Power brokers: Jack Abramoff brought together corrupt politicians, the criminal underworld, and the global power elite.

Jack Abramoff liked to slip into dialogue from 'The Godfather' as he led his lobbying colleagues in planning their next conquest on Capitol Hill," observed a December 29 Washington Post profile of the confessed felon. "The playacting provided a clue to how Abramoff saw himself--the power behind the scenes who directed millions of dollars in Indian gambling proceeds to favored lawmakers, the puppet master who pulled the strings of officials in key places, the businessman who was building an international casino empire."

Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Congressman Tom DeLay, are accused of swindling a half-dozen casino-owning Indian tribes out of $80 million over a four-year period. On January 3, Abramoff pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy, tax evasion, and mail fraud charges as part of an agreement to provide testimony in an influence-peddling investigation implicating up to 20 members of Congress. For this crime, the ex-lobbyist will pay $25 million in restitution and $1.7 million to the Internal Revenue Service, and faces a prison term of 9 to 11 years.

Abramoff arrived in Washington roughly 20 years ago in the company of former college buddy Ralph Reed, who would become the head of the Christian Coalition. Like his Republican activist comrade, Abramoff professed an undying commitment to limited government and free-market capitalism. With the Republican conquest of Congress in 1994, Abramoff mutated into a canny practitioner of crony capitalism, in which large economic interests prosper as a result of their political connections, rather than through legitimate market competition. Government-chartered Indian casinos are a splendid example of crony capitalism.

In 1995, Abramoff met House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Out of that meeting grew a working relationship with DeLay aide Michael Scanlon, who went on to a lucrative career as a lobbyist and PR consultant for American Indian casino interests.

In 2001, Abramoff, Scanlon, and Reed were all involved in an effort to defeat a proposed Texas state law that would have permitted an Indian tribe in Alabama to open a casino near Houston. This would have undermined the economic interests of a casino-owning tribe in Louisana that had a $32 million lobbying and PR contract with Abramoff and Scanlon. That pair, with the help of Reed, who mobilized Christian conservatives, mounted a successful campaign to pass a law shutting down all Indian gambling in Texas. (Reed has admitted to taking $4 million in casino money from Abramoff to run "anti-casino" political operations.) When Texas banned Indian casinos a secondary result was the closing of a casino operated by El Paso's impoverished Tigua tribe.

Unlike the tribes Abramoff had taken as clients, the Tiguas were partisan Democrats. "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions," mused Abramoff in an e-mail to Reed, one of many compiled by investigators for the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. "I'd love to get our mitts on that moolah! Oh well, stupid people get wiped out."

Such a Deal!

Though Abramoff labeled the Tiguas "stupid," he was willing to help them--for a price. Shortly before the Tigua casino was shuttered in February 2002, Abramoff arranged a meeting with the Tiguas to offer them his services. "Fire up the jet baby, we're going to El Paso!" he wrote in an e-mail to Scanlon, who replied: "I want all their MONEY!!!"

In his meeting with the tribe, Abramoff "reportedly boasted of his political connections and said he could discreetly slip language into a federal bill to reopen the casino," summarized an account in Mother Jones. "He offered to do the initial work for free, but said the tribe needed to hire Scanlon to run a $4.2 million 'political operation'" involving sophisticated direct-mail and phone-tree databases. He also asked for $300,000 in "wheel-greasing political donations" and $50,000 to take key House ally Robert Ney (R-Ohio) on a golfing trip to Scotland.

When the promised legislation failed to appear in 2002, Abramoff devised a novel arrangement with the Tiguas to pay his retainer, reports Mother Jones: "The Tiguas could buy life insurance for their older residents, with benefits paying Abramoff's future fees.... The payments would be funneled through Eshkol Academy, a Jewish school Abramoff had founded, which would keep some of the money." Although the Tiguas initially agreed to the arrangement, they eventually balked--at about the same time that other Indian tribal clients began to reevaluate their relationship with Abramoff.

Bernie Sprague, subchief of Michigan's Saginaw Chippewa tribe, was astonished to learn that the tribe--which paid Abramoff more than $2 million from 2001 to 2003--had donated $25,000 to a group called the Capital Athletic Foundation. Although the foundation was described as a charity for needy youth, it was a front for the Eshkol Academy. Eshkol, in turn, sent at least some of the money it raised to Israel, where it was used to fund a sniper academy for radical Israeli settlers on the West Bank.

"More than $140,000 of foundation funds were actually sent to the West Bank," where the money was used to buy "camouflage suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager and other material described in foundation records as 'security' equipment," reported the May 2, 2005 Newsweek. The "thermal imager" mentioned in those records may tie those purchases to Abramoff's connections in the shadowy world of Soviet/Russian military intelligence (see page 17).

Nothing Personal--Just Business

In 2000, Abramoff sought to expand his casino empire by acquiring, in partnership with Scanlon and failed entrepreneur Adam Kidan, the SunCruz fleet, a collection of luxury yachts that ply international waters, raking in millions of dollars from poker, blackjack, and slot machines.

In 1998, Konstantinos Boulis, the Greek-Canadian owner of the casino ship line, was indicted for violating the U.S. Shipping Code, which prohibits foreign nationals from owning American commercial vessels. In 2000, a deal was worked out in which Boulis would sell SunCruz, pay a fine, and avoid jail time. Art Dimopolous, Boulis' attorney, was a partner at the Washington law firm Preston Gates, whose star lobbyist was none other than Jack Abramoff. Asked by Dimopolous if he could think of a potential buyer for SunCruz, Abramoff volunteered himself.

While he was forbidden by the law firm's ethics rules to enter into a deal with Boulis, Abramoff arranged for two of his outside business partners, Adam Kidan and Ben Waldman, to buy SunCruz. Kidan and Abramoff were to be equal partners, with Waldman playing a much smaller role. Boulis' price was $145 million.

Boulis was initially a reluctant seller and drove a hard bargain, demanding a substantial role as a partner after SunCruz changed ownership. The Abramoff team devised a unique way to pressure Boulis into selling: acting through Michael Scanlon, they had Ohio Congressman Ney--who had received tens of thousands of dollars from Abramoff--make a speech on the House floor accusing Boulis of being a "dishonest casino operator" who "cheated" his customers. Since Boulis was already under pressure by the reds to sell SunCruz, the orchestrated floor speech amounted to a novel form of blackmail. "The Ney speech was meant to demonstrate to Boulis both the seriousness with which Abramoff treated the purchase of SunCruz casinos, and the power of Abramoff's connections," concludes the November 28 Weekly Standard. "It seems to have worked on both counts."

In September 2000, Abramoff and his partners closed on the loan in exchange for what the Standard described as "two flimsy IOUs" and a clumsy forgery, a document calling itself a "Funds Transfer Notification." The forged document purported to show a $23 million wire transfer from an account at Chevy Chase Savings Bank in Maryland to Boulis' account in Miami's Ocean Bank. In fact, that document had been confected by Abramoff and Kidan, and no money actually changed hands. Nonetheless, the lenders released a $60 million line of credit for Abramoff and his cohorts to buy SunCruz.

A few weeks after the sale, Abramoff, acting as ventriloquist, arranged a second House floor speech by Rep. Ney, praising its new owner Adam Kidan as a man with "a renowned reputation for honesty and integrity." By that time, Abramoff and Kidan had received the first installments of their respective $500,000-a-year salaries from the casino operation, and Abramoff's old partner Michael Scanlon had been hired as a "public affairs specialist." However, Boulis--who retained a partnership in the company--was becoming angry and frustrated over the missing $23 million payment.

From Blackmail to Murder

As relations between Boulis and the Abramoff clique deteriorated, Kidan urged "a concerted press effort" to target the former SunCruz owner. In newspaper interviews, Kidan denounced Boulis as a "sleazy" and "violent" figure. Kidan also intimated that Boulis had threatened to do him bodily harm.

Kidan then hired Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello, a former associate of Gambino crime family don John Gotti. Kidan put Moscatiello, an old family friend from Brooklyn, on the SunCruz payroll, paying him $200,000 in December 2000. Kidan also sent $40,000 to Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari, a Miami-based "security consultant" who boasted of being Gotti's "cousin." Two months later, on February 6, 2001, Boulis was murdered in a mob-style hit near a Burger King in North Miami Beach.

Last September 26, police in Queens arrested Moscatiello; a few hours later, Ferrari was arrested in North Miami Beach. The following day, a third suspect, James Fiorillo, was arrested in Palm Coast, Florida. All three have been indicted by a Broward County grand jury for the murder of Boulis. Adam Kidan, who ran SunCruz as Abramoff's cat's-paw, had motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate the murder. Abramoff's role in this affair has yet to be disclosed, and his plea agreement will not protect him should he be implicated in Boulis' murder.

RELATED ARTICLE: What can we do?

Dick Morris, the former Clinton campaign strategist who has become a key GOP adviser, warned in a January 11 column for The Hill that "the nation is moving left and is likely to stay that way through at least the 2006 election." One indication of that leftward tilt, Morris says, is "a 13-point Democratic edge" in what he calls the "generic party ballot for Congress," as defined by public opinion polls.

At least some of the electoral momentum enjoyed by the Democrats results from public disgust over the Abramoff/DeLay scandal. But another important factor is the relentless leftward migration of the Bush-era Republican Party. Given a choice between two corrupt, big-spending parties promoting centralized government at home and endless military intervention abroad, why shouldn't the electorate decide that 2006 would be a good time to give the other guys a turn?

This development would serve the interests of the power elite quite well, as Carroll Quigley, the chief historian of that shadowy oligarchy, pointed out in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope: "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea.... Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.... Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of those things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."

The present system of partisan politics offers nothing more than two branches of the same Establishment party engaged in a tag-team assault on the liberty and prosperity of the public. As Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) points out: "Indicting one crop of politicians and bringing in another is only a temporary solution. The only effective way to address corruption is to change the system itself, by radically downsizing the power of the federal government in the first place. Take away the politicians' power and you take away the very currency of corruption."

--WILLIAM NORMAN GRIGG