A must-read LA Times piece on Bob Ney's long and cozy ties to lobbyists, including his purchase of a houseboat from one. And more scrutiny of his well timed $34,000 gambling win accompanied by a Cyprus based Lebanese wheeler dealer interested in having US sanctions relaxed on Iran so he could sell Tehran US plane spare parts:

Another lobbyist — who employed a former Ney aide convicted in the Ohio bribery scandal — negotiated the sale of a family boat to Ney in 1999. The lobbyist, Afsoun Kuhnsman, ran a firm that was then representing a healthcare group with business before Congress.

Ney bought the 54-foot houseboat on the Potomac River from Kuhnsman's father, according to U.S. Coast Guard records. She handled the transaction, her father said in an interview.

Rhodes Prince, a former lobbyist at Kuhnsman's firm, said he had talked several times with Ney's staff on behalf of the healthcare group. Prince said Kuhnsman also had been in regular contact with the congressman.

Kuhnsman did not respond to requests for comment. Ney lawyer William Lawler said Kuhnsman never lobbied the congressman, although he acknowledged that Ney and the lobbyist were acquainted.

Spokesman Walsh said the congressman paid about $132,000 for the 1988 Hilburn custom fly-bridge houseboat, though he declined to provide documentation. (Coast Guard documents show he financed the purchase, which included a coveted boat slip on the Potomac, with a $105,000 loan.) Ney sold the houseboat for $103,000 five years later, according to the buyer.

"The bottom line is, so what?" Walsh said. "It was a fairly rundown houseboat. I have never heard anything remotely inappropriate about the houseboat."

In 2003, Ney was again doing business with someone working with a former aide, records show.

Cyprus-based FN Aviation (later renamed FAZ) was seeking U.S. approval to sell aircraft parts to Iran and hired Ney's former chief of staff on the Hill, Dave DiStefano, according to federal lobbying disclosure forms.

In February 2003, the company flew Ney to London.

Ney's host on the trip was FN partner Nigel Winfield, who, according to court records, was sentenced to jail for six months in 1982 and fined $10,000 for his involvement in an earlier scheme to swindle Elvis Presley on an aircraft lease-purchase deal.

The congressman's companion and benefactor also was jailed for failure to pay income taxes, and New York state records show he was barred from owning racehorses in that state because of past involvement with organized crime figures.

Records in Washington show Winfield owes about $30 million in past-due taxes and penalties. Florida racing officials also barred him from owning horses in that state, citing the New York action, records show.

Winfield's partner in FN Aviation, Fouad al Zayat, accompanied Ney to a London casino during a second trip to London in 2003. Ney has said he paid his own way.

Al Zayat, known in gambling circles as "The Fat Man," gained notoriety in England a year earlier when he was sued by London's Ritz Casino for bouncing checks worth about $3 million.

After the 2003 trip, Ney reported in his annual financial disclosure statements that he won $34,000 at the Ambassador's Club, a private London casino at which Al Zayat was a member. That disclosure coincided with another change in Ney's financial statements: He stopped reporting about $30,000 in credit card debts.

Walsh, Ney's spokesman, has said the congressman played only two hands of cards.

The information that Ney speaks fluent Farsi and lived in Iran (and as the NYT reported earlier, in Saudi Arabia as well) is also interesting.

Posted by Laura at January 22, 2006 09:38 AM