WASHINGTON — It seemed more befitting an episode of "The Sopranos" than a page from congressional history: $90,000 in allegedly ill-gotten $100 bills, wrapped in aluminum foil, stuffed in the freezer of the gentleman from Louisiana.
The idea that a member of Congress may have been caught in a bribery scandal is certainly nothing new. Lawmakers of old were known to walk the marbled halls, their briefcases bulging with cash.
Even the amount isn't particularly extraordinary. After all, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the disgraced former Republican representative from Rancho Santa Fe, recently was convicted of accepting almost 27 times as much in illegal gifts and graft.
But what stands out about the contents of the freezer belonging to Democratic Rep. William J. Jefferson, as described in an FBI affidavit released Sunday, is the old-style simplicity of what investigators found: bundles of C-notes, wrapped tightly like leftover lasagna.
"Why the freezer? Why not the mattress?" asked Lara Brown, a political scientist at Cal State Channel Islands, who has studied 30 years' worth of modern House ethics scandals. She noted that 2006 was yielding a "bumper crop" of congressional embarrassments.
The fallout from the latest alleged wrongdoing could be politically costly -- one more thing to cement voters' low opinion of Congress in an election year.
Democrats have been using the ethics storm swirling around the Republican Party as election-year fodder: Cunningham is now serving eight years for bribery and tax evasion. And the once-powerful and well-connected GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff has pleaded guilty to defrauding clients and conspiring to bribe lawmakers in one of the most sweeping political scandals of modern times.
But the Democrats have fallen upon troubles of their own. Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia resigned from the House Ethics Committee when the FBI began looking into his personal finances; and Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney of Georgia embarrassed her party by poking a Capitol Police officer at a security checkpoint.
Jefferson is the latest to join the pack of beleaguered lawmakers. According to an 83-page affidavit released Sunday, he offered to help a northern Virginia businesswoman win contracts to install telephone and Internet contracts in Nigeria and Ghana in exchange for a 30% kickback.
