My Life and Times

Karl Lagerfeld
1925 A little black chiffon dress, part of the Chanel exhibition that opens this week at the Met

May 1, 2005
A Peek Into Coco's Closet
By CATHY HORYN

EVER since Gabrielle Chanel's death on Jan. 10, 1971, people have been asking the same question about her: "What would Coco think?" No designer has provoked more curiosity from the grave. If Chanel was one of the most opinionated women in Paris, capable of the mean remark as well as the sensible, she was not alone in creative power. Dior and Balenciaga also left large legacies. But nobody ever asks what they would think.

It may be that Chanel, the orphan girl whose life was an embroidery of lies, who kept (and was kept by) a string of wealthy lovers, who created her style after her own free-spirited image - it may be that she possessed something her rivals did not: a cult of personality. Dior died in the spa town of Montecatini after ingesting, it was said, a fatal helping of foie gras. Balenciaga simply closed the doors of his couture house one day and returned to his native Spain. In journalistic terms, they did not make good copy.

Chanel, on the other hand, has been the subject of numerous biographies, exhibitions and stage and film treatments, including the 1970 Broadway musical "Coco" that starred a knobby Katharine Hepburn in pearls and tweeds. Chanel No. 5, the perfume she created at the start of the Roaring Twenties, bottling it in a plain pharmaceutical flacon, is today the top-selling fragrance in the world. And of course in the 22 years since Karl Lagerfeld took over the designs for the house, amplifying and subverting her themes, to the point of putting her likeness on baubles, her cult has only grown. Everyone knows something about the woman even if they don't know everything about what made her a genius of modernism.

On Wednesday a new Chanel exhibition opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, five years after a previously planned show was canceled over objections about its focus, and Mr. Lagerfeld and the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, publicly spatted. (It continues through Aug. 7.) As Mr. Lagerfeld, who wanted an installation that would include works by contemporary artists, said at the time, "I'm not interested in an exhibit that's just old dresses."

Mr. Lagerfeld had no direct involvement in this exhibition, said its curators, Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Met's Costume Institute. He did, however, provide certain insights about Chanel's work, and he approved the choice of Olivier Saillard, a well-known curator in Paris, to design the white Corbusier-like grid of boxes in which 60 examples of both Chanel's original pieces and Mr. Lagerfeld's interpretations will be minimally displayed. These will be interspersed with cases of jewelry, both real and costume, and three separate cubes in which a video artist has created abstract montages of Chanel motifs, like sequins and the famous Coromandel screens from her Paris apartment.

Given the show's starkly conceptual design, which includes no biographical references - not even so much as a Beaton portrait - and the proprietary way that people feel about Chanel, it will not be surprising if many of the 400,000 expected visitors frown and say to themselves, "What would Coco think?"

Mr. Koda acknowledges that visitors expecting to see a soup-to-nuts retrospective will be disappointed, even outraged. "My fear is that all the people who are completely immersed in Chanel, and there a lot of women who wear only Chanel, are going to be mad," he said. "Because we don't have their Chanels in the exhibition. That's my nightmare."

In a sense, the curators say, the largest obstacle to mounting a Chanel exhibition is not the persnickety, tweed-clad museumgoer, or the all-knowing Mr. Lagerfeld, or the Chanel corporation, which is a sponsor of the show. (Its pledge has not been made public but it is likely to be close to, if not exceed, the $1.5 million the company had expected to give in 2000.) The real obstacle is Chanel herself. Her designs were amazingly contemporary. But, as Mr. Koda suggests, just because a satin evening dress from 1931 could be worn today doesn't communicate what makes a Chanel uniquely a Chanel.

"Unlike Schiaparelli or Dior, she was such a modernist in the truest sense of addressing women and their comfort," Mr. Koda said, adding that he and Mr. Bolton felt that a retrospective would have obscured this central theme. "People would have gone through the exhibit and said, 'Oh, my God, this is so beautiful I wish I saw that at Bergdorf's,' " Mr. Koda said, with a laugh. "But it wouldn't have seemed like a fashion exhibition. What we wanted to underscore was that she was a designer."

Included in the exhibition are original examples of beauty products from the Chanel archive in Paris, like an after-swim powder and a self-tanning cream that she developed in the 20's. The curators say these show that her modernist vision wasn't limited to little black dresses or the use of nautical jersey.

When the museum returned to the idea of a Chanel exhibition, last spring, Mr. Koda's plan was to include pieces by Mr. Lagerfeld. He said he felt that designs like Mr. Lagerfeld's quilted leather motorcycle ensemble would help "spice up" the period garments and give young visitors a means of relating to the past. "We're really using Karl's work as a medium," Mr. Koda said, adding, "It's hard to see what is instinctively Chanel until you see his riff on it." The first garment that people will see is a highly reverential sequined dress designed by Mr. Lagerfeld and based on one Chanel wore for a sitting with Beaton.

Though Chanel originals dominate the show, some purists may object to the inclusion of Mr. Lagerfeld's work, or see what value it lends beyond "spice." In recent years museums have been accused of allowing their subjects too much influence through their sponsorship. In 1999 the Brooklyn Museum was criticized for taking contributions for "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection" from companies and individuals with a commercial interest in the works. And the Guggenheim Museum was criticized for accepting millions of dollars from Giorgio Armani, who was also directly involved in a retrospective of his fashion.

Mr. Koda said that while Mr. Lagerfeld was not involved, and made no attempt to interfere in the selections for the exhibition, it would have been unthinkable not to ask for his aesthetic opinions. "No one knows the iconography of Chanel better than Karl," Mr. Koda said. Still, the invisible hand of Mr. Lagerfeld may be felt in unexpected ways. He colored the black-and-white photographs for the exhibit's catalog, and he has lent the house's chief hairdresser, Odile Gilbert, to see that the mannequins' feathered caps look right.

A museum can also be sensitive to a fault. The curators wanted to use Chanel's original 1921 logo, only slightly different from the one that now appears on shopping bags, at the entrance of the show. "We could rationalize it - this was history," Mr. Koda said. "But it looked too corporate." He added, "It's a problem, but the reason for the problem is actually the argument for the show. She was a modernist."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
 

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Summer Wesson, Marc Marcuse and Dennis Luciani, all former ?Average Joe? stars, making an appearance at a chop house in Hollywood last week

May 1, 2005
Weren't You Famous?
By DAMIEN CAVE

DON'T let anyone tell you that reality television offers stars only one fleeting, white-hot moment in the spotlight.

Even after being kicked off "Survivor" or evicted from the chic "Real World" digs, you can still pick up $1,200 for appearing at a Baltimore bar, handing a trophy to a motocross champion in California or being twirled by a menacing lummox in a professional wrestling match.

It is not without its perils. You could become so sick of shaking hands that you drop out and find yourself adopting a baby monkey, as Tara Gerard from "Paradise Hotel" did. Or, like Eric Nies, the breakout star from "The Real World: New York" in 1992, identified back then as an "aspiring actor," you could be sucker-punched at a paid appearance.

"I came outside, and the girls there were doing their thing, and some guy sneaked in a punch," Mr. Nies said of the blow he took two years ago outside a nightclub in Iowa. After appearing on "The Real World" he went on to release the "Grind Workout" videocassette series, but the assault knocked him out cold. And the $5,000 fee didn't offer much consolation. "I'll never do another club again," he said.

Depending on one's perspective, life after reality television is either excessively rewarding or deserved punishment for anyone vainglorious enough to pursue fame at any cost. Having entered the public imagination for their ability to seduce, double-cross and perform often gruesome physical feats on national television, alumni of shows like "Survivor," "Joe Millionaire" and "Road Rules" are often unable to slip back into their old hometown routines. And if they were hoping that wading through swamps in a bikini might jump-start a more legitimate Hollywood career, they often find themselves waiting tables instead.

So they wind up in a strange celebrity netherworld. Unable to attain creative respect, they settle for attracting onlookers, commanding fees of $500 to $30,000 for appearing at shopping centers, nightclubs, resorts, colleges or corporate conferences: appearances that reflect both a nationwide addiction to fame and the stars' earnest attempts to define themselves within its dicey limbo.

"Part of the genre is based on an audience feeling superior to them," said Alan Raymond, a director of "An American Family," the landmark PBS documentary from the 1970's that propelled a dysfunctional Santa Barbara family to national prominence over 12 episodes. "That's a strange kind of fame. You're not actually being lauded. You're just in the public eye and often in ways that are unflattering."

Toni Ferrari, 30, the volatile blonde from Fox's "Paradise Hotel" and "Love Cruise," said that in her experience, "Hollywood frowns on reality because we're not looked at as real talent." She appeared in the two series, which offered six-figure prizes for competitive coupling, in hopes of furthering an acting career. But since then, she said, even after temporarily disguising herself by dyeing her hair dark brown, she has been laughed out of auditions and asked to leave several improvisational acting classes by fellow students who accused her of being a sellout. "People don't realize that I only did this because I was hoping I'd get another chance," she said.

There is no official count of ex-reality-show contestants, but each television season produces a fresh crop of dozens. In Los Angeles they've already become a sizable clique, with Sunset Boulevard hangouts, poker nights and their own talent agencies. Such is their critical mass that television programmers are designing a new entertainment genre that focuses on the alumni.

On May 24 Fox will unveil a 24-hour cable channel, Fox Reality, that is largely dedicated to reality reruns with commentary from ex-participants. MTV, not to be booted off the island it helped build, is working on a documentary with reality's old flames, while its partner VH1 shot a pilot this month for "Reality Rehab," which offers life-coach sessions to rascals like Jonny Fairplay from "Survivor: Pearl Islands."

Ms. Ferrari, who has been called in to provide commentary on Fox Reality for rebroadcasts of "Love Cruise," hopes her updated on-air persona will help rehabilitate her image. "It feels good when I'm recognized, but it's not because I did something well," said Ms. Ferrari, who is now bartending to pay the bills.

Reality stars might be facing an uphill battle when it comes to reinvention. Fans tend to overlook the power of editing, and believe they know reality stars because their personalities are on display. "There's the pretense of a greater relationship between the people on the show and the audience," said Leo Braudy, the author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History" (Oxford, 1986). "They just happened to be tapped by their fairy godmothers and then they're on this show, where they act normal."

Because of this, he said, viewers can easily feel envious and wonder, "Why not me?" and "What makes him so special?"

Those who expect to return to their former lives are kidding themselves, most participants say. Darva Conger, the blond bombshell who won Fox's "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?" in February 2000, said in an interview last week that she did the show "for a free trip to Vegas" and that she never realized that marrying Rick Rockwell on national television would be so disruptive.

After the show was recorded, she returned to work as an emergency room nurse but was fired in the aftermath of the show's finale when her marriage to Mr. Rockwell was revealed to be a sham. Unable to find another job and stuck with a mortgage, a dependent mother and no pay from Fox, she said she ate through her savings and cried.

"It was devastating," she said. "I'd never been fired. Nursing was my passion, my identity."

So, she said, she decided to play the game. Which meant that when Playboy called later that year during her desperate job search, she answered. Then, in 2002, looking for cash to wed a paramedic, the reality gravy train rolled by again: for $35,000 she agreed to appear on "Celebrity Boxing II" and take a beating from Olga Korbut, the former Olympian gymnast.

"The notoriety was still there," said Ms. Conger, 39, now five months pregnant and back in school for a degree in nursing anesthesiology. "I did one show, and it paid for my wedding."

Ms. Gerard, the dark-haired siren from "Paradise Hotel," also found herself surprised by the money she could earn. She did appearances full time for a year, signing autographs at a Toledo mall, being a host of a radio show in Canada and hanging out at bars.

It eventually burned her out, to a point where Ms. Gerard, a 23-year-old California actress, said she "had not to work." Along with shelving her bikini, she traded her bond with fans for a baby monkey. "I got her when she was three and a half weeks old," she said. "It's just like having a baby."

But the lure of fame and showbiz apparently remained too strong to resist. She stayed in Los Angeles, and a few months ago, she said, she started dipping back into the business, working on modeling shoots for a Japanese firm and appearing in a music video for someone named Jake Coco. She figures that the connections she made in reality television will keep her flush for years, and she may be right.

Though most reality alums use appearances to grab extra cash for a trip or a down payment on a house, a handful seem to have leveraged their notoriety into financial stability. Randy Barry from "The Real World: San Diego" is now a paid spokesman for STA Travel, and Alex Michel, star of "The Bachelor" during its first season, said he would only be interviewed if he was identified as a spokesman for Match.com. (Then he canceled because of "work responsibilities.")

Rachel Robinson, who appeared on MTV's "Road Rules" in 2002, has been doing about 10 appearances a month for the past three years, speaking mostly at colleges about sexual and ethnic diversity. She said that while the pay is good - $2,000 to $3,000 a gig - she and a "Road Rules" co-star, Veronica Portillo, have recently decided to move in another direction. About a month ago they started a T-shirt company called College Dropout.

The designs (with phrases like "switch hitters" and "coochie couture") parlay their image - as the two girls who took part in a threesome during an episode in 2002 - into what they hope will be a successful business.

"We turn down appearances because we have to work," said Ms. Robinson, 22. "To me this T-shirt business is about longevity."

Meanwhile Marc Marcuse, the smart aleck whose balding head was assaulted with an egg on the original "Average Joe" in 2003, now runs Reel Management, a year-old booking agency that arranges up to 10 appearances a week for cast members from 16 different reality shows.

One of his most prodigious clients is Jonny Fairplay, a man who seems to have understood from the start that television is a business and a medium that needs a villain. Before the show in 2003, he was just a curly-haired guy named Jon Dalton who worked at an art gallery in Los Angeles. But after turning himself into a jerk even more obnoxious than "Survivor's" first victor, Richard Hatch, he became a character in demand.

Mr. Fairplay said he earned $95,000 for "Survivor," even though he lost. Since then, with the help of Mr. Marcuse and other agents, he has earned more than most Los Angeles actors make in a year.

Eight appearances with TNA Wrestling alone, he says, brought in six figures; add in the club gigs that he did nearly every weekend for a year at $7,500 a shot and you've got a nest egg that even Tommy Lee might covet. Now, Mr. Fairplay says, he sleeps until whenever, with whomever, and generally enjoys a life that beats anything he did for CBS on that God-forsaken tropical island.

"I still get hate mail every single day," he said. "People love to hate me, and that's good. I don't work as a result, not a real job at least."

According to Mr. Nies, reality renown may last far longer than anyone imagined.

"It's an ongoing real-life soap opera," he said. "Luke and Laura have been on 'General Hospital' for 20 years," he said, referring to the show's fictional characters. "Maybe that's how it will be for us."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

April 29, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
'What, Me Worry?'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One of America's most important entrepreneurs recently gave a remarkable speech at a summit meeting of our nation's governors. Bill Gates minced no words. "American high schools are obsolete," he told the governors. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded. ... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they are working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

"Training the work force of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. ... Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year."

Let me translate Mr. Gates's words: "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids." I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress - or even a daytime one - to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don't even believe in evolution.

And the president stayed fixated on privatizing Social Security. It's no wonder that the second Bush term is shaping up as "The Great Waste of Time."

On foreign policy, President Bush has offered a big idea: the expansion of freedom, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world, where its absence was one of the forces propelling 9/11. That is a big, bold and compelling idea - worthy of a presidency and America's long-term interests.

But on the home front, this team has no big idea - certainly none that relates to the biggest challenge and opportunity facing us today: the flattening of the global economic playing field in a way that is allowing more people from more places to compete and collaborate with your kids and mine than ever before.

"For the first time in our history, we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia," President Lawrence Summers of Harvard told me. In order to thrive, "it will not be enough for us to just leave no child behind. We also have to make sure that many more young Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them. How we meet this challenge is what will define our nation's political economy for the next several decades."

Indeed, we can't rely on importing the talent we need anymore - not in a flat world where people can now innovate without having to emigrate. In Silicon Valley today, "B to B" and "B to C" stand for "back to Bangalore" and "back to China," which is where a lot of our foreign talent is moving.

Meeting this challenge requires a set of big ideas. If you want to grasp some of what is required, check out a smart new book by the strategists John Hagel III and John Seely Brown entitled "The Only Sustainable Edge." They argue that comparative advantage today is moving faster than ever from structural factors, like natural resources, to how quickly a country builds its distinctive talents for innovation and entrepreneurship - the only sustainable edge.

Economics is not like war. It can always be win-win. "But some win more than others," Mr. Hagel said, and today it will be those countries that are best and fastest at building, attracting and holding talent.

There is a real sense of urgency in India and China about "catching up" in talent-building. America, by contrast, has become rather complacent. "People go to Shanghai or Bangalore and they look around and say, 'They're still way behind us,' " Mr. Hagel said. "But it's not just about current capabilities. It's about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.

"You have to look at where Shanghai was just three years ago, see where it is today and then extrapolate forward. Compare the pace and trajectory of talent-building within their population and businesses and the pace and trajectory here."

India and China know they can't just depend on low wages, so they are racing us to the top, not the bottom. Producing a comprehensive U.S. response - encompassing immigration, intellectual property law and educational policy - to focus on developing our talent in a flat world is a big idea worthy of a presidency. But it would also require Mr. Bush to do something he has never done: ask Americans to do something hard.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
 

David Burnett

Jack Abramoff

May 1, 2005
A Lobbyist in Full
By MICHAEL CROWLEY

Can you smell money?!?!?!'' Jack Abramoff wrote.

It was December 2001, and he was a kingpin of Republican Washington, one of the city's richest and best-connected lobbyists. His former personal assistant had gone to work for Karl Rove, the new president's top political adviser; he was close friends with the powerful Republican congressman from Texas, Tom DeLay, a relationship most of his competitors would kill to boast of. He was making millions on fees of up to $750 per hour; he was the proprietor of two city restaurants; and he was even a man of good works -- a charitable giver and the founder of a private religious school in the Maryland suburbs. Dressed in expensive suits, he moved around the capital in a BMW outfitted with a computer screen, often headed to one of the countless fund-raisers he gave for Republican congressmen and senators at Redskins and Orioles and Wizards games in his private sky boxes. Jack Abramoff was a man in full.

But he was still expanding. The scent of money was coming from the Saginaw Chippewa, the owners of the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort -- a $400-million-a-year enterprise in Mt. Pleasant, Mich. Abramoff and his informal business partner, Michael Scanlon, an independent public-relations consultant who had been a spokesman in DeLay's Congressional office, had begun to specialize in representing Indian tribes with casino operations. They hoped for a contract with this tribe.

''Did we win it?'' Scanlon wrote back.

''The [expletive] troglodytes didn't vote on you today,'' Abramoff responded.

''What's a troglodyte?'' Scanlon asked. (In his early 30's, he had much to learn from his master.)

''What am I, a dictionary? :) It's a lower form of existence, basically,'' Abramoff wrote. ''I like these guys,'' he hastened to add, yet then continued: ''They are plain stupid. . . . Morons.'' Ultimately, the lower life forms would pay Abramoff and Scanlon $14 million -- just a fraction of the $66 million the two men's businesses would take in from six different Indian tribes over the next three years. (Abramoff would offer his lobbying services to tribes at relatively modest rates, but then tell them that they couldn't afford not to hire Scanlon, who charged astronomical amounts for his P.R. services and then subcontracted much of the work at budget rates; he also supposedly kicked back millions to Abramoff.)

By last September, however, the ride was over. That's when dozens of Abramoff's ''Sopranos''-like e-mail messages were released at a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The e-mail messages, seized from Abramoff's computer, told a story of front groups, secret kickbacks, manipulated tribal elections and political payoffs. ''What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit,'' an outraged John McCain said at the hearing. ''Even in this town, where huge sums are routinely paid as the price of political access, the figures are astonishing.''

Nearly as shocking as the sums was the coarseness of the e-mail messages, especially given that Abramoff was a devout Orthodox Jew who presented himself publicly as a man of conservative values. About one tribal client Abramoff had written to Scanlon, ''These mofos are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure.'' In another e-mail message he wrote, ''we need to get some $ from those monkeys!!!!''

Money was always the imperative, the language of his desire strong enough to make the 46-year-old father of five sound like a frat dude in a beer ad: ''Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?''

At the hearing, Abramoff cut a handsome figure in a dark suit. His short black hair was neatly trimmed and combed. With his square jaw and dark eyes, he might have passed for a dashing Baldwin brother. But Abramoff had the look of a condemned man. (He would tell me later that the experience reminded him of ''that scene in 'Braveheart,' when he's brought in on a gurney to be cut up, with the crowd assembled.'') As the assembled senators lambasted his dealings -- ''a pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amok,'' said one -- Abramoff would merely invoke his right not to testify.

Abramoff's rise and fall is not just a Washington story of our time. His close-knit relationship with DeLay -- the contours of which have been the chief topic of discussion in Washington for the past month -- threatens DeLay's position as majority leader of the House. Yet in Jack Abramoff's telling, his is merely the story of how Washington really works.


I met with Jack Abramoff in late March at Signatures, the upscale contemporary American cuisine restaurant in which he has a majority stake. Located on Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and Capitol Hill, Signatures is no personal lark: it has been an important locus for Abramoff's business, broadly defined, a hangout where Republican lobbyists and congressmen could dine on a $35 beef filet and where Abramoff held many political fund-raisers. Abramoff -- who, except for a brief TV interview, had not spoken for attribution since the Indian Affairs hearing in September -- agreed to see me with the understanding that he would not discuss specific allegations. (He is the subject of investigations by two Senate committees, the Department of Interior and the Justice Department.)

When I arrived, Abramoff was finishing lunch with his lawyer Abbe Lowell, a scandal specialist who represented Washington's last great pariah, Gary Condit. Abramoff and Lowell soon joined me in a private dining room at the back of the restaurant. Abramoff walked in quietly and extended his hand with a sheepish grin. In his notorious e-mail messages Abramoff comes across as manic, impatient and ruthless. Now he seemed deflated. He was pale and tired-looking and thick around the middle. He took a seat by a window and fidgeted with an empty yellow packet of artificial sweetener he had poured into an iced tea. Sitting beside him, Lowell seemed more tense than his client. ''Jack is doing this against my advice,'' he said.

Abramoff was friendly, talkative and funny. When I suggested to him -- gently, not wanting to put him off -- that he had become ''a little radioactive,'' his face brightened. ''I don't know what it's like to be a little radioactive! The Geiger counters are going'' -- he raised his hands in lieu of completing the thought. At other times, he was far more somber. ''I have basically had my life obliterated,'' he said softly.

Put simply, Abramoff claimed not to see what he had done wrong. ''I've been shocked at how I've been portrayed in the media,'' he said. ''The Jack Abramoff who has been made into a caricature and a punching bag in the national media is not the Jack Abramoff who I think exists. If I read the articles about me, and I didn't know me, I would think I was Satan.'' The experience, he said, has been ''Kafkaesque.''

Over the course of two meetings -- the second one a week later at the offices of Lowell's law firm -- Abramoff maintained that his lobbying work had been totally ethical and that his fees were justified by his effectiveness. ''I have been an aggressive advocate for people who engaged me,'' he said firmly. ''I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.'' He suggested that jealous rivals had sabotaged him. ''There is this tremendous cutthroat zero-sum game'' in the lobbying industry, he said.

Despite some reports to the contrary, Abramoff was not prepared to turn on his Capitol Hill friends, DeLay among them. But there were occasional hints that the knowledge he possesses could indeed be quite damning. At one point, for instance, I asked Abramoff to gauge the influence of lobbyist money in Congress.

''I just don't think members of Congress for the most part sell their votes or their ideology,'' he told me.

For the most part?

''Ahem!'' Lowell interjected. ''Hold on, hold on.''

Lowell stood and summoned his client from the table. The two men walked to a corner of the room and huddled with their arms around each other. After a minute or two Abramoff returned and sat down.

''I would say the same thing,'' he told me. ''I would say, generally speaking, that's the case.'' Generally speaking, that is.

Abramoff was born, as chance would have it, in Atlantic City, where his father was with Arnold Palmer Enterprises. When he was 10, the family moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., where Abramoff became a high-school weight-lifting champ who once squatted 540 pounds. He was raised in a nonobservant Jewish household. But when he was 12, he told me, a viewing of ''Fiddler on the Roof'' changed his life: ''I made the decision that I would become religious in order to preserve the faith in our family.'' He ran out and bought books on Judaism with his own savings.

Abramoff inherited his conservative worldview from his father, who had ties to Ronald Reagan. As a student at Brandeis, outside Boston, he brought California Reaganism with him, organizing Massachusetts campuses for Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980. After graduating a year later, Abramoff was elected chairman of the College Republican National Committee, a position once held by Karl Rove.

Even in his early 20's, says Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and longtime mentor to young conservatives: ''Jack was a good politician. He clearly was a leader.'' And he looked the part, in his pinstripes and fedoras. ''He always dressed incredibly well, even when he was a kid,'' says a conservative activist in Washington who has known Abramoff for more than 20 years. (Like many people I spoke to, he did not want his name in an article about Abramoff.) ''He was always more stylish than Brooks Brothers. The hair was immovable, always done up. I don't think I ever saw him not in a suit.''

Early on, Abramoff made friends who would be vital to his future success. His College Republican campaign had been managed by Grover Norquist, who is now one of Washington's most influential conservative activists. Joining the team as a $200-per-month intern was a baby-faced college student, Ralph Reed. Together, the three of them shaped the organization into a right-wing battle machine. ''It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left,'' Abramoff was quoted as saying in the group's 1983 annual report. ''Our job is to remove them from power permanently.''

Abramoff's next stop was Citizens for America, a Reaganite grass-roots group that helped Oliver North build support for the Nicaraguan contras and staged a daring meeting of anti-Communist rebel leaders in 1985 in Jamba, Angola. (''I spent Shabbos in Jamba, and when I went out to pray,'' he told me, the locals thought he was a ''mystic.'') Things ended on a sour note when the group's millionaire founder, Lewis Lehrman, concluded that Abramoff had spent his money carelessly.

By the mid-1980's, Abramoff was tiring of political activism and its low wages. ''I wanted to make money,'' he says. After graduating from Georgetown Law School in 1986, Abramoff, not yet 30, started a production company. Its signature achievement was the 1989 film ''Red Scorpion,'' an action movie in which Dolph Lundgren plays a Soviet agent who turns on his evil Communist masters. Produced and based on a story by Abramoff himself, it is a crude film: in one scene, Lundgren stumbles into a crowded bar, belches loudly and then proceeds to head-butt a barfly, punch out the bartender and boorishly sing the Russian national anthem before machine-gunning the joint. In the film's first 30 minutes, Lundgren K.O.'s or kills a dozen people. When I mentioned that I'd seen half of the movie, Abramoff grinned and said: ''You got through half of it? Wait until you see 'Red Scorpion 2'!'' (Yes, there was a sequel.) A few years after ''Red Scorpion'' was released (but before the sequel), however, Abramoff claimed to be upset, publicly blaming the film's director for its runaway violence and profanity. He established a short-lived Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment, but then concluded he wouldn't be able to put out movies that met his standards.

The political world soon beckoned. In November 1994, with the public frustrated over the Clintons' health care proposals and with Republicans leveling charges of corruption at Democrats in Congress, the G.O.P. won control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1954. ''The 1994 election was a huge shock on K Street,'' Abramoff recalled, referring to the location of many lobbying firms. ''These folks they were used to ignoring'' -- conservative bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich and DeLay -- ''were suddenly running committees. I found myself in the position of being one of the few who actually knew these guys.'' On the very Saturday after the election, Abramoff was approached about a job with the prominent law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. Upon his hire, the firm's news release boasted of Abramoff's ties to Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition, the Republican National Committee and top House Republican leaders. ''He is someone on our side,'' Tom DeLay's chief of staff, Ed Buckham, explained to National Journal magazine soon after. ''He has access to DeLay.''


Abramoff soon made his name representing an obscure client: the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth in the remote western Pacific Ocean where businesses enjoyed a quirky status. American labor laws like the minimum wage did not apply, but manufacturers there could still affix the Made in the U.S.A. label to garments they produced for companies like the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger. Abramoff depicted the tiny islands as an entrepreneurial paradise, fighting Congressional attempts to impose pro-worker regulations there (and bringing in some $7 million to his company). It was during this period that he cultivated the art of the junket, over the years flying dozens of members of Congress and their aides to the islands, where they stayed in luxury resorts. Numerous conservative columnists and think-tankers made the trips as well. ''Suddenly the Mariana Islands became one of the critical conservative causes of the mid-90's,'' says Marshall Wittmann, who was then a senior official with the Christian Coalition but has since defected to the Democratic Leadership Council.

One of Abramoff's key allies in the Marianas fight was Tom DeLay, then the No. 3 Republican in the House. They had met through Daniel Lapin, a Seattle-based rabbi with strong ties to the Christian right, and bonded over their hard-edged conservative politics and devout religious faith. Since then, they have traveled together on at least three lavish junkets, including trips to Moscow and London. (It was on a trip to the Marianas in 1997 that DeLay proclaimed Abramoff ''one of my closest and dearest friends.'') Abramoff did DeLay smaller favors, like lending him premium sky-box seats to a Three Tenors concert in 2000 (a gift DeLay did not report). In 2002 Abramoff even dropped by a baby shower for DeLay's daughter. One former DeLay aide described him as the ''godfather'' of DeLay's Washington network.

During the mid-1990's, Abramoff began representing Indian tribes with casino operations. The first was the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who would pay his firm more than $5 million in the late 90's. As his business and reputation grew, Abramoff was becoming a vital cog in the G.O.P.'s money machine. He played a major role in ''The K Street Project,'' a Norquist-designed initiative that pressured lobbying firms to slant Republican in their hiring and donations. Public-interest watchdogs were appalled at the new level of coordination between Congress and business lobbyists, but Abramoff makes no apologies for it. ''It was my role to push the Republicans on K Street to be more helpful to the conservative movement,'' Abramoff told me. Partly to that end, Abramoff hired several former senior G.O.P. Congressional aides onto his lobbying team, including DeLay aides like Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy, now a prominent lobbyist. He also sent his associates in the other direction; in 2001, for example, his personal assistant, Susan Ralston, took the same job under Karl Rove, effectively making her Rove's gatekeeper.

Abramoff also directed his clients to donate to the conservative movement. None did so more than the Indian tribes that he had begun to represent. Abramoff once boasted he had steered more than $10 million in tribal contributions to G.O.P.-aligned groups. Documents from the Coushatta Tribe, based in Kinder, La., show how this worked: Abramoff presented the tribe with a specific list of ''requests,'' which included such helpful notations as ''Very receptive to tribal issues,'' ''Senate Appropriations cmte. Member'' or simply ''Race is priority for the Republican leadership.'' Abramoff's old friends, including DeLay, were often the beneficiaries of Coushatta money. For instance, the tribe sent $20,000 to one DeLay political committee and $10,000 to Texans for a Republican Majority, a DeLay-run state political committee whose activities are now under investigation. Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform received $25,000 from the tribe for a promised meeting with the president, which never took place. Coushatta money also went to Ralph Reed's Atlanta-based political consulting firm. That firm took more than $4 million from Abramoff to rally religious opposition to a casino Abramoff was trying to shut down on the Coushatta's behalf. (Reed, who is running for lieutenant governor of Georgia, has insisted he was ''deceived'' by Abramoff. Others on the Christian right aren't so sure. ''I think it's a hard sell that he didn't know any of this,'' says Paul Weyrich, a dean of Washington social conservatives.)

Abramoff wouldn't talk specifically about his relationship with DeLay. But he did suggest, in a general way, that people are being naive about the capital's true workings. ''I don't think it's a secret that, in Washington, the role of the lobbyist includes gaining access to the decision maker, all within a proper legal context,'' he told me. ''There are probably two dozen events and fund-raisers every night. Lobbyists go on trips with members of Congress, socialize with members of Congress -- all with the purpose of increasing one's access to the decision makers.

''That is not unusual,'' he continued in a calm voice. ''They've been made to seem unusual with me. Perhaps because they haven't pulled e-mails to see the various fund-raisers and golfing outings that [other lobbyists] have been engaged in.

''I think there are people who would prefer that there are no political contributions, people who would prefer that all members of Congress live an ascetic, monklike social life. This is the system that we have. I didn't create the system. This is the system that we have.'' At another point in our conversation, he said something else about that system. ''Eventually,'' he said, ''money wins in politics.''

Certainly money fueled Abramoff's lobbying work. One case study is Abramoff's relationship with the Tigua Indians, based in El Paso. A poor tribe, desperate for casino riches, the Tiguas were the incidental victim in 2001 of an Abramoff lobbying campaign to enforce a state gambling ban in Texas, focused primarily on an upstart tribal casino near Houston that threatened his Louisiana Coushatta clients. When the ban also shuttered the Tiguas' Speaking Rock Casino, Abramoff showed little pity at first. Writing to Ralph Reed on Feb. 11, 2002, he declared: ''I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out.''

But Abramoff soon converted the Tiguas' loss into his gain. By Feb. 18, 2002, he was pitching his services to the tribe in an e-mailed memo that scorned the ''ill-advised'' ban he had just supported and noting ''the critical importance of not allowing tribal sovereignty to be eroded by the actions of the State of Texas.'' The Tiguas hired Abramoff and Scanlon, but it was a delicate relationship. When Abramoff was copied on a mass e-mailing apparently sent by Marc Schwartz, then a consultant to the tribe, he sent a livid message to Scanlon: ''that [expletive] idiot put my name on an e-mail list! what a [expletive] moron! he may have blown our cover!! Dammit. We are moving forward anyway and taking their [expletive] money.''

Abramoff planned to slip a provision granting the Tiguas gaming rights into a bipartisan election-reform bill before Congress. He turned to an old Republican friend, Representative Bob Ney of Ohio. On March 20, 2002, he sent Scanlon good news: ''just met with Ney!!! We're [expletive] gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua.'' A few days later, Abramoff sent Schwartz an e-mail message asking for $32,000 in donations to Ney's campaign fund and political action committee -- ''asap.''

In June, Abramoff sent Schwartz an e-mail message with a new request: ''our friend asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff . . . for August. The trip will be quite expensive (we did this for another member -- you know who) 2 years ago. I anticipate that the total cost -- if he brings 3-4 members and wives -- would be around $100K or more.'' (Schwartz later testified before a Senate committee that Ney was ''our friend'' and that Abramoff told him that ''you know who'' was DeLay. Records show that DeLay did, in fact, travel to Scotland in 2000, accompanied by Abramoff as well as his wife and two top aides.)

Abramoff told the Tiguas that Ney ''would probably do the trip through the Capital Athletic Foundation as an educational mission'' and asked them for a donation to the foundation, a charity Abramoff had founded ostensibly to support youth athletics. That August, Ney traveled to Scotland with Reed. (Eventually, money from other Abramoff clients paid for the trip.) In a disclosure form, Ney -- who now says he was ''duped'' and ''misled'' by ''these two nefarious individuals'' -- would report that the purpose of his trip was to give a speech to Scottish parliamentarians, attend an Edinburgh military ceremony and visit the British Parliament.

Abramoff's plans came to naught, however. In a July 25, 2002, e-mail message to Scanlon, he explained how Senator Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat thought to be supporting them, had let him down: ''I just spoke with Ney who met today with Dodd on the bill and raised our provision. Dodd looked at him like a deer in headlights and said he never made such a commitment and that, with the problems of new casinos in Connecticut, it is a problem!!! Mike, please call me immediately to tell me how we wired this, or were supposed to wire it. Ney feels we left him out to dry. Please call me!!!''

The deal had collapsed. But Abramoff never informed the Tiguas, who now claim he continued to hold out hope of victory even when he knew the battle was lost. Based on what he has learned subsequently, Schwartz told me that ''from July 25, 2002, it became an absolute fraud.''

Abramoff insisted to me that he kept working on behalf of the Tiguas: ''We were like flying Dutchmen going from bill to bill.'' He made a last-ditch effort to attach the Tigua provision to a huge budget bill, a plan he outlined in a Dec. 30 e-mail message to Schwartz: ''Our hope is that an omnibus bill is put together so we can work through our friends on the leadership staff to insert the language at the very end of the process, instead of working through the normal appropriations process -- which involves too many people and could jeopardize our legislative fix.''

That tactic failed, too. In this instance money did not win. By early 2003, the Tiguas, having paid $4.2 million on the campaign, were running low on cash. Schwartz says it would be months before the Tiguas realized that, just a year before, Abramoff had made millions supporting a ban on casino gambling in Texas.

Abramoff is adamant about one thing: he did not dupe his Indian clients. The topic brings him to life and elicits an aggressive tone reminiscent of his e-mail messages. ''My clients got tremendous value!'' he told me. ''My clients used to refer to me as the most profitable slot machine in the whole operation! Tribes are not a bunch of idiots and simpletons. If a tribe spends millions of dollars to protect billions of dollars, that doesn't make them saps! It makes them good businesspeople!''

It was our second meeting, in a conference room at Lowell's law offices. When I arrived, Abramoff was tapping at a laptop computer, trying to find a synagogue for Lowell, who would be traveling to Mississippi for another client. ''There's a conservative synagogue in Biloxi!'' Abramoff exclaimed merrily. Lowell said, ''Jack's my spiritual adviser.''

Abramoff had proposed a second meeting for the specific purpose of explaining that ''the story of the Tigua is not a story of me going 'hahahaha!''' -- here he rubbed his hands together in sinister movie-villain fashion. He had come armed with a Rand McNally atlas and spent the better part of an hour walking me through the saga. It was a maestro performance: Abramoff waved his arms, jabbed a pencil at obscure towns on the map and let his voice boom. The talk of strategy and deal-making had him out of his funk; I felt I was seeing the master operator of the not-too-distant past.

The crux of his argument is that he never planned to shut the Tiguas down and then ''go out to get them to pay me.'' From the e-mail messages released by the Senate, that much seems true. Abramoff's main target was a Houston-area casino; the Tiguas were collateral damage. What about Abramoff's fear that his ''cover'' had been blown in an e-mail message? He insisted his fear was that rival lobbyists might spring into action if they learned that someone of his caliber was involved. Oddly, however, Abramoff seemed most passionate about the notion that he had failed to get what he wanted. He blames Ney and Dodd, whose recent claims of ignorance about the details of his Tigua lobbying, he said, are bogus. ''We would have succeeded but for Chris Dodd, who said yes -- and then all of a sudden, he changed!'' Here he was practically pleading with me: ''He changed!''

But he reserved special scorn for his old friend -- ex-friend -- Bob Ney. Abramoff said that Ney was deeply involved in the lobbying effort and that any claims otherwise are untrue. He singles out a meeting and a long conference call Ney conducted with Tigua leaders in which he assured them that he would help. ''Ney told the press, 'I was duped'? It's crazy!'' He turned up his palms, again with the pleading look in his eyes. ''He was on the phone for an hour and a half!'' (A spokesman for Ney, Brian Walsh, said that Ney only considered the Tigua provision when he heard it had Dodd's support. ''After Congressman Ney spoke to Senator Dodd and found that Jack Abramoff was lying, no further action was taken,'' Walsh said. Dodd has issued a statement saying he never supported the provision, a contention supported by the testimony at the Indian Affairs hearing.)

''That,'' Abramoff said, collecting himself, ''was the only time I can think of that we failed to achieve our goal. That was 1 loss against 10,000 wins.'' He stared at me intently. ''We never lost,'' he said, stabbing the table to punctuate each word. ''We. Did. Not. Lose. One. Fight. Ever.''


Today Abramoff's life is in shambles. Stacks, the Washington deli he opened in 2002, has closed. So has the Eshkol Academy, a small private Jewish school in suburban Maryland that Abramoff founded in 2001; a group of its former teachers is suing Abramoff for unpaid wages. Given the multiple investigations, an indictment and maybe even prison time are possibilities for Abramoff. ''All of a sudden, in an almost Job-ian fashion, my whole world collapsed,'' he says.

His friends maintain that Abramoff will be vindicated. ''I don't know what it is that he is supposed to have done that is supposed to have been illegal or wrong,'' Norquist told me. ''I understand that there's a lot of money here, and more than people are used to. But that's different from some broken law.''

Abramoff also seems to see himself as an innocent victim. ''Of course, I have made mistakes,'' he told me. Yet it's not quite clear what he thinks those mistakes are. Abramoff insisted that his hunger for riches was driven by charitable impulses. ''I have spent years giving away virtually everything I made,'' he said. ''Frankly, I didn't need to have a kosher delicatessen. That was money I could have bought a yacht with. I don't live an extravagant lifestyle. I felt that the resources coming into my hands were the consequence of God putting them there.'' And he has a ready explanation for much of his behavior. When asked, for instance, how a religious man who reportedly loathed Hollywood profanity could send e-mail messages playfully calling Scanlon a ''big time faggot'' or declaring, apropos one intransigent tribal client, ''We need a beautiful girl to send up there,'' Abramoff suggested that he dumbed down his words to motivate Scanlon. ''I didn't have a lot of time to articulate things,'' he said. ''Sometimes I would find myself speaking to people in the language that they speak.'' He likened himself to the Biblical character Jacob, who dressed in his brother Esau's clothes. Jacob did this, Abramoff told me, as ''a more effective means of communicating with Esau.'' (In fact, Jacob's goal is to deceive his father.)

And the racism implied in calling tribal leaders ''monkeys'' and ''troglodytes''? Abramoff responded: ''That's probably the thing that hurts me the most about all this. It's just so opposite of who I am.''

Lowell interjected: ''When he uses the word 'monkey' to describe one part of a faction, he is referring to an opponent, not Native Americans in general.''

The shame is particularly acute for a religious man. I had noticed that amid the vast profanity and insults and Machiavellian exultations in his e-mail messages, Abramoff drew lines. In one message, he rendered ''God'' as ''G-D.'' Abramoff nodded solemnly when I brought this up. ''This is a Jewish tradition, to not write out God's name in something that might be destroyed,'' he explained. (Bizarrely, amid all the damning candor of his e-mail messages, Abramoff also showed this tantalizing dash of caution: ''I have an idea but don't want to put it on e-mail,'' he wrote to Scanlon in early 2003.)

The effect has been devastating for a man once defined by his exuberant hubris. ''In Judaism, it's one of the definitions of hell,'' Abramoff told me, ''that you have to sit and watch the replay of everything you said and did with the people you know.'' Members of the Jewish community whose respect was so important to him are especially upset. ''[It] is a scar on the entire Jewish community,'' a conservative Jewish activist who knows Abramoff told me. During a Purim comedy night in March, one Georgetown synagogue performed a gag song entitled ''The Ballad of Jack Abramoff.'' Sample verse: ''With all this influence and all this power/His deli still couldn't cook a burger in an hour.''

And yet Abramoff only seems ready to embrace his faith more fully. He said he wants to have another try at making movies -- this time ''for the audience that was rediscovered by 'The Passion.''' He has already written a few treatments, he said.


Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
 

Alan Chin for The New York Times

One of the bombings in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad killed at least four.

April 30, 2005
Wave of Attacks in Iraq Kill 40 and Wound 100
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
and ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 29 - Insurgents determined to destabilize Iraq's new government executed a devastating series of coordinated attacks on Iraqi forces on Friday, detonating 12 car bombs across greater Baghdad and striking military targets throughout Iraq. At least 40 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded.

The attacks, a direct challenge to the new Shiite-dominated government that was formed Thursday, were aimed at Iraqi police officers and national guardsmen at their bases and traveling in convoys in northern and southern Baghdad and in Madaen, 15 miles southeast of the capital. At least 23 Iraqi policemen and troops were killed. Some reports put the total death toll at as many as 50 people.

Later in the day, other car bomb attacks struck Diyarah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing two American soldiers, and near Taji, just north of Baghdad, where a bomber killed one American soldier and wounded two others. One American soldier was also killed and four were wounded by a homemade bomb Thursday night near Hawija, 150 miles north of Baghdad.

The strikes Friday morning came after a momentous and tumultuous day for the new government. After three months of delays that American officials said gave new strength to the insurgency, the dominant Shiite alliance won approval for a new cabinet - but not before angering Sunni political leaders who said they had been shortchanged.

The Shiites also pledged a housecleaning of former Baathists from the government, a move sure to drive a deeper wedge between Shiites and Sunnis, who conduct most insurgent activity. Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq's Baathist government under Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted elections in January.

With Friday's attacks, at least 480 Iraqi policemen and troops have been killed by insurgents in the last two months, according to tallies by Western security contractors, Iraqi officials and local news accounts.

Followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, claimed responsibility in Internet statements for a dozen attacks on Friday. The group also released an 18-minute recording said to be of Mr. Zarqawi that offered reassurances to insurgent fighters, warned Iraqis against negotiating peace with the United States and cited Pentagon data on shortfalls in American military recruiting.

In the streets, the insurgents once again turned to an increasingly common tactic: multiple bombings intended to kill not only the victims of the initial blast but also security forces and bystanders who rush to the aid of the wounded.

The strikes began just after 8 a.m. on Friday, the weekly holy day for most Iraqis, with four car bombs in the Adhamiya neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northern Baghdad that is home to many former Baathists. The attacks killed 7 Iraqi national guardsmen, 2 policemen and 4 civilians, and wounded 50 others, an Interior Ministry official said. Other reports said as many as 20 people had been killed there.

The first Adhamiya bomb went off next to a popular restaurant as an Iraqi convoy drove by, the police said. The blast propelled the crumpled remains of the bomber's vehicle more than 100 feet, where the police at the scene pointed to parts of the suicide bomber's body lodged in the charred wreckage.

Several pools of blood surrounded an aqua minivan in front of the destroyed restaurant. A child's stuffed animal, blackened from the blast, and women's sandals were strewn amid the bloody debris.

"It was terrible," said Muhammad Kadham, a 27-year-old worker who rushed to the scene. "Human body parts were everywhere. Ambulances have been busy carrying away the injured. It was insane." A few hours later, a car bomb aimed at a passing convoy of Iraqi National Guard troops detonated in the Ghadeer district in southern Baghdad, and 15 minutes later a second bomb struck in the same spot, killing one civilian and wounding four troops and four civilians, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

In Madaen, a town of Sunnis and Shiites that has seen intense sectarian violence and insurgent activity, three car bombers struck in a coordinated attack that killed 3 Iraqi police commandos, 4 Iraqi troops and 2 civilians while wounding 38 others, the ministry official said.

In Baquba, a prominent cleric, Abdul-Razzaq Hamid Rashid, blew himself up with a hand grenade when Iraqi security forces tried to arrest him on Friday, a police official said.

Two homemade bombs were detonated Friday morning a few miles north of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, killing one Iraqi border guard and wounding another.

The violence, which the American military said was clearly aimed at discrediting the new government, showed that despite a lull in attacks after the Jan. 30 elections, the insurgents still have the resources and organizational structure to carry out disciplined and demoralizing strikes.

"Terrorists have still proven they can execute or surge their capability to conduct limited attacks," the American military said in a statement.

The American commander of the troops that oversee Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr. of the Third Infantry Division, described the Baghdad attacks in an interview on CNN as "another desperate attempt to try to derail the emerging democratic government."

"Today was just another spike that comes periodically," General Webster said, adding that his "message back to Zarqawi is that he's not going to win."

Friday's toll could have been worse. Five car bombs intended for Iraqi police stations and other targets in Salman Pak and eastern Baghdad were intercepted by the Iraqi police and troops, said Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, a military spokesman in Baghdad. Seven Iraqis suspected of involvement in Friday's attacks were captured, and another was wounded, the military said.

American officials disclosed new details of a previously discovered mass grave near Samawa in southern Iraq this week, saying they had exhumed at least 113 bodies, mostly Kurdish children and women, according to a pool report provided by American officials. Most victims had been shot with Kalashnikov rifles.

The new details followed the disclosure by Iraqi officials two weeks ago that the Samawa site held the remains of about 2,000 Kurdish members of the clan of Massoud Barzani who were killed by the government of Saddam Hussein.

It was impossible on Friday to verify the authenticity of the purported Zarqawi recording, but terrorism analysts said it appeared authentic. The Jordanian-born terrorist, who has a $25 million bounty on his head, delivered a wide-ranging speech warning resistance fighters against efforts to "open a dialogue" with American-led forces.

American military officials confirmed this week that they narrowly missed capturing Mr. Zarqawi in February near Ramadi.

A number of people claiming to speak for insurgent groups have approached American officials in Baghdad to open a dialogue, but they have been referred to the Iraqi authorities. It is not clear how the new Iraqi government will handle negotiations with insurgent fighters or requests for amnesty.

"They have tried a wicked trick to pull the carpet from under the feet of the mujahedeen," the speaker on the recording says of the authorities. "They made an offer to some defeatists who pretend they are mujahedeen to establish the nucleus of the Iraqi Army in Sunni areas."

The speaker also discusses American recruiting shortfalls and cites an article published in The Washington Post on March 19. Mr. Zarqawi's group opened a heightened media campaign in March and often releases several statements in a single day.

Along with familiar exhortations to armed struggle, the statement included an unusual reference to injustices committed against Sunni Arabs by Shiite army and police officers. Although Mr. Zarqawi and other insurgents initially aimed their attacks and oratory at Americans, they are increasingly striking Shiites, who predominate in the new government and Iraq's fledgling security forces.

Zaineb Obeid and Alan Chin contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top