If you feel you’ve missed some of the details about Jack Abramoff,

world-class crook, here’s a good summary. Read it before the next round of details come out as he turns in everyone he knows. Heads will

roll in 2006. mjh

The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff

A reconstruction of the

lobbyist’s rise and fall shows that he was an ingenious dealmaker who hatched interlocking schemes that exploited the machinery of

government and trampled the norms of doing business in Washington — sometimes for clients but more often to serve his desire for wealth

and influence. This inside account of Abramoff’s career is drawn from interviews with government officials and former associates in the

lobbying shops of Preston Gates & Ellis LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP; thousands of court and government records; and hundreds of e-mails

obtained by The Washington Post, as well as those released by Senate investigators. …

A quarter of a century ago, Abramoff and

anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist were fellow Young Turks of the Reagan revolution. They organized Massachusetts college campuses in the

1980 election — Abramoff while he was an undergraduate at Brandeis and Norquist at Harvard Business School — to help Ronald Reagan pull

an upset in the state.

They moved to Washington, maneuvered to take over the College Republicans — at the time a sleepy

establishment organization — and transformed it into a right-wing activist group. They were joined by Ralph Reed, an ambitious Georgian

whose later Christian conversion would fuel his rise to national political prominence. …

Abramoff also worked on

behalf of the apartheid South African government, which secretly paid $1.5 million a year to the International Freedom

Foundation, a nonprofit group that Abramoff operated out of a townhouse in the 1980s, according to sworn testimony to the South African

Truth and Reconciliation Commission. …

When Republicans wrested control of the House from the Democrats in 1994, Abramoff turned

his focus back to Washington politics. With Norquist’s help, he reinvented himself as a Republican lobbyist on heavily Democratic K

Street. Norquist was one of the intellectual architects of the Republican Revolution and a muse for its leader, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.),

soon to be speaker of the House. …

Nearly two years later, Abramoff’s legal troubles appear to threaten the careers of many of

his colleagues and political allies. Sources familiar with the Justice Department investigation say that half a dozen lawmakers are under

scrutiny, along with Hill aides, former business associates and government officials. …

Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming

senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal — the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in

which six House members and one senator were convicted — said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently

rode in a plane with one of Abramoff’s attorneys, who told him: “There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to

be taken down.”
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