By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 1, 2005; Page A01
It was a gangland-style hit straight out of "Goodfellas."
A
man in a BMW was driving down a quiet side street after an evening
meeting at his Fort Lauderdale office when a car slowed to a stop in
front of him. A second car boxed the BMW in from behind, then a dark
Mustang appeared from the opposite direction. The Mustang's driver
pulled alongside and pumped three hollow-point bullets into the BMW
driver's chest.
The dead man was
Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, a volatile 51-year-old self-made
millionaire, a Greek immigrant who had started as a dishwasher in
Canada and ended up in Florida, where he built an empire of
restaurants, hotels and cruise ships used for offshore casino gambling.
Boulis's slaying, still unsolved four years later, reverberated all the
way to Washington. Months earlier he had sold his fleet of online casinos ships
to a partnership that included Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Abramoff
is best known as a target of a federal investigation in Washington into
the tens of millions in fees he and a partner collected from
casino-owning Indian tribes. But the wreckage from his brief and
tumultuous time as owner of the gambling fleet threatens to overtake
his Washington legal troubles.
Not long after Abramoff and his
partners bought SunCruz Casinos in September 2000, the venture ran
aground after a fistfight between two of the owners, allegations of mob
influence, dueling lawsuits and, finally, Boulis's death on Feb. 6,
2001. Now, Abramoff is the target of a federal investigation into
whether the casino ship deal involved bank fraud. According to court
records, the SunCruz purchase hinged on a fake wire transfer for $23
million intended to persuade lenders to provide financing to Abramoff's
group.
Although the outlines of the tale have become part of
South Florida lore, what has not been disclosed are the full details of
the alleged fraud at the heart of the transaction and the extent of
Abramoff's role -- including his use of contacts with Republican Reps.
Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and members of their staffs
as he worked to land the deal.
The SunCruz story combines the
South Florida of novelist Carl Hiaasen with the Washington of
influence-peddling K Street: Thousands of pages of bankruptcy and other
court records, along with dozens of interviews in Florida and
Washington, reveal secret deals; a forged document; double-crossing
partners; and socializing with government officials on a private jet,
at the U.S. Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach, at a Monday night
football game in a private box at FedEx Field, and at an exclusive
party on Inauguration Day in Washington.
Gus Boulis never really
wanted to sell SunCruz. He bought his first cruise boat in 1994 and
swiftly added 10 more, building an enormously profitable business that
took in as much as $30 million in yearly profits.
Boulis, a
larger-than-life character, had always been a scrapper and something of
a business genius. As a teenager, he jumped ship from a Greek freighter
in Canada, where he made his first fortune with Mr. Submarine sandwich
shops. After retiring to the Florida Keys, at the age of 30, he built
another fortune with the popular Miami Subs chain. Then he launched
SunCruz, known as a "cruise to nowhere" casino business. His midsize
cruise ships left on day trips from nine ports around Florida, taking
tourists, high-rollers and elderly players into international waters,
beyond the reach of the state's anti-gambling laws.
Based outside
Fort Lauderdale, the business was the bane of Florida officials, who
thought Boulis flouted the law, and SunCruz's port city neighbors, who
complained that drunken gamblers were urinating on their lawns. For
years, Boulis beat back efforts by federal and state lawyers determined
to shut him down.
In 1999, federal prosecutors charged Boulis
with violating the Shipping Act by purchasing his vessels without being
a U.S. citizen. Boulis agreed to pay a $1 million fine and sell his
cruise line. The government gave him 36 months to do it and agreed to
keep the settlement secret so Boulis would not lose money in a fire
sale.
To sell his business, Boulis turned to his lawyers in the
D.C. office of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP. Art
Dimopoulos, a maritime lawyer, looked for buyers. Jack Abramoff, one of
Dimopoulos's partners at Preston Gates, said he could find one.
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