(Publisher’s Note: This article is the first of a two-part series written by new contributing writer Dimitri Vassilaros. Vassilaros hosts “Dimitri – Live & Dangerously Local!” on River Talk – Ohio Valley 100.1/100.9FM and AM1290/1430 Monday through Wednesday from 7-9 a.m.)
As the Feds were closing in, U.S. Congressman Bob Ney was going to execute his exit strategy the next day.
The plan was to wear a Republican blue suit with a red tie, take a weekday drive from his home in Ohio to Washington D.C., bring two envelopes, each with the same angry screed trashing President George W. Bush, and political advisor Karl Rove, and saying the Iraq War was a setup.
“Everything! I was going to show them. I was going to teach them,” Ney said.
After arriving at the Department of Justice, Ney was going to put one of the envelopes in his suit pocket and the other on the ground, right before he pulled out his Smith & Wesson Bodyguard J-frame revolver to kill himself.
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Ney said.
The former Bellaire altar boy had come a long way from his days at St. John’s Catholic Church, where he would sneak his first sips of wine somewhere behind the altar. His analysis of the situation was that he had fewer than nine seconds of privacy while the priest was busy changing his garments.
“Here’s the big principle of the thing: I didn’t just take a sip of wine. I counted how long it would take. Within those 8 1/2 seconds, I opened it, took a swig, put the thing back, so I wouldn’t be caught. That was more important than taking the drink,” Ney said.
He was 11 years old.
As Ney was going to school at Ohio University, and then at The Ohio State University (“Where everybody drank.”), he also had volunteered to help the Republican Party on college campuses. Ney didn’t realize he had started on a career path within the GOP. But after graduation, with just a few hundred dollars in his bank account, and no job prospects teaching history in the Upper Ohio Valley, Ney thought “screw it.”
He considered a career path detour of roughly 6,700 miles. To Iran.
Ney was teaching and tutoring there for less than a year when the Iranian Revolution drove him back home. Ohio’s Republican governor gave him a government job, and from there, it led Ney to public service in Columbus, and then, to Washington, D.C.
As fate would have it, his exposure to the languages and religions of the Middle East during the late ‘70s was helpful years later after he pleaded guilty in 2006 to the falsification of federal documents.
During his 30-month prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, W.Va., Ney taught Black Muslim inmates how to properly say their prayers in Arabic.
“Things collide in life,” Ney said. “Big-ass collisions.”
One of the biggest was the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling corruption investigation. By 2006, the collateral damage included convictions of almost two dozen lobbyists, congressional aides, and politicians: including one from Bellaire. Ney was facing the end of his political career, and maybe his life. But there was no end to his drinking.
“You rationalize it in your mind. I would make rules about not drinking. I would lay off; not drink for two nights in a row. It doesn’t work unless you stop (permanently). You always go back to where you stop, and then you catch up,” Ney said.
During the Abramoff investigation, Ney drank in the evenings at home for about two years, bottles and cans of bourbon and beer. Vodka, too. And yet, it seemed to him that he was functioning very efficiently during the day.
Ney’s campaign account had been drained bone-dry to pay his legal team about a half million dollars. And in the opinion of his pollster, after the public learned of the scandal, “Mickey Mouse will beat you in the primary election.”
And if Ney had planned on pleading ‘not guilty,’ fighting the feds would have cost $3.2 million in legal fees. And if he had lost, the additional cost was an untold number of years in prison.
His kids had told Dad that “We can lose you for 18 months: we can’t lose you for 10 years.” So, Ney offered to plead guilty and take the 18-month prison sentence. The judge, a Bill Clinton nominee, tacked on 12 more months.
Ney told his attorney, “My kids would be better off if I’m dead.”
His children would get the rest of Ney’s congressional salary. And while in office, he was insured for more than a million dollars. “Plus, I was drinking so much, I couldn’t make sense of anything,” Ney said.
“(The drinking) progressively escalated my entire adult life, but then, it just became … the solution. You drink until you black out, then, you don’t have the issue anymore. You’re sleeping. Then, you wake up, and it starts all again the next day.
“The pressure was intense, and the alcohol was rampant. I was at the end of my rope, and I decided to kill myself.”
His attorneys and a close friend suggested that driving to an in-patient rehab facility in Cleveland was the better route to take. Ney was ready to surrender his drinking and his freedom.
But, at the first meeting, his thoughts included, “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” Ney compared himself quite favorably to the other attendees. After all, none had been in Congress, and probably none had gone on junkets to exotic lands such as Afghanistan.
After learning that his insurance coverage would not pay for more than three days of rehab, Ney drove back home after the third day.
But then his sister called that night.
(Part 2 will be published tomorrow morning.)
