Washington Post Princeton Berkeley at the Top Again

Introduction

By Robert G. Kaiser

For Gerald Sylvester Joseph Cassidy, creator and proprietor of the most lucrative lobbying house in Washington, May 17, 2005, was a day to exult. That vivid, clear bound Tuesday marked the 30th birthday of Cassidy & Associates, and an impressive crowd had come up to pay tribute to a godfather of the influence business.

Hundreds of guests gathered on the rooftop terrace of a handsome new office edifice at the foot of Capitol Colina, xiii stories higher up Constitution Avenue. A brilliant orange sun descended gently backside the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial at the western end of the Mall, casting athwart beams of low-cal beyond the assembled throng. The guests' view from the roof was filled by the U.s.a. Capitol, which from this startling vantage point could be seen, from stop to finish, in a single field of vision. The Capitol looked contained and compact, almost a plaything within easy reach.

Gerald Cassidy at his business firm'south 30th ceremony celebration. (Susan Biddle/TWP)

As the setting sunday illuminated the scene, the party illuminated a new Washington -- a capital letter transformed past big coin in the 30 years since Cassidy became a lobbyist. This new Washington operated on new ethical norms, embraced new standards of risk and reward and offered tempting new career choices for quondam officials, members of Congress, their spouses and their aides.

Cassidy helped invent the new Washington, which had made him seriously rich. His personal fortune exceeded $125 million. He and his original partner, whom he forced out of the firm 20 years earlier, devised a new kind of business, later on mimicked past many others. Their innovation was the showtime modern "earmarked appropriations" -- federal funds directed past Congress to private institutions when no federal agency had proposed spending the money. Over the subsequent 3 decades, the government dispensed billions of dollars in "earmarks," and lobbying for such appropriations became a booming Washington industry.

Cassidy may exist the richest Washington lobbyist, merely he is far from the best-known. Since a scandal erupted that bears his name, that championship belongs to Jack Abramoff, the confessed felon, bribe-payer and tax evader who is now an inmate in the federal prison house camp in Cumberland, Dr.. He is still cooperating in a widening federal probe of corruption on Capitol Hill.

Jack Abramoff with attorney Abbe Lowell. (AP Photograph/Dennis Cook)

Abramoff's brazen behavior fit a stereotypical extravaganza of the Washington lobbyist as a willful rogue eager to corrupt members of Congress. The Abramoff story is a crude pulp thriller punctuated by free dinners, lavish golfing outings, big entrada contributions, arm-twisting and old-fashioned bribery.

Cassidy's is a subtler ballsy that probably reveals more than nearly the culture of Washington, D.C. Information technology, also, involves favors, gifts and contributions, but they are supplemented by the disciplined awarding of intellect, hard work, salesmanship and connections. In Cassidy's story, all these can influence the decisions of government to the benefit of private parties -- Cassidy'south clients.

On a personal level, Cassidy's saga is a variation on the classic American myth: A determined man from nowhere accumulates swell wealth and rises to the top. At different moments it evokes Charles Foster Kane, Jay Gatsby or a character from a Horatio Alger tale. Like them, Cassidy is a cocky-made man who fulfilled many of his most ambitious dreams. But fabric success has not pacified all of his personal demons. He is tough, temperamental, driven and, co-ordinate to many around him, rather alone.

Over the next five weeks, The Washington Post will tell Gerald Cassidy's story in a unique manner. On Monday, the series will bound to the newspaper's Web site, washingtonpost.com, to brainstorm a 25-affiliate series narrative that volition describe how Cassidy congenital his business, how he made the deals that earned his millions, how he and his fellow-lobbyists influenced decisions of authorities and helped create the coin-centric culture of modernistic Washington.

A Gatsbyesque Affair

Charlie Palmer Steak, the gleaming Washington outpost of a famous Las Vegas eatery, had catered Cassidy's party. Restaurant staff circulated with platters of miniature hamburgers and tartlets of goat cheese and mushrooms. The eating house occupies much of the ground floor of the edifice at 101 Constitution Ave., where the rooftop political party was held. One of the restaurant's owners is the same Gerald S. J. Cassidy, a human of many investments.

He had turned 65 a calendar month before the party, and he looked spiffing. His full beard of uniformly short whiskers was trimmed to a triangle of white. His fullback'south frame was perfectly draped in a dark grey, double-breasted and pin-striped suit made by Alan Flusser in New York, Cassidy'due south domicile boondocks. Flusser's custom suits offset at $3,800. A white shirt with French cuffs and a silk tie in a pattern of black and white checks completed the ensemble. The checked tie set against the suit's prominent pin stripes evoked a Las Vegas defense attorney.

The outfit advertised the distance Cassidy had come from his hard childhood in a troubled Irish gaelic-American family. None of its other members, denizens of Brooklyn and Queens, wore custom-made suits; none had even graduated from college earlier Cassidy did in 1963. Cassidy's memories of his youth are short on nostalgia, long on deprivation. "I retrieve evictions, repossessions, things you never forget." Jack Cassidy, his stepfather, was a pugnacious Navy veteran and former boxer who sometimes threw a punch at his son.

At his large party Cassidy's shyness was displaced by pride; he was virtually preening. He presided with a certain dignified formality, greeting guests with a warm smile but never slipping out of character. Like Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-invented tycoon, Cassidy seemed to enjoy the thought of the party at least as much as the party itself.

Gatsby sought riches to repossess a lost love who had rejected him when he was young and poor; Cassidy, too, sought riches as armor against poverty and rejection. Both were dreamers who would be forced by circumstances to go realists.

For Cassidy, the urge to accumulate money drove him to succeed. "I'chiliad a big fan of financial security," he said in i of numerous extended interviews. "I didn't have a lot of it equally a kid, so I wanted to be successful and financially secure." He never pretended not to exist interested in money nor tried to deny who he was or how he made his cash. He proudly, though quietly, made large donations to numerous charities.

His candor about his business organization and his pursuit of wealth gear up him apart from the nearly successful lobbyists of earlier generations, who often were reticent about their merchandise. Washington powerbroker Clark Clifford was a good instance; he never registered as a lobbyist and would deny heatedly that he was one, even equally he helped his constabulary firm's corporate clients solve issues in Washington for handsome fees. Clifford wanted to be known every bit an elder statesman.

Cassidy fabricated no basic about his piece of work. He liked to talk about his ability to get things done: winning hundreds of millions in federal dollars for his university clients, getting Ocean Spray Cranberry juice into school lunches, helping General Dynamics save the billion-dollar Seawolf submarine, smoothing the mode for the president of Taiwan to make a speech at Cornell despite a U.S. ban on such visits.

Cassidy's career has spanned an astounding boom in the lobbying business. When Cassidy became a lobbyist in 1975, the total revenue of Washington lobbyists was less than $100 million a year. In 2006 the fees paid to registered lobbyists surpassed $2.5 billion; the Cassidy house'due south 51 lobbyists earned virtually $29 1000000. In 1975 the rare hiring of a former member of Congress as a lobbyist made eyebrows rise. Today 200 quondam members of the House and Senate are registered lobbyists. Ii of them, tall, gregarious men named Marty Russo and Jack Quinn, work for Cassidy, and at the 30th birthday party they worked the crowd with relish.

The business organisation involves giving as well as receiving. Equally lobbying became more and more lucrative, Cassidy realized that members of Congress who helped his clients could be thanked with campaign contributions. "You can't exist in this business concern and not give," he once explained.

He encouraged his colleagues to give, and he gave prolifically himself. In the quarter century leading up to his party, Cassidy, his employees and their spouses had personally given at least $5.three meg to candidates for the House and Senate and to the two major parties. Cassidy and his married woman, Loretta, donated more than a 1000000 of that themselves. The lobbyists of Cassidy & Associates had received many times that much in fees from their clients - almost always in the form of monthly retainers. The clients had received hundreds of millions in earmarked appropriations and other benefits worth hundreds of millions more.

Cassidy's appetite for lobbying revenue could atomic number 82 him into trouble. Information technology was the crusade of 1 of the few public mistakes of his career: his 2004 offer to the shortly-to-be notorious Abramoff to join Cassidy & Associates every bit a consultant just after the law business firm of Greenberg Traurig had fired him. Abramoff accustomed the offering, merely then Cassidy had to withdraw it. Abramoff was not invited to the 30th birthday party.

Starting with McGovern

The party oversupply looked like a typical A-Listing Washington gathering, sprinkled with past and present senators, House members and Washington hangers-on of many varieties. But at that place was a story upwards on the roof that evening that wasn't obvious to most of the guests -- the story of Gerry Cassidy's remarkable career.

The crowd included figures from every stage of Cassidy's life in Washington, showtime with George McGovern. The long-retired former Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee had flown in from South Dakota to toast Cassidy, whom he had beginning met 36 years before in Immokalee, Fla., when McGovern chaired the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.

Gerald Cassidy, right, guides Sen. George McGovern, center, on a tour of labor camps in Immokalee, Fla. (Courtesy Gerald Cassidy)

In 1969, Cassidy, then a young legal aid lawyer for migrant workers, helped McGovern's staff organize hearings in Immokalee on hunger among those workers. Cassidy then escorted the senator around ane of the virtually impoverished areas in the Us. The hearings drew extensive television and newspaper coverage, one of McGovern's commencement moments in a national spotlight (view a newspaper article, pdf). Just two months later, Cassidy made his fashion to Washington and knocked on the Diet Committee'south door. Could he accept a job? In April 1969, Gerry Cassidy arrived in the nation's capital to join the staff of McGovern's committee. He has been here always since.

When Cassidy moved up from Florida, he and Loretta rented a small apartment in Arlington. Today, they own grand houses in McLean and on the Eastern Shore and a condo on Key West.

Cassidy and McGovern have maintained friendly if non shut relations over the years -- a typical pattern for Cassidy, who has many acquaintances but few real friends. McGovern expresses personal amazement at Cassidy's fiscal success, and also gratitude for it. The lobbyist has contributed $100,000 to the George and Eleanor McGovern Library, which was dedicated in October at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D.

Both men say they have forgotten that McGovern fired Cassidy from the nutrition committee in early 1975 to make room on the staff for Bob Shrum, at the time a young political operative who McGovern hoped could help him run for president over again in 1976. Shrum went on to advise eight losing Democratic presidential candidates.

McGovern's order to fire Cassidy, in a letter to Kenneth Schlossberg, staff director of the nutrition committee, can be constitute in McGovern's papers at Princeton University (view the letter, pdf). Schlossberg interpreted that letter as a cue that information technology was also time for him to find a new chore. He proposed to Cassidy that they beginning a consulting business, he recalled in an interview. They became l-50 partners in a house called Schlossberg-Cassidy & Associates, though they had no associates.

When they first prepare shop in a tiny, one-room part, Schlossberg and Cassidy sent messages to everyone they knew offering to provide whatever assistance might be needed in Washington. One of the first to respond was Jean Mayer, a renowned nutritionist, who had just become president of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., exterior Boston. Mayer summoned Schlossberg to Tufts to talk about his dream of edifice a human nutrition research middle. He recounted how House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill had once told him virtually the babyhood days when he and his blood brother sneaked onto Tufts' playing fields to play ball. "If I can do anything to assist you, let me know," O'Neill had said.

Mayer hired Schlossberg-Cassidy to figure out how O'Neill might help him. And they did. Afterwards two years of work by the young lobbyists, Congress appropriated $27 million for the human being nutrition center. Over the class of the next 3 decades, that $27 million would exist followed by hundreds of millions more than in directed, earmarked appropriations to Cassidy clients -- colleges, universities, hospitals, corporations and state and local governments.

The Absent Alumni

Many of Cassidy'southward Democratic friends were in attendance at the rooftop party. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), for example, came prancing beyond the sail "carpet" that had been laid on the roof to greet his host: "My Cassidy!" he proclaimed with a mischievous Irish grin, "I'm a fan of yours!"

Gerald Cassidy, right, and Marty Russo at the 30th ceremony party for Cassidy & Associates. (Susan Biddle/TWP)

Cassidy has long had good relations with members of the Massachusetts delegation, going back to his friend O'Neill, the speaker from 1977 to 1987, boom years for Cassidy'due south firm. Many of the early clients were Massachusetts institutions. Past the finish of that period, Cassidy was paying himself as much as $5 1000000 a year, several times more the earnings of even Washington's fanciest lawyers.

One of the loudest guests at the party was Russo, the onetime Congressman from the suburbs of Chicago who was defeated in 1992 and joined Cassidy the next yr. At the party, Russo greeted his pals from the House with a booming phonation, and had hugs and pats on the back for many -- a Chicago political leader of the old school. On his Cassidy & Associates calling bill of fare, Russo has put an embossed, golden Seal of the U.s.a. and identifies himself as "Marty Russo, Fellow member of Congress, Retired." (view Russo's business card)

The guest listing for the party was long, just so was the list of people who had played a prominent part in building the Cassidy firm just had not been invited. Many of the professional and personal relationships Cassidy adult over 3 decades had not survived. His mercurial personality and sometimes violent temper put an end to some of them; his ways of doing business ended others. Some left him for greener pastures.

Members of a large Cassidy alumni association could be institute in anteroom shops and public relations firms all around town. When someone left the business firm, Cassidy tended to take information technology desperately. He got into a prolonged legal action with one erstwhile employee and forced him into a settlement, a story that chop-chop made the rounds and had the desired effect. Only a fraction of the old employees was invited to the party on the roof, though the consequence had been the talk of the alumni for weeks.

Gerald Cassidy, right, and James Fabiani exterior the offices of Cassidy & Assembly in 1989. (Frank Johnston/TWP)

The uninvited included some of the about important people in the history of the business firm -- offset of all James P. Fabiani. Fabiani was the third person to join the firm, later on Schlossberg and Cassidy. He designed many of its procedures; he became its most successful marketer, luring in dozens of clients. Only he and Cassidy fell out after 15 years working together. Fabiani thought the firm had inverse: "It went from ... hard-charging, driven, we're-going-to-succeed-for-our-clients to a company preoccupied with money.'"

Schlossberg was absent-minded, likewise, an ironic status for the actual founder of the business firm -- despite many references in the firm's literature and on its Web site to Cassidy as its founder. The 2 men'due south gradual estrangement had culminated in 1984, when they agreed on a settlement that dissolved their partnership. Schlossberg left with $812,600 as his share of the enterprise. Today he runs a family concern, the Schlossberg Memorial Chapel, providing funeral services to the Jewish community on Boston's South Shore. He and Cassidy haven't spoken in 22 years.

The two had an achingly complicated relationship. "He simply agreed to the deal we finally settled on," Schlossberg said recently of Cassidy, "considering he knew that if we really ended up in courtroom I would make sure the whole city knew every last item about our concern and no clients would be left later on that." The money Schlossberg received proved to be a piddling amount. Eventually, in a series of complicated financial transactions from 1989 to 1999, Cassidy sold his interest in the firm for a full of $xxx million, while staying in place to run the business concern for a handsome salary.

Ten-Percenters

One of the alumni who did make information technology to the rooftop terrace was William 1000. Cloherty, a feisty niggling fireplug of a man who came upwards with an idea that helped Cassidy soar. Cloherty had been working in the Tufts administration when Cassidy and Schlossberg won that first earmark for Jean Mayer. He chop-chop grasped that what Schlossberg-Cassidy had accomplished for Tufts could become the basis of a real concern.

Through a connectedness with John Silber, the resourceful president of Boston University, Cloherty got to know Cassidy. Intense, vivid, disheveled and hopelessly disorganized, Cloherty quickly bonded with Cassidy, a fellow hustling Irishman.

Cloherty proposed to piece of work for Cassidy on a committee footing. He would receive 10 percent of whatever fees the clients he brought in paid to the house. Past 1985 Cloherty had signed upward 10 clients, viii of them universities. Over the years Cloherty collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions without doing whatsoever lobbying himself. Cloherty's success prompted Cassidy and Fabiani to build a large stable of "ten-percenters," who became critical to the house's early growth.

At the political party, Cloherty spent a long time chatting with Silber, who had flown to Washington for the occasion. Prior to joining Cassidy, Cloherty had worked for Schlossberg as BU'southward government liaison. Over a quarter century, BU has paid Cassidy millions of dollars in lobbying fees, and the school has received $106.5 million in earmarks from the federal government.

William Cloherty, left, talks with Rep. Tom Filibuster (R-Tex.) at the 30th anniversary party for Cassidy & Associates. (Susan Biddle/TWP)

Cloherty's success reflected the business firm'south. For years in the 1980s, Cassidy and his colleagues could truthfully tell prospective clients that they never failed to win an earmark for an institution that had retained them. "Sometimes it took longer than we expected," admitted Elliott Fiedler, who worked at the firm from 1987 to 1995, "and sometimes the client had to settle for a good deal less than it hoped for. But for years every customer eventually got something."

From its inception the firm also represented businesses. One of Cassidy'southward earliest corporate clients was the Body of water Spray Cranberry cooperative, a national system of cranberry and grapefruit growers. Ocean Spray got him into the political contributions business; he fix a political action committee for the group and decided which members of Congress would receive its largesse. That just increased Cassidy's influence.

His firm has also organized hundreds of fundraisers for members of Congress, many of them breakfasts in the firm's conference room. Cassidy believes in giving money to his friends for their election campaigns. The arrangement doesn't bother him in the least. "Lobbyists have always been contributors; they e'er will exist," he said in an interview. "It's like if yous lived in a rural community and you wanted to exist office of that customs, and they had a volunteer burn department. If you didn't participate, you wouldn't exist very well accepted in the customs. It'south as uncomplicated as that."

Selling the Firm Once again and Again

In the decade that began in 1989, Cassidy & Associates was transformed. Cassidy was able to fulfill his dream of becoming non but prosperous and successful, only rich. In two stages, he sold a portion of the firm to an Employee Stock Buying Programme, an unusual financial transaction that put $15 million in his pocket.

He used some of the money to profoundly expand his business. He created Powell-Tate, a public relations firm named for its primal partners, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter'southward press secretary, and Sheila Tate, press secretary to first lady Nancy Reagan. Cassidy also acquired a Republican lobbying house, a polling business firm and a grass-roots lobbying firm.

The Republican victory in 1994, taking command of Congress from the Democrats whom Cassidy had spent more than than 20 years befriending, cost the firm near $6 million in acquirement, or roughly 20 percent of what information technology had been making. Cassidy cut his own salary way back; for a couple of years he earned no bonus. But he survived, and business organization slowly picked up again.

In 1999, Cassidy sold the firm to InterPublic Group (IPG), a British advertisement and public relations conglomerate, in a stock transaction that netted about $60 million. Cassidy'southward share would full just over $xv million. His timing was impeccable; he used a financial device called a collar to sell the IPG shares he received in the deal at what turned out to be a historic loftier. Within months, the IPG shares lost half their value. Most of Cassidy'southward associates held on to their shares and suffered heavy losses.

For an entrepreneur who had created a business organization and shaped it in his own prototype, becoming the holding of an international conglomerate was non easy. At showtime Cassidy'due south relationship with IPG was rocky. Some executives working for the new owner idea it might be best to ease Cassidy out of the firm and turn it over to his longtime associate, Fabiani.

The gambit failed with the new owner, and Cassidy remained the boss. But the business firm roughshod on hard times. Fabiani left, and the earmarked appropriations concern was suddenly crowded with new competitors. And Congress, which loved earmarks, loved them then well that their number burgeoned, simply their average size shrank radically.

'A Republican Lobbying Firm'

Another guest at the 30th birthday party was Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the Republican whip in the House. 10 years earlier, a Republican as important as Edgeless probably would non have attended an event honoring a Autonomous lobbyist. But times changed later on the Republicans took command of Congress in 1994, forcing Cassidy to adapt to Republican tastes.

His latest adaptation had been the hiring of Gregg Hartley, an open, friendly Missourian like Blunt, who had worked as Blunt'southward right-hand human for nearly all his political career. In 2003, following a path trod past countless other Congressional aides, Hartley had decided to "become downtown" -- to get a lobbyist. A bidding war for his services ensued. Cassidy had won it with an offer of merely under $1 million a yr plus a substantial percentage of the lobbying fees paid by clients Hartley could bring to the firm.

Hartley had earned $150,000 as Blunt's senior adjutant. Now he was the chief operating officer of Cassidy & Associates. Hartley worked the crowd at the party with a friendly, low-fundamental style. A number of the guests represented corporate clients he had attracted to the business firm.

Gerald Cassidy, right, and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) at the 30th anniversary party for Cassidy & Assembly. (Susan Biddle/TWP)

Blunt was a squeamish catch for the Cassidy party, simply not in the course of the homo who arrived soon afterward, surrounded by a bustling entourage. That was Tom Delay of Texas, and so all the same the Firm majority leader. His presence was probably a favor to Hartley, who had belonged to the House leadership's inner circumvolve.

To have someone with Hartley's connections essentially running Cassidy'due south firm, every bit he has since 2005, showed how the times had inverse Cassidy. "I'grand running a Republican lobbying business firm," Cassidy quipped sheepishly to an old friend.

One of the most influential guests at the political party was a senior senator who one time went after Cassidy in public -- Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), ranking Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In 1989, just after Byrd became that committee's chairman, he threw a theatrical temper tantrum when The Washington Mail service reported that the University of West Virginia had hired the Cassidy house to help win an earmarked appropriation for an $18 million facility to study the uses of coal. When this became public noesis, Byrd decided he was furious. He really blocked the $18 1000000, which the Firm had already approved, and forced his domicile state academy to fire Cassidy. In a speech on the Senate floor he denounced "lobbyists who collect exorbitant fees to create projects and accept them earmarked in cribbing bills... for the benefit of their clients," a thinly veiled reference to Cassidy.

Gerald Cassidy, center, and married woman Loretta, left, greet Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West.Va.) at the 30th anniversary political party for Cassidy & Associates. (Susan Biddle/TWP)

The episode created a political opportunity, prompting Byrd to draft the "Byrd Amendment," putting new restrictions on all lobbyists. It appeared to be a memorial to his anger at Cassidy.

Then why, 16 years later, when he was 87 and frail, had Byrd come to a party to celebrate Cassidy? He responded to that question a piddling testily: "I'yard here because I'thou here. I was invited, and I decided to come."

Soon later the party another successful Washington lobbyist ventured an explanation: "That's simple. It's his bicycle. He's up." Indeed he was. Republicans thought Byrd might be vulnerable, and they had targeted him in 2006. He was busily raising money to defend his seat, and Cassidy, it turned out, was doing his best to assist.

Byrd'southward re-election commission later reported to the Federal Elections Commission that six weeks before his party, Gerald S.J. Cassidy had made a $2,000 contribution. And so in November 2006, half-dozen months after the 30th birthday party, Cassidy & Assembly' Political Action Committee fabricated a $938 "in-kind" contribution to organize and pay the tab for a Byrd fundraiser at Finemondo, an Italian eating place downtown. That event raised $16,645 more for Byrd, nearly all of information technology from employees of the Cassidy firm. One $2,000 donation was recorded in the name of Loretta Cassidy, the lobbyist'southward wife, whose pretty smiling and loftier spirits lit up the party on the roof on May 17.

Equally the sun set and the party wound down, Cassidy took a microphone and spoke, very briefly:

"All I desire to say is information technology's been a great time, I've enjoyed it. I've had a great time over the years considering of all of you. I've loved being in Washington working on important bug. My boss is here, Senator McGovern. He brought me to Washington 35 years ago and opened the door to a bully life. Cheers."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this written report.

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Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/citizen-k-street/chapters/introduction/

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