nagin’s “chocolate city.” It’s a drama that’s already played out—to catastrophic results—in other parts of the Gulf Coast.

  While its wreckage lacks the Dresden-esque feel of the Ninth Ward, the ruined Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, Mississippi, is creepy in its own way. The sand-blown streets of what was once a bustling tourist trap recall Planet of the Apes, or one of Hitler’s watercolors—people all gone, somewhere. A wind-battered sign for a beachfront Waffle House blown out to sea hints that this was the capital of some mighty cracker empire gone suddenly and tragically extinct.

  I came down here to investigate reports of immigrant recovery workers who’d been laid off, left unpaid, and mistreated by various scoundrelous villains of the industrial elite—Halliburton and such ilk. In light of other news reports to surface about the Katrina recovery effort—including recent revelations by the General Accounting Office that millions upon millions of dollars handed out in no-bid federal contracts had vanished down a budgetary rabbit hole of dubious reconstruction projects and inflated “aid” efforts—I thought it would be prudent to see what this corruption looked like on the business end of it.