Abramoff for dummies: a handy primer for those who don't know Jack.

Heist By Peter Stone $23, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Although Jack Abramoff, three of his lobbying associates, and one member of Congress are all going to prison, the story of the scandal is far from finished. In October, Karl Rove's assistant Susan Ralston resigned after a congressional report revealed that she'd apparently accepted thousands of dollars of unreported gifts from Abramoff (her former boss) while working in the White House. Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman also came under additional scrutiny after emails released with the report indicated that he had performed several favors for Abramoff's lobbying team--including helping to push through a $16-million grant over Justice Department objections, and engineering the firing of a State Department official who espoused policies unfavorable to Abramoff's client. The investigation is likely to continue into 2007 and beyond--and will almost certainly produce more indictments and guilty pleas as the scores of investigators and prosecutors continue their meticulous work. For those bewildered by the details of intricate deals and obscure organizations that have multiplied as the investigation unfolds, National Journal's Peter Stone has provided a comprehensive history of the Abramoff affair so far. Heist, his 200-page primer, draws together the mountain of documentary evidence already released, along with the dogged reporting of a handful of investigative journalists (Stone among them), to produce the clearest picture yet of how Abramoff's operation really worked.

The basic facts of Abramoff's tenure in Washington are simple enough. After an early political career that included a financially troubled stint atop the College Republicans and a foray into film production, Abramoff found his calling as a lobbyist in the heady aftermath of the GOP takeover of the House in 1994. His practice thrived at the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis, thanks to his ties with powerful House Republicans like former speaker Newt Gingrich and former majority whip--later majority leader--Tom DeLay. There he stayed, until his freewheeling ways and unorthodox clients unnerved the firm's senior partners. At the beginning of 2001, Abramoff moved his entire operation--clients, associates, and all--to another law firm, Greenberg Traurig, where he was allowed to operate under less scrutiny. Three years later, The Washington Post revealed in a front page expose that Abramoff had bilked his Indian casino clients of millions of dollars a year, and his fall, along with a federal investigation, ensued. Finally, on Jan. 3, 2006, he pied guilty to a raft of charges, bribery-related conspiracy chief among them. In exchange for his help, prosecutors offered to recommend a reduced sentence (between nine and a half and 11 years, instead of as many as 20 years). It's apparent that he's been avidly cooperating with investigators ever since, along with three former associates (and now fellow felons): Michael Scanlon, DeLay's former spokesman, who pied guilty last November to fraud and bribery; Tony Rudy, DeLay's former chief of staff, who pled guilty in March to conspiracy; along with Neil Volz, former chief of staff to Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who pled guilty in May to conspiracy (Rep. Ney himself recently pleaded guilty to corruption charges). In June, the government secured its first conviction in the investigation--former General Services Administration chief of staff David Safavian, on charges that he had lied to ethics and Senate investigators about his dealings with Abramoff. And on Sept. 15, Ney admitted to accepting bribes from Abramoff and his associates.

Although it's a fun game to play, Stone does not spend much time speculating whom prosecutors will nab next (Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.)? Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.)? Former Deputy Secretary of the Interior J. Steven Griles?). Instead, he dissects, in admirably thorough fashion, the factors that allowed Abramoff to elevate his lobbying practice to such audacious heights.

Probably the most important thing to understand about Abramoff is his choice of clients. Abramoff, as a former colleague told Stone, wanted to make "a million a day"; another recounts that Abramoff "once talked of his desire to make $1 billion." So, unlike most top lobbyists, he didn't pursue blue-chip corporations or build a broad practice. Rather, as a former colleague from Preston Gates tells Stone, he "wanted clients where there was a lot at stake, so they could support a large financial effort." Abramoff preyed on wealthy, desperate entities, like Indian tribes nervous about losing a casino, or the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory whose government was anxious to protect its exploitative labor industry from federal regulation. Abramoff himself once explained his strategy succinctly to Scanlon in an email: "I think the key thing to remember with all these clients is that they are annoying, but the annoying losers are the only ones that have this kind of money and part with it so quickly."

These small, naive, deep-pocketed clients provided the operating budget for Abramoff's extravagant lobbying apparatus. Most important, of course, were the millions that Abramoff's clients poured into lawmakers' political committees and other conservative organizations with the hope of securing favorable legislation in return. But Abramoff understood that fundraising only gets you so far. So his clients also bankrolled what might be called his extracurricular operations: the skyboxes, the restaurants, the golf junkets. He spent about $1 million a year on his skyboxes at Camden Yards, the MCI Center, and FedEx Field, where members of Congress held about six-dozen fundraisers from 1999 to 2003. Abramoff also dropped over $3 million to start a swanky D.C. restaurant called Signatures, which became a gathering place for conservative lawmakers. During the restaurant's first two years, it gave away at least $180,000 in free meals and drinks.

Another crucial cog in Abramoff's machine was "Team Abramoff," his cabal of ambitious, mostly young associates. Many of Abramoff's most profitable relationships with lawmakers were cemented by former staffers whom he had lured from the Hill to work for him, such as Volz, Ney's former chief of staff. As one ex-leadership aide told Stone, Abramoff "looked for staffers to up-and-coming members ... who were aggressive and highly social, who were impressed by important people." Abramoff acted as a kind of queen bee, dispatching his proteges to call in favors from their former bosses. It's no coincidence that the lawmakers reported to be the most likely targets of prosecutors--Ney, Doolittle, DeLay, and Burns--all had staffers (and in the case of DeLay and Burns, more than one) who went to work for Abramoff.

The final, and perhaps most under-appreciated, aspect of Abramoff's strategy was his "knack for framing his lobbying efforts in language that echoed the conservative principles embraced by his allies," as Stone describes it. Throughout his career, Abramoff banked on his conservative bona tides as well as his clients' money, couching their causes in the rhetoric of the Republican Revolution. Conservatism proved a surprisingly plastic ideological cover for Abramoff's friends in Congress. If, at Abramoff's prodding, members of Congress sought a tax break for a casino-owning tribe, it wasn't because of the skyboxes, the free meals, or the hundreds of thousands in contributions, but because the effort aligned with conservatism's anti-tax principles. If they worked to prevent an Indian tribe from opening a casino that might compete with Abramoff's client's casino, it was because of conservative opposition to gambling; if they worked to help a tribe open a casino, it was because conservatives wanted tribes to be fiscally independent and off the government dole; if they fought off legislative attempts to improve the lot of exploited immigrant laborers in a U.S. territory, it simply accorded with the conservatives' traditional distaste for federal regulation. In fact, one conservative think-tank official complained to Stone that the weekly meetings for high-powered Republican strategists and lobbyists convened by GOP luminary Grover Norquist had turned into a "freak show," in which Indian casinos and the Northern Mariana Islands were suddenly treated as central to the conservative movement.

And in one way, this assertion wasn't as absurd as it first appears. As Stone details, Abramoff was an instrumental part of the apparatus that helped nurture and expand the Republican majority. After Republicans took control of the House in early 1995, Abramoff immediately made himself an integral part of the GOP fundraising effort. That February, Stone reports, Norquist wrote to DeLay, who'd just become majority whip. It "would probably be worthwhile for Jack Abramoff to stop by and brief you on the 'K' Street Project," Norquist wrote, adding that Abramoff "is moving his clients to help our side, both through PACs and through giving to our coalition groups." This might be considered the founding document of the K Street Project, Republicans' long-time strategy to purge key lobbying firms of Democrats and turn K Street into a GOP money machine. For Abramoff's entire lobbying career, his clients poured money into lawmakers' committee accounts, as well as into conservative groups like Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. In return, their needs were tended to. So it was that Ralph Reed, speaking to Stone in 2004--before Reed's ill-fated run for lieutenant governor of Georgia, but after he'd been paid some $6 million by Abramoff for consulting work--could say with a straight face that Abramoff had been no mere lobbyist, but "a strategist and builder of the Republican majority."

It's clear from Heist that Abramoff's enterprise, which for the most part worked fantastically, might still be buzzing along to this day if he had not so flagrantly defrauded his Indian clients. Abramoff, Stone argues, was neither a unique phenomenon (as K Street and the Republican leadership would have us believe), nor the predictable spawn of a corrupt culture (as government watchdogs would have it). Rather, he was a remarkably greedy lobbyist who thrived because over the last 10 years, Washington has increasingly come to run on money. He was a man of the times, but more so--more ambitious, more wily, a harder worker, and well, more corrupt.

Paul Kid is a reporter/blogger for TPMmuckraker.com.