WASHINGTON BABYLON

California Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham traded military contracts for $2.4 million in antiques, cash, and other booty. He is now in jail, but his case exposed a world of bribery, booze, and broads that reaches into the Pentagon, the C.I.A., and Congress. Washington is wondering: Who's next?

By JUDY BACHRACH

The corruption of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a powerful California Republican, was, as the U.S. Attorney's Office maintains, historically "unparalleled"—an astonishing statement coming in the wake of the Abramoff scandal. A former Vietnam naval pilot who was awarded two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart, Cunningham, now 64, appropriated John Wayne's nickname and first ran for the House with the slogan "A congressman we can be proud of." Indeed, from the moment he arrived in Washington, in 1991, he made it his business to seem larger than life, telling people that his wartime heroics had inspired episodes in the movie Top Gun. His military service and expertise eventually earned him a place on the defense-appropriations subcommittee, with vast sway over the military budget, as well as on the intelligence committee, which oversees the C.I.A. and other spy agencies. Ever ready to defend the integrity of the armed forces, as he saw it, Duke excoriated Democrats who wanted to cut the defense budget, calling them the same people "who would put homos in the military."
But in November, Cunningham's heroic image came crashing down, and his swagger evaporated when he pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors in exchange for pressuring the Pentagon to buy their products and services. The government believes he was bribed chiefly by two men, identified in court documents as "co-conspirator No. 1" and "co-conspirator No. 2," now known to be Brent Wilkes and his protégé Mitchell Wade. (Wilkes has vigorously denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crimes in this case.) The products they hawked—computer software to scan and convert military maps, drawings, and documents into digital format—lacked glamour, perhaps, but they made the two entrepreneurs and Cunningham wealthy, arrogant, and even reckless, courtesy of a compliant Pentagon. Wilkes's two dozen or so firms, in California and Virginia, raked in $100 million over the last decade, while Wade's Washington-based MZM Inc. has gotten $150 million since 2002.
According to prosecutors, Wilkes and Wade generously remunerated Duke Cunningham for steering government business their way. Wilkes, prosecutors allege, gave Cunningham more than $600,000 in bribes, including two checks totaling $100,000 and $525,000 to pay off a mortgage. (Wilkes, through his attorney, denies these allegations.) In February, Wade pleaded guilty to bribing Cunningham with over $1 million—but he operated with more panache, indulging Cunningham's taste for outsize antiques. The trove he offered included Persian and Indian rugs, sleek Louis-Philippe and Restoration commodes, a $24,000 Victorian china hutch, leaded-glass cabinets, and silver candlesticks worth $5,600. "Duke liked his antiques big and he liked them expensive," explains a Maryland antiques dealer, who despaired of his taste. (Duke got other gifts as well: a secondhand Rolls-Royce and the use of Wade's 42-foot boat, renamed the Duke-Stir.)
The truth is no one knows if the $2.4 million in bribes Cunningham has admitted taking in his guilty plea is the final total. Duke's been at it for some time. In fact, right up to the end, the Maryland antiques dealer tells me, Cunningham was trying to get her to put one of his valuable 19th-century armoires in storage, "anywhere, he didn't care where," as long as it was far from the government's prying eyes. "Very immature, thinking the rules of the game didn't apply to him," the dealer says. But why should they? For years he had been running the game. (Cunningham's attorney, K. Lee Blalack II, refuses to comment on the substance of the case.)
In March, Cunningham was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison—the harshest sentence ever received by an ex-congressman for corruption. But the investigations are far from over, and allegations continue to surface implicating other legislators and government officials. California Republican congressman Jerry Lewis, head of the House committee on appropriations, is currently being investigated. So is Wilkes's best friend from high-school days, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who was until recently No. 3 at the C.I.A., and who is alleged to have accepted lavish favors from Wilkes—a trip to a Honolulu estate, for instance, renting for $50,000 per week—in exchange for arranging lucrative C.I.A. contracts for his friend. (Wilkes, Lewis, and Foggo have denied any wrongdoing.) Republican congresswoman and senatorial candidate Katherine Harris, of Florida, a source familiar with her activities tells me, is also being scrutinized for her dealings with Wade—in particular, for receiving $32,000 in illegal campaign donations, and for a lavish dinner she enjoyed last year for which he paid more than $3,300. (Harris says that she did not know the donations were illegal and has since given the money to charity.) In addition, Wade, who is cooperating with the authorities, has told the F.B.I. that Wilkes kept hospitality suites in the Watergate Hotel and Westin Grand in order to entertain legislators and government officials with evenings of poker, cigars, and, on occasion, for Cunningham, prostitutes.
Tens of thousands of pages of congressional documents going as far back as 1997 have been demanded by the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. The C.I.A., Pentagon, I.R.S., and F.B.I. are conducting investigations, and at least three congressional committees are cooperating in hopelessly tardy fashion. "We are scrubbing" is how a staffer on the intelligence committee puts it. Washington is unraveling.
"What these revelations provide is a window into Babylon or the last stages of Rome," explains a source with knowledge of the multiple ongoing investigations. "Many felonies went undetected because in the Defense Department a lot goes on in secret, and these crimes grew in the shadow of both 9/11 and one-party rule—with little scrutiny. So what you're looking at is a world where money, secrecy, sex, and indulgence were all in play. Where everyone is guilty of something."
n June 2004—in the middle of the Caucus Room, a crowded Washington restaurant—Cunningham accepted a fat envelope from Wade. "What's in it?" asked David Heil, Cunningham's chief of staff. Money to repair the Duke-Stir, $6,500 in cash, Cunningham told him. Several months later the aide, who had long been concerned about his boss's misdeeds—so much so that he personally checked Cunningham's real-estate records in California—begged Cunningham to resign. "This is stupid! It's insane!" the aide supposedly said. "I would bet my own house this whole thing will come out." Cunningham listened to this lecture, silent and shamefaced, but he didn't resign. Instead, his chief of staff did.
Heil's prediction came true when Marcus Stern, of the Copley News Service, broke a story last spring in The San Diego Union-Tribune about a very profitable real-estate transaction Duke made in 2003. That year the congressman bought a new, $2.6 million house in Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic area of estates in the northwestern part of his district, in San Diego County. To do so he sold his old house, in Del Mar, to Wade for $1.675 million. This was $700,000 more than it was worth. In fact, Wade, who never moved into the house, sold it for that much less nine months later.
Subsequent stories about Cunningham in The San Diego Union-Tribune (which shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize with the Copley News Service for superb reporting on the Cunningham scandal) were followed by intense interest in the congressman by the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego. Last year, this caused him to sink into a depression that included thoughts of suicide. He wasn't wholly to blame for his troubles, Cunningham later told Saul Faerstein, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. He'd been led astray, his "moral and religious values" perverted by unwholesome friends. "He recognizes now that Wade and others in Washington were part of a culture of corruption," wrote Faerstein, an expert for the defense in the O. J. Simpson trial, who was hired by Cunningham's lawyer in an effort to obtain a lighter sentence for his client. "He is troubled he didn't see the motives of the people he trusted." In fact, Faerstein wrote to the court, he found Cunningham "naïve in some ways, always trying to see the best qualities in people."
Do you know that Cunningham wrote a "bribe menu," detailing how many hundreds of thousands he should be paid for defense contracts, right under the bald eagle on his House of Representatives stationery? I ask the psychiatrist. Did Duke tell you he tried to inveigle innocent people into covering up his moneymaking schemes? "That was certainly quite damning…. But I never heard about that until later," says the psychiatrist. "I asked Cunningham's lawyer, 'Why didn't you provide me with that information?' They told me they gave me what I needed…. I am not very happy I didn't know all the facts." (Blalack says, "We made available to Dr. Faerstein all of the evidence that was in our possession.")
So, even as he was pleading guilty, Duke wasn't straight with you? I ask. "No," says Faerstein. "If I'd known about those things, I would have seen he was not so much influenced by the culture of corruption as part of the culture of corruption."
hen he tearfully informed the psychiatrist that he "came to Washington to do good" and that for most of his tenure he "did good and was not involved in illegal or unethical conduct," Cunningham probably believed every syllable. The son of a Union Oil truckdriver, he was born in Los Angeles and grew up in rural Missouri, where, according to Faerstein's psychiatric evaluation, he was "raised with traditional values," doing farm work, such as forking hay and driving tractors. As a young man, Cunningham worked as a teacher and swimming coach. He married twice, the first time in his senior year of college to Susan Albrecht. They adopted a son, Todd, now 37, who in 1997 was arrested for possession with intent to distribute 400 pounds of marijuana. Cunningham and Susan were divorced in 1973. A year later he married his current wife, Nancy. The couple has two daughters, April, 27, and Carrie, 24. Both Cunningham families appear to have suffered from Duke's long absences. In court for Todd's marijuana sentencing, he admitted he had spent only a month a year with his son after he and his wife divorced, and April Cunningham, now a librarian, recently declared in court papers, "My father was often not with my family throughout my childhood."
In 1967, Cunningham joined the navy, where he became a fighter pilot. It was Vietnam, where he flew an F-4 Phantom, that changed his life and ambitions. In May 1972, he shot down five North Vietnamese MiGs to become the war's first "ace." Around this time he took the pilot call sign "Duke." It was a name he kept on his return to civilian life, in 1987. Faerstein believes it symbolizes both his strength and his undoing: "'Duke' became an outsized personification of Randall Cunningham," Faerstein wrote. "It is possible that his extraordinary deeds in the service planted a subconscious sense of entitlement."
That "outsized personification" would mark every step of Cunningham's political career. Two years after his election to Congress he announced that the liberal leadership of the House should be "lined up and shot." During a debate on Bosnia, he engaged in a physical scuffle (broken up by Capitol police) with Representative James Moran, a Virginia Democrat. In 1997, when Cunningham's suspicious enthusiasm for projects going to Brent Wilkes's companies was noted by the press, the congressman stated, "I'm on the side of the angels here." Anyone who questioned his intentions, said Duke, can "go to hell."
Cunningham is believed to have been introduced to Wilkes, now 51, in the early 90s by Congressman Bill Lowery (whose seat Cunningham would fill after Lowery and his wife were discovered to have written 300 bad checks on the House bank). Wilkes's father, like Cunningham a naval pilot, was killed in a 1959 accident while taking off from an aircraft carrier. Wilkes grew up poor, raised by his widowed mother near a San Diego naval base. At San Diego State University, he roomed with his high-school football buddy Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, and both were active in the Young Republicans, as was Lowery. After graduation, Wilkes moved to Washington, D.C., where, I am told, he accompanied groups of congressmen, including Lowery, to fly down to Central America to hang out with Dusty Foggo, by then a C.I.A. agent who was working with the contras to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Every time Wilkes was asked by Tom Casey, a California defense contractor who would eventually work with him, how he got to be so friendly with Lowery and other congressmen, the answer was always the same, Casey tells me: "Honduras." Specifically, Casey adds, Wilkes described sexual encounters between congressmen and women from Honduran villages. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports similar recollections, attributing them to three of Wilkes's former friends. (Through his attorney Nancy Luque, Wilkes denies having ever traveled to Honduras with congressmen. Lowery's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, says that when his client was a congressman he did indeed go "on a couple of trips with Wilkes to Central America." However, he adds, Lowery "absolutely denies being involved with any women with Wilkes." Foggo's attorney says that Foggo never met congressmen in Honduras.)
By the early 1990s, Wilkes had returned to California, where he was "beyond broke," recalls Casey. "He lived in a rented house and carpooled in a Chevy Cavalier." It was at this point that Wilkes began to work with Casey at Audre, Inc., a Rancho Bernardo producer of automated document-conversion systems (with defense applications). Casey, the firm's founder and C.E.O., says he paid him about $90,000 a year to market the product and to lobby Washington officials and legislators. On trips to Washington, Casey recalls, Wilkes was able to usher him into the presence of important members of the armed-services and appropriations committees, including, most notably, Lowery and Lowery's closest friend on the latter, fellow California Republican Jerry Lewis, now 71. The genteel Lewis and the earthy Lowery reportedly loved to dine and even vacation together. "Everyone on the defense committee always works cooperatively," says Casey, who realized pretty quickly that no money came his way without their support. "It was team play, and they emphasized that to me constantly."
Wilkes also introduced Casey to Dusty Foggo, who often passed through Washington. Around 1994, during a visit to a Washington strip club, Casey says, Foggo wore a gun in a shoulder holster and flashed his identification at the club doorman. He was promptly seated by the stage. "Foggo sits there the whole night telling me how he likes to fuck girls in the ass," Casey recalls. "He sees a girl there, he jabs you and says, 'She's ready to go—let's double-team her.' The weirdest combination of sex and domination! And Wilkes, he's just laughing the whole time." (Through an attorney, Foggo says that this incident never happened. According to his lawyer, Wilkes denies visiting strip clubs in adulthood.)
asey says that Wilkes soon felt cocky enough to ask him for $148,000 a month for a Washington office, with complete discretionary control of funds. He also wanted to rent hotel "hospitality suites" for congressmen, the idea being, as Casey recalls, "these are fun-loving guys, they get tired of being in an office all day, and yet they have to be in proximity of the Capitol to vote. So we'll have booze and bedrooms for them to sleep in." Casey and two former Audre executives say that this plan was vetoed, as was, says Casey, the two million Audre share options Wilkes had requested. (Wilkes's attorney responds: "There may have been a discussion about creating [an office]. The funds would have been for technical and program-management people…. Audre offered Wilkes stock as an incentive plan, but he never received any." And "there is no truth" to the hospitality-suite allegation. She adds, "Nothing Casey says can be relied upon.… He apparently harbors ill will towards Wilkes for leaving Audre behind to become successful.")
Wilkes left Audre and in 1995 launched a competing firm, ADCS. Soon he started giving money to Cunningham's campaign and PAC. It didn't take long to get the desired results, especially after Cunningham obtained a seat on the defense-appropriations subcommittee, in 1997. In July 1999, the government says, Wilkes wrote for Cunningham's benefit a memo helpfully entitled "Talking Points," a copy of which is in court documents. Printed in capital letters, the memo is written in a tone edged with all the righteous rage felt by the author. "WE NEED $10 M[ILLION] MORE IMMEDIATELY," Cunningham was to instruct a Pentagon official. "THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT AND IF YOU CANNOT RESOLVE THIS, OTHERS WILL BE CALLING ALSO." (Wilkes's attorney would not comment.) It is unknown if any calls were made, but Cunningham and Lewis held a joint press conference in Washington to announce they were cutting nearly $2 billion from the F-22 Raptor fighter-jet program, which both had initially supported. Shortly thereafter, $5 million more was allocated by the military for Wilkes's company, and in October most of the F-22 money was restored. (Through his spokesman, Lewis says he was unaware of Cunningham's efforts to secure funding for ADCS.)
"The enabler in this story is the Pentagon," explains someone familiar with the investigation. "To get what it wants—the F-22, say, or better intelligence—it goes along and funds the shoddy stuff Cunningham and [Wilkes] want. It's thinking, 'Cunningham will fund the Taj Mahal of intelligence for us as long as we take care of his friends.'"
Within a year of his victorious fight with the Pentagon, Cunningham claims, he received $100,000 from Wilkes. Gone were the days when Wilkes was cash-strapped. In 1999 he and his wife, Regina, bought a $1.4 million gated home with a tennis court and pool in a suburb of San Diego. In 2003 he built an $11 million glass office building in Poway, 20 miles north of San Diego, as his business headquarters. He and Regina donated generously to his alma mater, San Diego State University, so much that until recently it was rumored that its College of Business Administration was going to name itself after him. "Boom shaka-laka!" Wilkes used to shout in his more bouyant moments, at the height of his prosperity, or, alternatively, "Yeah, baby!"
n 2000, Wilkes and ADCS became "too hot to deal with," a source familiar with the situation tells me. A Pentagon official believed they had fraudulently billed $750,000 for unfinished work scanning maps of the Panama Canal Zone. (Wilkes's lawyer declares, "If there was any fraud, Wilkes was unaware of it because he was only a subcontractor and not doing the billing.") At this point, Wilkes hired "co-conspirator No. 2," Mitchell Wade, who would act for him in winning new government contracts. Wade, now 47, was a former Pentagon intelligence official with formidable contacts in the military, lavish tastes, and—most important—a profound understanding of the "black world" of classified intelligence, which Wilkes didn't know much about. A graduate of George Washington University, Wade had been a Middle East desk officer at the Pentagon during Desert Storm and was awarded a Desert Storm medal. In 1993, he had set up the defense contracting firm MZM—a name based on the first names of his children, Matthew, Zachary, and Morgan—and although the company posted no revenue for its first six years, it flourished after that.
At first, Wade studied Wilkes carefully: "Everything he learned, he learned from Wilkes," says a friend, and the two worked together closely. In 2004, Cunningham appropriated nearly $6 million for MZM's data-storage systems, which were worth "substantially less," prosecutors claim. They were actually delivered by Wilkes's ADCS, which ended up with $4.8 million of the total.
However, after a few years as associates, Wade and Wilkes experienced a growing disaffection with each other. "Wade was carrying the subcontracts for Wilkes, and taking the political heat," I am told by a source close to Wade. In time Wade would outstrip his mentor. He threw massive parties at Washington's Four Seasons Hotel, where, one guest estimates, "it cost $200 a person: filet mignon, alcohol, champagne. He was actually smart about the image he projected."
Soon, Wade developed his own relationship with Cunningham. "Mitch, I'm going to make you somebody," Cunningham promised in November 2001, after selecting $12,000 worth of antiques paid for by his new friend, and he was true to his word: Wade did become somebody. He was able to buy a $3 million house in Washington's prized Kalorama area. His company, MZM, operated out of a beautiful four-story Victorian house on Dupont Circle, packed with 19th-century partners desks and ruby-colored Oriental rugs.
Wade paid lofty salaries—$105,000 for an entry-level job, in one case, with a promise to pay off graduate-school debts at $6,000 a year. "I told my wife it was just like John Grisham's novel The Firm," recalls one former employee. "Everything was compartmentalized, and if it wasn't your business, you had no business knowing about it."
"Absolutely, it was very secretive," Cynthia Bruno Wynkoop, who worked at MZM from 2001 until 2004, tells me. In fact, a lot of the work done by the firm was very secretive as well. Wynkoop, a lawyer, was hired out to work in Arlington, Virginia, on the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), with computer systems processing specific data. "Yes, you could call it data mining," she says.
She was troubled by her boss, though. "Of course, I was pressured to give money to certain candidates—everyone was," says Wynkoop. "[North Carolina Republican senator] Elizabeth Dole and [Virginia Republican] representative Virgil Goode—they were highly recommended." (Goode's rural district is the site of an MZM facility.) "Wade would make remarks and let you know." She says she ended up giving $1,000 to the company PAC and $500 to each candidate. Indeed, Wade would eventually inform prosecutors, he not only pressured employees to make political contributions, in violation of federal election laws, but also illegally repaid some—in cash.
wo years ago, Katherine Harris (best known as the Florida secretary of state who presided over the agonizing 2000 presidential recount, and now more obliquely known in court papers as "Rep. B") went to dinner with Wade—whom she had met through Cunningham—and subsequently got a stack of $2,000 checks for her campaign signed by his employees. Many were written on the same day. Harris would later say she had hardly any idea why—maybe they just liked her politics. (In all, Wade gave her $32,000 in illegal contributions.)
But, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Wade told Harris exactly what he wanted over the dinner, for which he paid $2,800 at Citronelle, an elegant Washington restaurant: lots of federal funding to build a $10 million counter-intelligence facility in her Florida district. They also discussed the possibility of his throwing her a fund-raiser. In vain did Ed Rollins, who was then Harris's campaign strategist, warn the congresswoman (who is not allowed to receive gifts exceeding $50) that a $2,800 dinner and a fund-raiser might be interpreted as a shady quid pro quo for snagging millions of dollars for her benefactor. "Mitch, what a special evening! The best dinner I have ever enjoyed in Washington…. Please let me know if I can ever be of assistance," a thrilled Harris wrote by hand in a letter given to me by a former MZM employee. (After insisting she had "reimbursed" the restaurant for the meal, Harris switched positions recently, saying, "I have donated to a local Florida charity $100, which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer.")
In 2005, Harris had a second dinner with Wade, for which, a friend of his tells me, he paid more than $3,300, and a few months later a Harris aide named Mona Tate Yost was hired by MZM. Although a Harris spokeswoman initially said Yost's contacts with her old congressional office were "purely on a social level," this too turned out to be false. An e-mail I have seen, written in 2005, indicates Yost had promised to approach a top Harris staffer "with a meeting." She was working on an MZM draft of a legislative-funding proposal that would, Wade hoped, underwrite his $10 million counter-intelligence facility. (Yost didn't return phone calls for comment.) An MZM employee, Kay Coles James, e-mailed the company's draft to Harris's office, which ultimately submitted it to the appropriations committee, with some of the language intact. (Possibly because Harris applied for the funding late and the request was ill-written, the money never was allocated. "I think Mitch made a mistake in trying to bribe Harris," a Capitol Hill source says, chuckling. "She's so incompetent she can't be bribed.")
t was Duke Cunningham, however, who was foremost in the thoughts of Wade's employees. The firm honored him with fund-raisers, where some found him a bombastic, boastful fellow, according to an ex-employee. "At one point, Mitch made the comment about Cunningham, 'I own him,'" recalls Richard Peze, an MZM vice president until 2003. "Here's the point I tried to make to Wade. I thought we were putting too much faith in Cunningham…. If the company was going to be successful, we had to stop relying on Wade's benefactors in Congress." Another thing bothered Peze. "I know of two instances where I believe hours were billed to the government that weren't being worked," he says, adding that last summer he talked to Pentagon investigators about his concerns.
But Wade was flying high. Indeed, for a man who was usually so secretive, he could be amazingly indiscreet. "Where's your Rolls-Royce?" one employee asked him. "Duke's driving it now—it's parked in the congressional parking lot," Wade answered. Wynkoop recalls Wade telling her he had bought the yacht, the Duke-Stir, which Cunningham was living on. "I was sitting with Mitch in the Capital Grille restaurant when he phones Duke at midnight! Who ever calls a congressman at midnight?" asks Wynkoop. "It was all very bizarre and very surreal."
Another bizarre circumstance: For a modest $140,000, I learn from the Federal Procurement Data System, MZM was hired to provide computer programming for the Executive Office of the President—a remarkable coup for Wade. One month later he paid exactly $140,000 for the Duke-Stir, which was moved to Cunningham's boatslip. "I knew then that somebody was going to go to jail for that," says a party to the sale. "Duke looked at the boat, and Wade bought it—all in one day. Then they got on the boat and floated away."
Cunningham was not shy about detailing his desires. Above the word "Duke" on his congressional stationery he scrawled the number 16, then the letters BT for "boat," then 140. This meant, his friend Wade later acknowledged to prosecutors, that in return for the congressman's use of the $140,000 boat Wade would get a $16 million contract. For another $50,000, Wade would get a $17 million contract—and so on.
After the news story about the sale of his Del Mar house broke, Cunningham tried to get others to cover his tracks. He called Elizabeth Todd, a local real-estate agent, and pressured her to fax him a letter claiming that 2004 was a buyers' market, a request with which Todd only reluctantly complied, since she knew it to be inaccurate. Next, he wrote a letter to Wade in which, after professing amazement at the low resale price of his former home, he offered to pay the $700,000 difference—but never did. Later that same month, he sent a $16,500 check to a dealer from whom Wade had purchased a few Oriental rugs for him. Along with the money came a handwritten note explaining that he had tried to send the dealer the check earlier, but had misaddressed the envelope. Nor was that the end of his machinations. Last July Duke phoned the Maryland antiques dealer he and Wade had patronized at least half a dozen times. Anxiously, he pleaded with her to recall that he had quietly slipped $35,000 in cash to Wade as compensation for the lavish purchases. "I never saw it, and believe me, $35,000 in cash I would remember!" the dealer tells me.
When the distraught Cunningham called her yet again—this time right before Thanksgiving, just days before he tearfully pleaded guilty—to get the dealer to put his Victorian armoire in storage, a store employee put Cunningham on speakerphone. "What's going on? Am I being taped?" the congressman demanded to know. "Has anyone 'visited' the antique store recently?"
They had, indeed. Months earlier, two female F.B.I. agents, flashing badges and demanding furniture receipts, had visited the store—because Wade had been talking to authorities since June 2005.
He had plenty to say. In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, Wade was also talking to investigators about his mentor, Brent Wilkes. Specifically, he claimed that Wilkes used a limousine service to ferry escorts to and from assignations with Cunningham in rented suites at Washington's Watergate Hotel and Westin Grand. Federal agents are investigating to see if any other lawmakers were involved with the escorts. (Luque responds, "Brent Wilkes never arranged prostitutes for anyone.") But a source who knows the details of the scandal suggests this is too simple an equation. "People are missing the completeness of the corruption: It wasn't 'Get me a hooker and I'll get you a defense contract from the appropriations committee,'" he says. "It's 'I will take care of you and meet your every wish, need, and fantasy, and in exchange you are going to take care of me!' Wilkes tried to corrupt completely—it was a real omertà thing. And when Mitch Wade came in later and had his relationship with Cunningham, that too moved into a broader scheme, but it was driven by Duke, asking for more and more. 'Get me the boat, the antiques—then pay the costs to move those antiques to California!'" ("This is an absolutely false picture of Brent Wilkes," who conducted his business properly, says Luque.)
Among those rumored to have attended poker nights at Wilkes's hospitality suites were C.I.A. director Porter Goss (although a spokeswoman strongly denies Goss ever went) and Wilkes's old high-school football buddy and college roommate, Dusty Foggo, by this time No. 3 at the C.I.A. Goss, who became C.I.A. director in 2004, had promoted him to executive director. Agency personnel were stunned. Foggo was "a very obscure guy," explains a former top operative. As it turned out, Foggo's sudden rise was due in part to Brant Bassett, a C.I.A. case officer known as "Nine Fingers" after he lost a digit in a motorcycle accident. It was Bassett who told Goss that Foggo was "a very capable man who's done tremendous things for the agency."
hy Goss would take personnel tips from Bassett is anybody's guess. "From time to time Bassett ran aground on judgment issues," recalls Milt Bearden, a former C.I.A. station chief. In 1989, Bassett was reprimanded for inappropriately carrying a gun to a meeting. That same year he sent a prank letter to a C.I.A. agent stationed in Vienna whom he'd heard the K.G.B. was trying to blackmail. "So Bassett wrote the poor guy in Vienna a letter as if he were his lover, describing their supposedly delightful sex acts," reports a source. What Bassett didn't expect was that Cuban intelligence would get hold of his bawdy letter, at which point they tried to blackmail him.
Foggo, too, had problems with his C.I.A. bosses. He was reportedly accused of insubordination by a female superior, who retired shortly after his 2004 promotion. In Frankfurt, where he had been chief of the C.I.A.'s logistics office, a $2-to-$3-million agency contract to supply bottled water to agency personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan was awarded to Archer Logistics, which had no experience in such matters, but which happened to be owned by Foggo's old high-school friend Wilkes. (A lawyer for Foggo claims his client had no idea the firm belonged to Wilkes.) Like Congress, the C.I.A. is used to doling out huge sums, often with little or no oversight. "Look, the agency guys live in a culture where there's tons of money and a lot of it is cash," explains one intelligence source, "where you say, How much cash are we giving that guy, that asset, and what suitcase was it in? The American Tourister?"
In early May, when Foggo arrived for work at Langley, he was told to relinquish his security pass. On the seventh floor of the C.I.A. all sorts of agents—C.I.A., F.B.I., Defense Department, and I.R.S.—were looking for evidence of possible bribery and corruption. When Goss was nudged from office that same month, General Michael V. Hayden, who replaced him, announced that "amateur hour" was over at the C.I.A. "The prosecutors are really focused on Foggo in every one of his postings," a source who has been interviewed by federal prosecutors tells me.
he investigation of Duke Cunningham has touched any number of his associates. Representative Jerry Lewis is reportedly under investigation for dealings with his friend Lowery, as well as for what the Copley News Service has referred to as "steering earmarks [money for pet projects] to certain entities," but he hasn't been contacted by prosecutors "about anything," says his spokesman.
Unlike the federal authorities, Tom Casey has had an uneasy feeling about Lewis for a long time, he says. In the spring of 1993, Casey says, he received an 11 p.m. phone call from Lewis, who had an urgent message: he wanted Casey to hire Lowery as a lobbyist—with remuneration "worth a fortune." After leaving Congress, Lowery had joined a Washington lobbying firm, which became Copeland Lowery & Jacquez, and ties between him and the stately Lewis remain warm to this day. In the last six years Lowery's firm and its clients gave more than $450,000 to Lewis.
"Tom, let's cut to the chase. I want you to get stock options for Bill Lowery" was how Lewis opened their conversation, Casey recalls. Specifically, Casey adds, Lewis suggested that a very large number of Audre stock options issued in Canada be given to Lowery, but put under other names. Lewis's actual words were "I am going to give you a list of names," says Casey, who declined to go along. That was the last time he and Lewis had a pleasant conversation, Casey says. (Through a spokesman, Lewis acknowledges that he "thinks he remembers meeting Tom Casey," but denies the story. "What's described sounds illegal to me," says the spokesperson. Through his lawyer, Lowery also denies any knowledge of the proposed deal.)
In May, Casey discussed his allegations about Lewis (among others) with federal prosecutors—as the unhappy congressman now knows. Lewis is sick to death of the scandal that started with Cunningham. Gone is the fabled cooperative spirit of the defense-appropriations subcommittee. "I have never been as angry toward anyone in my entire career," Lewis recently said of Duke.
Cunningham is now separated from his wife, Nancy, who used to tell friends the Duke-Stir made her "seasick." In court papers, she refers to him as "Mr. Cunningham." In February she sued the government in an effort to retain her share of the proceeds from the sale of the $2.6 million Rancho Santa Fe house.
The main assets of Wade's firm were sold last year and renamed Athena Innovative Solutions, which is led by James C. King, a retired army lieutenant general. Blogger Justin Rood has claimed that King, along with his wife, Jeneane, gave on one day—March 23, 2004—a total of four checks of $2,000 each to Katherine Harris's campaign.
Polls show that in her Senate campaign Harris is badly trailing the Democratic incumbent, Bill Nelson. In May, Florida governor Jeb Bush announced, "I just don't believe she can win."
In June it was revealed by The New York Times that Lowery's prosperous lobbying firm, which earned $7.4 million last year, was dissolving in the face of the investigations. Two Democrats seceded to form their own firm; three Republicans, including Lowery, will compose another.
Wilkes, I am told by a source who has talked to investigators, is not cooperating. ("He will not plead guilty, because he is not guilty," says Luque. "But he has offered to cooperate.") Incensed and invigorated, prosecutors are poring over his campaign contributions, and the Pentagon's inspector general is scrutinizing his contracts. "Before, they were willing to ignore a lot of things. Now they are concentrating on Wilkes and Foggo," says the source.
Wade's sentencing has been deferred because, federal prosecutors believe, "his cooperation will continue for quite some time." (Wade's lawyer Howard Shapiro refuses to comment on this story.) There were early reports that Cunningham was acting mulish with Pentagon investigators, but his lawyer says, "My client's fate depends on how well he cooperates."
Eight years ago Cunningham was diagnosed with prostate cancer and two months later underwent a radical prostatectomy, but the cancer has recurred. He will live, doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital estimate, perhaps seven years. A long jail term "would likely be a death sentence," Cunningham's lawyer informed the court. Currently, he is expected to serve seven years—although his sentence may be further reduced if the government is satisfied with his revelations. He is to be told shortly which federal prison will be his new, and perhaps final, home.