The Big Handshake

The first time I shook the hand of a Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor, I thought it was a big deal. This was before I learned that any politi­cian would shake your hand, and do most any­thing else you want­ed, for the right price, as this sto­ry illustrates.

The hand­shake occurred in 1979. I was a junior lawyer in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., work­ing with Rod Hills, a for­mer senior advis­er to Pres­i­dent Ford and Chair­man of the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion.  A Sen­ate com­mit­tee held hear­ings on amend­ments to the Employ­ee Retire­ment Income Secu­ri­ty Act (“ERISA”), which gov­erns employ­ee ben­e­fit plans. The com­mit­tee asked Rod to tes­ti­fy. He assigned me to write his testimony.

I was not hap­py about this. ERISA is extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed. Even U.S. Supreme Court jus­tices seem to strug­gle with it, call­ing it a “retic­u­lat­ed statute,” mean­ing criss­crossed, inter­twined, and con­vo­lut­ed. I was capa­ble of under­stand­ing only small parts of it for brief moments, and when I tilt­ed my head to one side, those few insights would slide out of my ear.

Work­ing under a tight dead­line, I crawled through ERISA’s dense thick­et of “retic­u­lat­ed” sub­sec­tions, draft­ed a lengthy state­ment that made no sense but had a lot of big words in it, and hand­ed it off to Rod, con­vinced he would cut it to shreds and ques­tion the wis­dom of my con­tin­ued employment.

To my sur­prise, he sent it to the Sen­ate com­mit­tee with a cou­ple of minor changes. I assumed he didn’t have the time to read it care­ful­ly. For days, I lived in fear the com­mit­tee would call to tell him some­one forged his sig­na­ture to an utter­ly stu­pid state­ment. As time passed and the com­mit­tee didn’t rat me out, I learned my draft prob­a­bly died under a bliz­zard of writ­ten sub­mis­sions. Forty wit­ness­es filed such state­ments, and over a hun­dred inter­est­ed par­ties post­ed lengthy com­ments. As we’ve recent­ly learned, mem­bers of Con­gress don’t even read the statutes they enact, so it’s hard to imag­ine they pay much atten­tion to the moun­tain of back­ground mate­r­i­al sub­mit­ted by the pub­lic. In this case, I’m great­ly thank­ful for their negligence.

On the day of Rod’s tes­ti­mo­ny, he and I entered a cav­ernous room and sat at a table look­ing up at a row of high-backed chairs stretch­ing across an ele­vat­ed dais. All the chairs were emp­ty except the one in the mid­dle. Of the committee’s fif­teen sen­a­tors, Har­ri­son “Pete” Williams was the lone ranger that day, and he only showed up because he chaired the com­mit­tee and had to run the hear­ing. Serv­ing his fourth term, Williams was known as New Jer­sey’s “sen­a­tor for life” because of his enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty, and he was pow­er­ful, hav­ing led the charge to enact reams of social wel­fare laws, includ­ing ERISA.

He intro­duced Rod in glow­ing terms. Rod spoke elo­quent­ly and answered ques­tions. I didn’t under­stand any­thing he said, but Sen­a­tor Williams seemed pleased.

After­wards, the sen­a­tor joined us on the floor of the hear­ing room, and Rod intro­duced me to him, where­upon the big hand­shake took place.

I was young, green, and not the senator’s con­stituent. He had every rea­son to ignore me, but he asked about my fam­i­ly, my move from Cal­i­for­nia, and my impres­sions of Wash­ing­ton, and he seemed gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in my answers. When we left the hear­ing room, I liked him and felt priv­i­leged to have met him.

My warm feel­ings didn’t last long. I was read­ing the news­pa­per one night with the tele­vi­sion on in the back­ground when I heard Sen­a­tor Williams’ name men­tioned. I looked up to see a live cam­era film­ing gov­ern­ment agents stand­ing at the door of his house. A few min­utes lat­er, an NBC reporter stuck a micro­phone under his chin. Smil­ing ner­vous­ly, Williams said he’d been served with an indict­ment, but he didn’t know what it was about.

This is what it was about. In 1978, the FBI set up a sting oper­a­tion code-named ABSCAM, using Melvin Wein­berg, a con­vict­ed con artist, to run it. Wein­berg cre­at­ed a fake com­pa­ny called Abdul Enter­pris­es and super­vised a cast of FBI agents, who posed as Arab sheikhs seek­ing to invest mil­lions of dol­lars in the Unit­ed States. They offered bribes to politi­cians to secure gov­ern­ment advan­tages for the pho­ny company.

The sting was wild­ly suc­cess­ful. A big crowd of politi­cians fell for it, includ­ing six mem­bers of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, three Philadel­phia City Coun­cil­men, the May­or of Cam­den, New Jer­sey, and one U.S. Sen­a­tor, my hand­shake bud­dy, Pete Williams.

A few weeks after I shook his hand, he shook the hand of Richard Farhart in the Plaza Hotel in New York. Farhart was an FBI agent out of the Cleve­land office. Of Lebanese descent, he wore a sheikh’s tra­di­tion­al head­dress and flow­ing robes and feigned a Mid­dle East­ern accent. “I would like to give you some mon­ey,” he told Williams. The sen­a­tor was hor­ri­fied, imme­di­ate­ly exclaim­ing, “No, no, no, no, no!”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the bribe itself didn’t hor­ri­fy him. It was the form of pay­ment, which he con­sid­ered too easy to trace. In sub­se­quent meet­ings with the ersatz sheikh, Williams nego­ti­at­ed a com­plex deal with Abdul Enter­pris­es, where­by the com­pa­ny would issue 18% of the shares of a tita­ni­um min­ing enter­prise to Williams’ lawyer with the under­stand­ing that the lawyer would deliv­er the own­er­ship inter­est to the sen­a­tor. In exchange, Williams promised to use his posi­tion to steer gov­ern­ment con­tracts to the venture.

Williams vehe­ment­ly denied all of this. “I know I broke no laws.… time, his­to­ry, and almighty God will vin­di­cate me,” he thun­dered, but when it came out that the FBI tape-record­ed his meet­ings with the sheikh, noth­ing short of almighty God’s divine inter­ven­tion could have saved him. At his tri­al in 1981, his lawyers were reduced to argu­ing he hadn’t real­ly tak­en a bribe because the tita­ni­um min­ing com­pa­ny was fake and its stock had no val­ue. When that failed, they com­plained that the Attor­ney Gen­er­al tar­get­ed him for pros­e­cu­tion sole­ly because he sup­port­ed Ted Kennedy for pres­i­dent over Jim­my Carter. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the jury came back in record time with guilty ver­dicts on nine counts of bribery and conspiracy.

Williams remained free on bail while he appealed the con­vic­tion. Mean­while, the Sen­ate Ethics Com­mit­tee asked him to resign. He refused. The com­mit­tee moved to expel him, and he demand­ed a full hear­ing on the Sen­ate floor. The com­mit­tee played the damn­ing tapes. Sen­a­tor Inouye, who act­ed as his coun­sel, didn’t ask the sen­a­tors to dis­be­lieve their lying eyes. Instead, he railed against the FBI. “The Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment had no busi­ness test­ing the weak­ness of Unit­ed States sen­a­tors,” he said, and he warned the sen­a­tors to be wary of inves­ti­ga­tions into their own activ­i­ties. Inouye’s trans­par­ent “vote-for-Pete-because-next-time-it-could-be-you” defense didn’t work. Know­ing the tal­ly was against him, Williams resigned just before the roll call vote.

He lost the appeal of his con­vic­tion in 1983, served two years in a fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary, and a third in a halfway house. His request for a par­don from Pres­i­dent Clin­ton failed. Despite the FBI’s tapes, he main­tained his inno­cence until he died of heart dis­ease in 2001 at the age of 81.

Had he not resigned, Sen­a­tor Har­ri­son “Pete” Williams would have been the first sen­a­tor expelled from Con­gress since 1862 when Jesse Bright of Indi­ana sold guns to the Con­fed­er­a­cy, and he was the first sen­a­tor to go to jail since 1906 when Joe Bur­ton of Kansas served a stretch in the big house for tak­ing a bribe in a mail fraud case.

But, hey, I got to shake his hand!

Post Script: Tom Pax­ton wrote and record­ed a hit song about ABSCAM enti­tled, I Thought You Were An Arab. An excerpt: “When you hand­ed me the brief­case full of cash,/I accept­ed with a wink./You can catch it on the evening news you rat,/Now I’m head­ed for the clink.” And: “I smiled for the camera,/I could­n’t see it from my seat./So I thought you were an Arab,/And all the time you were the heat.”

“There is no dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can crim­i­nal class except Con­gress.” – Mark Twain