This is the best of the 3 articles here on Jack Abramoff , and worth checking out at Barry Yeoman's website. He is the real deal -- an authentic American Hero who does his homework and tells it like it is.

http://www.barryyeoman.com/articles/abramoff.html

by Barry Yeoman

First Published in Mother Jones Oct/Nov 2005

ON THE FIRST MORNING of the Republican National Convention, the stocky former weightlifter waited nervously for his turn to speak. Just 25 years old, he was impeccably dressed in a dark gray suit and red tie. But he had slipped some contraband past security: a handful of note cards, hastily compiled the night before and now stashed in his sleeve. He mounted the podium, looked over the crowd, and noticed how few delegates were paying attention. "Fellow Republicans," he began predictably, "I come before you representing American students." Then, suddenly, he veered wildly from the approved text. He looked up and noted the teleprompter operator's panicked expression, with glee.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi

By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi
The Washington Post
Published December 30, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Jack Abramoff liked to slip into dialogue from "The Godfather" as he led his lobbying colleagues in planning their next conquest on Capitol Hill. In a favorite bit, he would mimic Michael Corleone facing down a crooked politician's demand for a cut of Mafia gambling profits: "Senator, you can have my answer now if you like. My offer is this: nothing."

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, the businessman building a casino empire.

Abramoff is the central figure in what could become the biggest congressional corruption scandal in generations. Justice Department prosecutors are pressing him and his lawyers to settle fraud and bribery allegations by the end of this week, sources knowledgeable about the case said. Unless he reaches a plea deal, he faces trial Jan. 9 in Florida in a fraud case.

This reconstruction of the lobbyist's rise and fall is drawn from interviews with government officials and former associates in the lobbying shops of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP; thousands of government records; and hundreds of e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, as well as those released by Senate investigators.

Abramoff, 47, had mammoth ambitions. He sought to build the biggest lobbying portfolio in town. He opened two restaurants close to the Capitol. He bought a fleet of casino boats. He produced two Hollywood movies. He leased four arena and stadium skyboxes. He was a generous patron in his Orthodox Jewish community and started a boys' religious school in Maryland.

For a time, all things seemed possible. Abramoff's brash style often clashed with culturally conservative Washington, but people were drawn to his moxie and his money. He collected tens of millions of dollars from casino-rich Indian tribes. Lawmakers and their aides packed his restaurants and skyboxes and jetted off with him on golf trips. He offered jobs and other favors to congressional staffers and executive branch officials.

Abramoff was a man of contradictions. He presented himself as deeply religious, yet his e-mails show that he blatantly deceived Indian tribes and did business with people linked to the underworld.

A senior Preston Gates partner warned him to slow down or he would be "dead, disgraced or in jail."

Abramoff declined to comment for this article.

"I have advised my client not to speak, except in court," said Neal Sonnett, one of his attorneys.

A friend of two decades, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), defended Abramoff: "I think he has been dealt a bad hand and the worst, rawest deal I have ever seen in my life. Words like bribery are being used to describe things that happened every day in Washington and are not bribes."

Few people interviewed would agree to be quoted on the record because of the ongoing investigation by a Justice Department task force. Some who spoke on the condition of anonymity said they look back in amazement at the heady days of Abramoff's rise.

"We weren't outside the box," the former Preston Gates colleague said. "We were outside the universe."

A quarter-century ago, Abramoff and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist were Young Turks of the Reagan revolution. They organized Massachusetts college campuses in the 1980 election while Abramoff was an undergraduate at Brandeis and Norquist was at Harvard Business School, helping Reagan pull an upset in the state.

They moved to Washington, taking over the College Republicans, a sleepy Establishment organization, and transforming it into a right-wing activist group. They were joined by Ralph Reed, who later would become executive director of the Christian Coalition.

Soon they made headlines with such tactics as demolishing a mock Berlin Wall in Lafayette Park, where they also burned a Soviet leader in effigy.

"We want to shock them," Abramoff said at the time.

`Flop' forecasts troubles

Even in those early days, there were hints of the troubles to come.

Abramoff and his crew busted the College Republicans' budget with a 1982 direct-mail campaign that was "a colossal flop," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. He said he banished the three from GOP headquarters, telling Abramoff: "You can't be trusted."

Shortly thereafter, Abramoff was running Citizens for America, a conservative group founded by drug-store magnate Lewis Lehrman. Abramoff was in frequent contact with Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, the Reagan White House's Iran-contra mastermind, about efforts to lobby Congress for the Nicaraguan contras, according to records in the National Security Archive.

One of Abramoff's more audacious adventures involved Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader who had U.S. support but was later found to have ordered the murders of his movement's representative to the U.S. and that man's relatives. With Savimbi, Abramoff organized a "convention" of anti-communist guerrillas from Laos, Nicaragua and Afghanistan in a remote part of Angola. Afterward, Lehrman fired Abramoff amid a dispute over the group's $3 million budget.

Abramoff also worked on behalf of the apartheid South African government, which secretly paid $1.5 million a year to the International Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group that Abramoff operated in the 1980s, according to sworn testimony to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At the same time, Abramoff dabbled as a Hollywood producer, shepherding an anti-communist movie, "Red Scorpion," starring Dolph Lundgren, filmed in Namibia, which was then ruled by South Africa. When the film was released in 1989, anti-apartheid groups demonstrated at the theaters. The movie ran into financial difficulty during and after production, but Abramoff produced a sequel, "Red Scorpion 2."

When Republicans wrested control of the House from the Democrats in 1994, Abramoff turned his focus back to Washington. With Norquist's help, he reinvented himself as a Republican lobbyist on heavily Democratic K Street. Norquist was one of the intellectual architects of the Republican revolution and a muse for its leader, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), soon to be speaker of the House.

Abramoff also counted on his father's connections from his days as president of the Diners Club credit card company.

Soon the younger Abramoff developed an alliance with Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who was working his way up in the House leadership. The two met at a DeLay fundraiser in 1995, according to a former senior DeLay aide. The aide recalled that Edwin Buckham, then DeLay's chief of staff, told his boss: "We really need to work with Abramoff. He is going to be an important lobbyist and fundraiser."

Almost from the start, Abramoff struck rival lobbyists as someone operating on the margins. He represented Pakistan's military when Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto went to Washington in 1995 to seek the return of $600 million the Islamabad government had paid for 28 F-16 fighters. The sale had been blocked by the U.S. over concerns about Pakistan's nuclear program. Abramoff's role surprised Bhutto and her lobbyists, who were unaware he had been hired by Pakistan's military.

In August 1999, Abramoff signed up for the National Republican Senatorial Committee's Tartan Invitational, in which a half-dozen Republican senators and their aides spent a few days with about 50 lobbyists golfing at the exclusive St. Andrews Links in Scotland.

The next year, Abramoff figured out how to use his clients to fund his trips to St. Andrews with lawmakers. The first guests: DeLay and his aides.

With Norquist's help, Abramoff joined the Interior Department's transition team after George W. Bush's election as president in 2000.

He befriended Steven Griles, the deputy interior secretary, according to e-mails and interviews. By the summer of 2001, Abramoff referred to him in an e-mail as "our guy Steve Griles." Federal investigators are looking into Griles' official actions. Griles has denied wrongdoing.

Abramoff paid columnists thousands of dollars to write favorably about his clients. One Copley News Service writer disclosed this month that he had been paid for as many as two dozen columns.

Team Abramoff included former staffers of DeLay, as well as of Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), head of the Senate Appropriations panel's interior subcommittee; Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration Committee; Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), who has served on the key House committee that oversees tribes; and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), now minority leader.

Ethics? What ethics?

At Abramoff's strategy meetings, ethical niceties were derided with locker-room humor, recalled a former Preston Gates colleague.

"Jack would say, `I gave that guy 10 grand, and he voted against me!"' the former associate recalled.

Bill padding was openly discussed, according to Abramoff's Greenberg Traurig e-mails In April 2000, Abramoff had lobbyist Shawn Vasell working on a monthly invoice to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, telling him to "be sure we hit the $150k minimum."

Vasell e-mailed back: "You only had 2 hours. We are not even close to this number."

Abramoff's solution: "Add 60 hours for me," and "pump up" the hours for other lobbyists.

The Choctaws were one of a half-dozen Indian tribes who gave more than $80 million to Abramoff between 2000 and 2003.

Not only were the tribes paying Abramoff's lobbying firm, they were also paying Abramoff's secret outside partner, Michael Scanlon, who charged the Indians millions of dollars for public relations work and split the money with Abramoff. Scanlon's fees did not have to be disclosed under lobbying rules. The two dubbed their scheme "Gimme Five," according to e-mails in which Abramoff disparaged clients as "morons" and "troglodytes."

E-mails show that Abramoff put his money into an array of political and personal projects.

The non-profit Capital Athletic Foundation was ostensibly created to help children from low-income urban families through sports. There is no evidence money went to city kids, but the foundation did fund some of Abramoff's pet projects: a sniper school for Israelis in the West Bank, a golf trip for Ohio Congressman Ney and others, and a Jewish religious academy in Columbia that Abramoff founded and where he sent his children.

By early 2003, Abramoff's religious academy was draining his income, and his restaurants were hemorrhaging money. But to Abramoff's rivals in tribal lobbying, he was still a confounding success.

Team Abramoff was taking away tribal clients from other lobbyists and charging 10 or 20 times what the Indians had been paying to others. Team members did it by touting their ties to powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill and stoking tribal worries that Congress might try to tax casino proceeds.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) remembers hearing "vague complaints" about Abramoff in June 2003 from three Democratic lobbyists.

The tribes traditionally had supported Democrats, but Abramoff was getting them to give two-thirds of their contributions to Republicans.

There was even more buzz on Capitol Hill about Scanlon, a former DeLay press aide who had become a multimillionaire almost overnight. Scanlon, then in his early 30s, was traveling to the beach by helicopter and living in a mansion in Rehoboth Beach, Del., that he bought for nearly $5 million in cash.

A lobbyist who was one of Abramoff's rivals contacted the Post in fall 2003, and in early 2004, the newspaper reported that four of Greenberg Traurig's Indian clients had paid $45 million, most of it in fees to Scanlon's firm. Within weeks, Greenberg Traurig initiated an internal investigation, Abramoff was ousted, and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee began an inquiry.

By the spring of 2004, the Justice Department had launched an investigation that developed into a multiagency task force.

Nearly two years later, Abramoff's legal troubles appear to threaten many careers in Washington. Sources say a half-dozen lawmakers are under scrutiny, along with Capitol Hill aides, former business associates and government officials.

Two of Abramoff's former business partners, Scanlon and Adam Kidan, have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify. Another former Abramoff associate, David Safavian, has been indicted on five felony counts of lying to investigators about dealings with Abramoff while he was the General Services Administration's chief of staff.

Abramoff is under pressure to reach a deal before his trial begins Jan. 9 on accusations of fraud involving the purchase of a fleet of Florida casino boats.

Dozens of lawmakers--who were showered with dinners, trips and sports and concert tickets--are returning campaign contributions from Abramoff and his clients.

Burns, the Montana Republican, who is under scrutiny by the task force, returned $150,000 in campaign funds this month.

"This Abramoff guy is a bad guy," Burns told a Montana television station. "I hope he goes to jail, and we never see him again. I wish he had never been born, to be right honest with you."