The Fall of a True Believer
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EVEN WITH all the disclosures about his business M.O., there was a chance Abramoff's personal reputation might have been salvageable -- had it not been for the hundreds of memos and emails that the Senate investigators released. Some of the notes are merely embarrassing: "I love this bitch talk you punk ass bitch," Abramoff emailed Scanlon in an exchange about racquetball. "As soon as I get yo ass on court, you be crying like a baby!" Others are laced with slurs about clients. Of the Saginaw Chippewa he wrote, "These mofos are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure." When Scanlon grew frustrated with one tribe, Abramoff urged patience: "The key thing to remember about these clients is that they are annoying, but that the annoying losers are the only ones who have this kind of money and part with it so quickly."
Last September, at the first of a series of Senate hearings, Abramoff was forced to listen to his own words. He sat at a long red table, forehead creased, large brown eyes cast downward. "According to your emails," Senator Campbell read from a script, "you and Mr. Scanlon referred to tribes as morons, stupid idiots, monkeys, f-ing troglodytes...and losers." The senator looked up. "Why," he asked, "would you want to work for people that you have that much contempt for?"
On his lawyer's advice, Abramoff declined to respond. In fact, says ex-colleague van Horne, comments like these were utterly commonplace. "Privately, to each other, we bitch about the clients," he says. "They're annoying. How is that different from any other client on the planet?" Still, Abramoff's words cut deeply into his own long-cultivated image. For all his bravado over the years, he had prided himself on being squeaky clean. When the College Republicans went out drinking on Capitol Hill, the teetotaling Abramoff would stay in the office and lift weights. During his Hollywood years he pleaded with directors to eliminate from films the word he refers to only as "GD."
Abramoff calls the release of the emails "one of the most painful parts of the past year's assault on my life." The notes captured "emotional outbursts of the moment," he says. "I am sure that none of my accusers would wish to be judged solely by a few utterances over the course of 10 years, instead of the accomplishments and acts of loving kindness which permeate their life."
Some of Abramoff's defenders insist that he was singled out for doing what everyone else did. "Jack replaced a lot of lobbyists who had made money in the past treating the Indians as incompetents," says Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). Even though "it's clear that greed played a role in this," Rohrabacher says, "I've seen nothing that wasn't done 100 times more when the Democrats were in charge. This is standard operating procedure." For a party that promised to reform Washington, though, "SOP" is an odd defense.
In fact, even many of Abramoff's closest friends say he grew intoxicated with power. "Jack is probably guilty of achieving success on a level that society compliments -- being aggressive and assertive, and sometimes forgetting the Good Lord," says his friend and rabbi, Jonah Gewirtz. "I think that he, like many young people living in the swirl of the Beltway, got caught up." Paul Erickson, Abramoff's friend and fellow CR alum, agrees: "I think this went south for him only because he was a bit seduced by the potential financial rewards of these relationships. Had he not reached for the last dollar on the table, we might not be hearing some of these questions today."
ABRAMOFF'S LAWYERS have barred him from talking about his future, saying curtly that the former lobbyist is "focusing on other business opportunities." Friends say he's struggling to keep up his gung-ho facade. "He's paid a terrible price," says Gewirtz. "There can probably be no pain worse than reading the newspaper each morning."
As the headlines tightened around him this summer, Abramoff often took refuge at Signatures, the upscale restaurant near the White House that he founded (and where he used to direct his staff to give influential friends free meals). Amid the framed autographs that adorn the wall -- Martin Luther King Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, Joan Crawford, P.T. Barnum -- he would tap on his laptop, consult with lawyers, and meet with prospective movie investors and the occasional visiting tribal chief. He chatted on his cell phone, poking bitter fun at his predicament to his remaining friends. ("I've worked my way up to national clown," he told one. "I've bought the nose and the hair.") And he contemplated leaving the nation's capital. By midsummer, he was making arrangements to sell the restaurant. Among the prospective buyers was a group of Washington lobbyists.
Barry Yeoman, a writer based in North Carolina, has written numerous articles for this magazine.
