Murder One

It must have been just an imaginary shudder I thought went through Jack Abramoff today. He is under indictment for wire fraud and other crimes, but sometimes having options is not that big a comfort. Florida, for example, gives the condemned the choice of lethal injection or the electric chair.

This point must have become a bit more immediate with the arrest for murder and conspiracy of three men linked to the Gambino crime family. James V. Grimaldi and Susan Schmidt have laid this and much else out in a very nice Washington Post Story.

The chain of events got underway when Abramoff and Kidnan bought Santa Cruz Casinos from (the late) Gus Boulis. The murdered man was a former partner who had been complaining that Jack and his business partner (and old College Republican buddy) Adan Kidan had cheated him out of several million dollars. The problem for the partners is that a nice fat ($240,000) money trail leads from their enterprise to the alleged perps. Their troubles are not theirs alone. Republican Congressmen Tom ("Jack who?) Delay and Bob ("I was duped") provided some political muscle to make the original casino deal happen.
Abramoff is at the center of a federal investigation into lobbying for Indian tribes and influence-peddling in Washington. Abramoff used contacts with Republican Reps. Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and members of their staffs as he worked to land the SunCruz deal, interviews and court records show.
This is just another bit of bad news for a couple of guys whose day might already have been spoiled.
On Aug. 11, Abramoff and Kidan were indicted by a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale on five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy relating to their $147.5 million SunCruz purchase. Prosecutors alleged that Abramoff and Kidan faked a wire transfer of $23 million -- the down payment they had agreed to put into the deal for the fleet of Florida-based day-cruise casino boats.
Coincidence, no doubt, but:
Abramoff and Kidan were traveling on business abroad at the time of Boulis's murder.
Jack has a lot of old College Republican buddies who have also been enmeshed in his schemes - Karl Rove, Grover Nordquist, and Ralph Reed for example. It's just possible that the prosecutors might suspect that Jack now has some incentive to start talking.

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