The Worst Senator in America

Most of the prosecutors from the Organized Crime Strike Force were sitting in the back of Judge Joseph McLaughlin's federal courtroom in Brooklyn on December 20, 1983. They wanted to see this event with their own eyes: A United States Senator was about to testify as a character witness for a Mobster.

In the case at hand, the Department of Justice showed that Philip Basile became a multimillionaire by fronting for the Mob in discos, clubs and concert promotions, many of them on the Long Island turf of his supporter, Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican Senator from New York.

D'Amato raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth before God and law, and then informed the jury that Philip Basile "is an honest, truthful, hardworking man, a man of integrity."

When the Senator completed his testimony, he walked to the prosecution table as if he were campaigning for reelection on the Coney Island boardwalk. He tried to kiss young prosecutor Laura Ward on the cheek, but Ward recoiled from his attempted embrace and sat down. The Senator, seemingly immune to embarrassment, marched over to the defense table where, in front of the wide-eyed jury, he kissed Philip Basile on each cheek and then embraced him.

The day before, the jury had listened to the testimony of Henry Hill, who a few years later would become a minor celebrity as the subject of Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy and of the resulting movie GoodFellas. Hill had told the jury how Basile, acting on the orders of Lucchese family capo and drug dealer Paul Vario, had given him a no-show job (complete with fake pay stubs) at Basile's Breakout Management. This was done so Hill could get early release from prison and return to work for Vario, who had already been convicted of rape, loan-sharking, tax evasion, bribery, contempt and bookmaking.

Philip Basile was the man Senator D'Amato called, with unassailable accuracy, "a hardworking man." D'Amato was the only witness who was called by the defense.

Now it was up to the jury to decide whom to believe: the sleazebag, (continued on page 124)Worst Senator (continued from page 104) Hill, or the Senator, D'Amato. In less than three hours, the jury voted to convict Basile of conspiracy to defraud and lying to the federal government. Vario was convicted of the same charges a few months later.

Basile got five years' probation and Vario went to jail. Senator D'Amato returned to Washington.

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As this election year rolls on, the members of America's most exclusive club have special reason to worry: In 1992, the Senate is held in singularly low regard by the people who elected it. There are good reasons for this opprobrium. The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, for instance, spotlighted both the Republicans' partisan sexism and the Democrats' flaccid incompetence and turned the entire affair into a telethon for term limitation. There has also been an unseemly parade of lawmakers into the closed hearing rooms of the Senate Ethics Committee, where they plea-bargain and return to the cloakroom in the Capitol version of turnstile justice. For these reasons and others, there is a growing sense that this is a club of pompous, self-serving windbags who do not even try to solve our problems.

Such a generalization is, of course, unfair to at least a handful of intelligent and diligent lawmakers, including Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Carl Levin of Michigan and Republicans James Jeffords of Vermont and John Danforth of Missouri. But the talents of these men bring the decline of the rest into bas-relief. Even as the standard sinks, it helps to remember that there have always been some Senators who come up shy of the prevailing threshold (however low) of integrity, seriousness and principle. In the Forties, a segregationist named Theodore Bilbo pronounced the term "burr-headed nigras" on the Senate floor. In the Fifties, Joe McCarthy trampled the Bill of Rights while purging the country of imagined Communists. And in the Eighties, Harrison Williams gained infamy as a New Jersey crook with the perfect liberal voting record.

There is always one Senator who stands out as the worst, usually in a way that exemplifies the problems of the Senate as a whole--the rotten apple that typifies a rotting barrel. In this era, the worst of our 100 senators is the man who embraced a hoodlum in front of an honest jury.

What gives D'Amato that distinction when there is so much competition? In an era of greed and government scandal, D'Amato has been the governmental Zelig who, like Woody Allen's chameleon hero, magically materializes at virtually every white-collar crime scene. The savings-and-loan collapse? D'Amato was there. Trouble at HUD? The Senator was in the thick of it. Junk-bond apocalypse? Look for Alfonse. Wedtech? Pentagon shenanigans? Nice to see you again, Senator. After a numbing succession of these affronts, even the one-eyed, toothless watchdog that is the Senate Ethics Committee was forced, last summer, to bark feebly at the Senator from New York. D'Amato interpreted the committee's mild reproach--based on a timid inquiry and scant testimony (of 56 witnesses, 25 took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify)--as exoneration. None of the committee's cringing members mustered so much as a peep of protest.

In his 11 years in the nation's most notorious club, Senator D'Amato has passed no serious legislation, though he constantly grandstands on such issues as gun control, drug abuse and the death penalty. He makes no attempt to contribute to the intellectual life of the Senate, such as it is, unlike conservative colleagues Robert Dole, Warren Rudman or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His efforts to influence policy have ranged from the comical--as when he took a busload of reporters to the border of Lithuania and demanded to be let in--to the zany, as in his Inspector Clouseaulike sleuthing of the alleged Soviet plot against Pope John Paul II. Sometimes he's outright dangerous, as in last autumn's credit-card caper, which threatened to pitch the already-teetering banking establishment over the edge into full-scale collapse. Few single acts of pseudopopulist demagoguery have come as close to launching a depression as D'Amato's proposed limits on credit-card interest. Lemminglike, 73 of D'Amato's colleagues, along with President Bush, were ready to follow him over the cliff. Senator Al led the way.

Perhaps the only good to come out of that adventure was that former chief of staff John Sununu begged off of the President's backing of the plan and then was forced to resign. D'Amato, on the other hand, held fast. But he is up for reelection this year, so the people of New York have a choice about whether or not to terminate his career and return him to the company of his Nassau County friends, to whom he has shown such devotion.

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In 1984 and 1985, Senator D'Amato did a couple of favors for two Mobsters even more extraordinary than serving as a character witness for Philip Basile. On two occasions, D'Amato urged United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani to show leniency toward notorious organized-crime figures.

In the fall of 1984, D'Amato telephoned Giuliani to suggest that the eight-year prison term given to Mario Gigante, a capo in the Genovese crime family and brother of boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, was too severe.

"The sentence was really heavy," the Senator told the prosecutor, whose appointment he had recommended. "Just look into it. His brother is a priest." Although he does have a brother who is a priest, Mario was no choirboy. According to Giuliani's presentencing memorandum, Mario Gigante had threatened a debtor so viciously that the victim urinated in his pants. He told the man, "I'd like to take your fucking skull and just open it up."

Gigante's attorney was the reptilian Roy Cohn, who, before his death in 1986, had represented many top mafiosi. Cohn and his law partner Tom Bolan controlled the Conservative Party of New York, and with it much of the Reaganite apparatus in the state. In 1980, they endorsed D'Amato almost as soon as he had announced for the Senate, giving him political credibility and fund-raising clout. Full of gratitude, the Senator appointed Bolan to his judicial committee, which screened nominees for appointment as federal judges and prosecutors.

His gratitude did not stop there.

D'Amato intervened on behalf of another of Cohn's gangster clients: Paul Castellano, the notorious boss of the Gambino family.

As Giuliani recalls it, D'Amato took him aside at a 1985 law-enforcement conference for a private conversation that lasted "four or five minutes."

"The lawyers tell me you have a big RICO case where the murder counts are shitty," said D'Amato. "You should review the facts so that you don't get embarrassed at the trial." He made it sound like he was protecting Giuliani.

The big RICO case with murder counts pending at the time was against (continued on page 158)Worst Senator (continued from page 124) Castellano. Giuliani had indicted him in March 1984, along with 20 other racketeers, on charges that included 25 murders. Giuliani understood the Senator's reference perfectly. He immediately summoned his top aide, Dennison Young, to his side as a witness.

"You shouldn't talk to me about pending cases," he then told D'Amato. "Roy Cohn shouldn't try to communicate with me through you. Don't talk to me about this. This should be done lawyer to lawyer. There are proper ways to do this."

Giuliani says he once believed that D'Amato carried these messages "because he was naive." Now he believes that the Senator "may have done this out of arrogance."

Looking back on his increasingly difficult relationship with the Senator, Giuliani says, "I think the Castellano conversation was a turning point in my relationship with Al. Maybe he was testing to see how far he could go with me."

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When Alfonse D'Amato walked into the Capitol in January 1981, he did so as the product of the most systematically corrupt Republican machine in the nation. What the freshman Senator from New York found in Washington--with its corporate lobbyists, its cash-bloated political-action committees, its patron-age-ridden bureaucracy and its "ethics" committees--was a way of doing business altogether familiar to any true son of the Long Island G.O.P.

And a true son he is. Twenty years before he reached the Senate, D'Amato was inducted into the Republican Party of Nassau County as a young law graduate who'd failed to find a position in the private sector. He was taken care of by a powerful family friend who secured for Al the rather lowly position of law clerk in the county government. Paying just over $100 a week, the job didn't portend a great future, but it introduced him to the vast empire controlled by the Nassau Republican organization.

The riotous growth of America's largest bedroom community offered many ways for politicians to enrich themselves: an ever-growing list of jobs to be filled, thousands of acres of land to be developed (with the attendant zoning variances, permits and subsidies, as well as legal, architectural and engineering fees) and hundreds of fat contracts to be let for garbage collection, road maintenance, sewer construction and insurance. In later years, there were franchises for services such as cable television and waste recycling. If your party ran the government, you could help yourself to a little, and often a lot, of every aspect of Long Island's multibillion-dollar boom. With the proceeds, you could build yourself a political juggernaut. That's exactly what the Nassau Republicans did.

Al D'Amato probably got his first lesson about the machine's methods the day he showed up for work in the county office. Like every other public employee in Nassau County, the young attorney was expected to kick back one percent of his salary for the Republican organization's upkeep. No matter how little you made, if you wanted a raise, a promotion, some overtime or just not to be laid off, you paid.

As all machine pols must, D'Amato waited his turn and paid his one percent. For this he was regularly promoted to better county and party jobs. In 1969, he was put on the G.O.P. ticket as Hempstead, New York, tax assessor and, a few years later, moved up to supervisor and presiding supervisor.

From the beginning, he instinctively understood the Nassau County system of favors. In 1964, D'Amato became the Island Park G.O.P. leader. The following year, his father, Armand M. D'Amato, an insurance broker with an office in a nearby town, began to handle the village's insurance needs. According to the village clerk's office, Island Park's insurance ran to around $20,000 in annual premiums from 1965 through the early Seventies. The contract was awarded on a no-bid basis and Pops D'Amato's take increased as his son moved up. When Alfonse became town supervisor, a larger firm handled Island Park's insurance but still handed over all its commissions to the supervisor's father.

This insurance patronage was derived from a countywide Republican scam. Legitimate brokers seeking town or county insurance business had to agree to kick back part of their commissions to other, G.O.P.-connected agents, who did little or no work. As a state investigation later revealed, at least $400,000 in taxpayers' money was squandered this way. A federal probe of the insurance conspiracy in the early Eighties finally put D'Amato's mentor, county boss Joseph Margiotta, in prison.

D'Amato survived the scandals of the Margiotta machine while others were tarnished, in part by lying to a 1975 grand jury about his personal knowledge of the one-percent system. But he was still almost unknown to the rest of New York when he decided in 1980 to challenge the state's distinguished but aging Republican senior Senator, Jacob Javits. D'Amato mounted a series of brutal televised attacks on Javits suggesting he was too old, too infirm and too liberal for another term.

Before his assault on Javits, D'Amato had never identified with ideological conservatism. There was nothing conservative about the free-spending Nassau machine. But ever alert to shifting winds, he learned to speak the language of the rising Reaganites.

Political insiders in New York and Washington were stunned when these tactics won the Republican primary for D'Amato. They were more shaken when the nasal-voiced, cheap-suited local pol went on to win the general election in a three-way race against Javits and the Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Holtzman. What was scarcely noticed amid the wailing over the defeat of an elder statesman was how much D'Amato spent to win, and where he got the money.

Nobody who owed anything to the Nassau machine went unsqueezed after its favorite son announced his candidacy. Everyone on a public payroll--even Comprehensive Education and Training Act county workers, poor trainees who made subsistence salaries--was expected to ante up. So did professors at the community college who, like all other county workers, owed their jobs to political connections.

The big money came not from these little people but from high rollers whose fortunes had been made in D'Amato's town hall. Companies that leased trucks to the town of Hempstead gave. Concessionaires who ran restaurants and golf courses on public property gave. Developers who had received tax breaks or zoning changes gave, sometimes within days of winning the favors they'd sought. Executives of the cable TV company that had just been awarded the county franchise, without so much as a public hearing, also gave. And so did the builders of a controversial $135,000,000 recycling plant that had been brought into Hempstead on unusually favorable terms by D'Amato himself. In 1977, the same developers had handed him a blank check in front of a campaign aide.

Such gifts in the primary amounted to well over $100,000, a figure quickly dwarfed when money poured in for the general election. And that early estimate didn't include an unsecured campaign loan of $80,000 from the Bank of New York, which gave borrower D'Amato a bargain interest rate eight points below prime. He insisted this had nothing to do with his longtime practice of depositing millions of the town's tax revenues in the same understandably grateful bank without getting a penny of interest for the taxpayers.

Most of this went unnoticed in the mainstream media, which gave D'Amato the free pass he continued to enjoy for years after he entered the Senate. New York magazine noted, without irony, that D'Amato seemed "intent on retaining his down-home ways." Occasional profiles in The New York Times referred admiringly to his "hard-won stature" in the Senate and praised him for "sticking to local interests." Critics were given short shrift, and the good gray New York Times even found the words to endorse for reelection the Senator who'd testified on behalf of a Mafia associate.

Thus guarded against public reproach, D'Amato went about being a Senator--his way. His offices won renown for constituent service, offering cheerful help to every caller with a Social Security or Veteran's Administration problem. On the Hill, where D'Amato was awarded a valuable seat on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, he became known as an abnormally unscrupulous expert in back scratching, favor-trading and contribution-grabbing.

D'Amato's abrasive style has won few admirers among his clubbish, slightly snobby colleagues. It also hasn't met with much success in the White House, where he has regularly twisted arms. The Senate Ethics Committee whitewash last summer was done not out of affection but expediency--though the Senator does enjoy the friendship of the committee's ranking Republican, Warren Rudman. The Fonz, as D'Amato is known, habitually throws his arms around old pals and new acquaintances, pinches their cheeks, and addresses everyone as "babes."

Although he is physically unimpressive, the former high school hurdler considers himself a tough guy and is prone to violent gestures. During the 1980 election, he went to Grand Central Station looking for the husband of a disloyal campaign staffer, and when the man appeared, D'Amato cursed and threatened him.

Richard Korn, a Democratic leader in suburban Long Island, is another casualty. "It was the Sunday before the 1989 election," he recalls, "and all of the politicians on Long Island were at a breakfast sponsored by an Italian-American group. It was really a sort of campaign rally for the Republicans, but I was invited, so I went anyway, just to show my face. So I'm walking in front of the dais, shaking hands and greeting people, and I see D'Amato. He stands up and starts screaming at me: 'You fucking scumbag! Who the hell do you think you are? You fucking cunt! You fucking bastard! I'm going to get you.'

"Then he lunges across the dais, swinging his arm, and falls on the table," Korn says. "The guy next to him grabbed him, and I just said, 'Nice to see you, Senator,' and kept walking. I should've let him hit me."

The reason D'Amato was so furious at Korn was that the gadfly Democrat had threatened to subpoena him in a citizen lawsuit charging misuse of taxpayer funds in one of the old land-development schemes of the Nassau machine. It was a curious reaction, because when the incident occurred, D'Amato already had much bigger problems. In the middle of his second term, the Senator's ethical lapses were finally attracting notice among his colleagues and in the press.

The process began on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, of all places, which published path-breaking stories about D'Amato's favoritism toward investment-banking contributors in the writing of Banking Subcommittee legislation, and about his high-pressure fund-raising tactics in the financial community. Then The New Republic published a cover story by Murray Waas that portrayed D'Amato as "Senator Shakedown."

By the time Mark Green, D'Amato's 1986 election opponent, lodged an official complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee in 1989, he could credibly allege that D'Amato was involved in more than a dozen ethics violations. As mentioned above, the result was a timid slap on the wrist from Senate colleagues who seemed more interested in their public images than in seeing justice done.

When indictments came down against Wedtech, the pseudominority Bronx firm that used bribery and fraud to win big defense contracts, there was D'Amato. The Senator had strong-armed the Pentagon into helping Wedtech, and his campaign had, according to the testimony of a former Wedtech official, received about $30,000 in illegal cash contributions from the company's principals. But nobody could prove that D'Amato knew about these funds, and he eventually ended up as a prosecution witness against one of his closest friends, Mario Biaggi, the Bronx Congressman who was convicted along with several other politicians in the case.

But that debacle was nothing compared to the savings-and-loan scandal and the related collapse of the junk bond market and Drexel Burnham Lambert. At their nexus on Capitol Hill stood Al D'Amato, palm outstretched.

By almost every measure, D'Amato was the favorite Senator of the highflying financial crowd that dominated the Eighties. He received $88,000 in campaign donations from the savings-and-loan industry, ranking fifth in this regard in the Senate, just below Senator Alan Cranston (D--Cal.). He was the third-ranking recipient of honoraria from the financial industry, raking in $52,000 over a four-year period. The only Senators who got more in combined donations and honoraria were Donald Riegle (D--Mich.) of the Keating Five and Jake Garn (R--Utah).

A large chunk of D'Amato's money came directly from the doomed directors of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which did big business selling soon-to-be worthless junk bonds to the soon-to-be insolvent S&Ls. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 1985, "just one week before holding a hearing on a proposal to limit purchases of junk bonds by federally regulated thrift institutions," D'Amato was treated by Michael Milken and other Drexel executives to a $1000-a-plate dinner at Chasen's restaurant in Beverly Hills. They wanted D'Amato to kill the legislation that would have restricted their scheme, and he did. Five days later, he got another $18,000 from Drexel, and within a year, his total take from Milken and company topped $70,000.

Lacking any evidence that D'Amato had promised to do specific favors for specific donations, no one could prove that his relationship with Drexel was illegal. It was simply the way D'Amato had done politics ever since his apprenticeship with the Republican machine in Island Park. But he slid much closer to the edge in two other national disgraces of the Reagan era--the blatant influence-peddling uncovered at both Housing and Urban Development and the Pentagon.

The HUD scandal is the centerpiece of D'Amato's current table of woes. Not only were his dealings at HUD the main subject of the Senate ethics investigation, they are also currently attracting the scrutiny of a special prosecutor in Washington and a separate federal grand jury on Long Island. A major D'Amato fundraiser who received HUD favors has already been indicted in Puerto Rico, but he was only a minor player. The inquiry being pursued by the teams of lawyers, accountants and FBI agents is a long and complex one, though the basic question is simple: Did an inside group of developers and consultants illicitly obtain millions of federal dollars because of D'Amato's intercession, and if so, how?

Thanks to his seat on the Senate subcommittee that controlled HUD appropriations, D'Amato eventually amassed so much power at the department that officials there jokingly referred to him as their boss. D'Amato controlled the appointments of the regional directors who ran HUD's billion-dollar subsidy programs covering New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. So tight was his grip that he forced the White House to appoint Geraldine McGann, a neighbor from back home on Long Island, as director of the agency's New York office. Friends, former staffers and even a girlfriend of D'Amato's (he is separated from his wife) showed up in high positions on the HUD organization chart. And again, his campaign coffers were generously replenished, this time by contractors and developers whose interests he pursued through the HUD appointees loyal to him.

There was something strange and ultimately ironic about the way D'Amato threw his weight around at HUD. He pressed the concerns of contributors and he sought funding for projects in his home state, the way many Senators might have done. But when a House committee investigated HUD in 1989 and the deals involving D'Amato were added up, he appeared to have a peculiar interest in Puerto Rico. In percentage terms, the little island had received a far larger share of HUD monies than New York. The Senator, who has never demonstrated the slightest solicitude for poor people in general or Hispanics in particular, received contributions--some so large as to be illegal--from certain builders and consultants on the island who had reaped millions in HUD grants pushed by D'Amato's office. One of D'Amato's top fund-raisers on the island, a Cuban American named Eduardo Lopez Ballori, has already been indicted for concealing $32,200 in contributions to D'Amato under false names. (D'Amato has since announced he will donate the illegal funds to charity.) There was nothing new or surprising about the favors for Puerto Rican contributors, except that they belied D'Amato's boast about delivering for his state above all.

Even as the HUD scandal broke around him, D'Amato was in the process of securing government money for a big development in Sackets Harbor, New York, for a company named Jobco. The pattern was the same. The executives of Jobco, which received HUD grants and loans for work in Sackets Harbor totaling $6,500,000, had raised more than $25,000 for D'Amato's campaign treasury. And on November 3, 1986, while Senator D'Amato was aggressively lobbying HUD on its behalf, Jobco received a bill of $150,000 from its attorney, who happened to be the Senator's brother, Armand P. D'Amato. In the midst of all this, the Senator was vociferously protesting his innocence, even as the documentary evidence piled up around him.

About the same time the Senator was fighting for his brother's client at HUD, both D'Amatos were neck-deep in another national disgrace across the Potomac. In April 1988, FBI agents were listening to a phone conversation between Charles Gardner and Dennis Mitchell, two Unisys executives whose chatter had already provided evidence of a $5,000,000 slush fund used to steer Pentagon contracts to the giant Long Island defense contractor. These wiretaps were part of an investigation codenamed Ill Wind, which would eventually lead to more than two dozen convictions, including guilty pleas by Gardner and Mitchell.

Sitting with headsets and notebooks as the tape ran, the agents heard a Unisys official asking, "How to handle the rest of [Armand] D'Amato's pay?" Then, three days later, the agents heard Gardner say that Armand D'Amato had turned in "the nicest reports," and ask Mitchell, "Who wrote them?" He replied that he had written them for D'Amato. Gardner then warned Mitchell to make sure he carried out his ghostwriting on Senator D'Amato's office stationery.

These two snippets sparked a federal investigation into the role played by the D'Amato brothers in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Navy contracts awarded to Unisys. The FBI found that between 1986 and 1988, Unisys paid Armand D'Amato's law firm $188,000. But the payments weren't for legal services, because the firm wasn't doing normal legal work. Labeled "consultant" or "lobbying" fees and laundered through dummy corporations, these were thought to be payments for Armand's sway over Alfonse. On two occasions, Armand ghostwrote letters on the Senators' stationery, urging that Unisys be awarded lucrative contracts, and sent them to the Secretary of the Navy.

The first letter appeared on the desk of Secretary John Lehman in July 1986. D'Amato wanted Lehman to purchase Unisys missile-firing kits that the Navy Secretary had previously rejected as obsolete. It was a classic Washington squeeze. As a member of both the Armed Services Committee and the Appropriations Committee's powerful subcommittee on defense, D'Amato was a Senator with power over Lehman's entire budget. The Secretary ordered almost $100,000,000 worth of the obsolete firing kits.

On December 1, 1987, Armand again used the Senator's letterhead to write to Lehman's successor, James Webb, seeking a role for Unisys in building a new warship radar system. The letter concluded quite bluntly: "As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I would appreciate being advised of your plans in this regard." Unisys was given what it wanted.

Drafts of these same letters were discovered by FBI agents when they searched Armand D'Amato's law offices. The originals had been written by Unisys employees, then taken to the Senator's office by Armand to be placed on Senate letterhead and sent out over Alfonse D'Amato's signature.

Again, there were legal fees as well as campaign contributions--in this case, $10,000 to the Friends of Al D'Amato in illegal, laundered gifts from Unisys executives. The donors had been ordered by their superiors to make donations to D'Amato and to get reimbursed by falsifying their expense accounts. Ultimately, these costs were borne by the taxpayer. In July 1991, the prosecutors asked that D'Amato return this money, which he did.

By the fall of 1990, Gardner (then serving a 32-month sentence for bribery) and Mitchell were cooperating with federal prosecutors against Armand D'Amato. Those prosecutors felt they had enough by March 1991 to request permission from the Justice Department to indict Armand for fraud and unregistered lobbying. At presstime, they were still awaiting that permission.

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As these baying hounds gain ground on him, Senator D'Amato is running furiously for his third term. Joining the chase is an eager group of contenders who sense that if the feds don't bring D'Amato down first, the voters will surely do so in November.

There seems to be an inevitability to the arc of Al D'Amato's career. As the first U.S. Senator produced by one of the Republicans' most corrupt suburban machines, it was possibly his fate to become a one-man employment program for FBI agents, special investigators and muckraking reporters. His career was born in the ooze of one-percent kickbacks for patronage jobs and it grew in the slime of Mob friends and favors, of campaign contributions and quid pro quo.

The day after D'Amato won the Republican primary in 1980, one of the most powerful officials in New York State, who had known D'Amato for many years, said privately, "I predict Al will serve two terms in the Senate and one term in Allenwood."

He was referring to the federal penitentiary.

"D'Amato has been the Zelig who materializes at virtually every white-collar crime scene."