Six Degrees of Jack Abramoff

Jack Abramoff is just a link in a 6 degrees of separation game in which each link is an awful person and you get disgusted and frightened before you've gone past 2 degrees of separation.

I started this on a lark, and then I realized it is just so easy to make these connections, so sadly this is just a skimming of the surface. You too can frighten and anger yourself by doing looking into the history of Jack.

Some connections we all know quite well such as the strong friendship of Abramoff and Delay.



Other obvious connections some people would like to pretend don't exist.



EXCLUSIVE EMAILS: Jack Abramoff Describes Relationship With President Bush

ThinkProgress has obtained emails written by Jack Abramoff in which the fallen lobbyist personally describes his relationship with President Bush. They depict a relationship far more extensive than has been previously reported.

At a January 26 press conference, President Bush said "You know, I, frankly, don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy. I don't know him."
But according to Eisler, Abramoff told him that the two have met almost a dozen times, shared jokes, and spoke about details of Abramoff's family.

The Republicans in the House have moved around the chairs to look like they are dealing with the Abramoff issue.



But the new Majority Leader Boehner also is quite connected (maybe the issue with DeLay was that is was just waaay too obvious).

Ex-aide to House leader tied to Abramoff
Now adviser to Karl Rove, he helped plan trip to Mariana Islands

WASHINGTON - A White House aide who was once chief of staff to House Majority Leader John Boehner helped plan a 1996 trip to the Northern Mariana Islands that was organized by fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff, billing records from Abramoff's firm show.

Barry Jackson, now chief deputy to White House adviser Karl Rove, accepted an invitation to travel to the island of Saipan in April 1996 but later decided not to go, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Tuesday.

Okay, let's just throw in anther obvious one:



ROVE & ABRAMOFF SHARED ASSISTANT

In 2001, Karl Rove needed a Gal Friday, someone to help oversee the "strategic planning, political affairs, public liaison, and intergovernmental affairs efforts of the White House."

He chose Susan Ralston, who came highly recommended from a friend: Jack Abramoff. Ralston performed similar duties for the Don of K Street -- that is until Abramoff realized she'd be far more useful embedded in the West Wing. (Ralston had also previous worked for Abramoff and Rove's fellow College Republican crony Ralph Reed.)

Though Abramoff has been a Republican political figure all along, he didn't always work in Washington. He had other ideas of how to increase conservative control (and his personal wealth). He headed to Hollywood.





Yes, only Abramoff could join forces with the military of the right wing apartheid government of South Africa to make a film that destroys what slim hope Dolph Lungren had of becoming a movie star

INDICTED GOP LOBBYIST JACK ABRAMOFF'S FAILED CAREER IN HOLLYWOOD....

Following his triumphant portrayal of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Hollywood pundits touted Lundgren as the Swedish Schwarzenegger. With his girlfriend, the flat-topped Jamaican actress Grace Jones, he formed a muscle-bound glamour couple that paparazzi could hardly resist. Therefore, it made little sense that Lundgren would follow a rookie producer into a small African kingdom to make a B-movie called Red Scorpion.

As he mulled the Red Scorpion offer, Lundgren got a tempting taste of Abramoff's largesse, when, thanks to the producer, he starred in his very own grip-and-grin photo-op with the president of the United States. "In [Lundgren's] living room somewhere, there is a photo of him with Ronald Reagan," the movie's production manager, Avi Kleinberger, told me.

The tale of "Red Scorpion"

Initially, the movie was set to shoot in Swaziland, but at the last minute Abramoff moved the production to Namibia, which was occupied by South Africa's apartheid government. Congress had passed (over Reagan's veto) the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, making it very frowned-upon, when not illegal, to do business with South Africa or its proxies. This did not seem to bother Abramoff, who planned to use South African Defense Force vehicles and equipment on the set and soldiers as extras.

James Glickenhaus, whose company, Schapiro Glickenhaus Entertainment, ended up distributing "Red Scorpion" after Warner Brothers jumped ship, said he was not aware of the help provided by the SADF, but he was aware of the controversy over the location. "Look, had the film been made in Nazi Germany, I wouldn't have distributed it," he said. "But I personally felt upon investigating that the Namibian government was more simpatico than the South African government."

Yes the movie was a dud but do read the full write up, it wasn't just a mission to push the anti-communist conservative Republican agenda, it was also a chance to screw people out of money (and leave some actors complaining about unpaid bills).

Abramoff has been part of the Republican machinery for 2 decades, going back to when he was the Chairman of the College Republicans.



Yep, the man who managed Abramoff's campaign was none other then Grover Norquist. The man who compared the estate tax in the United States to the Holocaust. Grover is the one you can go to for a quote that sums up his and his ilk philosophy of governing:

To Norquist, who loves being called a revolutionary, hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

But Norquist tried to widen the circle of Republican friends and donors, and here is where he made some interesting connections.

Friends in high places
Sami Al-Arian isn't the only prominent Muslim leader who posed for chummy pictures with President Bush. Many conservative Republicans are uneasy at the way GOP power broker Grover Norquist curries support from the Muslim community.

Norquist and Saffuri founded the Islamic Institute in 1999 with seed money from Qatar, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern sources. Among the contributors, records show, was Saffuri's former boss, a Muslim charity director and founder of the American Muslim Council, Abdurahman Alamoudi.

The records show Alamoudi gave at least $35,000 to the institute, although Alamoudi said in a written statement he did "not recollect having been quite that generous."

Also funding the institute were two Virginia-based nonprofit organizations. The Safa Trust donated at least $35,000, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought gave $11,000, the records show.

Last March, federal authorities raided those groups and others in Operation Greenquest, a major assault on suspected terrorist financial networks.
Among the more than 50 targets of the raid were people and organizations connected to Norquist and the Islamic Institute.

The American Muslim Council had long been viewed with suspicion by federal investigators, terrorism experts and Jewish groups.

Although it preached tolerance, its co-founder, Alamoudi, had been videotaped at a pro-Palestinian rally outside the White House in 2000 exhorting the crowd: "We are all supporters of Hamas ... I am also a supporter of Hezbollah."

Still, a few months after the rally in Washington, Alamoudi was photographed in Beirut at a conference attended by representatives of the terror groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and al-Qaida.

Abramoff's college republican campaign wasn't run just by Norquist alone, no Norquist had a very able assistant, Ralph Reed who'd become a life long friend of Mr. Abramoff.



Its that kind of wonderful Washington friendship where a political operator, who's whole resume is his connection to the Christian right and his participation in creating the whole GOP moral values myth, can feel free to really open up and say what he needs deep down inside.

Reed and Abramoff appear to have set up a business arrangement as Reed wound down from the 1998 election cycle. Responding to a query from Abramoff about how candidates he supported had done, Reed wrote: "Hey, now that I'm done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."

Such old time values - that humping yielded money (humping for money truly being the world's oldest profession):

Material released yesterday also appeared to undermine assertions by former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, now a candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor.

Reed has acknowledged receiving $4 million from Abramoff and Scanlon to run anti-gambling campaigns in the South. Reed has said he did not know where the funds were coming from, but e-mails suggest that he was aware that some of the money he was getting came from the casino-rich Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

The political partnership and friendship of Reed, Abramoff, and Norquist is a shining beacon that people of different faiths can work together and bond over common goals. Alas their goal was power, influence, and cash, but let's not let that tarnish that little image of a mini world faith conference going on there on K street.

Another one of Abramoff's Republican College friends became a business partner later in life.



Let's talk about Ben Waldman (couldn't find a picture, but I should credit Google Image Search for finding all the other pictures.) college Republican pal and business partner. Ben used to work in the West Wing under President Reagan and later worked on Pat Robertson's Presidential bid. You know Pat Robertson, the guy who talks to god, espouses the assassinations of foreign leaders, and promotes the idea of praying to god so god will off some supreme court justices.

Pat Robertson does more then just say awful things, he has some awful business partners himself. Such as Charles Taylor:

Pat Robertson and His Business Buddies

Pat Robertson did learn about the gold mining investment opportunity from a visiting Liberian delegation. Robertson did subsequently create the for-profit Freedom Gold Limited in the Cayman Islands in December 1998 in which he was listed as the president and the company's sole director. He did conclude a mining agreement signed personally by him, Charles Taylor and key members of Taylor's cabinet on May 18, 1999. And the deal does give the Taylor regime a cut of the action.

Ah, having business partnerships with murderers.

Now it's going to get really interesting.





Abramoff owned a casino cruise line with Adam Kidan (the guy with the sling, and another college republican); Ben Waldman also participated, but just an itty bit, Kidan and Abramoff were the main and equal partners. The cruise line was SunCruz. SunCruz was owned by Gus Boulis. But Mr. Boulis didn't really want to sell. So Abramoff used some of his influence to get interesting things to happen. Such as the following piece being entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Ney of Ohio (I'll do his picture later)

However, there are a few bad apples out there who don't play by the rules and that is just plain wrong.

One such example is the case of Suncruz casinos based out of Florida. Florida authorities, particularly Attorney General Butterworth, have repeatedly reprimanded Suncruz casinos and its owner Gus Boulis for taking illegal bets, not paying out their customers properly and has had to take steps to prevent Suncruz from conducting operations all together.

I don't want to see the actions of one bad apple in Florida, or anywhere else to affect the business aspect of this industry or hurt any innocent casino patron in our country.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that steps will be taken by the industry, and in the case of lawbreakers by the appropriate authorities, to weed out the bad apples so that we can protect consumers across the country.

Wow Gus must have thought, the Congressional Record, these guys have got connections (which is the point of this post really- Abramoff really had connections).

Congressional records show that on June 9, 2000, six days after House majority whip Tom DeLay returned from a golf junket to Scotland with Abramoff, the whip's office sent an American flag that had flown atop the Capitol to Boulis. Less than a week later, on June 15, Abramoff, Kidan, DeLay's deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy, and Joan Wagner, Boulis's chief financial officer at SunCruz, flew on SunCruz's private jet from Ft. Lauderdale to Pebble Beach, California, to watch the U.S. Open golf tournament. (Rudy never mentioned the trip in his congressional disclosure reports.)

Sending a flag that had flown over the capital to help a pal secure a business deal on a casino, talk about disgracing the flag.

So Abramoff and pals get the SunCruz lines and suddenly Rep. Ney puts another bit in the Congressional Record saying that SunCruz is now owned by awesome honest guys. Yep Abramoff and Kidan. The article, Money, Mobsters, Murder that I quoted from above goes into some detail about Kidan's possible mob ties (his mom was killed in a gangland hit). So if I was feeling really energetic I'd have another arrow pointing to the Mob, but its hard coming up with a graphical representation of the mob.

You're probably guessing where this all ends. Gus Boulis is murdered 6 months after the sale.

But all this talk about Ney and Casinos and SunCruz makes me ask this question:
What does a Republican Congressman and 9/11 terrorists have in common?

Answer: They like to launder money at Casinos.



Like all of the other bad apples connected with Abramoff, Ney had issues even without his Abramoff connection.

Congressman Linked to Abramoff Is No Stranger to Lobbyists

So far, Ney is the only member of Congress directly linked to allegations that Abramoff traded such gifts as the golf outing for legislative favors. He is identified simply as "Representative #1" in a Jan. 3 plea agreement between Abramoff and federal prosecutors.

Years before Ney came to Washington, however, he began accepting honorariums, in the form of personal checks, and travel from lobbyists and business interests when he served in the Ohio Legislature in the 1980s and '90s.

Two of his former legislative aides in Ohio became lobbyists and went to jail for bribery after Ney went to Washington.

On Capitol Hill, Ney has been tied to a string of favors from Abramoff, including the Scotland golf trip.

But this is the piece I want you to pay attention to:

He also traveled to England as the guest of a convicted swindler and businessman seeking government trade concessions, reported winning $34,000 at a London casino he visited with the ex-con's business partner, and made a personal deal with another Washington lobbyist to buy her family houseboat.

Going into a casino with a little bit of money (in Ney's case I think it was $100) and coming out with a lot of cash is a classic way of money laundering, it is one of the attractions that casino's hold for folks like the mob, and for 9/11 terrorists.

Yes the 9/11 terrorists loved going to Casinos.

Terrorists at Casinos has a laundry list of media reports of the casino visits from Atta and the other 9/11 terrorists. They loved Vegas and casinos it seems.

Brad Blog notes that al Qaida has indeed been reported to be interested in money laundering via casinos:

The Toronto Star of September 20, 2002 reported that members of al Qaida were arrested in Buffalo, New York, for participation in a money laundering scheme centered at the Casino Niagara.

But both of those links mention something else. Something that brings me to this last connection. And this is only one that may be of a stretch, but after reading the above and then reading the below one has to wonder: Yes is a small world, but is it this small of a world afterall?



From the Casino Watch page (which Brad Blog also notes), you'll see this little bit:

SunCruz Casinos turns over documents in terrorist probe
TAMPA, Fla. - SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.

Michael Hlavsa, chairman of the gambling cruise company, said Wednesday two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida's gulf coast.
9/26/01 By VICKIE CHACHERE Associated Press Writer and Florida Times-Union

Brad Blog has this observation:

Since Abramoff used SunCruz to provide services to Republicans (we may safely presume that the Super Bowl junket wasn't the only occasion), I'd very much like to see that September 5, 2001 passenger manifest. Who was on the boat with the terrorists?

6 days before dying in the Pentagon and World Trade Center some of the 9/11 terrorists were on one of Abramoff's SunCruz boat gambling.

Was poor Jack just a bad apple magnet?

Note: This was originally published by me in the site This Century Sucks back in 2006. I'll probably reprint a few TCS stories here - if they makes sense for this site. Eventually I hope to write more posts exclusively for this site.