You gotta admire such evil genius

Last week, he pleaded guilty, essentially, to doing his job, which consisted mostly of bilking people out of money and paying off congressmen with golf trips. One of his many schemes, a plot involving an attempt to buy a line of cruise ship casinos in Florida and various and sundry bribes to public officials, resulted in charges of conspiracy and tax evasion and such. And now that he got caught, he’s remorseful, maybe remorseful enough to be cooperating with authorities in an investigation that has caused colons all across Washington to clench.

Fairly mundane stuff.

Sure, he bought off some congressmen and cheated on his taxes and probably kicked his dog when nobody was looking.

But the real stuff of genius — the stuff that earns Abramoff the title of the Albert Einstein of sleaze — hasn’t resulted in criminal charges.

But it has been reported widely and was the subject of congressional hearings in 2004.

And it is brilliant.

According to a bunch of different reports, what Abramoff did was this:

He took money from everybody.

Genius.

For instance, he was hired by an Indian tribe that ran casinos in Alabama to lobby against the establishment of a state lottery. So Abramoff took the money from the Indian tribe, kept some of it, and funneled the rest to the Christian Coalition of Alabama to run a ginned-up grass-roots anti-gambling effort against the lottery.
And he pointed to the success of that opposition — opposition he created — to get more money out of the Indians, which he paid to the anti-gambling people to create more opposition, which he pointed to when he asked the Indians for more money.

Brilliant.

But that was nothing, child’s play.

He also represented the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi, getting tons and tons of money from them to lobby on behalf of their lucrative casino interests.

What Abramoff would do is funnel the money to Ralph Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition, and other conservative groups. Reed and these groups, in return, would set up phony grass-roots opposition to casinos being proposed by competing tribes on the Gulf Coast.

It’s sort of a variation on a theme.

Of course, the whole time, Abramoff was overbilling the Choctaws, according to the Post, which quoted his own e-mails as evidence. In e-mails to a colleague, he refereed to the Indians as “morons,� “idiots� and “troglodytes,� and suggested ways for his colleagues to get more money out of them. In an e-mail to a colleague, quoted in the Post, Abramoff referred to “the monkeys from the Choctaw tribal council.� He also wrote: “These mofos are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure.�

Nice guy.

Anyway, at the same time, according to the Washington Post, he used the cash from his Indian clients to rent skyboxes at sporting arenas and stadiums, including one at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which were then used to raise money for members of Congress, mostly opponents of gambling, who, in turn, posed a threat to the Indians, who, in turn, gave Abramoff more money to represent their interests.

Pause for a moment and savor that.

He was taking money from gambling interests and using it to help opponents of gambling and then using the fiscal health of the gambling opponents to solicit more money from the gambling interests.

Brilliant.

But it gets better.

In 2002, the Post reported, Abramoff worked, behind the scenes, with Reed to get the state of Texas to close a casino operated by the Tigua tribe in El Paso. The state of Texas, guardians of public morality, closed the casino down.

Abramoff entered the scene and convinced the Tigua that he would get their casino re-opened.

But it would cost them.

It would up costing them $4.2 million.

Oh, it gets even better.

When the Indian tribe ran out of money, the Post reported, Abramoff devised a plan. He convinced the tribe to take out life insurance on elderly tribal members, naming a school Abramoff founded as beneficiary. The school, the newspaper reported, would then pay Abramoff.

Not only was he making money on gambling and bribery and assorted other vices and felonies, he was making money on dead Indians, the first white man to benefit from dead Indians since the 19th century.

The guy’s a genius, an evil genius.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.