Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

She named her charity the American Voluntary Medical Team. In 1991, she camped in the Kuwait desert five days after the end of the gulf war to take medical supplies to refugees. That same year, she visited Mother Teresa's orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she saw 160 newborn girls who had been abandoned. The nuns handed her a small baby with a cleft palate so severe that the infant couldn't be fed. Another baby, also just a few weeks old, had a heart defect. Worried they would die without medical attention, Cindy applied for visas to take the girls back to the United States. But the country's minister of Health refused to sign the papers. "We can do surgery on this child," an official told her. Frustrated, Cindy slammed her fist on the table. "Then do it! What are you waiting for?" The official, stunned, simply signed the papers. "I don't know where I got the nerve," Cindy told Harper's Bazaar.

When she arrived in Phoenix, she carried the baby with the cleft palate off the plane. Her husband met her at the airport. He looked at the baby. "Where is she going?" he asked her. "To our house," she replied. They adopted the little girl and named her Bridget. Family friends adopted the other little girl. ...

... As she nursed baby Bridget back to health, Cindy was suffering problems of her own. In 1989, she lifted young Jimmy and ruptured a disc in her back, an injury that took several surgeries to fix. As she recovered in the hospital, an orderly set a newspaper down on her bed. "Guess your husband's not so great after all," she said sarcastically. On the front page was a story questioning whether McCain and four other members of Congress had inappropriately intervened to save a failed savings and loan owned by developer Charles Keating—a Hensley family friend. Cindy and her father had invested nearly $400,000 in a strip mall Keating owned. He had been a major contributor to McCain's campaigns and John and Cindy had vacationed at Keating's home in the Bahamas nearly 10 times, often flying down on one of Keating's private jets. McCain insisted he had paid for the use of the jet, but Cindy, in charge of the family's records, couldn't find the receipts. Ultimately, McCain received a mild rebuke for "poor judgment." But Cindy, convinced she had embarrassed her husband, was distraught. Under stress and still in pain after surgery, she began taking more of the pain pills doctors had prescribed. Soon she was addicted, taking up to 20 Percocets and Vicodins a day.

Initially, her doctors simply refilled her prescriptions. But as her appetite for pills increased, she began stealing drugs from her own nonprofit, asking doctors who worked for the group to obtain the pills for her trips overseas. She worked hard to conceal her habit. If anyone saw her downing a pill, she said it was a vitamin. Her husband, away in Washington most of the time, suspected nothing.

Her mother was the first to notice something was wrong. Cindy looked terrible and had lost weight. "What's the matter with you?" she asked Cindy one night in 1992. Cindy confessed, and says she quit the pills cold turkey that day. But she didn't tell John. "I was scared," she told NEWSWEEK. "I didn't want to disappoint him." The secret didn't keep. A little more than a year later, an employee who had been fired from Cindy's nonprofit went to the Drug Enforcement Administration and reported that pills had gone missing. When the DEA called Cindy to ask questions, she broke down and confessed. But first, she called McCain from her lawyer's office to tell him the news. The senator rushed home. "I should have known that it was happening," he told NBC News later. "Maybe I was wrapped up too much in Washington and my ambitions to pay as much attention as I should have." Cindy paid restitution, did community service and attended counseling sessions.

I believe she wore red that day. She granted semi-exclusive interviews to one TV station and three daily newspaper reporters in Arizona, tearfully recalling her addiction, which came about after painful back and knee problems and was exacerbated by the stress of the Keating Five banking scandal that had ensnared her husband. To make matters worse, McCain admitted, she had stolen the drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team, her own charity, and had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The local press cooed over her hard-luck story. One of the four journalists spoon-fed the story -- Doug McEachern, then a reporter for Tribune Newspapers, now a columnist with the Arizona Republic (and, it must be added, normally much more acerbic) -- wrote this rather typical lead:

"She was blonde and beautiful. A rich man's daughter who became a politically powerful man's wife. She had it all, including an insidious addiction to drugs that sapped the beauty from her life like a spider on a butterfly."

What McEachern and the others didn't know was that, far from being a simple, honest admission designed to clear her conscience and help other addicts, Cindy McCain's storytelling had been orchestrated by Jay Smith, then John McCain's Washington campaign media advisor. And it was intended to divert attention from a different story, a story that was getting quite messy.

I know, because I had been working on that story for months at Phoenix New Times. I had finally tracked down the public records that confirmed Cindy McCain's addiction and much more, and the McCains knew I was about to get them. Cindy's tale was released on the day the records were made public.

But the story I was pursuing was not so much about Cindy McCain's unfortunate addiction. It was much more about her efforts to keep that story from coming to light, and the possible manipulation of the criminal justice system by her husband and his cohorts. The irony is that Cindy's secret would have stayed secret if John McCain's heavy-hitting lawyer, John Dowd (of D.C.'s Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; his most recent claim to fame was serving as co-counsel for fellow partner Vernon Jordan during impeachment) hadn't heavy-handedly pulled out all the stops to protect the McCain family.

Dowd tried to get back at the man on Cindy McCain's staff, Tom Gosinski, who had blown the whistle on her drug pilfering to the DEA. But in the course of trying to get local law enforcement officials to investigate Gosinski -- Dowd and the McCains considered him an extortionist; others might call him a whistleblower -- Dowd set in motion a process that would eventually bring the whole sordid story to light. When that maneuver backfired, the McCain media machine went into overdrive to spin the story.

In the early 1990s, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, which did relief and medical volunteer work in third world countries.

Hired by Cindy McCain in 1991, Gosinski enjoyed his job, but he began to notice McCain's erratic behavior in the summer of 1992. In his journal, he wrote that he and others suspected the boss was addicted to painkillers and might have been stealing them from the organization.

In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn't afford him.

Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees' names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain's suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.

Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski's attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.

Rumors about the untold details of the lawsuit hit the cocktail-party circuit that spring, but the story was locked up tight. As a federal criminal investigation, the DEA probe was completely secret; none of it was public record.

The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn't entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.

"We believe that Mr. Gosinski is aware that in the past Cindy had an addiction to prescription painkillers ... Given Cindy's public position, exposure of this sensitive matter would harm her reputation, career, the operation of AVMT, and subject her to contempt and ridicule," Dowd wrote on April 28, 1994.

Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain. Although the federal investigative materials were not public, the county investigative materials were. Romley launched an investigation, and one of the first things his people did, naturally, was ask the feds to turn over their investigative materials.

New Times finally got hold of the county investigative materials and we did our own story. So did the Arizona Republic, which was uncharacteristically aggressive, perhaps because the McCain machine had left the paper out of the loop on the story of Cindy's addiction.

Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.

Gosinki's lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and wound up the subject of a criminal investigation and working two jobs to pay his legal fees. And where is John Dowd now? Why, he's on John McCain's Enemies List, after ditching Exxon John for Fred Thompson during the primaries!

Labels: 2008 election, Cindy McCain, John McCain, Keating Five