Today’s Must Read

OK, so you knew Duke Cunningham was dirty, but you didn’t know that he was this dirty.

The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught, the book about Cunningham by the reporters who brought him down, hits stores this coming Monday. We here at TPM were lucky enough to get an advance copy and have been tearing through it.

The book is the Cunningham scandal from A to Z — following from Duke’s childhood to his guilty plea, and following the (alleged) bribes from Brent Wilkes‘ or Mitchell Wade‘s pocket to the harassed contracting officer in the Pentagon who was to make sure that the contractors got their money. And the book is bursting with details, a number of them new and unforgettable.

Take, for instance, the following scene aboard Duke’s yacht, the Duke-Stir. It has a way of seizing hold of your imagination and not letting go, no matter how very, very hard you try:

…even Wilkes drew a line on what he would do for the congressman. For one thing, Wilkes was totally disgusted by the hot tub Cunningham put on the boat’s deck during the autumn and winter. What repelled Wilkes — and others invited to the parties — was both the water Cunningham put in the hot tub and the congressman’s penchant for using it while naked, even if everybody else at the party was clothed. Cunningham used water siphoned directly from the polluted Potomac River and never changed it out during the season. “Wilkes thought it was unbelievably dirty and joked if you got in there it would leave a dark water line on your chest,” said one person familiar with the parties. “The water was so gross that very few people were willing to get into the hot tub other than Duke and his paramour.” That was a reference to Cunningham’s most frequently seen girlfriend, a flight attendant who lived in Maryland.

One of these parties started at the Capital Grille with Cunningham ordering his usual filet mignon — very well done — with iceberg lettuce salad and White Oak. Wilkes used the dinner to update Cunningham on the appropriations he wanted. Cunningham then took the whole group back to the boat where they drank more wine, sitting on white leather sofas while Cunningham told more war stories. Cunningham then took his clothes off and invited all to join him in the polluted hot tub that was hidden from the neighbors by a white tarp. There were no takers.

You can read an interview with Marcus Stern, one of the book’s authors, here.