Roguish congressman snared in Abscam sting
John W. Jenrette Jr., a flamboyant congressman who was convicted of taking a $50,000 bribe in the Abscam sting operation of the late 1970s, and who gained further notoriety after his wife told Playboy about a romantic rendezvous they had on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, died Friday. He was 86.
His family announced the death through Goldfinch Funeral Home in Conway, S.C. Additional details were not immediately available.
Jenrette, a liberal Democrat from South Carolina, was one of seven members of Congress found guilty as a result of Abscam, an elaborate FBI sting operation that involved undercover agents posing as wealthy Arab sheikhs seeking favors for cash.
The investigation employed more than 100 federal agents, a convicted con artist working for the government, a 65-foot yacht in Florida, hotel suites across the Northeast and a townhouse in Georgetown, where a hidden camera filmed Jenrette chatting with undercover operatives in December 1979.
As the men lounged in the library and alcohol began to flow, the conversation turned to whether Jenrette would introduce private immigration legislation, allowing a fictitious sheik to come to the United States, in exchange for $100,000.
“I got larceny in my blood,” he said, according to an official transcript of the videotapes. “I’d take it in a goddamn minute.”
The case ended his political career as well as his marriage to Rita Jenrette, a onetime GOP operative who became an actress, model, real estate broker and, through her subsequent marriage, an Italian princess.
Shortly before they divorced, in 1981, she posed for Playboy magazine with little more than a feather boa and a brandy glass to spite her soon-to-be-ex-husband. In an article accompanying the spread, she looked back on her years as “a congressional wife,” writing that late one night, she and her husband went to the west front of the Capitol and “made love on the marble steps that overlook the monuments.”
The story of their nighttime tryst, in the shadow of the building’s Corinthian columns, attracted national attention, fueling the success of her best-selling memoir later that year.
Newsstand owners told journalists they planned to stock twice as many Playboy issues to capitalize on interest. A political satire troupe, the Capitol Steps, took its name from the incident, and a Washington Scandal Tour eventually brought busloads of tourists to the presumed site of their romance.
Jenrette did not deny the incident — “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he said at the time — but claimed that he asked his wife not to mention the episode in her article, fearing that it would give people a “false impression” of Washington.
“People would think we were interested in only one thing,” he told the State newspaper of Columbia, S.C.