They say the house always wins, but in the case of "Casino" Jack Abramoff it was the guy holding the keys to the front and back doors that made out like a bandit. Like thousands of other lobbyists (close to 14,000 individuals were registered as such in 2009 according to the Center for Responsive Politics) Abramoff peddled access to influence, which he bought with generous campaign "donations" and perks such as luxury "fact-finding" trips.
Abramoff wasn't too picky about who his clients were, had no problem representing more than one side, and, as a disciple of Ronald Reagan school of economics, had a innate disrespect for any rules and regulations that interfered with his ability to capitalize at the often excessive expense of his clients.
Having represented several Indian tribes with regards to their lucrative gaming rights, Abramoff (along with business partner Adam Kidan) utilized his gambling expertise and made a play to buy the SunCruz floating casino line. The deal hit headlines in 2005 when three men connected to the Gambino crime family were charged with the 2001 murder of SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Bouli, who had sold a majority interest in the company to Abramoff and his associates. By this time Abramoff was being investigated for bribery and corruption relating to his Indian gaming clients, who had collectively been charged an estimated $85 million in fees by Abramoff and cronies Ralph E. Reed, Jr., Grover Norquist and Michael Scanlon -- for the privilege of being played off against each other.
In truth, Abramoff's business practices probably had much in common with those of a large proportion of his contemporaries. His main crime in Washington's prevailing climate of corruption seemingly being that he got too cocky not to get caught. Ultimately Abramoff and an elite group of conspirators including Ohio's Republican Rep. Bob Ney, his former Chief of Staff, Neil Volz, and Michael Scanlon, who had served as Communications Director for disgraced Texan Rep. Tom DeLay (and had assisted Abramoff in the SunCruz purchase), paid -- albeit relatively lightly -- for their crimes, and Washington was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief that it had been seen to do something with actions that had minimal long-term impact on the status quo.
However, it's this status quo, the lobbying system and how its symbiotic with the way we finance the election of our leaders, that we should really take issue with since it has done more to pervert the course of democracy than any one individual. In 2009 a record $3.48 billion was spent on lobbying. And since a politician's primary objective once they get in power, by necessity, is to find the money to get reelected, it's easy to understand why our representatives in government are forced to serve the needs of those with fat checkbooks above those of the people.
With an eye on this bigger picture, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (whose previous credits include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) takes an in-depth look at the stranger-then-fiction Abramoff affair in his new film Casino Jack and The United States of Money. SuicideGirls caught up with Gibney to talk about the wholesale selling of America he investigated, and how, with a dearth of untarnished white knights, our future champions might just take the form of the likes of Eliot Spitzer (who's the subject of Gibney's next, as yet untitled, project).
Nicole Powers: We all think we know Abramoff, but what struck me about this movie is that what has been reported by the mainstream media is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, I had no idea that his story went from Angola to Russia to Malaysia, and from revolutionary rebels to oligarchs to heads of state.
Alex Gibney: I know, and to me that was the wild and fun part. I got into the story not just because he was a lobbyist, but because he was this action movie hero. He's the main character in an action film of his own mind. He's going all over the place like some sort of secret agent. It was a fantastic story.
NP: I loved the clips you show of the movie Abramoff produced, Red Scorpion, which starred Dolph Lundgren in the rogue freedom fighter role that you theorize was Abramoff's fantasy version of himself.
AG: The weightlifting scene, I mean who thinks of that? To come up with a weight lifting scene in an action movie -- because, of course, Jack was a weightlifter. How good is that?
NP: And obviously your movie covers the mob-style hit too.
AG: That's right.
NP: How far towards Abramoff do you think that went?
AG: You mean, was he responsible for the murder?
NP: Yes.
AG: I don't think he was responsible for the murder. I think what it shows though is his recklessness. In other words, suddenly, he's become so drunk with power and money that he's become extremely reckless, and he's using his political pals to help him do financial deals -- Bob Ney's role in the SunCruz thing. And suddenly he's got himself in a situation that because he's so close to the center of power in Washington D.C. that mobsters that are associated with his pal Adam Kidan are just a hair's breadth away from the seat of power in Washington D.C. So that recklessness about who he was doing business with, and how he was doing business, really is what's important about that I think.
NP: Obviously Abramoff is sitting in jail, but the people that he was interacting with on a daily basis are still out there. The powers that be stuck Abramoff in jail and tied a nice bow on top of his case, but there are many more people that are just as guilty in the highest echelons of power who got off scot-free.
AG: I became really sympathetic to Jack in the sense that I think it's exactly as you say, he became the convenient mechanism by which everybody could say, "It wasn't me. I didn't have anything [to do with it]. It was Jack. Jack did it all. He was the criminal. Now the criminals are behind bars and it's all good." When in fact Jack was doing what in many ways was mainstream. He was dong it more outrageously, he was dong it more recklessly, but a lot of the stuff he did was very mainstream lobbying stuff.
NP: He was the fall guy. With him in jail, Washington could say they'd reformed, and that the checks and balances were working. But in actual fact, with the recent Supreme Court ruling which removed corporate spending limits on campaign financing, things are actually even worse than when Abramoff was doing his thing.
AG: I couldn't agree with you more. Things are much worse now, and, in a funny way, Abramoff going to prison becomes a smoke screen for just how bad things are.
NP: You got some amazing interviews for the film. What motivated people like Ney and DeLay to talk on camera?
AG: I bribed them. I learned that from Jack. [laughs] No, it took us a long time to get Bob. I wrote to him a couple of times in prison, [and got] no response. When he got out, one of my producers, Zena Barakat, made contact with him through another gig she was on. [She] mentioned this to him, and he liked her and ultimately agreed. Adam Kidan, same thing. We just reached out to him after he got out of prison. I had actually corresponded with him while he was in prison, and I think he wanted to tell his story. In the case of Bob, he knew that the guy who had sent him to prison, Neil Volz, had talked to me. At the time he couldn't have been more angry at one person than at Neil because Neil basically put him in jail. Now they've had a bit of a rapprochement I think, but that motivated Bob to talk.
It's funny the way it works. You keep at it, you keep at it, and then you get one person and it kind of leads you to another person. Once you get somebody in the room, my experience is that they're pretty open. DeLay is a little bit different. I mean DeLay spoke only because he was on a book tour. He was not the kind of strutting motherfucker that he was when he was at the height of his power. He was somewhat humbled, or, at least, soft-spoken, but he was completely unrepentant. And that was great. That's fine.
NP: You didn't get Abramoff on camera for the movie, but I understand you did talk with him.
AG: I didn't get any video of him in prison, but I did visit him. It was important for me, I think, to take the measure of the man. I found that productive, fruitful, important, but I was prohibited from taking my cameras into the prison.
NP: So what did he have to say to you?
AG: Most of what we talked about was off the record, but he gave me a tremendous amount of color and background in terms of how he did what he did, and that was great. Also, what was intriguing to me, back to this whole bad apple / rotten barrel thing, you know, talking to him, he's funny. He's a good storyteller, he's a movie buff, I'm a movie buff, he's a sports freak. It becomes easy to demonize people, like Washington has done to Abramoff, and when you do that you think, well it's just their character, it's a man of bad character, and you miss the bigger picture, which is how corruption works both systemically and how it works really in all of us.
NP: Because there's thousands of other lobbyists doing very similar things.
AG: Correct. It's going on now, and, as you say, it's worse in some ways.
NP: This movie is ultimately about the sale of America, and having seen your Enron documentary, it was interesting to see how you connected the dots in that film to Arnold Schwarzenegger. How Enron championed the ousting of California Governor Gray Davis, and brought in Schwarzenegger. Obviously we're sitting in California, which is a bankrupt state to this day because of that energy crisis. And one of the possible quid pro quos that you present in the movie is that Schwarzenegger was put in power on condition that he wouldn't go after the Enron money.
AG: Yeah. I think in a way, Schwarzenegger was a kind of beneficiary of the demonization of Gray Davis. I mean there was that famous meeting which I cite in the movie where Ken Lay talks to Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other people about taking advantage of what they did to Grey Davies. But I think Enron saw that much more pragmatically. Gray Davis was getting in their way, preventing them from making as much money as they wanted to make, so they took him out. And the way they took him out was by manipulating the electricity prices in the state. Now, at the same time, they were making scads of money doing that. With Enron it's a case of a failed company. I mean that was a disastrous company that was just hiding how disastrous it was from everybody, but that was one big profit center -- basically strip-mining California.
NP: And they were also pulling strings on a grass roots basis to oust Davis.
AG: They were definitely pulling strings, but one of the things I discovered afterwards was that they weren't the only ones. Sadly the outgoing Clinton administration wasn't giving a lot of help to Gray Davis either. In fact Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, the Chief of the Economic Council for the Obama administration, called up Gray Davis and lectured him. Basically they said you've got to build more dirty power plants and eviscerate your pollution controls, and let electricity prices rise as much as they will rise. You've got to believe in the market is what they told him. These were Democrats, well Greenspan wasn't a Democrat but Summers was Treasury Secretary.
Everybody has imbued that kind of money logic, the idea that whatever's good for business is good for America. Now Clinton has apologized for a lot of the policies that were done in his name through [Robert] Rueben and Summers, and that gets back to Casino Jack because Casino Jack is all about how money twists people. You know, suddenly people think it's a really good idea to have no regulation. Is that because in the pure marketplace of ideas they've just come to that [conclusion]? Or is it because actually, year after year after year, they're being re-elected because of the amount of money they're being paid by Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citibank etc?
NP: You talk about how money twists people, but the subject of your next documentary, Eliot Spitzer, is somewhat of an exception. One of the reasons they went after him was because money didn't twist him.
AG: Correct. Now, we should say right away that he certainly gave them the ammunition to take him out. They didn't force him to start seeing prostitutes. But, he was the one guy who was standing up when the federal government wasn't, when the FCC wasn't, the Justice Department wasn't. He stood up to them. He really had a finger on what ultimately led to the huge financial meltdown, and they were very angry at him. And, yeah, I think they took him out.
NP: What hope is there for a man (or woman) that can't be bought? Everyone has skeletons that can be rattled.
AG: At the end of the day, that's why we all watch. I think we're all potentially corrupt. I mean, in some ways, hoping for the white knight, the one perfect person, it's a fruitless hope. We're all imperfect. But the question is, when are we going to stand up behind people who are trying to do the right thing? That's important. Spitzer may not be perfect, but we have to ask ourselves, is it more important that he was seeing hookers or that the global economy was melting down?
Casino Jack and The United States of Money opens in select theaters on May 7. For more information on the film and to find out how you can help the campaign for more transparency and accountability in government go to: TakePart.com/CasinoJack
Abramoff wasn't too picky about who his clients were, had no problem representing more than one side, and, as a disciple of Ronald Reagan school of economics, had a innate disrespect for any rules and regulations that interfered with his ability to capitalize at the often excessive expense of his clients.
Having represented several Indian tribes with regards to their lucrative gaming rights, Abramoff (along with business partner Adam Kidan) utilized his gambling expertise and made a play to buy the SunCruz floating casino line. The deal hit headlines in 2005 when three men connected to the Gambino crime family were charged with the 2001 murder of SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Bouli, who had sold a majority interest in the company to Abramoff and his associates. By this time Abramoff was being investigated for bribery and corruption relating to his Indian gaming clients, who had collectively been charged an estimated $85 million in fees by Abramoff and cronies Ralph E. Reed, Jr., Grover Norquist and Michael Scanlon -- for the privilege of being played off against each other.
In truth, Abramoff's business practices probably had much in common with those of a large proportion of his contemporaries. His main crime in Washington's prevailing climate of corruption seemingly being that he got too cocky not to get caught. Ultimately Abramoff and an elite group of conspirators including Ohio's Republican Rep. Bob Ney, his former Chief of Staff, Neil Volz, and Michael Scanlon, who had served as Communications Director for disgraced Texan Rep. Tom DeLay (and had assisted Abramoff in the SunCruz purchase), paid -- albeit relatively lightly -- for their crimes, and Washington was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief that it had been seen to do something with actions that had minimal long-term impact on the status quo.
However, it's this status quo, the lobbying system and how its symbiotic with the way we finance the election of our leaders, that we should really take issue with since it has done more to pervert the course of democracy than any one individual. In 2009 a record $3.48 billion was spent on lobbying. And since a politician's primary objective once they get in power, by necessity, is to find the money to get reelected, it's easy to understand why our representatives in government are forced to serve the needs of those with fat checkbooks above those of the people.
With an eye on this bigger picture, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (whose previous credits include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) takes an in-depth look at the stranger-then-fiction Abramoff affair in his new film Casino Jack and The United States of Money. SuicideGirls caught up with Gibney to talk about the wholesale selling of America he investigated, and how, with a dearth of untarnished white knights, our future champions might just take the form of the likes of Eliot Spitzer (who's the subject of Gibney's next, as yet untitled, project).
Nicole Powers: We all think we know Abramoff, but what struck me about this movie is that what has been reported by the mainstream media is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, I had no idea that his story went from Angola to Russia to Malaysia, and from revolutionary rebels to oligarchs to heads of state.
Alex Gibney: I know, and to me that was the wild and fun part. I got into the story not just because he was a lobbyist, but because he was this action movie hero. He's the main character in an action film of his own mind. He's going all over the place like some sort of secret agent. It was a fantastic story.
NP: I loved the clips you show of the movie Abramoff produced, Red Scorpion, which starred Dolph Lundgren in the rogue freedom fighter role that you theorize was Abramoff's fantasy version of himself.
AG: The weightlifting scene, I mean who thinks of that? To come up with a weight lifting scene in an action movie -- because, of course, Jack was a weightlifter. How good is that?
NP: And obviously your movie covers the mob-style hit too.
AG: That's right.
NP: How far towards Abramoff do you think that went?
AG: You mean, was he responsible for the murder?
NP: Yes.
AG: I don't think he was responsible for the murder. I think what it shows though is his recklessness. In other words, suddenly, he's become so drunk with power and money that he's become extremely reckless, and he's using his political pals to help him do financial deals -- Bob Ney's role in the SunCruz thing. And suddenly he's got himself in a situation that because he's so close to the center of power in Washington D.C. that mobsters that are associated with his pal Adam Kidan are just a hair's breadth away from the seat of power in Washington D.C. So that recklessness about who he was doing business with, and how he was doing business, really is what's important about that I think.
NP: Obviously Abramoff is sitting in jail, but the people that he was interacting with on a daily basis are still out there. The powers that be stuck Abramoff in jail and tied a nice bow on top of his case, but there are many more people that are just as guilty in the highest echelons of power who got off scot-free.
AG: I became really sympathetic to Jack in the sense that I think it's exactly as you say, he became the convenient mechanism by which everybody could say, "It wasn't me. I didn't have anything [to do with it]. It was Jack. Jack did it all. He was the criminal. Now the criminals are behind bars and it's all good." When in fact Jack was doing what in many ways was mainstream. He was dong it more outrageously, he was dong it more recklessly, but a lot of the stuff he did was very mainstream lobbying stuff.
NP: He was the fall guy. With him in jail, Washington could say they'd reformed, and that the checks and balances were working. But in actual fact, with the recent Supreme Court ruling which removed corporate spending limits on campaign financing, things are actually even worse than when Abramoff was doing his thing.
AG: I couldn't agree with you more. Things are much worse now, and, in a funny way, Abramoff going to prison becomes a smoke screen for just how bad things are.
NP: You got some amazing interviews for the film. What motivated people like Ney and DeLay to talk on camera?
AG: I bribed them. I learned that from Jack. [laughs] No, it took us a long time to get Bob. I wrote to him a couple of times in prison, [and got] no response. When he got out, one of my producers, Zena Barakat, made contact with him through another gig she was on. [She] mentioned this to him, and he liked her and ultimately agreed. Adam Kidan, same thing. We just reached out to him after he got out of prison. I had actually corresponded with him while he was in prison, and I think he wanted to tell his story. In the case of Bob, he knew that the guy who had sent him to prison, Neil Volz, had talked to me. At the time he couldn't have been more angry at one person than at Neil because Neil basically put him in jail. Now they've had a bit of a rapprochement I think, but that motivated Bob to talk.
It's funny the way it works. You keep at it, you keep at it, and then you get one person and it kind of leads you to another person. Once you get somebody in the room, my experience is that they're pretty open. DeLay is a little bit different. I mean DeLay spoke only because he was on a book tour. He was not the kind of strutting motherfucker that he was when he was at the height of his power. He was somewhat humbled, or, at least, soft-spoken, but he was completely unrepentant. And that was great. That's fine.
NP: You didn't get Abramoff on camera for the movie, but I understand you did talk with him.
AG: I didn't get any video of him in prison, but I did visit him. It was important for me, I think, to take the measure of the man. I found that productive, fruitful, important, but I was prohibited from taking my cameras into the prison.
NP: So what did he have to say to you?
AG: Most of what we talked about was off the record, but he gave me a tremendous amount of color and background in terms of how he did what he did, and that was great. Also, what was intriguing to me, back to this whole bad apple / rotten barrel thing, you know, talking to him, he's funny. He's a good storyteller, he's a movie buff, I'm a movie buff, he's a sports freak. It becomes easy to demonize people, like Washington has done to Abramoff, and when you do that you think, well it's just their character, it's a man of bad character, and you miss the bigger picture, which is how corruption works both systemically and how it works really in all of us.
NP: Because there's thousands of other lobbyists doing very similar things.
AG: Correct. It's going on now, and, as you say, it's worse in some ways.
NP: This movie is ultimately about the sale of America, and having seen your Enron documentary, it was interesting to see how you connected the dots in that film to Arnold Schwarzenegger. How Enron championed the ousting of California Governor Gray Davis, and brought in Schwarzenegger. Obviously we're sitting in California, which is a bankrupt state to this day because of that energy crisis. And one of the possible quid pro quos that you present in the movie is that Schwarzenegger was put in power on condition that he wouldn't go after the Enron money.
AG: Yeah. I think in a way, Schwarzenegger was a kind of beneficiary of the demonization of Gray Davis. I mean there was that famous meeting which I cite in the movie where Ken Lay talks to Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other people about taking advantage of what they did to Grey Davies. But I think Enron saw that much more pragmatically. Gray Davis was getting in their way, preventing them from making as much money as they wanted to make, so they took him out. And the way they took him out was by manipulating the electricity prices in the state. Now, at the same time, they were making scads of money doing that. With Enron it's a case of a failed company. I mean that was a disastrous company that was just hiding how disastrous it was from everybody, but that was one big profit center -- basically strip-mining California.
NP: And they were also pulling strings on a grass roots basis to oust Davis.
AG: They were definitely pulling strings, but one of the things I discovered afterwards was that they weren't the only ones. Sadly the outgoing Clinton administration wasn't giving a lot of help to Gray Davis either. In fact Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, the Chief of the Economic Council for the Obama administration, called up Gray Davis and lectured him. Basically they said you've got to build more dirty power plants and eviscerate your pollution controls, and let electricity prices rise as much as they will rise. You've got to believe in the market is what they told him. These were Democrats, well Greenspan wasn't a Democrat but Summers was Treasury Secretary.
Everybody has imbued that kind of money logic, the idea that whatever's good for business is good for America. Now Clinton has apologized for a lot of the policies that were done in his name through [Robert] Rueben and Summers, and that gets back to Casino Jack because Casino Jack is all about how money twists people. You know, suddenly people think it's a really good idea to have no regulation. Is that because in the pure marketplace of ideas they've just come to that [conclusion]? Or is it because actually, year after year after year, they're being re-elected because of the amount of money they're being paid by Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citibank etc?
NP: You talk about how money twists people, but the subject of your next documentary, Eliot Spitzer, is somewhat of an exception. One of the reasons they went after him was because money didn't twist him.
AG: Correct. Now, we should say right away that he certainly gave them the ammunition to take him out. They didn't force him to start seeing prostitutes. But, he was the one guy who was standing up when the federal government wasn't, when the FCC wasn't, the Justice Department wasn't. He stood up to them. He really had a finger on what ultimately led to the huge financial meltdown, and they were very angry at him. And, yeah, I think they took him out.
NP: What hope is there for a man (or woman) that can't be bought? Everyone has skeletons that can be rattled.
AG: At the end of the day, that's why we all watch. I think we're all potentially corrupt. I mean, in some ways, hoping for the white knight, the one perfect person, it's a fruitless hope. We're all imperfect. But the question is, when are we going to stand up behind people who are trying to do the right thing? That's important. Spitzer may not be perfect, but we have to ask ourselves, is it more important that he was seeing hookers or that the global economy was melting down?
Casino Jack and The United States of Money opens in select theaters on May 7. For more information on the film and to find out how you can help the campaign for more transparency and accountability in government go to: TakePart.com/CasinoJack