No accounting for a crook's taste
IT'S NOT OFTEN you get a chance to mock a man's ethics and his taste in interior decorating at the same time.
I sure wasn't going to miss it.
Today the feds are slamming down the auction hammer on some of Randy "Duke" Cunningham's ill-gotten gains, the loot that the former honorable Republican congressman from San Diego County amassed by hanging a "for sale" sign around his own dishonorable neck.
On Tuesday, I went to the auction preview to see for myself the mess of pottage Cunningham sold his political birthright for. And quite a mess it is.
You know the story arc by now: the Vietnam "Top Gun" ace, elected to Congress, who starts treating defense contractors like Santa Claus and Capitol Hill like Santa's workshop. He's spending eight years in prison for tax evasion and for taking $2.4 million in bribes.
A sample Cunningham story: A couple of months after 9/11, he goes shopping with "co-conspirator No. 2" -- identified in various accounts as defense contractor Mitchell Wade -- at a swanky Beltway antique store. The Dukester wanders around the shop, picks out stuff adding up to about $12,000, then discreetly steps away while "co-conspirator No. 2" pays the tab.
My own shopping excursion took me to an icy concrete cube of a warehouse -- EG&G Technical Services in Rancho Dominguez, where the feds were offering a preview of seized property. Ill-gotten goods from the D.C. shopping spree -- "Antiques Roadshow CSI" -- were spread out under the eye of the IRS alongside goods seized from drug dealers, Tahitian-pearl smugglers, software pirates -- criminals of the sort Cunningham used to rail against so righteously.
It was shocking on two counts: the quantity -- 40 pieces in 35 lots -- and the quality. You sell out your career, your reputation and your freedom, and this is your asking price?
Cunningham's Gustav Stickley bed, Lot 72, and the two now-notorious 19th century French commodes, Lots 79 and 87 -- inspiration for late-night comics' deadpan bedpan jokes -- were the only objets I'd give house room to. The rest struck me as hideously overdone: rococo, ormolu, Eastlake woodworking, more beveled mirrors than a French Quarter cathouse and more marble slabs than a New England churchyard.
A three-panel rattan screen looked as if it came from a Pier 1 parking lot sale, and some pieces were reproductions. It made me go all warm and fuzzy to think that somewhere in the greater D.C. area there may be an antiques dealer who snookered a congressman and his two-legged checkbook even as the two of them picked the public pocket.
