CHAPTER 11
THE ADDICT AND THE ENABLER
On the eve of the House of Representatives vote on the impeachment of President Clinton, upon Newt Gingrich’s sudden resignation as Speaker, after the debacle of the 1998 midterm elections, Republicans chose Bob Livingston, a congressman from Louisiana, as acting Speaker. Although Livingston was a conservative, he was a competent deal maker who privately opposed Clinton’s impeachment. One month after Gingrich’s departure, on December 20, 1998, Livingston resigned when porn publisher Larry Flynt threatened to release audio-tapes of an adulterous relationship. Speaking on the House floor, Livingston said, “We are all pawns on the chessboard and we’re playing our parts in a drama that is neither fiction nor unimportant.” DeLay quietly cheered Livingston’s political death. That same day, the House Republicans, whipped into line by DeLay, voted for impeachment. DeLay now was the ultimate power in the House.
The job of Speaker fell to Representative Dennis Hastert, a dull and dutiful politician and former high school wrestling coach from Illinois. Hastert was in reality little more than an extension of DeLay, who gave him his daily marching orders. With Hastert as his vassal, DeLay turned Congress into his fiefdom. He locked Democrats out of committee hearings and blocked them from amending bills involving more than three-quarters of legislative votes. On the wall of his office next to his Ten Commandments plaque, he hung a bullwhip, and he delighted in being referred to as “The Hammer.” DeLay disciplined his troops in a way Gingrich never did, transforming the Republican Congress into a lockstep machine whose function was to perpetuate his dream of creating a one-party state. The Congress became a play-thing of DeLay’s coercive personality.
“But while Gingrich was autocratic (answering to no one else),” former Nixon counsel John Dean wrote in his book Conservatives Without Conscience, “he was not dictatorial (imposing his will on others). Dictatorship in the House would not occur until DeLay held full sway.”
Like many authoritarian leaders, Tom DeLay was raised in a climate of abuse and addiction. DeLay’s father, Charlie Ray, was an oil wildcat who toiled in the petroleum fields of Texas and Venezuela. A Baptist who became the first in his family to break a long tradition of sobriety, Charlie Ray liked to knock back an entire fifth of Chivas Regal scotch after a hard day of work. The abuse he inflicted on young DeLay and his two brothers when he was drunk left them with physical and psychic scars.
“I pretty much raised myself. My parents didn’t participate in much of what I did . . . I think I’ve been an adult all my life,” DeLay confessed to Washington Post reporter Peter Perl. His profile on DeLay for the Washington Post Magazine in 2001 provides one of the clearest windows into the politician’s conflicted background.
According to Perl, DeLay was expelled from Baylor University for alcohol-fueled hijinks. Upon election to the Texas state legislature, DeLay, a married man, moved with several single male legislators into a condo that they called “Macho Manor.” With a taste for bawdy liquor-sodden bashes and rowdy sex with women other than his wife, DeLay earned the nickname “Hot Tub Tommy.” His hard drinking intensified when he was elected to Congress in 1984. “I would stay out all night drinking till the bars closed,” DeLay said. “I just did it, and then I got up sober and went to work.”
DeLay’s signature mark in the Texas legislature was his one-man crusade to allow the use of an ant-killing pesticide the EPA had banned. “People would stand in the back [of the Texas legislature] and chant: ‘De-Lay, De-Lay,’” veteran Texas journalist Lou Dubose recalled. “He was not a good speaker and there was only one topic: deregulation.” DeLay was obsessed with removing restrictions imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (which he labeled “the Gestapo”) on use of the pesticides that he claimed would be a boon to the extermination business he owned. His sheer hatred of government was his platform for his campaign for the Congress.
If DeLay had not met Republican Representative Frank Wolf during his first year in Congress, he might have remained just another pro-business Republican—perhaps a slightly crankier, more obscure version of Dick Armey. But Wolf, a born-again Christian, hounded DeLay in the hallways of the Capitol, urging him time and again to see the video he said had changed his life—“Where’s Dad?” starring James Dobson. This short film, Wolf told DeLay, had transformed him from a workaholic into a responsible Christian father who opposed abortion and homosexuality almost as fervently as he loved his children. Wolf buttonholed fellow Republican members and urged them to see it. He himself watched it repeatedly. Finally, DeLay gave in to Wolf’s beseeching and followed him into a darkened room in the Capitol basement, where Wolf showed him the film.
DeLay claimed to be forever altered by “Where’s Dad?” When Dobson stared into the camera and sang Harry Chapin’s schmaltzy folk ballad “Cat’s in the Cradle,” DeLay broke down in tears. “I started crying because I had missed my daughter’s whole childhood,” he said. “It was awful. My daughter in third grade asked her mother ‘if somebody adopted Daddy, because he was never around.’” The guilt that consumed DeLay became the impetus for his redemption. “Hot Tub Tommy” became submerged in a baptismal pool of born-again righteousness.
“It wasn’t just being raised in a dysfunctional family, though,” DeLay reflected in an interview published in Focus on the Family’s political newsletter. “It also led me to Christ, which I am eternally grateful for—and Dr. Dobson had a big part to play in that. For the last 20 years I’ve been walking with Christ, and I think as I look back over my life, the Lord has had a major part in developing who Tom DeLay is . . . I’m a different person now.”
But DeLay’s born-again experience had only transformed his alcoholism into another addiction. “The convert maintains the same addictive thinking as before,” University of Kansas professor of religious studies Robert Minor wrote of alcoholics who trade liquor for evangelical religion. “There’s a similar level of intensity in their dependence upon religion as [in] their dependence upon the previous addiction. And the substitution will remain successful as long as the religion continues to produce a more fulfilling high than the substance or process they abandoned.”
With his conversion, DeLay gained the loyalty of the evangelical grassroots. Writing in 2001, when DeLay’s influence was at its zenith, Peter Perl observed that “DeLay’s faith has solidified his political base and fundraising with the Christian Coalition and other religious and socially conservative groups. They love him, because DeLay’s America would stop gun control, outlaw abortion, limit the rights of homosexuals, curb contraception, end the constitutional separation of church and state, and adopt the Ten Commandments as guiding principles for public schools.”
But the bond between DeLay and the Christian right went beyond politics. DeLay’s evangelical supporters derived profound emotional satisfaction from his reign over the House. He embodied their sensibility, proudly representing the culture of personal crisis that kept the movement knit together. The visceral connection between DeLay and his base lent his leadership style a dynamic quality that few House figures could replicate. As DeLay headed into a sea of scandal, the Christian-right leaders who revered him became his enablers.
“If we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person,” Erich Fromm wrote in Escape from Freedom, “then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis: the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life.”
With moralists like Dobson by his side, DeLay seemed to believe he was insulated from accountability. He proceeded to tap the miracle-working powers of corporate lobbyists for piles of campaign cash. Together with anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who notoriously compared the federal income tax to “date rape” and the estate tax to “the Holocaust,” DeLay created what his aides dubbed the “K Street Project” to corral powerful lobbying firms into the Republ
ican machine. DeLay demanded that firms hire Republican lobbyists or be denied access to members of Congress. His harsh mandates forced firms to hire dozens of his former aides, who were referred to along the glass canyons of Washington’s K Street as “graduates of the DeLay school.”
DeLay’s system of shaking down corporate cronies for massive campaign donations helped make possible sweeping Republican electoral victories in 2002 and 2004. “As Republicans control more and more K Street jobs,” journalist Nicholas Confessore presciently wrote in 2003, “they will reap more and more K Street money, which will help them win larger and larger majorities on the Hill.”
DeLay’s K Street Project provided the fuel for an illegal redistricting scheme he implemented in Texas to enhance his power. During the 2002 Texas elections, DeLay tapped corporate funders from Enron to Phillip Morris for donations to the Texas GOP and laundered the money through his own political action committee. With the Texas Republicans’ campaign war chest flush with corporate donations forbidden by state law, they seized a majority in the statehouse. Then DeLay’s plan to redraw the thirty-two Texas congressional district lines to create more Republican districts and destroy Democratic ones, giving DeLay a bigger majority in the House, went into effect.
Fifty-one Democratic legislators fled the state, holing up in a motel in Oklahoma, to try preventing a vote on DeLay’s plot, but, illegally, DeLay ordered the Department of Homeland Security’s Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center, in Riverside, California (used to track terrorist threats) to locate them and force them back to Texas. Redistricting passed with a narrow majority. The following day, millions of black and Latino citizens were removed from integrated districts that elected Democrats and reassigned into racially concentrated voting zones. DeLay achieved a kind of electoral ethnic cleansing in Texas. Longtime Democratic members of Congress, including conservatives such as Charlie Stenholm, stood no chance of winning in the new, homogeneously white, conservative districts to which they had been assigned. DeLay’s project enabled the House Republicans to increase their narrow majority by five seats in the 2004 elections. The “permanent Republican majority” seemed more permanent than ever.
But back in Washington, DeLay’s elaborate schemes had finally attracted scrutiny. The nearly neutered, Republican-run House Ethics Committee rebuked the majority leader in 2004 for his hijacking of Homeland Security in the Texas redistricting war. Later that year the committee found DeLay culpable for soliciting donations from an energy corporation just before a bill that the corporation had lobbied for came up for a vote. Again the committee slapped DeLay on the wrist for attempting to bribe Representative Nick Smith to change his vote on a hotly contested Medicare bill—in the middle of the night and on the floor of the House, no less. In February 2005, DeLay got his retribution. The chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Joel Hefley, was unceremoniously removed and replaced by a reliable DeLay flunky. Speaker Hastert, DeLay’s agent, executed the purge, adding two new members to the committee, Lamar Smith and Tom Cole, whose political action committees had given thousands of dollars to DeLay’s legal defense fund.
That legal defense was needed because a scrappy Texas district attorney named Ronnie Earle had convened a series of grand juries to investigate DeLay’s shady campaign finance methods. Through his investigation, Earle uncovered evidence of one of the largest influence-peddling scandals in American history. Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist and Republican activist whom DeLay had called “one of my closest and dearest friends,” and his business partner, former DeLay aide Michael Scanlon, registered on the prosecutor’s radar when one of their clients, a tribe called the Mississippi Choctaws, anxious about control of its casino, inexplicably donated $1,000 to DeLay’s Texas redistricting scheme. The revelation of this donation led to a trail of e-mails disclosing a far-flung criminal syndicate that operated with impunity at the highest levels of the Republican Party’s apparatus.
But the e-mail trail also led in a more unexpected direction: to the heart of the Christian right. Movement leaders from James Dobson to Pat Robertson had been enlisted, perhaps unwittingly, by Abramoff to help him lobby against casinos that infringed on his clients’ territory. When the scheme came to light, Dobson and his wrathful minions directed their ire not at Abramoff’s “dear friend” DeLay, but at the investigative journalists who helped expose it.
CHAPTER 12
CASINO JACK, THE FACE PAINTER, AND THE SAUSAGE KING
By 2007, Jack Abramoff was living in a prison cell, serving a sentence of five years and ten months at a minimum-security prison camp in Cumberland, Maryland. He had pled guilty to a host of crimes, including defrauding Indian tribes of millions of dollars, corrupting public officials, and using wire fraud in an attempt to take over SunCruz, a cruise business operated by the very late Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis. Twelve people, including a congressman, Representative Bob Ney, were convicted of crimes related to their collusion in Abramoff’s scams. From prison, Abramoff was cooperating with federal investigators in their wide-ranging probe, fingering others.
Two months after quarreling with Abramoff over the terms of selling SunCruz for $23 million, Boulis was found shot dead in his car in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was murdered execution style, with a single gunshot wound to the head that suggested a professional hand in his killing. Abramoff’s business partner, Adam Kidan, a Republican fundraiser, whom Boulis had stabbed with a pen during their dispute, was alleged to have paid $95,000 to one of three Mafia wiseguys arrested for killing Boulis—Anthony “Little Tony” Ferrari, James “Pudgy” Fiorillo, and Anthony “Big Tony” Moscatiello. The fee paid was marked for unspecified “security services.” Abramoff was not implicated in the killing, although his prison term was reduced to the minimum under sentencing guidelines because he agreed cooperate in a federal investigation of it.
While hovering on the fringes of the criminal underworld, sometimes clad in a trademark black overcoat and black fedora, Abramoff maintained an inside track on Republican Washington. He was, for example, a glad-handing Bush “Pioneer” who raised more than $100,000 for George W. Bush’s presidential election bids, and he visited the White House hundreds of times, where he conferred more than eighty times with Bush’s chief political strategist and White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. (The Bush White House sought to keep Abramoff’s visits secret and even went to court to prevent the records from being made public.)
Typically, after long days trolling the hallways of Republican power, Abramoff’s lobbying continued into the night. He frequently wined and dined DeLay and other Republican congressmen and power brokers at his downtown Washington restaurant, Signatures, where he picked up the tab. He also entertained DeLay and others in one of the sports arena skyboxes he rented. And he generously took DeLay and three other congressmen on a golfing trip to Scotland. Their good times rolled with the tens of millions in casino cash that Abramoff received from Indian tribes and channeled through DeLay’s U.S. Family Network, a conservative shell organization that described its mission as defending “moral fitness” in the public sphere.
Abramoff, like DeLay, had a strange penchant for bullying, apparent since his youth. Indeed, as long as Abramoff’s acquaintances could remember, he had enjoyed hurting those he perceived as weaker than himself. Journalist and self-described former “nerdy soft kid” Jonathan Gold, a high school classmate of Abramoff’s at Beverly Hills High, described him as an inveterate bully. “In my most notable instance, I was walking down the hall to history class, and he hip-checked me. . . . I went sailing down the stairs with my cello,” Gold recalled. “He was laughing about it with his friends. I suspect he forgot about it five minutes later. I didn’t.”
Abramoff’s business partner, Michael Scanlon, also exhibited the same sort of sadistic tendencies. Scanlon, self-described as a “graduate of the DeLay school,” served as the majority leader’s communications director for several years. At the height of impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, Scanlon emaile
d his colleagues to describe his fantasy of a Mafia-style execution of the president. “This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS,” Scanlon wrote. “Not only do you kick him—you kick him until he passes out—then beat him over the head with a baseball bat—then roll him up in an old rug—and throw him off a cliff into the pounding surf below!!!!!”
Abramoff hired Scanlon from DeLay’s staff, and together the dynamic duo courted Indian casino tribes, promising to lobby aggressively for relaxed gambling restrictions in exchange for whopping fees. While they ripped off the tribes for a total of $85 million, Abramoff and Scanlon gleefully mocked them as “mofos,” “troglodytes,” and “monkeys.” Whenever a new payment rolled in, Abramoff and Scanlon celebrated like frat boys. “You iz da man!” Abramoff wrote to his business partner. “Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?”
But to the duo’s dismay, other casino tribes had hired high-powered lobbyists of their own, such as Republican super-lawyer and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. These tribes planned to build new casinos near those of the clients of Abramoff and Scanlon. So the duo concocted a daring scheme to exploit the grassroots power of the Christian right to push for new anti-gambling laws that would stifle competing casinos. “The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees,” Scanlon wrote Abramoff. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.”
Republican Gomorrah Page 11