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Corruption countdown
At Number 12: former House Speaker Jim Wright. The venerable Texas politico was a master at evading the rules about how much a Congressman could make on the side. He was accused of forcing supporters to give his wife a no-show job, and of doubling his fees for speeches by insisting that groups also make bulk purchases of his book, "Reflections of a Public Man."
Placing eleventh, a reminder that you really should be nice to those on the way up, because you'll meet them on the way down: Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, who persecuted Hollywood writers as head of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the '40s. He was sent to the pen after it turned out that for eight years, he had padded his Congressional payroll with at least five fictional employees, $20 thousand of whose salaries, he kept for himself. Congressman Thomas wound up in the Federal Penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut -- a couple of cells down from two of the very same Hollywood writers he'd branded as Communists.
Our tenth all-time money-grabbing great? Congressman Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky. During the second World War, ordnance officers throughout the Army were barraged with phone calls from Congressman May, insisting they award war contracts to the Garsson brothers, two businessmen from New York. The Garssons, of course, were paying Congressman May. But it wasn't just the money involved. The Garssons were no good at making military materials. Their mortar shells tended to detonate at the wrong time - they killed at least 38 American soldiers.
At number nine on the list: Simon Cameron, President Lincoln's first Secretary of War. He was the Pete Best of the Lincoln Administration, the fifth member of the "Team of Rivals" -- the one Lincoln fired for corruption after not ten months in office. Lincoln supposedly asked Congressman Thaddeus Stevens about Cameron's honesty and Stevens replied, "I do not believe he would steal a red hot stove." Cameron demanded a retraction, so Stevens said he might have been wrong about that.
As the Secretary of War as the Civil War broke out, Cameron invested heavily in the Northern Central Pennsylvania Railroad, because it had the only tracks going from Harrisburg to Baltimore. Soon, Cameron, the Secretary of War, was shipping U.S. military men and supplies on the railroad largely owned by Cameron, the Investor.
Eighth is the infamous Albert Fall, the Secretary of the Interior in the Harding Administration, and centerpiece of what was, before Watergate, the consensus choice for worst political scandal in U.S. history: Teapot Dome. Fall was not, as legend has it, the man for whom the term "The Fall Guy" was coined, but he got a lot of coin. Naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, were transferred by President Harding to Fall's Department of the Interior. Fall promptly leased them to oil barons Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny. They made millions; Fall got first an interest-free loan of $100,000, then another pay-off. This at the time when Babe Ruth only made about $80,000 a year.
Our seventh most financially corrupt, is one of the most overshadowed figures of American political greed: Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president. Between 1967, when he failed to report $29,500 in bribes while governor of Maryland, and 1973, when he resigned as V-P to escape jail time, Agnew took at least a hundred grand, almost all of it in cash, and much of it in paper bags, the last few of which were handed to Agnew as he sat behind his desk in the White House.
For pure take-home money -- even in the context of the famous FBI sting in the '80s that laid him low -- number six, Congressman Richard Kelly, Republican of Florida, was hardly the greatest offender; in fact he got the shortest sentence of any of those convicted. But the less-than-ingenious way he took his payoffs in the "Abscam Scandal", combined with the advance of technology, push him near the top of our list. Kelly was convicted after prosecutors produced at his trial, grainy videotape of him taking $25,000 in cash from the FBI agents dressed up as Middle Eastern businessmen and stuffing the money into his coat pockets. The Congressman then turned to one of the agents and asked, "Does it show?"
And now to the top five.
And if you put up an online petition to urge President Bush to pardon you, and in three years
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Sandy Huffaker / Getty Images Congressman Randy Duke Cunningham (2nd R) walks into Federal Courthouse during the sentencing phase at the U.S. District Courthouse March 3, 2006. Cunningham was found guilty of conspiracy and tax evasion for accepting more than 2.4 million in bribes. |
Fourth on our "Blagojevich List" – yet another American Vice-President: Schuyler Colfax was the presumed successor to President Ulysses Grant. But then the "Credit Mobilier" scandal broke, and even the ethically-laissez-faire Grant dropped Colfax from his reelection ticket. Colfax had supposedly done a masterful job concealing his role in the most massive swindle of the 19th Century, the building of intercontinental railroad lines for the Union Pacific. $72 million was spent - $72 million in 1872 money -- but Credit Mobilier built only $53 million worth of rail lines. The scandal was so big, it rocked the U.S. economy.
They got Vice President Colfax on one check -- for just $1,200 bucks.
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Morry Gash / AP Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich |
This is mostly based on degree of difficulty. To think -- in any year after the invention of the first recording device of 1877 -- that you could get away with selling a senate seat, and nobody would find out! Just think what he could've done with a little more time. And a little less wiretapping.
But who could possibly top B-Rod? Well, the runner-up for all-time most financially corrupt American politician is, at number two, probably the most cold-heartedly venal of all our politicians: Charles Forbes, President Harding's choice to head up the then-brand new Veteran's Bureau, in 1921. In his three years on the job, the total budget for the Bureau was $1.3 billion. He embezzled close to 250 million of it.
Forbes sold supplies meant for the vets and kept the money, took huge kickbacks during the building of VA hospitals, and maybe worst of all, he managed to make himself a Colonel in the Army, an especially galling outcome considering he had deserted from the Army in 1912.
And so to the top of the list, and, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, the Napoleon of Political Crime: None other than the almost mythical William Marcy "Boss" Tweed.
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Mathew Brady / AP An undated image of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed |
The living monument to his blinding felonious brilliance is the Tweed Courthouse, still standing.
Even in the 1870's, the three million dollars it actually cost to build was a phenomenon of largesse. But the city didn't pay three million for it. Your cost? Thirteen million!
When finally arrested in October, 1872, Boss Tweed was held on bail of $8 million -- the 2008 equivalent of bail of $137 million. And because, sadly, he lived long before wiretaps or careless boasting, we will never know exactly how much he stole. But academic research estimates it could have been as much as $250 million -- about $3.2 billion today.
Eat your heart out, Rod Blagojevich!
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