dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Marc Mezvinsky's father was a real scam artist…

Edward Maurice Mezvinsky (1937) is a former American congressman and convicted felon. A Democrat, he represented Iowa's 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms (1973–77).

grew up in Ames, Iowa, the son of Jewish grocery store owner Abe Mezvinsky.

He earned his first nickname: "Rat Claw" Mezvinsky. Fellow legislators smelled an attention-seeker.

After serving in Congress, Mezvinsky was United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1977-79.

Prosecutors later would call Mezvinsky a one-man "crime wave" and said they uncovered elements of fraud in nearly every business deal of his dating to 1980.

In March 2001, Mezvinsky was indicted and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 felony charges of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Nearly $10 million was involved in the crimes.

Man who believes in Nigerian scams: READ THIS

http:// crab.rutgers.edu/~mchugh/nigeriamezvinsky.html

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After a stint as a U.N. ambassador for human rights under President Carter, Mezvinsky began a series of bad moves in Pennsylvania.

He ran for Congress in 1980, although he was new to the state, and lost.

He began setting up businesses, among them grain export and medical instrument companies. Both failed. He was sued after a shipping company he contracted with didn't have grain to ship.

"I had these great ideas, but I didn't follow through with them," he says.

He moved on to other ventures, dabbling in schemes with African businessmen to get rich quick.

"In Mezvinsky, they had a perfect man," said Zauzmer, the assistant U.S. attorney. "His whole life, he wanted the home run. He didn't want to operate a business. He wanted to make millions in one home run."

Mezvinsky's stories sound fantastic. At one point, he says, he found himself in Africa gazing on an open suitcase filled with paper shaped like money, although the bills were black.

"That's the way they would hide it," he says. "The man later came out with a chemical, threw it on the money, and it all turned to $100 bills. He gave me 10 to have them tested back home. And they were real."

Some of the African schemes were not far removed from the classic, laughable Nigerian scams often run through the Internet - seeking victims with financial backing to extract millions out of bogus accounts. Others were sophisticated oil prospects.

Mezvinsky poured money into these ventures and sought other investors, promising big returns.

"Yes, the stories were strange and out of the intellectual box, but they were believable," says Margolies-Mezvinsky, who was elected to Congress in 1992 and served one term.

She now lives in a rented home in the Philadelphia area after filing for bankruptcy. "We're not talking deals that would come over the fax," she says. "They were very complex deals."

Mezvinsky continued to lose money while financing fanciful political campaigns. After he served as chairman of the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee from 1981 to 1986, he ran for state attorney general and lost. The campaign cost him more than $1 million.

Meanwhile, his home life was frantic. At times as many as 15 people lived in the 8,200-square-foot mansion. The home had six bedrooms, five bathrooms, a ballroom and greenhouse, and the complex included a carriage house with four bedrooms, an in-ground pool and pool house with a kitchen and three bathrooms.

The home was filled with four daughters from his first marriage, two daughters Margolies adopted before their marriage, two sons they had together, and three foreign children they raised as guardians.

They threw parties with well-connected people. They were friends with the Clintons; their son Marc even dated Chelsea Clinton.

"He had a lot of friends in the community of all walks of life," Jerome Shestack, a longtime friend and past president of the American Bar Association, said of Mezvinsky. "He was very well-regarded."

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