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In
its blatant disregard for anything
resembling reality, the scheme
resembles nothing so much as the
blatantly phony Abramoff-sponsored
Institutes, Foundations, and
political “think tanks” (whose
‘scholars in residence” turn out to
be lifeguards and yoga instructors)
which were exposed in recent Senate
Hearings as vehicles used to move
money through the bank accounts of a
network of DeLay cronies and former
aides.
"Thinking outside the think tank"
Not one to rest when America's
national security can be used as a
cover for making a buck,
Cunningham was also steering Pentagon
money to a second tiny “defense
contractor,” MZM Inc,
which had the great good
fortune to go from zero dollars
in Federal contracts to $169 million
in two short years, through
the simple expedient of indulging
Cunningham’s taste for expensive
yachts and a new $2 million dollar
mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe,
California, to go with the trophy
wife, also on the payroll.
Here's a photo taken of a Washington
D.C. bask thrown by MZM Inc to
further U.S.-Panama friendship. MZM
Inc founder Mitchell Wade is the
beefy fellow with the self-satisfied
smile.

And why not? He's dining out on
your money.
While the story has its humorous
aspects, the money involved is
nothing if not serious... A (highly preliminary) total of almost
$700 million earmarked for national
security going to “defense
contractors” which just a few years
earlier didn’t exist which provide services the
Pentagon didn’t ask for or
presumably need.
The companies involved would also
share another characteristic as
well: they were very very
grateful.
The point man on the Group W
“account” for the Alexander
Strategy Group, which received
almost $200,000 of gratitude for
"client services," was former DeLay
aide Karl Gallant, who
apparently made a specialty of
stealing money from widows and
orphans, having signed Enron
Corp. to a $750,000 lobbying
contract a few years earlier.
(Maybe he can someday share a cell
with Ken Lay. We hope its not in one
of those federal tennis camps.
Pelican Bay might do nicely.)
"Eschewing the soft sell"
"Buckham
and that crew, they were Tom DeLay,”
a senior GOP House member, careful
to remain anonymous, told
Congressional Quarterly Weekly.
“The Alexander lobbyists' sales
pitch was, ‘Either you hire me or
DeLay is going to screw you,’” said
a top Republican lobbyist. "It was
not really a soft sell."
Alas for Karl Gallant, his chances of
pleading lack of premeditation are
dimmed somewhat
by his participation way back in
1990 in a Heritage
Foundation report entitled, no
doubt with tongue place firmly in
cheek,
“A CONSERVATIVE AGENDA FOR
COMPREHENSIVE CAMPAIGN REFORM.”
We
only mention this because we found
it so funny: "Defense
contractor cum lobbyist" Brent Wilkes was recently appointed
by California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger to the State Race
Track Leasing Commission, which
oversees thoroughbred racing at Del
Mar Race Track near San Diego.
Del Mar
of course was where FBI head J.
Edgar Hoover used to vacation yearly
as the guest of Texas oil man Clint
Murchison. A Senate committee discovered
in 1955 that 20
per cent of Murchison’s Oil
Lease Company was owned by Mob
Boss Vito Genovese.
A
sordid episode involving Hoover at
Del Mar was relayed to author Anthony Summers in “The
Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover,"
by veteran film producer Joe
Pasternak.
"He was a homosexual,"
Pasternak told Summers. "Every year he used to come down to
the Del Mar racetrack with a
different boy. He was caught in a
bathroom by a newspaperman. They
made sure he didn't speak. . .
Nobody dared say anything because he
was so powerful."
La
plus ca change.
"Great
humanitarians know how to spread it
around."
Wilkes is also the
proud papa of his very own
foundation (de rigueur in certain
circles.) The Wilkes Foundation
sponsored the second annual San
Diego Tribute to Heroes Gala
recently, we discovered. It
honored the no doubt heroic Congressman
Duncan Hunter,
who just happens, as they say, to
currently be
chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee.
For the Congressman's sake, we
hope he doesn't dock a yacht
anywhere near Duke Cunningham's
We thought he was exaggerating when
former Ambassador Wilson wrote in
his recent book that the sordid
spectacle we have all been forced to
witness has been caused by “a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned
decades, and that through years of
selective recruitment has become
a
government cult with cells in most
of the national security system.”
Guess what? He's not...

A
news account in the San Diego
Union-Tribune about
the Lear jet used by Cunningham and
DeLay, paid for by you and I from
money "passed through" to San Diego
"businessman"
Wilkes, told
of a flight DeLay flew from Dulles
Airport in Washington, D.C., to John
Wayne Airport in Orange County to
appear at a campaign dinner for Rep.
Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington
Beach.
Dana Rohrabacher will
appear again (several times) in our
story... He gave a sterling personal
recommendation, for example, to Adam
Kidan, the "dunsky (John Gotti's
phrase) about to be indicted
for paying for the brutal murder of
Sun Cruz Casino Line owner
Gus Boulis...
with a check.
The
original bad penny
Rohrabacher was there when the cult first
began to do business as The
Enterprise, in
Angola, for example, with Jack
Abramoff... and Oliver North.
The same group involved in the Cunningham
affair will soon be seen to
have their fingerprints all over the
Boulis hit, as well as a host of
recent activities of individuals for
whom the noun “baseball bat” is
a verb...
As
in: "We shoulda baseball-batted him."
Emilia DiSanto
is a staffer on Capital Hill working
for Senator Charles Grassley,
currently investigating Abramoff.
She was attacked with a baseball bat
on November 8 by a mysterious
masked man trying to hide
his identity by wearing a hood and
black gloves, who said nothing and
made no demands before attacking the
49-year-old staffer. The FBI is
investigating it as being
“work-related.”
Or
FRANK Mosco, a whistleblower
whose testimony convicted another
figure in the Cunningham scandal, a
man named Thomas Kontogiannis,
to whom Cunningham sold his yacht at
an inflated price, just as he’d sold
his house to Mitchell Wade of MZM
Inc.
Today Mosco won't leave his home
without his bulletproof vest. He
started wearing body armor a few
months ago after four goons attacked
him on a Queens street, bashing him
on the head, pummeling him to the
ground and throwing him into a van,
where he was threatened to "keep
[his] mouth shut."
The brazen beating occurred just
days after Queens District Attorney
Richard Brown issued grand jury
subpoenas to targets of a massive
kickback and corruption probe which
eventually fingered Duke Cunningham.
When Cunningham learned that the
prosecutor in the case against Kontogiannis knew of the attack, he
wrote telling him that there may be
a political agenda against the
school official (who he now admits
had been paying him bribes) by what
he termed a "disgruntled contractor
(Mosco.)
A crime
spree by the "baseball bat boys"
A
short list of recent violent crime
suspected of having been committed
by Abramoff associates makes for
fascinating reading, and we will
regale you with it at a later date.
But we just wanted to
mention it now, in case anyone
thinks we may be being too hard on a
former war hero who's become a broken man who
simply misplaced his moral compass,
or as Rush Limbaugh characterized
it, "made a mistake."
Locking your keys in your car is
"making a mistake."
When the San Diego Union-Tribune
detailed charges of Congressman
Cunningham’s questionable activates
in December 1997, Cunningham told
the paper’s reporter that anyone who
questioned his actions in lobbying
for ADCS could “go to hell.”
After Cunningham's
sniveling performance yesterday, its
safe to assume he was still at
that point exhibiting the
bravado of the not-yet indicted.
Less we forget, most of this
happened during a
time period in which the U.S. was
to war, after 3000 innocent people
were murdered in an attack
which our
nation, which spends more on defense
than most of the rest of the world
combined, was unable to thwart.
Its a good thing for Cunningham that
people seem willing to cut him some
slack, because of his service as an
ace Navy pilot during the Vietnam
War, a decade-long attempt to keep the U.S. West Coast
from being invaded by fleets of
Viet Cong sampans that somebody must
have feared mightily, given the
costs of that struggle to
our nation.
Otherwise there might be
calls for Cunningham to be indicted for
treason.
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