Cunningham Bribery Case “Is A Window Into Babylon Or The Last Stages Of Rome”...

Vanity Fair JUDY BACHRACH July 5, 2006 at 02:55 PM
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The corruption of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a powerful California Republican, was, as the U.S. Attorney's Office maintains, historically "unparalleled"--an astonishing statement coming in the wake of the Abramoff scandal. A former Vietnam naval pilot who was awarded two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart, Cunningham, now 64, appropriated John Wayne's nickname and first ran for the House with the slogan "A congressman we can be proud of." Indeed, from the moment he arrived in Washington, in 1991, he made it his business to seem larger than life, telling people that his wartime heroics had inspired episodes in the movie Top Gun. His military service and expertise eventually earned him a place on the defense-appropriations subcommittee, with vast sway over the military budget, as well as on the intelligence committee, which oversees the C.I.A. and other spy agencies. Ever ready to defend the integrity of the armed forces, as he saw it, Duke excoriated Democrats who wanted to cut the defense budget, calling them the same people "who would put homos in the military."

But in November, Cunningham's heroic image came crashing down, and his swagger evaporated when he pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors in exchange for pressuring the Pentagon to buy their products and services. The government believes he was bribed chiefly by two men, identified in court documents as "co-conspirator No. 1" and "co-conspirator No. 2," now known to be Brent Wilkes and his protégé Mitchell Wade. (Wilkes has vigorously denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crimes in this case.) The products they hawked--computer software to scan and convert military maps, drawings, and documents into digital format--lacked glamour, perhaps, but they made the two entrepreneurs and Cunningham wealthy, arrogant, and even reckless, courtesy of a compliant Pentagon. Wilkes's two dozen or so firms, in California and Virginia, raked in $100 million over the last decade, while Wade's Washington-based MZM Inc. has gotten $150 million since 2002.

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