This list of Duke Cunningham's offenses (and it's far from complete) just boggles my mind. It appears that Duke kept on seeing things he wanted, and asking defense contractor buddies to buy them for him. A Chevy Suburban. A used Rolls-Royce. A boat. And then there's the scheme to have millions funneled to him through above- and below-market real estate transactions. He even had a menu for how much you'd have to pay him to get a certain amount in contracts. (Buying the boat got you $16 million in contracts.) But it's the little things that really strike me. I picked a random page and found Cunningham getting a guy to buy something called a Laser Shot Shooting Simulator for his office. It cost a few thousand dollars.
Corruption on this level is sort of beyond me. It can't just be that he wanted to score the most points in the money game -- lots of the things he got don't have that much resale value. Did Cunningham reallywant all this stuff for its own sake? Did he get off on being powerfulenough to make people buy these things for him? Did he have some kindof Bond-villian plan to assemble all this stuff into a gigantic robotand use it to take over the world?
