LEFTOVERS GONE BAD

Others withered bootlessly in prison on drug charges, on the lain for murderous protests, or in a centrist Clinton administration. Then there were the better-adjusted, who got down to the practical business of living, retaining their ideals as they burrowed into city governments, student ghettoes, and progressive business ventures. They may have lost their leaden and their ideological influence even in traditionally liberal, urban bulwarks, but they could find solace in their possession of the one thing others could never have as much of — unimpeachable intent. That, they had in spades, they’d remind us, settling into lives of not-so-quiet declaration. Or so it once seemed. But as exemplified this summer by three former repositories of liberalactivist virtue who’ve run afoul of the law (and in one case run from it), this last asset of the insolvent is in mercilessly short supply.

Chicago alderman Lawrence Bloom was a clean man — clean, the papers called him “Mr. Clean,” when they weren’t calling him “a goody-two-shoes in a rack of mud-splattered brogans.” The career of Bloom, who teethed on the late-’60s student-activist movements, struck a chaste contrast to that of his colleagues on the city council, nearly two dozen of whom have faced corruption charges since the “70s. Bloom was first elected in 1979 to represent the 5th ward (the Hyde Park/University of Chicago area). As such, he was the first “60s heir to the Lake-front Liberals — the bloc of independent Democrats who raged against Mayor Richard J. Daley’s corrosive machine. Bloom followed suit, becoming the scourge of Daley’s son and namesake, once the city’s chief prosecutor and now its mayor. Decrying Chicago’s proud tradition of patronage, Bloom has criticized Daley over the years for using bond work to reward friends and keeping campaign workers on his payroll, and he prophesied that Daley’s legalized-gambling proposal would lead to “payoffs and corruption.”

Representing his largely black ward, Bloom busied himself with higher- minded municipal pursuits, like trying to force a private company to adopt the city’s affirmative-action laws. When he recently departed from the city council and returned to his law practice, Bloom boasted that he “traveled alone and without fear,” facing off with sitting mayors, influential developers, and the taxicab monopoly.

He can now add to that list a federal grand jury, which this July handed down a 14-count indictment of Mr. Clean that included mail fraud, extortion, money laundering, and tax violations.

Among the highlights stemming from the government’s undercover investigation called “Operation Silver Shovel,” Bloom allegedly extorted bribes totaling $ 16,000, bilked taxpayers out of $ 288,000 in two separate fraud schemes, and frequently consorted with known criminal and formerly unknown government mole John Christopher, who was thoughtful enough to wear a wire during many of their conversations.

Fortunately for Bloom, he is innocent — at least, that’s how he’s pleading. It seems he was “mugged” by the government, which attempted “to induce the commission of a crime.” While the inducing is disputable, Bloom appears to have fulfilled his aldermanic duties on the “commission of a crime” end of things.

Staying out of prison was the only inducement Boston’s Michael Ansara needed to turn cooperating witness this summer in a grand-jury probe of a money-funneling scheme that helped swing the Teamsters presidency for Ron Carey last year. The founder of Harvard’s Students for a Democratic Society in the “60s, Ansara had subsequently (in his own words) “become less of a Marxist, but more angry.” And there was much to be angry about, like the ” advanced capitalism and . . . market mentality that does warp us,” as well as the constant struggle to balance personal values “with the business of making money” — which he’s made plenty of, despite his conflicted innards.

Inc. magazine recently ranked the Share Group, the lifetime activist’s telemarketing organization, as one of the fastest growing companies in the country. It isn’t, however, your average greedhead endeavor. Ansara’s outfit provides — hold on to your lunches — “a new meaning for the business ethic: Telemarketing with a conscience,” in the words of the Boston Globe. Representing only progressive nonprofits and socially responsible companies — from environmental groups to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League to the DNC — the Share Group cites its “clients’ values” as the key to its success.

That, and the union kickbacks. In a scheme designed to move money illegally from the Teamsters’ general fund into Ron Carey’s reelection campaign against James Hoffa Jr., FBI investigators discovered, the Teamsters paid Ansara $ 97, 175 to make nearly 150,000 get-out-the-vote calls for congressional Democrats last fall. Martin Davis, a consultant for both Carey and the DNC who has now been charged with mail fraud, asked Ansara to “lose some of the calls,” providing surplus profits Ansara funneled to his wife, Barbara Arnold. She then wrote a $ 95,000 check to the Teamsters for a Corruption-Free Union, which pumped the funds to Davis’s direct-mail firm, which, in turn, pumped out a million pro-Carey fliers to coincide with election ballots. Carey subsequently beat Hoffa by fewer than 17,000 votes, and his victory has now been overturned partly because of these revelations.

Additionally, investigators allege, to reimburse Barbara Arnold for the shortfall not covered by the original transaction, Ansara was paid $ 75,000 for services he never performed by Citizen Action, an environmental/consumer watchdog group he helped found (and one fiddled with its own unrelated corruption allegations). Citizen Action’s $ 75,000 kickback was carved out of the $ 475,000 the Teamsters ostensibly paid it for independent expenditures on behalf of Democrats (legally), though the funds were actually moving circuitously from the general union fund to the Carey kitty (illegally).

To deflect culpability, Ansara’s wife cited her “long history of involvement with social justice causes,” saying she just wanted to assist Carey as he cleaned up the Teamsters’ image. Though Ansara admitted he was ” guilty of tremendous lapses of judgment that violate principles that have guided me in my life,” he, too, just wanted to see the Teamsters scrubbed up under the progressive reformer Carey — no matter how much money he had to launder to do it. (Carey, who’s also been called “Mr. Clean,” has had to return 10 percent of his campaign take because of illegal contributions.)

Nobody ever called Ira Einhorn “Mr. Clean.” As Philadelphia’s uber-Hippie, the founder of Earth Day, and a counterculture Zelig, the pony-tailed, brillo- bearded Einhorn was known for his erudition, charisma — and body odor. A truly free spirit, Einhorn was devoted only to Nietzschean elasticity, unshackling himself from slave-herd morality, which cleared him to be a world- class mooch, to deal drugs, and to bed coeds in his perpetual grad-student orbit at the clip of a hippie Writ Chamberlain.

Since “earning a living was an old form,” he busied himself holding Be-Ins and Smoke-Ins and 20-hour reading bouts, composing bad poetry and unreadable screeds, taking surgical anesthetics for pleasure, entermining houseguests in the raw (his raiment of choice as host), teaching courses like “Politics and Dada” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Free University, and priming easily impressed, easily confused trollops with hot blasts of Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, and Marcuse. His first love, however, was contemplating and cultivating himself — all else, he wrote, “has become ephemeral and illusory. ”

Though he never achieved critical mass nationally, Einhorn still made all the right stops: Esalen, La Honda with Ken Kesey, and sleepovers at Jerry Rubin’s. An early espouser of environmentalism, non-violence, and other do- goodnik boilerplate, he began to outpace the movement by the “70s. He always seemed to arrive two beats ahead of what would follow. Increasingly obsessed with the paranormal (he was a champion of Uri Geller), New Age stirrings, psychotronic weaponry, and management guruism (still in its embryonic stages), Einhorn built an impressive network of movers willing to heed, or more important, subsidize him. He attracted attention from the likes of futurist Alvin Toffler and the Bronfman family (as in the Seagram Liquor Bronfmans), and it was not unusual to find Main Line denizens and GE and Bell Telephone executives huddled around Einhorn’s smelly feet in his apartment, getting contact buzzes from their zeitgeist windsock.

This arrangement nearly came to an end in 1977, however, when Einhorn’s longtime girlfriend, Holly Maddux, disappeared after one of their myriad fights. Since he abused and cheated on her throughout their relationship, and since she was about to take up with another man, Einhorn was suspected by her family and investigators of murdering Holly. He denied it, however, and continued to prosper, becoming a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, conducting a national Sun Day observance for which he was celebrated as a reincarnated Thoreau, and entertaining in his bohemian enclave — stitchless as a newborn, of course.

There was, unfortunately, the problem of the stench emanating from his residence, along with the brown goo seeping into the apartment beneath his. By 1979, the airwicks couldn’t preserve Einhorn’s alibi when a detective opened a steamer trunk in his closet and found Holly Maddux in a fetal tuck, down to 37 pounds of mummified leather, with 10 to 12 skull fractures and holes so gaping, the coroner couldn’t tell how many times she’d been struck.

Einhorn claimed he had been framed by the CIA and/or KGB, while community pillars vouched for him as character witnesses, including an Episcopal bishop who had put him on the diocese payroll so Einhorn could educate him on Marxism and youth culture. Released on $ 40,000 bail while awaiting trial (future senator Arlen Specter was one of his early attorneys), he did what any hippie guru framed by two intelligence agencies would do: He skipped town.

Spotted over time in Dublin, Wales, and Stockholm, Einhorn always evaded officials either through extradition restrictions or from friendly tip-offs (Barbara Bronfman, ex-wife of liquor scion Charles, continued to fund him until 1988), even after a Philadelphia judge convicted him in absentia of murder and sentenced him to life in 1993. But this June, Einhorn finally turned up in the most obvious place, a place where a Raskolnikovian American has-been of great pretense and suspect hygiene could make a go of it: France.

His wealthy Swedish wife blew his cover by applying for a driver’s license, enabling authorities to arrest a still-naked Einhorn in Champagne-Mouton, a bucolic paradise 240 miles south of Paris. Einhorn lived in a converted mill set against streams and flowered hillsides, where he grew strawberries and marijuana, and mentored a small band of French no-nukesters who called themselves, as only the French would dare, “Baba Cool” (Cool Daddies). Einhorn, in turn, was deemed the “Vieux Baba Cool” (Old Cool Daddy), and like him, his proteges didn’t seem terribly bothered by his past. “He didn’t chop my head off,” said one Baba Cool. Nor did he Holly’s — just caved it in.

Author Steven Levy discovered some years ago after poring through Einhorn’s journals that his murderous impulse wasn’t an anomaly. When another relationship was going south, Einhorn wrote: “There is a good chance that I will attempt to kill Judy tomorrow — the rational awareness of this fact brings stark terror into my heart but it must be faced if I wish to go on — I must not allow myself to deviate from the self-knowledge which is in the process of being uncovered?” And such is the virus infecting so many ideological hacks, but with a particularly virulent strain plaguing “60s Leftovers: Almost any violation of high ideals can be rationalized as long as it is an exercise in personal growth or a transgression in the service of even higher ideals. (Einhorn, by the way, did not kill Judy — though he did hit her over the head with a Coke bottle and attempt to strangle her, after which he wrote a poem about it.)

His recent arrest hasn’t seen him lose heart, friends say. He remains optimistic, stubbornly clinging to the values that have sustained him: those of self-justification in the face of unjustifiably egregious behavior — perhaps the same “values” Michael Ansara’s company’s promotional literature assures us “aren’t for show. We live them every day.” Einhorn still maintains his innocence and is fighting extradition on grounds that he couldn’t attend his trial. It’s an excuse as salable as the rest. He was, after all, a fugitive.

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.