Oh, who will it be next?
Raw Story reports that the “distilled beverage company” referred to in Tony Rudy’s guilty plea is SPI Spirits, which produces Stoli vodka.
SPI paid $25,000 into Jack Abramoff’s sham charity the Capital Athletic Foundation as a kind of off-the-books fee, and also paid $20,000 to a “public policy group” – which Raw Story identifies as the National Center for Public Policy Research. The NCPPR kicked back $8,000 of that fee to Rudy – as a kind of thank you, you might say.
The NCPPR served as a front to cover various Abramoff junkets, but also as another forum for Abramoff to buy good press for his clients – the director Amy Ridenour was another of Abramoff’s editorial-writing hacks. In this case, she went to bat for Stoli vodka (you can see her work on Stoli’s website).
For those who can’t get enough, Slate published some of Abramoff’s correspondence with Ridenour a couple of weeks ago.
