April 13, 2006
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Nascar Fans Trade the R.V. for a Condo
Chris Rank for The New York Times
Richard Scott watches the sun set over the Atlanta Motor Speedway from a penthouse condominium owned by Jim and Muriel
April 13, 2006
Nascar Fans Trade the R.V. for a Condo
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
HAMPTON, Ga. The sound of automobile traffic was deafening. Inside Jim and Muriel Dollar’s two-bedroom penthouse condominium here, a party was going on, and the guests leaned in close in their theater-style leather chairs to make themselves heard, their drinks set in cup holders that occasionally vibrated ever so slightly.
But no one seemed to mind the noise or the tremors. In fact, some had binoculars in their hands to get a close-up view of what was going on nine stories below. That was because the apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked directly onto the racetrack of the Atlanta Motor Speedway, where cars were roaring by at speeds up to 190 miles per hour.
“It’s the best seat in the house,” said Mr. Dollar, 65, the president of a concrete construction company in Norcross, Ga., gazing out at the jet-black oval on a recent Saturday. Anyone who doubts that the traditionally blue-collar sport of Nascar has gone upscale need look no further.
The Dollars are among the dedicated fans who have forsaken the track infield the home of tricked-out R.V.’s, makeshift barbecue pits and parking spaces passed down from generation to generation to root for Jimmie Johnson or Dale Earnhardt Jr. from the plush confines of apartments that, in some cases, cost $1 million or more.
The Dollars said they paid $500,000 for their condo when they bought it about eight years ago.
There have been condos at Nascar tracks for several years, but it is only recently that the market for those second homes has become almost as active as that of a hot New York City neighborhood.
The building pace is accelerating, prices for some condos have more than tripled, and now with Las Vegas getting into the act the number of Nascar condos around the country is expected to almost double in the next few years.
In March, Speedway Motorsports Inc. announced plans to build 120 units at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway at prices ranging from $600,000 for a one-bedroom condo to $4.5 million for a three-bedroom penthouse. At three other tracks it owns the Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., the Atlanta Motor Speedway and the Texas Motor Speedway near Fort Worth the company has built a total of 174 condo units in the past couple of decades.
Some 15 percent to 20 percent are owned by corporations, and the rest by individuals.
The Trophy Towers, as the Las Vegas condominium building is called, will have a swimming pool, a workout room and a spa. Each of the 120 units will feature stainless steel appliances, oversize bathtubs and panoramic views of both the track and the Las Vegas Strip. One feature may be heavy-duty soundproofing. Apparently, the roar of the action is an acquired taste.
The International Speedway Corporation, which owns or operates 11 racetracks around the country, is conducting a feasibility study on a possible mixed-use development across the street from the Daytona International Speedway, which could include offices, restaurants and up to 100 loftlike apartments.
No one seems to doubt that Nascar fans can afford the prices of the condos the race-car world’s equivalent of golf manors on the 18th hole.
Nascar research shows that the sport’s following has grown 19 percent since 1995, to 75 million, 22 percent of whom are estimated to have household incomes topping $70,000.
The ever more elaborate condos are part of a trend that has seen tracks add amenities like high-end spas where fans can get $75 facials in between races.
Trackside condos, built adjacent to the course and often located near a turn to give a good view of the action below, are a step up from the luxury boxes that are now a standard feature at most sports stadiums.
But although the condos come with all the trappings of a second home, most owners occupy them for no more than a few weekends a year, typically bringing family, friends and business clients for big racing weekends.
At the Dollars’ 1,600-square-foot penthouse, the chef arrived around 11 a.m. for the Nextel Cup Series race. He tied a black apron around his waist and began preparing a spread on a speckled brown and white stone countertop that had been shipped from Brazil and hoisted into the home by a crane.
Before the starting flag fell, chicken and goat cheese tamales with chipotle salsa and cilantro sour cream, baked Vidalia onion dip with crostini, jumbo lump crab cakes, carved beef tenderloin and Gruyre in a puff pastry were ready to be dished out.
A group of burly guests clients of Mr. Dollar’s construction company strolled up the spiral staircase to a rooftop terrace to take in the panoramic view of the track and thick wafts of fuel.
“Look at all those high-end trailers out there,” said Bill Jaynes, 62, an electrical contractor from Fayetteville, Ga., motioning out the condo’s windows toward the track’s infield, where hundreds of trucks, mobile homes and R.V.’s including one with Oriental rugs were the scene of a giant tailgate party. “It’s millions of dollars out there.”
Sinking into the brown leather couch beneath the large flat-screen TV, Mr. Jaynes said, “If this is a redneck sport, I want to be a part of it.”
Ken Barbee, 65, the retired owner of a plastic injection molding company, liked Nascar so much he decided to live full time at the racetrack.
After separating from his wife in 1994, Mr. Barbee moved into a two-bedroom condo at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in North Carolina and has called it home ever since.
“For me, being single, living alone, it’s the greatest place in the world,” he said.
The condo was also a good investment. Mr. Barbee bought the unit in 1990 for $140,000 and estimated its current value at $450,000. “I should have bought two or three,” he said.
When the Tara Place Condominiums at the Atlanta Motor Speedway went on the market in the 1990′s, a basic two-bedroom condo on the sixth floor was listed at $250,000, said Beverly Currie of McDonough, Ga., who helped sell the first units and now handles many of the resales. The penthouses ranged from $455,000 to $495,000.
Now, Ms. Currie has a handful of listings ranging from $350,000 for a basic two-bedroom unit to about $1.5 million for a penthouse. Each comes with at least five tickets, which are required for entrance to the apartment building on race days, and V.I.P. parking passes. Some owners who bought their condos early get as many as 33 tickets.
Trackside condos took a while to catch on. “People thought it was so crazy,” said H. A. Wheeler, president of Speedway Motor Sports and head of the Lowe’s Motor Speedway, where the first condominiums went up in 1984. “They were just laughing at it.”
Some apparently still are. Bill Young, 64, a business owner from Wichita, Kan., said he could have snatched up one of the condos when they were first built. Instead, he said, he is happier in the infield, where he pays about $2,000 each for a handful of parking spots and entertains guests from his $400,000 motor home.
“You feel the race down in the infield,” he said. “You’re kind of isolated in the condos.”
But Jim Dollar seems to prefer it that way. “It’s not like sitting in the stands,” he said of his penthouse view. “You have a lot of your friends up, and it’s just a big party.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Does the Quick-Fix Oxygen Facial Really Work?
G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
Michelle Peck, who has performed hyperbaric oxygen facials on Madonna, demonstrates on Evie Evangelou, a spa publicist. The treatment is supposed to make skin look dewier and smoother.
April 6, 2006
Skin Deep
Does the Quick-Fix Oxygen Facial Really Work?
By NATASHA SINGER
EVIE EVANGELOU, a spa publicist and consultant in New York City, has scoured the world for new and unusual beauty regimens to lure clients to Now, a spa that is scheduled to open on Madison Avenue in May. Last week Ms. Evangelou discovered a treatment courtesy of Madonna that she says could be the next big thing: the hyperbaric oxygen facial. Madonna has recommended it on her Web site and in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar.
The facial involves a machine that sprays atomized moisturizers onto the skin using a stream of pressurized oxygen. The treatment is supposed to hydrate skin immediately, making the face appear smoother and plumper.
“So many celebrities are doing the treatment because it temporarily diminishes all the tiny imperfections that would otherwise be visible on high-definition TV,” said Michelle Peck, a masseuse from Los Angeles. Ms. Peck is referred to as Madonna’s personal oxygen treatment facialist on the Web site madonna.com. She came to Manhattan last week to demonstrate the facial on Ms. Evangelou and other spa managers, a trip sponsored by the maker of the oxygen compressor used in the facials.
As trendy as the oxygen facial may be, there is no hard evidence of its effectiveness, and academic experts are skeptical. Dr. Christopher B. Zachary, a professor and the dermatology department chairman at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, bluntly labeled it “snake oil.”
“The concept that high-pressure oxygen would do anything to help the skin is such nonsense as to be laughable,” said Dr. Zachary, who has not examined the oxygen-compression machine himself.
He suggested that the plumping or swelling effect might be mild inflammation caused by the blasts of compressed oxygen. “If you wanted puffy eyes, you could also go out for a hard night’s drinking,” he said.
The status of oxygen facials embraced by some doctors, spas and beauty mavens with little or no scientific evidence is typical of many cosmetic treatments that do not claim to alter the skin. Manufacturers are not required to conduct studies or submit such devices for approval to the Food and Drug Administration. Consumers are on their own in deciding whether to embrace the treatments, or rather, they are influenced by marketing, magazines, celebrity tastes and in some cases early-adopter doctors.
The lack of clinical evidence on oxygen facials has not prevented prominent dermatologists from offering them for up to $500. Six weekly treatments, followed by monthly “maintenance” treatments, are recommended to keep the face looking dewy and juiced up, Ms. Peck said.
Dr. Bradford R. Katchen, a dermatologist in New York City who just bought an oxygen compressor for his office, said the treatment is most appropriate for film or television actresses or for people who plan to attend a special event.
“It’s the ultimate hydration therapy that makes your skin look better instantly and stay that way for a few days,” said Dr. Katchen. The facials may provide a moisture boost that makes skin smoother so that it is easier to apply makeup, he said.
Since the 1930′s doctors have used hyperbaric meaning high-pressure oxygen inhalation chambers to force pure oxygen into the blood stream and tissue of oxygen-deprived deep-sea divers. The spas and dermatologists promoting these facials describe them as a way to force oxygen and moisturizers temporarily into aging skin.
“We hope that the oxygen is creating a pressure bubble that drives vitamins and nutrients into the skin,” said Dr. Fredric Brandt, a dermatologist in Miami and New York City. “But we have no data to support that.” After he learned about the treatment from one of Madonna’s personal assistants, Dr. Brandt ordered the machine for his Miami office, where aestheticians began offering oxygen facials last month, he said.
Americans have had about 20,000 oxygen facials in the last year, said Anthony McMahon, the chief executive of Intraceuticals, the Australian company behind the oxygen compressor and its treatment products.
The theory of the facial is that pressurized oxygen speeds the skin’s absorption of moisturizing agents like hyaluronic acid (a carbohydrate that attracts water), Mr. McMahon said. But Intraceuticals, which has sold the $10,000 oxygen compressors to about 100 spas and dermatologists in the United States, has not run any clinical tests to see how the treatment works on the skin’s top and underlying layers, he noted.
“We haven’t run any medical-style clinical trials because we are not making any biological claims,” Mr. McMahon said. “The instant results speak for themselves.”
Last week in a hotel room in Manhattan, Ms. Peck demonstrated the facial on the right side of Ms. Evangelou’s face. First she poured a protein solution into the nozzle of the compressor and carefully sprayed it around Ms. Evangelou’s right eye and along the creases that run from her nostrils to the outer corners of her lip. As the treatment progressed, these areas seemed to swell slightly.
Then Ms. Peck poured a hyaluronic acid solution into the compressor and sprayed the mist in short parallel strokes all over the right side of Ms. Evangelou’s face and along her jaw line. After Ms. Peck was finished, she led Ms. Evangelou into the bathroom so that they could both examine her face in the mirror.
“Look how smooth and more awake you look on that side,” Ms. Peck said. “Do you see how one of your eyes looks a lot more open than the other, and the apple of your cheek is plumped up?”
Cecilia Brown, the manager of the Now spa, who works with Ms. Evangelou, agreed that she could see a marked change. “You look lopsided,” Ms. Brown said as she pointed to the right side of Ms. Evangelou’s face. “This side looks swollen.”
Ms. Evangelou seemed please with her plumped-up look. “We are buying this machine for the spa right away,” she said.
Others are taking a more skeptical approach to high-pressure oxygen facials. Dr. Katchen said he sees it as a new technology that in the absence of scientific data from Intraceuticals he plans to test on himself.
“It’s a spa device with limited benefits,” said Dr. Katchen. “It has no more and no less validity than a facial.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
“Casino Jack” Abramoff
Illustration by Edward Sorel
The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington So this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack Abramoff — right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new American century — will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The End. There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and “Casino Jack” Abramoff will disappear for a few years of weightlifting and Talmudic study.
En route to his day of reckoning, Abramoff really did travel each and every right-wing highway, from Jo-burg in the old days to the Bush White House. But he’s being sentenced for only the last few miles of that trip. It’s almost an insult to a criminal of Abramoff’s caliber that the charge he’ll go to jail for is a low-rent wire-fraud scheme committed in a pickpocket capital like Miami Beach. In that one, Jack and his cronies claimed to have $23 million in assets when he didn’t have a dime, and he persuaded financial backers to purchase a $147.5 million cruise-ship casino empire. A nice score for a Gotti child, maybe, but a bit gauche for the wizard of the Republican fast lane.
The other charges are a little more respectable. He took tens of millions from Indian tribes that sought relief from Washington on gaming-industry questions, illegally pocketed millions in lobbying fees and evaded taxes on his ill-gotten gains. He also used their money to provide, in exchange for favors, a “stream of things of value” to elected officials, including golf junkets to Scotland, free meals and other swag.
It’s that last bit that made Abramoff a national celebrity, the poster boy for the way the Bush administration does business and the most feared name around in a Washington political society that is still waiting with bated lizard breath for the other shoe to drop. To most Americans, Jack Abramoff is the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came through the window in the middle of the night and stole their voice in government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much of a symbol of his generation’s Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater was of his.
He was an amazingly ubiquitous figure, a sort of Zelig of the political right — you could find him somewhere, in the foreground or the background, in almost every Republican political scandal of the past twenty-five years. He carried water for the racist government of Pretoria during the apartheid days and whispered in the ear of those Republican congressmen who infamously voted against anti-apartheid resolutions. He organized rallies in support of the Grenada invasion, showed up in Ollie North’s offices during Iran-Contra, palled around with Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi and the Afghan mujahedin.
All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.
He is a living museum of corruption, and in a way it is altogether too bad that he is about to disappear from public scrutiny. In a hilariously tardy attempt to attend to his moral self-image, lately he has been repackaging himself as a fallen prophet, a humbled super-Jew who was guilty only of going too far to serve God. He was the “softest touch in town,” he has said, a sucker for causes who “incorrectly didn’t follow the mitzvah of giving away at most twenty percent.” Then he shows up a few weeks before sentencing with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter, claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to “save the world.”
There is no evidence yet that anyone is going to call him on any of this bullshit, and we can see where all of this is going. He’ll go away now for his Martha Stewart fitness tour, and a few years from now he’ll slide straight into his own prime-time family show for cable’s inevitable Orthodox Channel and a $14 million deal from HarperCollins for his 290-page illustrated manual of marriage and intimacy for devout Jewish couples.
No other outcome is really possible, given the logic of the American celebrity world. What is unknown, as yet, is whether America will learn any lessons from the here-and-now of the Jack Abramoff story. For that to happen, we would all have to take a good, hard look at the remarkable life story he is now temporarily leaving us to consider.
Abramoff is a man defined by his connections. As an individual — as a lone dot on a schematic diagram, an intersection of crossed strands in a web — Jack Abramoff is a nobody, just another pompous Washington greedhead distinguished only by the world’s silliest Boris Badenov fedora (“That was between me and God,” Abramoff now says of the infamous hat). But let him loose in society, and magic happens. Jack Abramoff’s instinctive political talent was for first locating and then inveigling himself into the disreputable backroom deal of the hour. He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history.
* * * *
The story about Jack Abramoff and the elementary school election, the one first reported by The Los Angeles Times, is true. It only seems like apocryphal bullshit. Born in Atlantic City to Frank Abramoff, an affluent Diner’s Club executive who would go on to represent golfer Arnold Palmer, Jack moved with his family to Beverly Hills as a boy and grew up attending one of the more prestigious elementary schools in the country, the Hawthorne School. And it was here, at this same fancy-pants school that would one day be home to a chubby girl named Monica Lewinsky, that Jack got his start in politics by being disqualified from a race for student-body president for cheating.
“Jack was a very, very, very smart boy with a straight-A average,” recalls Milton Rowen, the then-principal of the school. “We had certain rules about the amount of money that could be spent, and there was no electioneering outside of the school . . . He had his mother come up with hot dogs in her car and give them out to the kids.
“He was a very nice boy,” the eighty-seven-year-old now says, laughing. “But he hot-dogged it.”
Still, even with that setback, Abramoff was already off and running on a course that would lead him straight to the political underworld. Like Watergate vets Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Gordon Strachan and Ron Ziegler before him, Abramoff throughout his youth would be drawn to student politics, running (and losing) again for student-body president at Beverly Hills High before becoming head of the Massachusetts College Republicans while at Brandeis University in the Boston suburb of Waltham.
Abramoff was part of the first wave of young people who came back to the Republican Party en masse during the so-called Reagan Revolution. The year 1980 was a time of resurgence for a party that just four years before had been in a post-Watergate death spiral; the Moral Majority had just been founded, and new-right prophets like Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie were attracting a fresh generation of young people to the brash, piss-in-your-face, fuck-the-poor ideas emanating from places like the Heritage Foundation and Bill Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom. Among their other converts at this time were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, a pair of ambitious students from Harvard and Emory University, respectively.
After Reagan’s 1980 landslide win, those two, along with Abramoff, would work together at the College Republicans National Committee, and when Abramoff succeeded Norquist as CRNC chief he would win a national reputation as a hard-liner with his Lenin-esque pronouncement that it wasn’t the job of young Republicans to “seek peaceful co-existence with the left.” The take-no-prisoners stance of the twentysomething student leader: “Our job is to remove them from power permanently.”
All accounts point to Abramoff as the prototypically humorless Animal House campus villain. A thick-necked champion weight lifter (he still holds the Beverly Hills High bench-press record) with a square jaw and exquisite hygiene, the man-child Abramoff also had the kind of sadistic jock temperament that impresses coaches and corporate recruiters alike. “The football coach was always afraid that Jack was going to kill somebody if he hit him head-on,” Rowen says. By the time he went away to Brandeis, he’d already undergone a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, having found religion at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles (after seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a youngster, Abramoff says), and so he arrived in 1970s Massachusetts the rarest of East Coast campus creatures: a moralizing weight lifter with short hair and a passion for Republican politics.
The Abramoff story, in fact, confirms in the most dramatic way every vicious popular stereotype about campus conservatives. Kids who get involved with lefty politics on campus almost always graduate straight into some degrading state of semi-employment — the defining characteristic of lefty student movements is how few doors they open for you. Another defining characteristic of the student left is its persistent, unquenchable and irrational suspicion that the campus Republicans hold their meetings in the offices of someplace like the Rand Corporation, where they have their buttocks branded with Sumerian symbols in secret ceremonies that upon graduation will gain all of them entrance to the upper ranks of corporate and governmental privilege.
That was Jack Abramoff. Like those famed USC student “ratfuckers” who went on to hold the ultimate panty raid in the Watergate Hotel, Abramoff and his close friends Norquist and Ralph Reed (the one-time head of the Georgia College Republicans used to sleep on Abramoff’s couch) never really abandoned the laughable training-wheel secrecy and capture-the-flag gamesmanship of student politics. His buttocks freshly branded, Abramoff in 1983 traveled to Johannesburg on behalf of the CRNC and immediately parlayed his student experience into a real job as a sort of frontman for South African intelligence services. He was the young progressive’s paranoid nightmare come shockingly true: absurd campus Republican proto-geek effortlessly transformed at graduation into flesh-and-blood neo-Nazi spook.
It is not easy to find anyone who actually encountered Abramoff during his South Africa experiences, although one source who was involved with South African right-wing student politics recalled “Casino Jack” as a “blue-eyed boy” who rubbed people the wrong way with his arrogant demeanor. On his first trip to Johannesburg in 1983, Abramoff met with leaders from the archconservative, pro-apartheid National Students Federation, which itself is alleged to have been created by South Africa’s notorious Bureau of Security Services. Together with NSF member Russel Crystal — today a prominent South African politician in the Democratic Alliance, an anti-African National Congress party — Abramoff subsequently, in 1986, chaired the head of a conservative think tank called the International Freedom Foundation.
The creation of the IFF officially marked the beginning of the silly phase of Abramoff’s career. According to testimony before Democratic South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, the IFF was not a conservative think tank but actually a front for the South African army. Testimony in sealed TRC hearings reportedly reveal that the IFF was known by the nickname “Pacman” in the South African army and that its activities were part of a larger plan called “Operation Babushka,” designed to use propaganda to discredit the ANC and Nelson Mandela at home and abroad. Among other things, Abramoff managed during this time to funnel funds and support from the IFF to a variety of stalwart congressmen and senators, including Rep. Dan Burton and Sen. Jesse Helms, all of whom consistently opposed congressional resolutions against apartheid. These members of Congress would deny knowing that the IFF’s money came from the South African government, because that, of course, would have been illegal; Abramoff himself denied it too, although he has been largely quiet on the subject since the TRC testimony in 1995.
In a hilarious convergence of ordinary workaday incompetence and pointlessly secretive cloak-and-dagger horseshit, Operation Babushka’s grand opus would ultimately turn out to be the production of the 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Red Scorpion, in which American moviegoers were invited to care about an anti-communist revolutionary targeted for execution by a sweat-drenched jungle version of Lundgren’s overacting Ivan Drago persona. The film, which Abramoff wrote and produced, was instantly derided by critics around the world as one of the stupidest movies ever made.
Veteran character actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the heavy, Col. Zayas, in Red Scorpion, recalls the “Cimino-esque” film shoot in Namibia as one of the most surreal experiences of his career. “It was pretty weird,” he says. “What was going on was fishy, and then in the middle of production the word spread that there was some kind of weird South African/CIA connection. And that bummed everyone out.”
Argenziano, whom history will likely absolve for being, with Lundgren, one half of the film’s only memorable scene, which also perhaps represents the apex of Jack Abramoff’s literary career (Argenziano: “Are you out of your mind?” Lundgren: “No. Just out of bullets”), laughs almost nonstop as he recalls his Namibia experiences.
“We were all staying in this hotel called the Kalahari Sands in Windhoek, the capital,” he says. “There was this huge new escalator in the hotel. I guess it was the only one in the country, because little African kids kept coming in to stare at it. But the South Africans we had on the shoot [Abramoff was reportedly provided free labor by the South African army] kept shooing them away, literally pushing kids off the escalator, shouting these racist words at them. Wasn’t exactly good for morale.”
The Eighties show Abramoff involved in a series of almost comic backroom escapades, the most famous being the organization of a sort of trade convention for anti-communist rebel leaders in Jamba, Angola. There are not many facts on the record about this incident, but what is known smacks of an articulate young Darth Vader putting out scones and lemonade at a sand-planet meeting of the leading bounty-hunter scum in the universe. Under the auspices of the Citizens for America, a group founded by Rite Aid drugstore magnate and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman at the request of Ronald Reagan, Abramoff helped organize a meeting of anti-communist rebels that included Angolan UNITA fighters, Afghan mujahedin, Laotian guerrillas and Nicaraguan Contras.
Some reports speculate that the meeting was convened so that one of the Americans — perhaps Abramoff or Lehrman — could pass along a message of support from the White House. But it’s more likely that this will be just another Abramoff episode to remain shrouded in mystery. Twenty-one years later, Lehrman won’t say what it was all about, noting that “I do not recall if there was a White House message discussion” and adding only that “there were very many anti-communist individuals present in Jamba.”
Abramoff’s CFA experience was extensive enough, however, to make him a character in the Iran-Contra scandal. His ostensible role was to raise support for the Contras through the CFA. “Abramoff was a bit player in Iran-Contra,” says Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who served as a special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iran-Contra investigation. “That’s where he learned that the money wasn’t in the ideological skulduggery world. It was in the go-buy-the-government world.” But, Blum adds, Abramoff’s experiences with various conservative foundations and nonprofits during this period proved valuable later on. “This is when he made all his connections,” he says. “It was through them that he learned that it was much more lucrative to work in the commercial end of politics.”
Abramoff, Norquist and Reed were all in their mid-to-late twenties, and all were experiencing paradigmatic life changes. While Abramoff was joining such groups as the Council for National Policy, the CFA and the United States of America Foundation, Norquist was founding Americans for Tax Reform, the organization he would later ride to prominence as a fat, hygienically deficient tax-policy oracle. Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington — and by 1985 he, too, had found his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.
There is a common thread running through almost all of Abramoff’s activities during this tadpole period of his in the Eighties. Suggested in his every action is an utter contempt for legal governmental processes; he behaves as if ordinary regulations are for suckers and the uncommitted. If the government won’t step up to the plate and sign off on support for the Contras, you go through channels and do it yourself. If you really want to win an election, you find ways around finance laws and spending limits. And if you want to oppose a national anti-apartheid movement on the country’s campuses, don’t waste time building from the ground up; go straight to Pretoria and bring home a few million dollars in a bag.
One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff’s obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various “smart guys” who upon closer examination aren’t all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte (“The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life,” said one Olympian client), Enron’s “smartest guys in the room” Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, “ingenious dealmaker” Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation — as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them — not even good at being criminals.
* * * *
All of Abramoff’s late-career capers — the inner-city youth charity that actually bought sniper scopes for Israeli settlers, the academic think tank that turned out to be a lifeguard in a shack on Rehoboth Beach, the “check’s in the mail” fleecing of his own tailor out of a bill for suits — they all exude the same infuriating “Check out the brains on us!” vibe.
Take the infamous Naftasib scheme of 1997-98. The short version of this story is that Abramoff and Tom DeLay met with a bunch of shady Russian oil executives in 1997; the Russians then sent $1 million to a British law firm called James and Sarch; James and Sarch then sent a million to the pompously named nonprofit “U.S. Family Network,” which in turn sent money to numerous destinations. It went to a lobbyist agency called the Alexander Strategy Group that was run by DeLay’s ex-chief of staff, Edwin Buckham; the agency would subsequently hire DeLay’s wife at a salary of $3,200 a month. It went toward the purchase of a luxury D.C. town house that DeLay would use to raise money. And it went toward the purchase of a luxury box at FedExField, which Abramoff used to watch the Redskins. If you follow the loop all the way around, the quid pro quo probably involved DeLay’s 1998 decision to support an IMF loan to Russia, whose economy collapsed that year and would rely on an IMF bailout to survive. A Maryland pastor named Christopher Geeslin, who briefly served as the U.S. Family Network’s president, would later say that Buckham told him that the $1 million from the Russians was intended to influence DeLay’s decision regarding funding for the IMF. DeLay ended up voting to replenish IMF funds in September of that year, right at the time of the bailout.
Is this smart? Sure, if you’re fucking ten years old. If your idea of smart is turning an IMF loan into Redskins tickets, then, yeah, this is smart. But another way to look at it is that these assholes got themselves Redskins tickets by giving $18 billion to one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. I’d call that buying at a premium.
That’s the most striking characteristic of Abramoff and his crew of ex-student leaders; nearly thirty years out of college, no longer young at all, the whole bunch of them are still Dean Wormer’s sneaky little shits, high-fiving one another for executing the brilliant theft and pre-dawn public hanging of the rival college’s stuffed-bear mascot. That whole adolescent vibe permeates the confiscated Abramoff e-mails, the best example of which being this exchange between Jack and his “evil elf” aide Michael Scanlon regarding their lobbying fees for the Coushatta Indian tribe:
Scanlon: Coushatta is an absolute cake walk. Your cut on the project as proposed is at least 800k.
Abramoff: How can I say this strongly enough: YOU IZ DA MAN
Again, these assholes affirm every stereotype about campus conservatives. They don’t spend enough time being kids when they’re supposed to, so they do it when they’re balding, middle-aged men with handles and back hair — using Washington and Congress as their own personal sandbox.
They figured out how to beat everything. Everything about the Abramoff story suggests that at some point, he and his buddies Norquist, Reed and DeLay took a long, hard look at the American system, war-gamed it and came up with a master plan to strike hard at its weakest points. In the end, almost all of the Abramoff scams revolved around the vulnerability of the national legislature to outside manipulation. Once Abramoff and his cabal figured out how to beat Congress, everything else fell into place.
Case in point: Abramoff’s remarkable success in defeating H.R. 521, a 2001 House bill that would place the Guam Superior Court under the control of a federally controlled Supreme Court. Led by Judge Alberto Lamorena, Guam Superior Court justices hired the lobbyist to defeat the bill, which would have unseated them as the chief judicial authorities of the island. It says something for Abramoff’s ability to bring out the worst in people that he managed to get a group of sitting judges to pay him $324,000 in public funds in $9,000 installments so as to avoid detection.
Despite the $324,000 fee, Abramoff could not prevent the House Resources committee from unanimously recommending H.R. 521 for passage. Would the superlobbyist finally fail? No, of course not. Given what we know about Abramoff’s tactics, we’d be naive not to conclude that he could lean on DeLay and then-Whip Roy Blunt to stall the bill in the congressional machinery. On May 27th, 2002, just five days after the Resources committee made its recommendation, an Abramoff-linked PAC wrote two checks for $5,000 — one to Blunt, one to DeLay. H.R. 521 never reached the floor.
The Guam incident certainly shows how easily the whole Congress was controlled by a small gang. The DeLay Republicans, along with Abramoff, were apparently the first to recognize the opportunities for corruption presented by the House leadership’s dictatorial control over key committees, in particular the Rules committee. Now, a single call to a lone Tom DeLay could decide the fate of any piece of legislation, pushing it through to a vote or gumming it up in the works as needed. The other 430-odd congressmen were window dressing.
I asked Rep. Louise Slaughter if the Guam case, which showed that just two men could quash a bill, proved that Congress was especially vulnerable to manipulation by the likes of Abramoff.
“Absolutely,” she said. “And the thing is, we have no idea how many incidents like that there were. What else didn’t get to the floor? We have no idea. No way of knowing.”
Even more ominously, Abramoff would eventually come under fire in Guam following the mysterious removal of Guam Attorney General Frederick Black, who had seen the fate of H.R. 521 and decided to investigate Abramoff’s role in it.
“The thing that really worries me about Guam is the prosecutor who was plucked off the case,” says Slaughter, a New York Democrat who has spearheaded her party’s lobby-reform drive. “It makes you wonder what really went on there.”
At the very least, Abramoff’s relationship with White House procurements officer David Safavian shows that he made at least some inroads into the world of White House patronage. Abramoff took Safavian on one of his famous Scotland golfing junkets and reportedly was receiving help from Safavian in leasing government property. Safavian was working on the distribution of millions in federal aid to Katrina-affected regions when he was arrested, which raises all kinds of questions about what else might have been going on.
“There were so many contracts, from Katrina to Iraq — God knows what really went on in there,” says Slaughter.
Once Congress was conquered, Abramoff, Norquist, et al., apparently discovered a means for turning it into a pure engine for profit. The game they may have discovered worked like this: One lobbyist (Abramoff, say) represents one group of interests — for example, the Malaysian government. Then, a lobbyist friend of Abramoff’s (say, Norquist) represents an antagonist to Abramoff’s client, in this case, let’s say dissident leader Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim asks Norquist to press his case against the Malaysian state in Washington; Norquist complies and uses his contacts to raise a stink on the Hill. Abramoff’s client, unnerved, turns to Abramoff to make the problem go away. Abramoff dutifully goes to the same friends Norquist applied to in the first place, and the problem does indeed go away. In the end, everyone is happy and both lobbyists have performed and gotten paid. Abramoff apparently pulled this kind of double-dealing scheme more than once, as he and Ralph Reed appear to have run a similar con on the Coushatta and Tigua Indian tribes, who were on opposite sides of a gaming dispute.
An idiot might call a scheme like this clever. But that’s only true if you don’t consider what really happened here: Dozens of people conspiring to reduce the U.S. Congress to the level of a Belarussian rubber stamp for the sake of . . . what? A few million dollars in lobbying fees? And not even a few million dollars apiece but a few million dollars split several ways. Shit, even Paris Hilton can make a million dollars in this country without blowing up 200 years of democracy. How smart can these guys be?
Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and many others in the House, to lie back and open their legs all the way for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions. In the Third World, corrupt politicians at least get something for selling out the people — boats, mansions, villas in the south of France. If you offered the lowest, most drunken ex-mobster in the Russian Duma $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 in soft money for his vote, he would laugh in your face; he might even be insulted enough to shoot you. But Jack Abramoff apparently got any number of congressmen to play ball for the same kind of money.
They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America’s journalists like Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff’s firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.
They targeted Congress, the courts, the integrity of elections, and the free press, and in every corner they found willing partners who could be had for a few bucks and a package of golf tees. That doesn’t mean Jack Abramoff was so very smart. No, what that says is that America is no longer trying very hard. And when Jack Abramoff hears his sentence, ours will certainly be made plain soon after. Jack Abramoff was the Patient Zero of Washington corruption. He’s the girl at school that everyone got a piece of, including two janitors in their forties. It strains all credulity to think that he’s been talking to the Department of Justice for months and yet prosecutors still have to “encircle” a lone congressman, Bob Ney, as has been reported. If Ney is the big target the government made a deal with Abramoff for, we’ll know we’ve been had again.
“If you’re venal and cunning enough, like him, you can do it,” says Slaughter, when asked if the American system has become easy to beat. “But he had a lot of help.”
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone Magazine
Posted Mar 24, 2006 11:42 AM
