Not our gang.

The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine by Matthew Continetti (Doubleday, 273 pp., $24.95)

'I THINK 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," Jack Abramoff counseled his protege and partner in crime Michael Scanlon three years ago. "This kind of money" included $80 million in fees from Indian tribes with lucrative casinos, who parted with it so quickly they failed to notice that Abramoff and Scanlon were a poor bet. As Matthew Continetti points out in his new book, "A lack of success is one of the Abramoff saga's recurring themes--a lot of people paid him a lot of money, but no one, in the end, can tell you exactly what the clients got in return."

As we now know, within a year of that contemptuous comment about their loser clients, Abramoff and Scanlon themselves were the big losers. The FBI launched an investigation in 2003 and both now face jail sentences, having pled guilty to criminal charges arising from their greedy schemes. Continetti provides fascinating details and fresh insights into the construction and crumbling of the corrupt house that Jack built. The Abramoff saga, as colorful as its amoral central character, includes a woman scorned and a dash of Miami Vice along with bribery, fraud, forgery, tax evasion, and a level of greed rarely witnessed by Washington.

While Continetti compellingly recounts the Jack Abramoff story, his book is less successful in its attempt to portray the greedy behavior and outrageous tactics of the disgraced lobbyist as representative of his profession, the conservative movement, and the Republican party--indeed, as the inevitable result of the GOP's congressional majority. With a dismay befitting the idealistic and disillusioned young conservative--he is a Weekly Standard writer and a former NATIONAL REVIEW intern--Continetti reports that as chairman of the College Republicans in 1984 Abramoff was once seen as "the spokesman for a new generation of conservative activists, young men and women coming of age just as their party was coming into power." Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed were among those coming of age, along with Abramoff, in the College Republicans--where their staunch anti-Communist and small-government politics shared a "paramilitary flavor." Continetti sees in the trio a shared moral failing representative of "a generation, it would turn out, that was corrupted by power before they knew what power was."

Abramoff, Norquist, and Reed realized, according to Continetti, that a credentialed conservative and party loyalist could cash in when his ideology neatly coincided with moneyed interests. Following the Republican takeover in 1995, GOP operatives learned what their Democratic counterparts had no doubt previously figured out: They could bill clients for pushing initiatives the congressional majority was already inclined to support.

In the millions paid to Jack Abramoff during the late 1990s by the Northern Mariana Islands--the U.S. territory in the Pacific that wanted to remain exempt from federal labor regulations--Continetti sees all the ingredients of his signature lobbying schemes: lavish junkets for lawmakers and their aides, outrageous fees for mundane letters and meetings, and the dressing-up of clients' interests in ideological clothing. The cause of statehood for Puerto Rico, officially endorsed by the Republican party, also proved lucrative for Abramoff as well as for Ralph Reed's consulting firm.

But even the island governments' deep pockets didn't compare to the rich new possible clients on K Street's block. "There are a ton of potential opportunities out there," Abramoff alerted Scanlon, who had left majority leader Tom DeLay's office to go to work with him. "There are 27 tribes which make over $100 million a year (according to a NY Times piece on Nov 24--can you have your guys do the research and find out which tribes these may be?) We need to get moving on them." Scanlon's "guys" were the former lifeguard and former yoga instructor who made up his phony think tank headquartered in a Delaware beach house.

Because Abramoff had no intention of sharing his largesse with his firm--or of reporting his fees, as required by law--his clients were told to pay huge sums to Scanlon (the "best in the business," he would ludicrously assure the naive tribes), who kicked back millions to the faux charities Abramoff created and wholly controlled. Some of this gambling lucre made its way to Abramoff's old buddies, Norquist and Reed, although Reed maintains he didn't know the source of the money sent indirectly to his firm to rally social conservatives against gambling competitors.

If Reed was kept in the dark, he had plenty of company. In exploiting the multiple tribes that eventually hired him, Abramoff deceived his clients, the members of his firm, his congressional allies, and even his cohorts in crime. As just one example of the secretive nature of Abramoff's schemes, Continetti cites the fact that Tony Rudy, another former DeLay aide who went to work with Abramoff and has since pled guilty to a corruption-conspiracy charge, was unaware that his crooked boss was using a charitable foundation as a shell for his huge fees. "Everyone was lacking a full picture," Continetti concludes.

The full story about one of Abramoff's business ventures still isn't known. Not content with his lobbying riches, Abramoff decided to get into the casino business himself and, along with a shady partner, purchased the eleven-ship fleet of the Fort Lauderdale-based SunCruz Casino line. The seller winds up murdered, and Abramoff pleads guilty to fraud, in this fascinating, well-told episode in the Abramoff epic.

In the end, Continetti's detailed reporting provides the goods on a handful of Washington fixers and raises questions about the complicity of a couple of members of Congress. Although he asserts that legislative power has been turned over to paid interests, his acknowledgment that little was actually accomplished by Abramoff in behalf of his credulous clients, despite his lavish wining and dining of lawmakers and their aides and his wheeling and dealing in big political contributions, contradicts the book's wholesale indictment of a generation of conservative activists, Washington lobbyists, and the Republican majority because Jack Abramoff walked among them. Matt Continetti tells a good tale about scams, scoundrels, and schemers, but it's not the tale of a town.

Kate O'Beirne, NR's Washington editor, is the author of Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports.