[Mb-hair] From Erroll

[ebooker at pacbell.net]

Michael:

Hollywood couldn't have thought up something this crazy. If any of this is
true....Delay and Abramoff just keep popping up.

Erroll Booker


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  Cunningham Stripped $700 Million from U.S. Defense

'Dukester's' Epic Boo-Hoo Hiding Massive Pentagon Rip-Off



*World Exclusive*
Nov 30 2005--Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker



The MadCowMorningNews has learned that California Republican Congressman
Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham steered $500 million in defense contracts in less
than a decade, according to the company’s own website, to a start-up San
Diego software firm which—and here’s the beauty part—doubled as a lobbying
firm.

The lobbying firm then gratefully kicked back—at a bare minimum—hundreds of
thousands of dollars annually to a Jack Abramoff-directed Washington D.C.
lobbying and consulting firm run by two former senior staffers of Texas
Republican Tom DeLay.

It offered, in other words, one-stop shopping.
While the focus was on the $2 million in bribes paid to Cunningham after his
guilty plea, the question of just what the Congressman had done for all that
long green received scant media attention.


The GOPMOB's Magic Horn of Plenty

But as the extent of the damage to America’s national security wrought by
the bribes which crossed Cunningham’s greasy palm begins to come into focus,
the fraud being revealed is orders of magnitude greater than has been hinted
at so far.

Here’s how it worked:

Money budgeted for U.S. Defense went in at the ADCS end of something called
the “Wilkes Corporation” for services which the Pentagon protested it never
requested, and out the other end came a magical cornucopia of bribes,
kick-backs, campaign contributions, yachts, Lear jets and Rolls Royce’s.

Over the course of almost an entire decade, from 1994 to 2001, Cunningham’s
Appropriations Committee repeatedly added funding to the Pentagon budget for
a previously non-existent (prior to 1995) software company, ADCS, owned by
the “Wilkes Corporation,” a private company (natch) owned by San Diego
businessman Brent Wilkes.

The money then made a short trip—courtesy the wonders of modern
accounting—from one of Brent Wilkes’ pants pocket to another, called “Group
W Advisors,” which proceeded to obligingly send hundreds of thousands of
dollars in ‘client fees’ annually to The Alexander Strategy Group, a
lobbying and consulting firm currently under scrutiny in the Justice
Department's investigation of Casino Jack Abramoff.

"A little trouble keeping the company names straight, is all."

Wilkes himself even seems to have had trouble distinguishing between his
various legal fictions...

Newspaper reports state his deal grew out of requests from the House
National Security Committee, of which Cunningham was then a member, for the
military to add an automated-document program to its budget.

His firm ADCS, according to Government Computer News, began by selling $5
million in document conversion software to the Pentagon. But the website of
his lobbying firm, Group W Advisors, claims it is the entity "instrumental
in introducing (digital document) technology to the Department of Defense,”
as well as that the company's document-automation work, which began as a
small “congressionally-mandated pilot project," has since generated more
than $500 million in appropriations.

If you're wondering which company deserves the "credit," you may be missing
the point.

Picture the memorable scene in the movie “Chinatown” where Fay Dunaway
explains to Jack Nicholson what may have been a similarly-complicated state
of affairs...

“She’s my sister! (Slap.) She’s my daughter! (Slap.) She’s my sister AND my
daughter!”

See, the pea is under one of the shells; it doesn't really matter which.

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, moat 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 Marine pilot during the Vietnam War,
keeping 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—which lasted twice as long as World War Two—to our nation.

Otherwise there might be calls for Cunningham to be indicted for treason.