10.24.06 -
In the Beginning, There Was
Adam: The man who helped bring Abramoff down goes to prison for his own
nefarious deeds.
On Monday, Adam Kidan began serving a 70-month sentence for a bank fraud scheme
he cooked up with Jack Abramoff, the former high-powered Washington lobbyist
turned convicted felon, in buying a fleet of gambling boats from a Florida
business tycoon named Gus Boulis.
"I wish I had never met Jack," Kidan lamented last December. But
while Abramoff will undoubtedly, and deservedly, go down as one of Washington's
most dastardly villains of recent vintage (no one will ever forget the black
hat and trench coat he wore when pleading guilty in January, a fashion mistake
likely not to be repeated when he goes to jail next month), he might well say
the same thing about Kidan.
That is, if anyone cared. Today Kidan is a footnote to
history—a chubby sidekick who got in over his balding head
with the infamous influence peddler who cajoled congressional leaders and
politicians into joining in his shady dealings. Though he wasn't an integral
part of the machinery that took Abramoff to the top, he played a crucial, if
largely unnoticed role in bringing him down.
Six years and nearly a month ago, Kidan happily shared the spoils of Abramoff's
crooked kingdom-memories that will now be cold comfort in his low-security
prison cell at Fort Dix.
Jack Pot! SunCruz Casinos' Entire Fleet; Nation's Large Fleet of Day-Cruise
Casino Boats Wins New Owner."
The press release sent over the business wires then trumpeted Kidan, at the age
of 36, as the chief executive officer in a "newly formed company headed by
a group of executives with strong ties to the entertainment and gaming
industries as well as to national, state and local governments." The other
partners were Ben Waldman, a former spokesman for the Reagan administration,
and a relatively unknown lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, who, the release went to
pains to note, also "has spent more than a decade as a producer of a
number of feature motion pictures."
Kidan's salary, a guaranteed $500,000 a year, could have doubled with bonuses.
The fringe benefits included use of a yacht he later named Summer Wind; a
corporate jet; a brand-new Mercedes, the bigass one; and a $4,300-a-month
luxury condo.
On the day of the announcement, as Kidan gave interviews to south Florida's
media-his Brooklyn accent evident only to the keen ear-the possibilities
appeared endless. Jowly, with slightly heavy eyelids underneath thin, almost
transparent eyebrows, Kidan immediately set out to double the size of the
SunCruz gambling ships' approximately 1,000-person workforce. He explained to
reporters that plans were already afoot to expand the 11-ship fleet, moving
into other ports in Florida and possibly even New York City.
It took Kidan only four months to fuck everything up. It was an astoundingly
short time even given his track record of failure, which included bankrupting
previous business ventures and getting disbarred for stealing from his own
stepdad. But this time, his failure proved so colossal that eventually it
pulled Abramoff down with him-in a manner that made and destroyed Abramoff's
national reputation in a media instant. It was Kidan and his misbegotten
business decisions that started authorities down a path that eventually led to
Abramoff and his world of corruption. But while every angle of Abramoff's being
has been dissected and examined then redissected and re-examined, Kidan's has
almost completely avoided media scrutiny-until now.
I called Kidan a few months ago (he promised to sit down and talk to me, but
never did), and when he finally responded, he apologized for not getting back
to me sooner. He told me he was still working as a business consultant and had
been out of town. When I expressed surprise that people were still hiring him
after the Abramoff scandal broke, he mulled that for a moment, then asked if I
wouldn't write about that because he didn't want to scare off his clients.
Kidan didn't want his reputation (or at least the one he'd fostered for
himself) to change. Despite his multiple missteps, he'd somehow always managed
to shake off his failures and move on.
As a teen at John Dewey High School, Adam Ronald Kidan was inspired by Ronald
Reagan to become a Republican, a decision that played a central role in his
roller-coaster ride of successes and failures. While at George Washington
University, he met and befriended Abramoff through the College Republicans.
While Abramoff made his way to Hollywood in the late 1980s to produce the
utterly forgettable movie Red Scorpion (starring Dolph Lundgren), Kidan got his
degree from Brooklyn Law School. Because of his work on George H.W. Bush's 1988
presidential campaign, Kidan was rewarded with his first job out of law school,
president of the Four Freedoms Foundation. He later described it during a
deposition as an "educational foundation designed to do work in Eastern
Europe" set up for Bush campaign kids. It crashed in a matter of months.
Kidan moved back to New York to put his law degree to work. At the same time,
he teamed up with his sister's boyfriend to open two stores (which he later
described to would-be lenders as a chain) called New York City's Best Bagels,
in the Hamptons. The partnership didn't last long and Kidan sold it at a loss
to the boyfriend, who was later fined by the Federal Trade Commission for
running a phony candy-vending business. In the winter of 1994, Kidan opened a
Dial-a-Mattress franchise in Washington, D.C., short-changing his partner,
Warren Bell, Brooklyn's bialy king, to do so. A month later, Kidan, still also
working as a lawyer, was accused of misappropriating $100,000 in escrow funds
from his stepfather.
For years Kidan's told anyone who would lis ten that he wasn't disbarred for
this. Instead, as he told Newsday last year, he only surrendered his law
license as a "business tactic" (no further explanation given). In
fact, records show that Kidan was not only disbarred in New York, but also in
New Jersey, for this ethical breach. In Washington, Kidan became something of a
minor celebrity through the "leave the last S off for savings" radio
and television commercials he did for Dial-a-Mattress. His company expanded to
six stores before shrinking back to two, and then went into bankruptcy. In
1999, the assets of the company were sold off, and he walked away with nothing,
according to court records. As 2000 approached, Kidan was broke. Court
documents later showed that he was paying a mortgage on a $175,000 condo in
Floral Park, Queens; driving a 1995 Dodge; and tens of thousands of dollars in
arrears.
Yet as 2000 closed out, Kidan had managed to become one of two majority
partners in SunCruz, a $147.5 million company, and was living the attendant
opulent lifestyle. And all with no money down. To understand how he made that
happen you have to know a few things.
First, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, the bombastic SunCruz owner who
later figured in Kidan's downfall, was under a secret court order to sell the
business.
The "cruise to nowhere"-as SunCruz was dubbed because its ships
ventured out to international waters then back-was targeted by Florida
politicians who thought Boulis was flouting anti-gambling laws. Boulis, who
wasn't a U.S. citizen when he bought his first SunCruz ship, agreed to sell in
three years, and the government agreed to keep it a secret so he could recoup
fair market value. That fall, Boulis called one of his attorneys and asked him
to find a buyer. That attorney turned to one of his firm's lobbyists, Jack
Abramoff, who took one look and realized he knew the perfect buyer-himself. Too
busy to run things alone, he recruited two friends, Waldman and Kidan, then
passing himself off as a wunderkind with $26 million from Dial-a-Mattress in
his pocket.
But Kidan and Abramoff didn't have the down payment to secure a loan, so they
committed bank fraud to achieve their ambitious ends.
Instead of demanding the $23 million down payment in cash, a stipulation of the
loan, Boulis agreed to allow Kidan and Abramoff to sign promissory notes for
the money. In return, he secretly (and illegally) kept 10 percent of SunCruz
through a shell company. The three forged a wire transfer purporting that
Abramoff and Kidan had paid the millions to Boulis and faxed a copy of it to
the financing company. The loan went through.
As long as the men kept in step, the fraud was impossible to detect.
Right away, Abramoff and Kidan, who was running the day-to-day operations,
began spending prodigious amounts of the company's money to buy a Washington
Redskins luxury box (where they entertained some of the country's most powerful
politicians), a 34-foot boat, Kidan's luxury condo, and so on. The company's
comptroller later told authorities that in short order "somewhere close to
a million dollars" was paid out for expenses that appeared "personal
in nature."
Still, as one federal law enforcement official explained, "This was a
privately owned business. They could do whatever the hell they wanted as long
as they paid the interest on the loans."
Which they didn't. Three months into the deal, the cash flow had dried up. They
defaulted on their loans and hadn't even attempted to repay the promissory
notes to Boulis. What could Boulis do? He'd broken the law too. They then began
firing some of Boulis's most trusted employees, including several girlfriends.
Threats were followed by lawsuits followed by more threats. The litigation
didn't bother Kidan; after all, he controlled the company until a judge ruled
otherwise. But when confronted, the first thing that Kidan did was reach out to
known mob associates. Abramoff's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said that Abramoff
asserts he had nothing to do with that decision, a contention that sources
close to Kidan confirmed.
Kidan had met Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello through a mobster Kidan
had once done legal work for. He later told authorities that bringing in Big
Tony, a onetime associate of John Gotti, was an effort to
"neutralize" any threats from Boulis, whom Kidan incorrectly
suspected of having organized-crime ties.
Instead, Boulis was permanently neutralized. On February 6, 2001, he was
murdered in an ambush as he drove his BMW home after a long day at his Fort
Lauderdale office.
Thus began a domino effect. The subsequent investigation first uncovered the
bank fraud. Kidan, who lost control of the company to Boulis's heirs, soon
agreed to cooperate with federal authorities. This opened the door for
prosecutors to apply pressure on Abramoff to cooperate in the
congressional-bribery and influence-peddling case, which he eventually did. In
the meantime, Moscatiello and two cohorts were arrested and charged in Boulis's
murder. Moscatiello told detectives that Kidan had ordered the hit. Prosecutors
apparently don't believe him. Instead, Kidan, who told police Moscatiello
freelanced the murder, is going to testify against Moscatiello in the Boulis
murder case, his attorney, Joseph Conway, says, in the hopes of reducing his
sentence. That trial is expected to start early next year.
By that time, Kidan will have settled into his new home-Fort Dix, a
low-security prison whose compounds in western New Jersey are surrounded by
razor wire. It's possible that by then Kidan will have befriended some of the
prison's once powerful inmates, like former Providence mayor Vincent
"Buddy" Cianci or ex-Bridgeport mayor Joseph Ganin, both in for
corruption, or crooked financiers like Robert E. Brennan, who owes $75 million,
or Jean Pierre Collardeau, who fleeced $20 million from his investors. Some of
these guys may have even heard of Kidan, though it's not likely. For some
reason, the role Kidan played in the Abramoff affair is like the hurricanes-it
never seems to travel much past south Florida.
- Sean Gardiner: Village Voice Staff
Writer
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