Voices: There was more to Jim Traficant than met the eye

Jim Traficant, who was always up for a spirited fight, lost his final one Saturday.

The flamboyant former Youngstown sheriff-turned-congressman-turned convict died Sept. 27 after being crushed by an old tractor on his farm, which is no small irony since the farm was the center of the corruption trial that sent him to prison.

I sat in that trial every day for 10 weeks in 2002 as an Associated Press correspondent, and it provided enormous insight into Traficant, the bellicose bully who wouldn't hurt a fly.

Every day Traficant would arrive in court and rant on the courthouse steps about how the Justice Department was unfairly targeting him or the judge was preventing him from defending himself or how the press was lying about him. And then he would turn and walk into the courthouse and politely greet the security guards who asked him to empty his pockets and walk through the metal detector.

Preening for the press before a hearing began one morning, he bellowed at the court sketch artist for making him look bad in a picture — then quietly took her aside and apologized and had conversation about her art.

Traficant was one of a kind in American politics. Acting as his own lawyer, he was acquitted in 1983 of racketeering charges when he convinced a jury that as sheriff, he had taken payments from the Mob as part of a secret sting operation he was running on his own. He walked out of court a local hero and was elected to Congress.

He regularly took to the floor of the House to mock things he found absurd, generally closing with his signature line from Star Trek — "Beam me up." Such as this, when a California transit agency sought to buy German fare machines: "Beam me up. You want to solve the deficit? Start buying some damn American-made goods." Or this in reference to a proposal for expanded trade preferences for China: "What do we do to these butchers on Tiananmen Square? We reward them. Beam me up." Or this regarding a free trade deal with Chile: "I think it would be wise for the American people to say, 'Beam me up, Scotty, there is no intelligent life left in the Congress.' "

Yet Traficant also was a crook. He made deals with local contractors in which he would intervene on their behalf with government agencies if they would do construction at his farm or help repair his boat. He had staff in his congressional office pay him back a portion of their salaries in cash.

Still, in Youngstown, being a crook was not necessarily frowned upon. A friend of mine from there once told me, "In Youngstown, if I put up a yard sign for your campaign, I assume I going to get my parking tickets fixed." Family members from the area told me they were certain Traficant was being targeted by the government as some kind of broad conspiracy against the little guy. Traficant's failure, these folks argued, was that he stole small. If he had stolen millions on Wall Street or in vast government contracts, the feds would have looked the other way. "Jimbo" was just not part of the club, so he had to be crushed.

This might have been a minority view, but it clearly was not outside the Youngstown mainstream. After his conviction and expulsion from Congress, Traficant ran for re-election from prison as an independent. He received 28,000 votes, about 15% of the total cast.

My lasting impression of Jim Traficant will be the day he bellowed at me and a few other reporters in the basement of the Capitol for no reason I can remember, sneered at us not to call him "Congressman" because "that's an insult," and said we were just going to write what we wanted anyway. Then the "Members Only" elevator arrived and he gently turned and said "It's OK, come on, you can ride with me."