Background and career
Jack Allan Abramoff (; born February 28, 1959) is an American lobbyist, businessman, film producer, writer, and convicted felon. He was at the center of an extensive federal corruption investigation, which resulted in his conviction and 21 others either pleading guilty or being found guilty, including White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian, U.S. Representative Bob Ney, and nine other lobbyists and congressional aides. Abramoff was national chairman of the College Republican National Committee from 1981 to 1985; a founding member of the International Freedom Foundation, allegedly financed by the apartheid-era government of South Africa; and served on the board of directors of National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank. From 1994 through 2001, he was a top lobbyist for the firm of Preston Gates & Ellis and subsequently for Greenberg Traurig until March 2004. After a guilty plea in the Jack Abramoff Native American lobbying scandal and his dealings with SunCruz Casinos in January 2006, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials and tax evasion. He served 43 months before being released on December 3, 2010. After his release from prison, he wrote the autobiographical book Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist, published in November 2011. Abramoff's lobbying and the scandals and investigation associated with it have been the subject of two films, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, released in May 2010, and Casino Jack, released on December 17, 2010, with Kevin Spacey starring as Abramoff.
Abramoff was born February 28, 1959, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents Jane (née Divac) and Franklin Abramoff, who was president of the franchises unit of Diners Club International. Abramoff is Jewish. In 1969, when Abramoff was ten years old, his family moved to Beverly Hills, California. After seeing the film version of Fiddler on the Roof two years later, at age twelve, Abramoff decided to practice Orthodox Judaism. Abramoff attended Beverly Hills High School, where he played football and was a weightlifting champion. In 2007, Jonathan Gold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic for The Los Angeles Times who attended Beverly Hills High School at the same time, recounted an incident in which Abramoff pushed him and his cello down a flight of stairs. The incident was reported by The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles under the headline, "Jack Abramoff the bully". Abramoff attended Brandeis University, where he was elected treasurer of the Brandeis College Republicans. In April 1980, Abramoff was elected chairman of the Massachusetts Alliance of College Republicans, a student volunteer organization then working for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Abramoff cited the Massachusetts College Republicans' role in Reagan's close victory in the state as a "major factor", claiming that "Reagan spent only $25,000 in the state and won by a mere 3000 votes. Five thousand (members of the) College Republicans produced thousands of votes for him". In 1981, Abramoff graduated from Brandeis with a B.A. in English, and enrolled in Georgetown University Law Center, where he earned his Juris Doctor degree in 1986. According to Nina Easton, who authored a 2001 biography on Abramoff and several other conservatives, Abramoff gained much of his credibility in the conservative movement through his father, Franklin Abramoff, who, as president of Diners Club International, worked closely with Alfred S. Bloomingdale, a personal friend of Reagan.
After graduating from Brandeis, Abramoff ran for election as chairman of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC). After a campaign, which cost over $11,000 and was managed by Grover Norquist, Abramoff won the election. His chief competitor, Amy Moritz, was persuaded to drop out; later, as Amy Ridenour, she became a founding director of the National Center for Public Policy Research and was treated to several trips funded by Jack Abramoff when Abramoff was a federal lobbyist. Abramoff "changed the direction of the [college] committee and made it more activist and conservative than ever before", CRNC notes. "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left," Abramoff was quoted as writing in the group's 1983 annual report. "Our job is to remove them from power permanently." Norquist served as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under Abramoff, and Abramoff later recruited Ralph Reed, a former president of the University of Georgia's College Republicans chapter, as an unpaid intern. According to Reed's book Active Faith, Reed introduced Abramoff to Pamela Clarke Alexander, who Abramoff later married. In August 1984, as CRNC chairman, Abramoff addressed the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, which nominated Reagan as the party's nominee and for reelection in the 1984 presidential election.
At the CRNC, Abramoff developed political alliances with College Republican chapter presidents across the nation, many who went on to hold key roles in state and national politics and business and some who later interacted with Abramoff in his role as a lobbyist. Some of those relationships were later at the core of the federal investigation. At the CRNC, Abramoff, Norquist, and Reed formed an aggressive alliance known as the "Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate". After Abramoff's election, the trio purged "dissidents" and rewrote the CRNC's bylaws to consolidate their control over the organization. According to Easton's biography, Gang of Five, Reed was the "hatchet man" and "carried out Abramoff-Norquist orders with ruthless efficiency, not bothering to hide his fingerprints". In 1983, the CRNC passed a resolution condemning "deliberate planted propaganda by the KGB and Soviet proxy forces" against the government of South Africa when the country's government was under worldwide criticism for apartheid. In 1984, Abramoff and other College Republicans formed USA Foundation, a non-partisan tax-exempt organization, which held two days of rallies on college campuses around the nation celebrating the first anniversary of the United States invasion of Grenada. In a letter to campus Republican leaders at the time, Abramoff wrote:
While the Student Liberation Day Coalition is nonpartisan and intended only for educational purposes, I don't need to tell you how important this project is to our efforts as [College Republicans]. I am confident that an impartial study of the contrasts between the Carter/Mondale failure in Iran and the Reagan victory in Grenada will be most enlightening to voters 12 days before the general election.
In 1985, Abramoff joined Citizens for America, a pro-Reagan group that helped Oliver North build support for the Contras in Nicaragua. Citizens for America staged an unprecedented meeting of anti-Communist rebel leaders, known as the Democratic International in Jamba, Angola, which included leaders of the Afghan mujahideen from Afghanistan, UNITA from Angola, the Contras, and opposition groups from Laos. The largely ceremonial conference led to the development of the International Freedom Foundation. Abramoff helped organize the conference, and participated in it. Abramoff later departed Citizens for America when the organization's primary sponsor, Lewis Lehrman, a former New York gubernatorial candidate, concluded that Abramoff had spent the organization's money carelessly. In 1986, Reagan appointed Abramoff to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
