KITTY KELLEY MEETS AN APPROPRIATELY DRESSED MRS. DUCHESS CUNNINGHAM-- DUKE'S CARMELA SOPRANO?

Kitty Kelley is a great celebrity and gossip writer and I was excited to hear she was doing a piece on Cunningham and his crooked wife. Even though it would be in the reactionary DLC rag, the normally worthless New Republic, I was eager to read it. It came out today. It only took me a minute before I wished Kitty had co-written it with someone who knows a little about politics. "...no member of Congress has roiled the public as brazenly as Duke Cunningham." Oy. I guess if you live in Michael Jackson-world you can be forgiven for not knowing who John Doolittle, Bob Ney, Dick Pombo, Charlie Taylor, Conrad Burns and Jerry Lewis are, all fellas who make Cunningham look like a piggy bank bandito. But even Ms Kelley should know who Tom DeLay is!

But this isn't about politics. It's a human interest tear-jerker about the poor woman (who, like so many Republican congresscrooks' wives, kept the books and knew exactly what was going on). For Kitty it's all about, what she calls "grandious" quotes like this: "I identify with women like Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana... They, too, had husbands like that" and "Mr. Cunningham had great entrepreneurial skills. Everything he touched turned to gold." Bitching about the modest palace Cunningham bought with his bribes, the poor wifey whines that it was just a "'fixer-upper,' far removed from the $15-$30 million estates that gave the community its cachet. 'We were never accepted there,' she added. 'We were just poor trash. We were never accepted there, believe it or not.' OK, I'll believe it. Duchess Cunningham does have a great zinger directed towards the Duke's former colleagues: "If you strip away their power, all you've got is a bunch of fat old men with white hair who look like Newt Gingrich and Baby Huey." And she admits that Duke expects to be pardoned by Bush. You want to read the whole thing?

Randy "Duke" Cunningham stumbled to the microphone. Heavily medicated, the former congressman from San Diego had to be propped up by federal marshals. He had lost 90 pounds since he pleaded guilty, and his rumpled suit hung on him like a deflated parachute silk. The fearless aviator and war hero who claimed to be the inspiration for the cocky ace played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun had vanished.

Standing in his stead on March 3, 2006, was an aging criminal whose droopy hound-dog face crumbled as he admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. "I did it to myself. I could have said no, and I didn't. It was me, Duke Cunningham." He broke down as he recounted his crimes, including conspiracy to commit bribery, evading taxes, and committing wire and mail fraud. "I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, and, most importantly, the trust of my friends and family."

Cunningham's conviction stands as the worst case of corruption to date involving a member of Congress. "In the sheer dollar amount, it's unprecedented," Deputy House Historian Fred W. Beuttler told the San Diego Union-Tribune. The sledgehammer sentence of eight years and four months is also unparalleled. According to the U.S. attorney, it is the longest prison sentence for a former member of Congress, but, then, no member of Congress has roiled the public as brazenly as Duke Cunningham.

Cunningham is a product of the times, in which there are more creative ways to buy off congressmen - including inviting them on lavish junkets, hosting lucrative lobbyist-filled fund-raisers, and funneling money to their spouses and children-than ever before. And there's also a scale of economy that makes it more tempting for congressmen to trade power for money: Lawmakers earn $165,200 per year; the new breed of lobbyists who woo them earn in the millions. But, even in this atmosphere, the brazenness of Cunningham's quid pro quo was unique. The notoriously volatile congressman did little to hide his influence - peddling, even writing up a menu of prices on his congressional stationary - the use of a defense contractor's $140,000 yacht, for example, was the price for delivering a $16 million government contract. He accepted lavish gifts as bribes, including a china hutch, Louis Philippe commodes, and a used Rolls Royce. During poker nights in rented suites at Washington's Watergate Hotel and the Westin Grand, he was also supplied with prostitutes.

What made Cunningham such an eminently corruptible politician? The people close enough to know stayed away from his sentencing, including his son by his first marriage, Todd, 35, and his daughters April, 28, and Carrie, 24. Most noticeably absent was Nancy Cunningham, his wife of 32 years. Cunningham had sworn to the judge that she knew nothing of his perfidy, but, rather than granting her immunity in its criminal investigation, the U.S. attorney deemed her "a person of interest." That vague but ominous legal term cast immediate suspicion and implied a degree of guilt.

Consequently, I did not know what to expect when a friend of Nancy Cunningham's lawyer contacted me. He said she had not talked to anyone in the press, but she would talk to me for The New Republic because she wanted a national platform for her side of the story. There would be no ground rules to the interview, and she would speak freely about her husband, from whom she is estranged. Her attorney, James A. Macy, explained why: "My client faces an uphill battle as far as people believing she is not part of her husband's conspiracy. I don't believe she benefited from anything Duke did, but every aspect of her life has been affected by the suspicion."

That suspicion is understandable. The night before Duke was sentenced, he dumped a duffel bag full of dirty laundry and $32,000 worth of cash in Nancy's driveway. And what macho Top Gun pilot would lust after frilly antiques and Louis Philippe commodes? But, despite the ambiguities surrounding Nancy, she is one of the few people who can answer the most important question of all about Duke Cunningham: Why did he do it?

Nancy Cunningham's lawyer suggested introducing us "girls" in a quiet restaurant at the San Diego Marriott across the street from his office in the Mission Valley neighborhood. From newspaper stories, I had learned of Nancy's impressive credentials. She is bilingual and has two Masters' degrees and a Ph.D. in educational administration. But, when I read that she was suing the government for her "fair share" of equity in the house her husband had bought with bribes, I questioned just how smart this educated woman was. Who in her right mind would take on the federal authorities over that?

When I walked into the restaurant, I half-expected to meet some combination of Ma Barker and Carmela Soprano. Instead, I met a trim, attractive 54-year-old woman with honey blonde hair who looked like the president of the Junior League. Dressed appropriately for a weekday afternoon in Southern California, Nancy was wearing black-and-white checked cotton slacks, black sandals, a black twin set, and simple silver jewelry - but no wedding ring. The only discordant note was a capacious black vinyl bag stuffed with legal files, clipping folders, papers, tissues, and bottles of water.

Since the government raid on the Cunningham estate in Rancho Santa Fe, the forced sale of that property, and the public auction of most of her furnishings, Nancy has been living with her dog and her 87-year-old grandmother in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow in a downtrodden neighborhood. Her lawyer described the house as "a dump - a real dump."

After a few sips of iced tea, he departed and left us alone. Nancy continued her own sad story. Since the scandal began, she had endured picketers from MoveOn, press stakeouts, mounting legal fees, and sneers from co-workers in the Encinitas School District, where she is struggling to hold onto her job as an administrator of support services. "It's been the worst experience of my life," she said. "People are writing to the school board to get me fired and contacting the school system, demanding they examine any budget I've ever had anything to do with." Worst of all, she knows most people consider her as guilty as her husband. Some even blame her for his criminality. "My mother-in-law says I forced him into it: 'He would never be in prison if it hadn't been for you.'"

Nancy vehemently disputed these allegations. She saw herself as an innocent spouse blindsided by a wayward husband, though she chose to equate her misfortune with an arguably more epic one. "I will not let Mr. Cunningham turn me into Pat Nixon," she said. "After Richard Nixon's scandal, she internalized his shame to such an extent that she suffered a stroke and died a miserable death. He got to live long enough to somewhat vindicate himself, but Pat Nixon got nothing. I will not let that happen to me."

Throughout our interview, Nancy referred to her husband as "Mr. Cunningham." "It's a mental distancing," she explained. "As far as I'm concerned, he no longer really exists." But, in this frosty dismissal and her constant Victorian references to "Mr. Cunningham," there was a sense of disappointment. "I have to tell you, I once idolized him," she later confessed. "He was the most charismatic person I ever met." In her recollections of their early days together, Duke mesmerized men as well as women. Despite his later lies and betrayals, she can still see him as the dashing young Navy ace. In weak moments when she isn't wishing him dead, she wonders why someone with "all the promise he once had" ever married someone like herself. "I identify with women like Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana," Nancy said. "They, too, had husbands like that."

Nancy can be forgiven her grandiosity, because there once was a time when Randall Harold Cunningham seemed destined for a life of greatness. In Vietnam, he adopted John Wayne's nickname of Duke as his pilot call name, because he identified with the movie star's swaggering glamour. In 1973, when Nancy met him in the watch room of Miramar Naval Air Station, he was a Top Gun instructor, teaching pilots to do what he had done in Vietnam - dogfight, kill, and escape capture. A year earlier, on a flak suppression mission over North Vietnam, he had been attacked by 22 MiGs. Seeing his wingman under fire, he shot down three of the MiG fighters before he was hit by a SAM 2 missile, which smashed the hydraulics on his jet. Flying 30 miles to reach the ocean, he ejected over the Gulf of Tonkin and was rescued and flown to the USS Okinawa. The next day, he became the Navy's first ace in Vietnam. He received the Navy Cross once, the Silver Star twice, the Air Medal 15 times, and the Purple Heart.

Nancy married Duke in 1974. On the surface, the two seemed well-suited. Each had been divorced before meeting; both came from modest means. Her father was a sailor; his was a truck driver. Nancy, 21, and Duke, 32, were the first college graduates in their families. When he proposed, she accepted eagerly. She felt she was marrying up. "Randy was what they called a 'brown shoe.' For years, pilots wore brown shoes, and people like my dad wore black shoes. There was always this pecking order-that pilots were superior to black shoes," Nancy explained.

Both Duke and Nancy shared a desire to move up in the world, although Nancy portrayed Duke as being in a greater hurry to do so. At the time of their engagement, he could not afford to buy his new bride more than a simple gold band with a few diamond chips. So she asked if she could take the 1.5-carat diamond from her first marriage and incorporate it into her new wedding band. He agreed, and she selected a simple setting. But Duke wanted her to have something bigger, a little showier, so they spent a few hundred dollars more than she had planned.

Two years after marrying Duke, Nancy filed for divorce and a restraining order. She said in court papers that her husband "is a very aggressive spontaneously assaultive person, and I fear for my immediate physical safety and well-being." She later had a change of heart - "he put on that poor sad-dog face of his," she said - and they reconciled. According to Nancy, he was shell-shocked from his tour in Vietnam and had nightmares about parachuting into waters filled with the bodies of Viet Cong. "When we first married, he slept with a knife under his pillow," she said. "Well, the knife graduated to a loaded gun."

They started their family while Duke was in the Navy working his way up the chain of command. But Nancy claims that her husband's temper got in the way of his advancement. "He was too confrontational with his superiors and got low scores on his fitness reports," she said. He was repeatedly denied promotions, and, according to Gregory Vistica's Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, he was nearly court-martialed for breaking into his commanding officer's files to compare his personnel records with those of fellow pilots. He also demanded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award, and then threatened to boycott the ceremony when he learned he was only getting the Navy Cross. "He felt cheated," said his wife. "He said, 'I earned it and I deserve it.'"

When Duke retired from the military in 1987, he and Nancy bought a four-bedroom house in Del Mar, California, for $450,000, which he said would be perfect for fund-raisers when he ran for Congress. In the meantime, he started his own business, Top Gun Enterprises, Inc., playing off his show-horse status as the first ace in Vietnam. Through it, he sold Top Gun merchandise, including lithographs of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, books by Cunningham, speeches by Cunningham, tapes by Cunningham, plus a Top Gun official organizational ball cap - a huge seller after the Tom Cruise movie. The most expensive item offered was "The Randy 'Duke' Cunningham Fighter Ace Kalinga Style Buck Knife." Packaged in a hardwood case lined with blue satin, it cost $595.00.

Nancy admired her husband's ability to turn his image into a lucrative brand. "Mr. Cunningham had great entrepreneurial skills," she said. "Everything he touched turned to gold." She rhapsodized about his motivational speaking, which brought in more money than either of them had ever seen. They no longer struggled to make their $1,600 monthly house payments on her salary as a school assistant principal, because he now earned $10,000 for weekend speaking engagements. "He told stories that had a real emotional impact on his audience," Nancy said. "He would relate his flight over Vietnam when he was shot down. He would always begin to cry."

After receiving a personal call from Ronald Reagan in 1989, Duke decided to run for Congress. "I didn't think he had a snowball's chance in hell of winning," said his wife. "But he stopped working and devoted 24/7 to the effort." When Duke officially announced his candidacy, Nancy had her 1976 divorce papers sealed. "I didn't want people to know he slept with a loaded gun under his pillow." The divorce papers remained sealed until the Cunningham scandal broke in 2005 and the San Diego Union-Tribune sued to get them released. Nancy went back to court to plead with the judge to keep secret the 25 words dealing with the knife and the gun. The judge granted her request. To show she had nothing to hide or any reason to protect her husband, she revealed them to me for the first time.

From the beginning of his political career, Duke exhibited a take-no-prisoners attitude. During his first congressional campaign primary in 1990, he distributed brochures associating his Egyptian-born opponent with Muammar Qaddafi. In the general election, he hammered the Democratic incumbent, Jim Bates, who was bogged down in a scandal involving charges of sexual harassment. Duke appeared at campaign rallies in his leather bomber jacket and referred to Bates as a "MiG." His posters featured him in his flight suit. He won by one percentage point and arrived in Washington an instant celebrity. Duke bragged to the Los Angeles Times that he would conquer Washington, D.C. "We'll, I'm here," he said, surveying his new office in the House of Representatives. "And, when I leave this place in ten or 20 years, I think I'll have left my mark." On that score, he proved prescient.

With Republicans in the majority, Duke received a prize assignment on the House Appropriations Committee; within a few years, he was sitting on the subcommittees for intelligence and defense, overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in military contracts.

Members of Congress also remember Duke Cunningham's abusive temper, especially toward Democrats. He suggested the Democratic House leadership should be "lined up and shot," something he had earlier recommended for Vietnam war protestors. He called Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich, "a communist supporter" because "he goes along with Karl Marx in many of his writings."

During a conference committee debate on illegal immigration, committee Republicans, including Cunningham, prevented Democrats from making any amendments, and Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank responded sarcastically: "I apologize to the gentleman from California for talking about substance." Cunningham shot back, "You want to talk about prostitution rings in basements?" (Six years earlier, Frank, openly gay, had been embroiled in a scandal involving a former male companion who had been caught running a prostitution ring from the congressman's basement apartment.) During a debate over sending troops to Bosnia, Cunningham accused Virginia Representative Jim Moran, who voted against authorizing the president to send U.S. troops to Kuwait, of turning his back on Desert Storm. Moran took a swing at him as they were leaving the House chambers. Moran later told The Washington Post: "I thought he had been bullying too many people for too long."

Nancy showed little interest in defending her husband's behavior, which, she said, was an embarrassment to her and her girls. "When I was going to retire and become director of the Rhoades School, I made him promise to stop gay-bashing in public, because it might upset parents at that private school," she said. She recalled when her husband addressed a group of men about his prostate surgery, he said his rectal procedure was "just not natural, unless maybe you're Barney Frank." Frank dismissed Cunningham's comment. "I wouldn't list stability as his strongest personal characteristic," he said. Frank later added, "He tends to frequently blurt out stuff on gay issues. He seems to be more interested in discussing homosexuality than most homosexuals."

The Top Gun congressman drew his harshest fire in 1995, when he objected on the House floor to a pro-environment amendment. He said it was supported by "the same people that would put homos in the military." When former Colorado Representative Patricia Schroeder rose in objection to the remark, he told her, "Sit down, you socialist." Again, Frank expressed contempt for the comment and demanded an immediate apology. Duke's initial refusal to apologize prompted the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation's largest gay and lesbian political organization, to call a news conference. Democratic lawmakers lined up to tear him to shreds, and he showed up for the massacre.

"Duke Cunningham, who's standing right here, has been racist, has been homophobic, has been outrageous, and has disrespected his colleagues," said California Representative Maxine Waters. "He should seek some psychiatric help." Duke waited for a turn at the microphone, then said, "To me, using that short term was not wrong, but, if it is offensive, then I apologize and I will not use it again."

Duke's temper became a liability as he tried to rise in the ranks of House leadership. According to Nancy, he resented former Speaker Newt Gingrich for ignoring his seniority and appointing people over him who had not been in Congress as long. Former California Representative Ron Packard, who sat with Cunningham on the Appropriations Committee, recalled him becoming irate in a California delegation meeting when he realized he did not have the support for a committee assignment he sought. "He was extremely upset and threatened to quit Congress," said Packard. "That was the first indication that he didn't have control of his emotions." Nancy said her husband became so irate in 2000 about not getting a leadership position that he stormed into Dennis Hastert's office. (Six calls to Hastert's office for confirmation went unanswered.) Looking back, Nancy sees her husband's loss of a leadership position as his final undoing. "He thought he should be at the top, and, when Speaker Hastert promoted people over him, Mr. Cunningham became very, very disturbed," she said.

The government believes that Duke Cunningham started taking bribes in 2000 from defense contractors Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade. By helping the men secure government-issued defense contracts, Duke made both of them Enron-rich: Wilkes's firms in California and Virginia raked in about $100 million in ten years, and, since 2002, Wade's Washington-based firm made $150 million. Duke insisted on a piece of the action. His "bribe menu," as the government calls the demands he wrote out on his congressional stationery, detailed how many hundreds of thousands of dollars he expected to be paid for each defense contract he procured. Most of Wilkes's bribes came in the form of cash ($625,000) to pay off Cunningham's mortgages, while Wade's bribes catered to Duke's taste for luxury. The Wade cache included a Victorian china hutch, silver candlesticks, leaded glass doors, Persian and Indian rugs, a sleigh bed, and Restoration and Louis Philippe commodes. There was also a four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban, a secondhand Rolls Royce (plus $18,000 in repairs), and use of Wade's 42-foot yacht, the Duke-Stir, which replaced Duke's first boat, Kelly C., and served as his home for a time.

After I detailed a list of her husband's ill-gotten goods, Nancy dismissed some items as "overpriced" or "not that great," while questioning the government's description of others, such as the Persian rug. "I bought that thing at Costco," she said. As for the rest, she said her husband told her that he had purchased all the antiques in Kensington, Maryland, and negotiated a deal on everything himself. "In high school, Mr. Cunningham worked at a country club and always told me he wanted that lifestyle," Nancy said. "He later learned about antiques from Johnny Cash, who had an extensive collection. But he grew tired of everything he collected and always wanted more."

As "a person of interest," Nancy tried to distance herself from her husband's co-conspirators. "They were his friends, not mine," she said. She begrudgingly acknowledges Mitchell Wade's generosity to her daughters. One summer, the defense contractor paid 19-year-old Carrie Cunningham $4,000 for two weeks' work and gave April Cunningham $2,500 as a wedding present. Nancy's explanation of why these payments failed to raise a red flag revealed her careful study of the type of circles she saw her and her family traveling in. "I know that sounds like a lot of money," she said, "but the Wades were wealthy. A $2,500 check for them was like a $75 check for anyone else."

After Duke began his felonious flight into the high life in 2000, he asked Nancy to join him in Washington. "Mr. Cunningham said he wanted me to be with him more to socialize with lobbyists and defense contractors," she said, adding that the girls were finally grown and graduated from college. In 2002, Nancy was appointed acting chief of staff to the assistant secretary of management in the Department of Education. She denied knowing then that her husband was on the education subcommittee, which approved the budget for her salary, but she did admit, "It was a political appointment, pure and simple. ... I had the prettiest office you've ever seen." Her salary was $114,200, more than she had ever made in the public school system.

Before moving to Washington, Nancy said she would not live on her husband's boat, because it made her seasick, so he bought a two-bedroom condominium in Arlington, Virginia. The government claims the $200,000 he paid for that condo came from bribes from two other co-conspirators, New York businessman Thomas Kontogiannis and his nephew, John T. Michael, president of a mortgage company.

If being a congressman hadn't given Duke the power and respect he had imagined, living in Washington as a congressional wife similarly disappointed Nancy. "Don't think there's any prestige in it," she said. "You're just one of 435 wives; there's much more prestige being a congressman's wife in your own district." She cringed walking into Washington parties and seeing young women ogle her husband. "There were many times when Mr. Fun Ball, as I called him, was just too friendly with women-so overly friendly that it was humiliating."

But, while she acknowledges her husband's volcanic temper and relentless need for ego-gratification, she also criticizes the Republican Party for exploiting him for fund-raising without reward. She deftly wields a shiv as she discusses traveling with the speaker of the House and his wife on a private plane paid for by Wilkes, one of Duke's unindicted co-conspirators. "I usually told my husband to check everything with Ethics, but it never occurred to me there might be something wrong about flying with Speaker Hastert and his wife. How can it be illegal or unethical if the most important man in Congress does it?" Nancy claimed she went on only one congressional junket-to the Paris Air Show in 2001, an experience she was quick to dismiss. "They are nothing more than fancy vacations for congressional representatives, their families, and staffers to fly in luxury and shop at PX's on military bases and see castles and museums," she said.

Sixteen months after arriving in Washington, D.C., Nancy decided to return to California. She left with few regrets and no illusions about her husband's congressional colleagues. "If you strip away their power, all you've got is a bunch of fat old men with white hair who look like Newt Gingrich and Baby Huey," she groused. "If Newt had kept his pants zipped, the Republicans would not have lost a tremendous leader in the House, which they needed," she added. "And the congressional staffers are just as disgusting, because they bow and scrape to these guys." Nancy blames her husband's staff for keeping her in the dark about his actions. "I feel they deceived me all along about what he was doing." She will not accept that the staff feels they were the ones misled and deceived by her husband. She also feels abandoned by her husband's attorneys at O'Melveny & Myers for not negotiating her immunity. Several attempts to reach Duke's lawyer, K. Lee Blalack III, failed.

In the middle of our first conversation, Nancy demonstrated her frugality when the waiter approached our table. She asked to take home her bowl of tortilla soup. The waiter returned with a six-ounce Styrofoam cup. "This will be my dinner," she said, putting the container in her purse. Eyeing the breadbasket, she delicately removed one small muffin. "My grandmother might like this for breakfast," she added. Envisioning bare cupboards, I suggested she take the whole thing. Nancy hesitated, but, when I assured her again that it was OK, she dumped the breadbasket into her purse.

Throughout our conversation, Nancy was anxious to distance herself from her husband and his opulent tastes, particularly his fateful purchase of their 7,500-square-foot, five-bedroom, eight-bathroom house with a turquoise pool in Rancho Santa Fe. Shortly after Nancy had moved back to San Diego in 2003, Duke flew home and began house-hunting. "He said he wanted more space, but what he really wanted was a more moneyed life. ... It got to be an obsession with him ... the rich people in Fairbanks Ranch and Rancho Santa Fe," she said, naming the district's wealthier communities.

The $2.55 million purchase of the house in Rancho Santa Fe became the tipping point of Duke's crash into corruption. "It was a fixer-upper. I mean, it doesn't look like that from the aerial views - it looks like an absolute Taj Mahal, and I understand that," Nancy said. But my credulity was strained as she struggled to explain how she and her husband parlayed their house in Del Mar into Rancho Taj. "He convinced me that, when he retired from Congress, he would make big money as a lobbyist, so I relaxed a little about the monthly payments," she said. Duke reassured her that, as a member of Congress, he had access to bankers and brokers and could secure any loans necessary. Nancy paused in her recitation to take a breath. Then, she said, "I didn't really want that house and I was an idiot [to go along with it], but he was just hell-bent. He was going to make that purchase or else. ... Trying to be a peacemaker, I gave in." She never believed her husband would "do anything illegal" to get the moneyed life he craved.

But Duke did do something illegal. To finance the purchase, he sold the Del Mar house to a company owned by Mitchell Wade for $1.675 million, which was $700,000 more than it was worth. "Mr. Cunningham told me Mitch needed a place in San Diego to establish a California beachhead for his business, MZM, Inc.," said Nancy. But Wade put the 3,800-square-foot house on the market without ever using it and sold it at a loss seven months later for $975,000. Nancy acknowledges the obvious discrepancy between the purchase price and selling price but maintains the house was fairly priced by her husband. When the sale became front-page news as a conflict of interest in June 2005, she viewed the problem as "just ethical, not criminal." She reiterated that their $2.55 million house in Rancho Santa Fe was "a fixer-upper," far removed from the $15-$30 million estates that gave the community its cachet. "We were never accepted there," she added. "We were just poor trash. We were never accepted there, believe it or not."

The next day, she drove me to the sight of the Duke's downfall. As we left the cement curbs and chock-a-block houses of Del Mar, Fords became Jaguars, Mazdas gave way to Mercedes, and the sparsely planted palms soon evolved into a lush landscape of graceful pines, gorgeous orange groves, and bougainvillea. Turning on to Via Del Charro, Nancy pointed to the gated driveway of number 7094. "I haven't been back here since the government raid, and I won't go in," she declared. "I never want to see that house again." While she waited in the car, I jumped out, strolled through the gates, and walked the block-long driveway to see what had thrown Duke Cunningham into the arms of the devil. The white stucco pile was filled with winding staircases and more pillars and palladium glass windows than Monticello. The three-acre spread made Scarlett O'Hara's plantation look anemic, but the Latino crew renovating the property said it would take months to make the house habitable for the new owners. "I told you it was a fixer-upper," Nancy said when I returned.

On the morning of July 1, 2005, Nancy received a call at work informing her that the house had been broken into. She rushed home to find a slew of federal agents with badges and guns wearing white surgical gloves opening closets, pulling out drawers, examining files, and scrutinizing checkbooks. In the middle of the raid, her cell phone rang. "It was Mr. Cunningham. I said, 'Don't come home. They're raiding our house. They're raiding Mitch's office. They're raiding the boat. ... I don't want you anywhere near here.'" For once, Mr. Cunningham did as he was told.

The government raid marked the public beginning of Duke's downfall. Still, Nancy stood by her man when he announced, later that month, that he was not going to seek reelection. But, abiding by her distinction between unethical actions and criminal ones, when Duke pleaded guilty to felony behavior in November 2005, Nancy decided that she'd had enough. "I said, 'You need to know, Mr. Cunningham, that we now do not have a marriage; we have a business arrangement,'" she said.

Before he donned his orange jumpsuit to work in the library of the holding pen at Butner, North Carolina, Duke tried to hide a small stash of money. The night before he was sentenced, he drove to Nancy's grandmother's house and dropped a duffel bag in the garage stuffed with cash and dirty underwear.

"She called me immediately," said her attorney. "I went over to inventory everything and gave it to the U.S. attorney. God only knows where that money came from. Duke had $32,000 in $20 and $100 bills stuffed in Ziploc bags jammed in a metal box." When Nancy told Duke that she had turned over his money to her lawyer, he berated her. She said she had no other choice. "But he just doesn't understand," she said. "He claims he's innocent, that he's been railroaded by the government, that he shouldn't be in prison. He says he signed the plea agreement under duress." She shook her head. "He even thinks he will be pardoned by President Bush."

The final humiliation came with the revelation that one of her husband's unindicted co-conspirators had provided him with prostitutes. "I called my doctor to be tested [for sexually transmitted diseases]," she said. And then she stopped taking calls from prisoner 21489-038.

Legally separated from her husband, Nancy now considers divorce but worries that Duke might survive his prison term and demand alimony. But this is an unlikely possibility. Having been through surgery for a thyroid condition and for prostate cancer, plus radiation therapy, Duke Cunningham suffers from depression, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and chronic pain from a torn rotator cuff. The psychiatric evaluation submitted to the U.S. District Court by Duke's attorneys confirms that he is taking several medications, including Zoloft for depression, Ativan for anxiety, and Trazadone and Ambien for insomnia.

Although Nancy feels tainted by her husband's criminality, she occasionally defends him and strikes back at his detractors, knowing that she, too, is being judged the same way. Still, the crucial question remains: Did she or didn't she know the extent of her husband's corruption? The answer may be that she shared enough of her husband's Gatsby-like dream to turn a blind eye to the means he used to obtain it. But the real tragedy for Duke Cunningham is that, by the time he arrived in Washington, the prestige and glamour that he imagined he would find there were long gone. The people who had the lifestyle he fantasized about weren't politicians; they were lobbyists. And Duke, the war-hero who felt he had earned a place in the pantheon of Kennedys and Bushes, felt cheated. The psychiatrist who evaluated Duke Cunningham explained his greed in proprietary terms: "It is possible that his extraordinary deeds in the service planted a subconscious sense of entitlement, which fed his rationalization to accept these gifts [bribes] for his sacrifice."

During our last evening together in San Diego, Nancy received a call on her cell phone. She gasped when she heard the special ring that signals a call from a correctional institution. "It's him," she said. "Should I take it?" I nodded and turned off the tape recorder. She took the call. She talked about the weather and listened patiently as her husband listed all his grievances. She later said that their conversations are tape-recorded and transcribed for the U.S. attorney still investigating the scandal, so she self-censors everything she says. On the other end of the line, I could hear the rich timbre of Duke Cunningham's baritone rumble, and, when she got off the phone, I said I understood how impressive he might have been as a communicator.

"Might have been, could have been, should have been," Nancy said after hanging up. "Sometimes I take his calls out of pity. Other times I ignore them, because I don't want to hear his voice ... his lies ... his broken promises. He has turned everything to ashes."

--Kitty Kelley is the author of  "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty."