Big Banking Invested $18 Million In Rahm Emanuel And Now They Are Expecting A Big Return-- Just Like They Do From Crooked Republican Politicians

I was just looking for the first DWT story I wrote positing that Rahm Emanuel was every bit as corrupt and self-serving as-- and in fact was the doppelganger of-- Tom Delay. Unfortunately I've written about that so frequently that I gave up looking for the original. A piece in today's NY Times by Michael Luo leaves readers of that paper with the impression that Emanuel's image as a foul mouthed lout and bully just might be clever disguise for his true identity: garden variety, high priced political crook. And as he's rapidly scurried up the insider power ladder, the members of Emanuel's crime family have been licking their greasy chops.

In late 1998, while Washington was in the throes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Rahm Emanuel, a departing senior political aide to President Bill Clinton, ventured out to an elegant restaurant in Dupont Circle for something of a job interview.

John Simpson, who ran the Chicago office of the investment banking boutique Wasserstein Perella & Company, had flown to Washington to meet with Mr. Emanuel at the behest of Mr. Simpson’s boss, Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and renowned Wall Street dealmaker who had gotten to know Mr. Emanuel.

“I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” said Mr. Wasserstein, now chairman and chief executive of Lazard, the investment bank. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”

And better than Mr. Emanuel could have imagined as well. Over the course of a three-hour-plus dinner, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Emanuel discussed how they might work together. Shortly afterward, Mr. Emanuel accepted an offer, nudging him down what has by now become a well-trodden gilded path out of politics and into the lucrative world of business.

Mr. Emanuel, who was chosen last month to become President-elect Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, went on to make more than $18 million in just two-and-a-half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions. He also benefited from the opportune sale of Wasserstein Perella to a German bank, helping him to an unusually large payout.

The period before he was elected to a House seat from Illinois is a little-known episode of Mr. Emanuel’s biography. Former colleagues said the insight it afforded him on the financial services sector is invaluable especially now. But Mr. Emanuel built up strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis, one that will be girding for a pitched lobbying battle next year as the incoming Democratic administration considers a potentially sweeping regulatory overhaul.

After Mr. Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And now he's leaving Congress to run the White House. Like I've been saying-- the seeds of President Obama's destruction. Perhaps for all of us.

Bankster video courtesy of the Washington Independent: