Listening to Jack Abramoff speak you can still hear the force and authority in his voice and sense the determination and intestinal fortitude that he plied to open doors in Congress closing them only when he emerged with his client holding the winning hand.

These days he employs that same fighting spirit when offering ideas to reform Washington DC where lobbyists outnumber members of Congress and their staffs by two-to-one.

A day before we spoke Abramoff had addressed the annual conference of Kentucky’s legislative ethics commission where attendance is mandatory for all state legislators.

Abramoff chuckled heartily when I asked if “legislative ethics” was an oxymoron.

“It was probably the first time they heard from someone who was actually involved on the ground” said Abramoff. “I told them how lobbyists think and how the people who can get them into trouble think.”

The way Abramoff thought and operated led to an indictment on multiple counts of conspiracy bank fraud and tax and mail fraud stemming from his decade of activities on Capitol Hill. He served 43 months of a nearly 10-year jail term before his early release.

At his peak Abramoff was able to command lobbying fees of up to $150000 a month. Today he is scrambling to repay debt incurred as a result of civil lawsuits filed against him. His jail term served as punishment in the eyes of the law but has Jack Abramoff also done teshuvah I ask?

“Can anyone look at themselves and say they’ve done teshuvah in the sense of having completed teshuvah?” he answers. “We have to do teshuvah every day and I’m trying every day. I hope I’m in a better place than I was but as the Rambam says we have to be put back in the same circumstances to ultimately be tested.”

Since Abramoff has not and will not return to his former profession he will never be put to that ultimate test. But he insists that the win-at-all-costs attitude that dominated his worldview from his youth is a vestige of the past.

“In that respect I hope I’ve done teshuvah” he said. “I believed that I could change situations no matter what. That was my kochi v’otzem yadi. Now I realize more than ever that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is in charge and that my kind of self-confidence and aggressive ambition was not helpful. I’m assiduously working on this and trying to root out the thought processes behind it. It’s a full-time business for me because unfortunately it was a very devastating part of my life.”

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