Traficant Case Goes to Jurors

CLEVELAND —  In the final minutes of his closing argument Monday, Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. (D-Ohio) waved a roll of toilet paper in the air for the jury to see.

“I’ll leave this here for you because this is all they have,” said Traficant, who despite not having a law degree represented himself in his trial on federal corruption charges. During the proceedings, Traficant had berated U.S. District Judge Lesley Wells for siding with the prosecution and charged that she was making a mockery of the Constitution.

The 10-count indictment of the nine-term congressman includes allegations that he made on-the-clock congressional staffers shovel horse manure on his farm, helped a convicted felon get federal contracts, filed false tax returns and forced one staffer to kick back half of his $2,500 monthly salary as a condition of employment.

Throughout the 10-week trial and into his final remarks, Traficant, 60, attempted to argue what he called a “vendetta defense,” his contention that the government had been out to get him for 20 years. He was warned repeatedly by Wells that he could not introduce his theory in court.

“Move along, congressman,” Wells told him several times during his 90-minute closing.

Traficant, known for his bombastic speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives and, more recently, his outbursts in court, was mostly subdued Monday. Spectators who stood 10 deep in the hallway outside the overflow courtroom strained to hear the uncharacteristically soft-spoken Traficant make his final appeal to the jury.

“There’s not a . . . bit of evidence that anyone gave me any money,” he said in one of his louder moments. Traficant used vulgarities to describe the prosecution’s case and called it a “dissertation on hearsay.”

Traficant’s main point in his rambling argument seemed to be that the government--particularly the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service--had grown “too powerful.” In questioning the case against him, Traficant asked: “Where’s the videotapes? Where’s the airplane surveillance?” He also reiterated that the government had not found his fingerprints on any of the papers it collected, a fact the prosecution introduced during its case. “They can make a case against you and scare you and scare your wife and scare your kids and take your property,” he said.

His argument was hotly disputed by Assistant U.S. Atty. Craig Morford, who asked the jurors to ask themselves how Traficant could evaluate the evidence against him since he boasted that he had never examined it.

“He just described to you a world that is very different from the world you and I live in,” Morford said. “It is a world filled with coincidences, convenient excuses and convoluted conspiracies.”

Morford said Traficant used his elected position as a “trough to feed his personal appetite.” The lead prosecutor, who has been as calm as Traficant has been unpredictable, held up an enlarged photograph of the congressman in an embrace with a convicted felon.

“The question is why is a U.S. congressman embracing this bad guy?” Morford asked the jury. “You know why. The evidence shows why. There’s an old saying: ‘Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you what you are up to.’ ”

Morford appealed to the jury of eight women and four men to use their “common sense” in evaluating the testimony of more than 55 witnesses and he urged them to pay careful attention to damaging testimony elicited by Traficant from his own witnesses.

As the jury departed to deliberate, court observers said Traficant cannot be counted out. In 1983, Traficant, then an elected sheriff, was acquitted after representing himself in a bribery trial where the government presented videotape of him accepting $163,000 from mob figures. He emerged from that trial as a hero in his native Mahoning Valley in northeast Ohio and ran successfully for Congress.

Traficant, an elected Democrat who has been stripped of his committee assignments by the party leadership, has vowed to run again as an independent.