I know all eyes are on the Supreme Court this week, but indulge me in another legal question: Who will get to Duke Cunningham first, the House ethics committee or the federal marshals?

Not an easy question, I grant you. But to help you along with your answer, let me bring you up to date on some of the latest on California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Wade).
You know all about the home sale that first landed Cunningham in the soup, defense contractor Mitchell Wade’s gift of upwards of a million dollars, and the FBI raids last weekend on the homes of both men, the boat and the headquarters of Wade’s company in Washington.

But now another name comes into the picture: Thomas T. Kontogiannis, a Long Island real-estate developer who owns a number of contracting businesses and, like many sudden congressional pals, appears to have had some recent and uncomfortable scrapes with the law.

On a couple counts, Kontogiannis’s name adds a few key pieces to the CunningScam puzzle. For instance, why did Cunningham need the Duke Stir, the boat Wade bought for him, when he’d already been living on an even bigger boat down on the Potomac since 1997? According to the original story, Cunningham had sent the old boat, the Kelly C, away for repairs a little while back. That left Cunningham temporarily boatless. And Wade bought him the 42-foot yacht to live on in the interim.

Turns out it’s not quite so simple.

Back in 1997, he bought the first boat from former Rep. Sonny Callahan (R) of Alabama for $200,000. But in 2002, Duke remembered that Kontogiannis had always had a certain hankering for the Kelly C even before he bought it from Callahan. So Cunningham picked up the phone to see if Kontogiannis was still interested. And before you know it, Kontogiannis was buying it from Cunningham for $600,000. Always a shrewd businessman, Cunningham made a killing on the Kelly C, just as he later did on his house.

What’s odd about that is that boats usually depreciate in value like cars, rather than appreciate in value like houses — especially this boat, which seems to have been in some state of disrepair and barely seaworthy at that.

And there’s another oddity too. After pouring about $100,000 into the Kelly C, Kontogiannis decided he didn’t really want it so much after all. And Cunningham had decided he’d buy it back. The sale would have been further facilitated by the fact that neither man ever made any attempt to confirm the sale in public records. Indeed, last year, while Kontogiannis owned the boat, Duke went ahead and reregistered it in his name using the address of his posh new place in Rancho Santa Fe.

And speaking of the house, the Kontogiannis connection turns out to provide another key piece of the puzzle there, too.

As you no doubt remember, Cunningham got nearly $1.7 million from Mitchell Wade for his old house. He then put that money toward the $2.6 million purchase price of his new home in Rancho Santa Fe.

But public records suggest that Cunningham bought the new place with cash. So where’d he come up with the extra million dollars?

Cunningham must have been asking himself that question when he rung up Kontogiannis and asked him whether Coastal Capital, the mortgage company his family owns, could lend him the money, and at wholesale, rather than retail, rates. Kontogiannis, probably because he felt so good about the boat deal, was happy to oblige.

From there, the ins and outs of Duke’s dealing with Kontogiannis became a bit too convoluted for even me to understand. For the moment, suffice it to say that not long ago Duke instructed Kontogiannis to pay off part of the loan for him with money he allegedly still owed Cunningham for the sale of the boat.

Just how that makes any sense, I’ll leave to the forensic accountants to figure out. But another question is, why? There’s no real mystery as to why Wade was so generous to Duke. He was looking for defense contracts that Duke was in a position to help with. But why was Kontogiannis so generous?

For a possible answer we can thank Marcus Stern of The San Diego Union-Tribune, who first broke the Cunningham story almost a month ago. It seems Kontogiannis is yet another one of those businessmen just looking for some good advice.

Not long ago, you see, Kontogiannis got nailed in a multimillion-dollar price-fixing and bribery scandal involving one of his companies and New York state public schools. And he wanted to know from Cunningham how an upstanding man like himself could look into getting a pardon.

Kontogiannis described his discussion with Cunningham like this: “I said I have this problem and I was wondering if I can get a pardon out of it. He (Cunningham) said to me, ‘I know nothing about these things, but I’ll find the proper law firm and I’ll let you know if they can help you.’”

So let’s close with this question: What ‘proper law firm’ did Cunningham refer him to for pardon hunting? If the marshals get to him first, Cunningham might want to remember their number.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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