Last winter, Jack Abramoff wore a really nice hat.
We saw him on television and in the newspapers. He came out of a courthouse after another of his public humiliations. The dark and shiny hat sat forward on his head. Its brim curled toward his eyes.
Jack Abramoff had been a dashing figure in Washington, a bear of a man with a square-cut jaw, flashing eyes and expensively trimmed black hair. He was a high-dollar lobbyist who knew how to move the levers of power in a city where such knowledge is worth millions.
All that had changed. In the winter, leaving a courthouse, Abramoff was furtive, his face empty, his star gone cold before he was 50 years old.
A shame.
But, hey. He earned it. He deserved it. Too bad, in fact, there wasn't more of it, and I'm here to tell you why.
It's not because of the hat, though I swear I heard the fedora say, "I'm Jack's hat. I cost more than your new 460cc driver. You may stand at a distance and admire me. Do not touch."
Nor should we dump more steaming censure on him just because we have learned the details of his trip to the old course at St. Andrews. True, he crossed the Atlantic in August 2002 with seven buddies and his son in a private jet and was limo'd to the first tee. Law-abiding folks would have flown all night in a middle seat between odiferous oafs and then schlepped their bags from Heathrow to Scotland in a train filled with diseased sheep.
It's not that. It's not envy, jealousy or their inbred cousin, class resentment. Here's what frosts our Titleists: Abramoff went to St. Andrews for all the wrong reasons. Passionate golfers think of the old course as a pilgrimage destination. Abramoff made it a payoff for politicians. The old course is heaven with Bobby Jones whispering swing thoughts on the summer air. To Jack Abramoff, it was Bluto's frat house.
"Hey," Abramoff had written to a buddy, naming a mutually disliked acquaintance, "let's bring Jeff to Scotland and hit balls into him!"
Came the reply: "Let's hang him upside down from a crane over the 18th at the old course and use him to line up our drives!"
Abramoff's catering list for the Gulfstream asked for 24 Miller Lites, 12 Bud Lights, two bottles of red wine, a quart of 2-percent milk, one package of Twizzlers (red), three grilled-chicken dinners with sides, five cheese omelets, side of bacon for six, an "assortment of bagels with cream cheese, butter and jellies on the side for four," and "lots of snacks."
Twice before, the lobbyist had gone trolling for political influence at St. Andrews. In 1999 he accompanied six Republican senators, their aides and 50 lobbyists. on his own in 2000 he invited the Texas congressman Tom DeLay, a rising Republican star who once cited golf as the first of his egocentric sins: "It was me, me, me, me, me. It was golf or my business or politics ..."
Abramoff's 2002 itinerary called for the fugitives from the public trough--Republicans all--to tee it up at seven courses in five days. They made the trip in high style. They slept in grand hotels, bellied up to fine dinners, punished themselves at Carnoustie and repaired their wounds at Gleneagles.
They did the whole Scottish golf thing, and--here's a teeth-gritter--they did it for free. Maybe they extracted from way down in their pants pockets a ball-marking dime for tips now and then. But federal investigators decided that Abramoff covered the trip's entire tab, which came to $150,225.
Though Abramoff insisted it was just a boys' adventure in the heather and gorse, investigators decided he'd paid for the trip "in exchange for certain official acts." Meaning, a bribe.
A master of the lobbyist's art, Abramoff paid the fare with someone else's money. It was taken from a foundation he created to fund inner-city youth athletic programs. Most of it came in "donations" from lobbying clients, primarily six Indian tribes that also paid him more than $80 million between 2000 and 2003 to represent their gambling casino interests.
So Jack Abramoff took money from Indians intended for inner-city youth and spent it on Twizzlers for freeloaders on a Gulfstream II headed for the old course.
Is it a surprise, then, that he ignored so many ethical norms, congressional rules and laws of the United States? or that in 2006 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion and fraud? Any surprise that he showed up at the old course with political operatives whose foreheads carried neon signs blinking "For Sale"?
On the old course, one doofus came to the Swilcan Bridge. That iconic piece of stonework has been used for generations, by Jones, Snead, Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Faldo, Woods. But when the Abramoff buddy later showed snapshots of the bridge at the trial of another Abramoff buddy, he had no clue.
He called it "kind of a famous bridge before the 18th hole." Kind of?
Next, some dolt will tell us there's this Amen corner place.
Fred Wertheimer, president and cEo of the nonpartisan group Democracy 21 and advocate of tightening congressional ethics rules, says, "The golf caucus on capitol Hill contains a considerable number of members who make playing golf a high priority for the country.
"Especially," he says, "at great golf courses."
H.L. Mencken warned us. The great old curmudgeon newspaperman hated sports, especially one. In 1943 he wrote, "If I had my way, no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States."
Such stricture would have saved the Abramoff junketeers some suffering, of players on the trip ...
* Former Christian coalition leader Ralph Reed lost in the 2006 Georgia Republican primary for the party's lieutenant-governor nomination.
* Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney came under investigation by federal authorities and withdrew from this fall's November election rather than seek a seventh term.
* A Bush administration senior official, David Safavian, became the fifth person found guilty in legal actions connected to Abramoff, with the distinction of being the first convicted at trial; the others pleaded guilty.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank said Safavian's trial came down to the bribery question: "Was he doing 'official acts' in exchange for 'favors'? And golf was the favor."
Abramoff wanted Safavian's help in acquiring two pieces of federal property. E-mails showed the lobbyist in relentless seduction mode. Safavian once wrote, "can't pull weekday golf until I'm a bit more ensconced as chief of staff," to which Abramoff replied, "Loser! I told you to come with me and not the gov!! You'd be playing golf non-stop."
The reporter Milbank used to play golf. "Before I had a kid." He isn't much good. "I keep score by how many balls I lose." He found the trial testimony golf-y with lots of talk about handicaps and a kind-of-famous bridge. So his column began:
"The way things are going at the David Safavian trial this week, don't be surprised if, in the coming days, a golf cart bursts into courtroom 29A of the federal courthouse and a pair of Scotsmen ask if they can play through."
In the end, maybe, it really was the hat.
I said to Jeff Gregson, a lobbyist in Virginia, "That hat Abramoff wore ... "
The lobbyist said, "It made him look like Lepke Buchalter."
I found a photograph of Louis Buchalter, known by the Yiddish nickname "Lepke," meaning Little Louis. He was 5-feet-5.
Here they are (above) in their hats, Buchalter on the right ...
In New York through the 1920s and '30s, Lepke Buchalter worked alongside Lucky Luciano at the top of Murder Inc. Lepke's career ended in 1944, when he sat in Sing Sing's electric chair.
Abramoff is no Buchalter, but the guilty plea commits him to cooperation with the government's investigations, to restitution of $26.7 million, and probably to 11 years in prison.
In all, if you ask me, a waste of nice hats.
To give feedback, send e-mails to: kindred@golfdigest.com.
Golf Digest, Oct, 2006 by Dave Kindred
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