The New Republic

Nineteen eighty-six marked the height of Dolph Lundgren's powers.
Following his triumphant portrayal of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV,
Hollywood pundits touted Lundgren as the Swedish Schwarzenegger.
With his girlfriend, the flat- topped Jamaican actress Grace Jones,
he formed a muscle-bound glamour couple that paparazzi could hardly
resist. Therefore, it made little sense that Lundgren would follow
a rookie producer into a small African kingdom to make a B-movie
called Red Scorpion.It didn't make any sense, except that the film's producer was Jack
Abramoff-- the same Jack Abramoff who bilked Indian tribes of

$80 million and brought down the most powerful House Republican in
the process. But, long before his siren song seduced congressmen
like Tom DeLay onto the ethical shoals, it tempted the Scandinavian
Adonis to abandon his burgeoning stardom for what seemed like a
big-ticket production. Abramoff's winning quality was that he
thought big and took others there with him. When he put together a
production, even on his maiden film, he didn't just sign up a major
studio. He signed up foreign investors to help cover his ambitious
budget. He even signed up a foreign army to make the action scenes
seem real. As he mulled the Red Scorpion offer, Lundgren got a
tempting taste of Abramoff's largesse, when, thanks to the
producer, he starred in his very own grip-and- grin photo-op with
the president of the United States. "In [Lundgren's] living room
somewhere, there is a photo of him with Ronald Reagan," the movie's
production manager, Avi Kleinberger, told me.

Last spring, Kleinberger ran into Lundgren at the Cannes Film
Festival. They began discussing the Abramoff scandal, which had
just begun to spill into the international press. As the rest of
the world expressed shock at Abramoff's venality, Lundgren
shrugged. "Look, he was always connected with politicians, and you
just had a feeling about the guy," he told Kleinberger. "I knew it
was going to end badly for him."

How did a thick-necked action star foresee the tragic fate that most
of Washington seems to have missed? Lundgren witnessed Abramoff in
his Max Bialystock moment. As the 27-year-old producer of the
doomed film that was Red Scorpion, Abramoff previewed the signature
style that would make him so famous 20 years later.

In 1986, Jack Abramoff, like half the twentysomethings in Southern
California, had an idea for a screenplay: the rollicking tale of
Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan anticommunist rebel. Following the first
rule of story craft, Abramoff pitched what he knew, and he knew
Savimbi's story well. After spending his early twenties overseeing
the College Republicans, Abramoff set up the Washington office of a
conservative student group called the International Freedom
Foundation (IFF)--a group that was later revealed to be a covert
propaganda operation of South Africa's apartheid regime. (Military
code name: Pacman.)

That Abramoff could imagine Savimbi as an archetypal Hollywood hero
wasn't that surprising, considering that Washington
conservatives--with an assist from the IFF--had been lauding him as
one. At a 1986 black-tie dinner for the Conservative Political
Action Committee, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the doyenne of the Reaganauts,
passionately described Savimbi as a "linguist, philosopher, poet,
politician, warrior ... one of the few authentic heroes of our
time."

Hollywood development offices often search for film subjects that
they can rip from newspaper headlines. But rarely do they glean
their material from agitprop supplied by foreign intelligence
agencies and conservative think tanks. There was also a little
matter of poetic license. In their celebrations of the rebel
leader, Washington conservatives overlooked the abundant evidence
suggesting that Savimbi was an ideological chameleon with little
compunction about stomping on human rights. But never mind the
nuances--Abramoff had found his muse.

And Abramoff's well-connected Beverly Hills family supplied him the
outlet, an entree to Warner Brothers. "It was Jack using Jack's
contacts," says Jeff Pandin, who worked with him at IFF. A script
doctor turned Abramoff's folkloric version of Savimbi into a bad
parody of the loud whiz-bang cold war thriller then popular with
audiences. Red Scorpion, described as the "African Rambo," tells
the story of a Soviet-trained assassin (Lundgren) sent to murder a
Savimbi-like character. In the end, Lundgren comes to understand the
virtues of the rebel cause and turns on his communist bosses,
killing lots of Cubans in the process. (Red Scorpion's
potty-mouthed dialogue bears tonal similarities to Abramoff's
infamous e-mail exchanges: "An American can swear whenever,
wherever, however much he or she fuckin' well pleases!") When
Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the picture, Abramoff was
suddenly living his Hollywood dream.

Abramoff sold Red Scorpion as a work of verisimilitude. He claimed
to know the region cold, and he would shoot his film in Swaziland,
the small Bantu kingdom wedged between South Africa and Mozambique.
His attraction to the region was financial as well as ideological.
By hiring the services of the South African film industry, which
suffered under the anti-apartheid boycott, he could exploit massive
tax deductions available to investors there. "Sometimes the
deductions totaled twice or three times the investments," says
Peter Leon, the South African lawyer who drafted an initial contract
for these investors. From his work with the IFF, Abramoff had
acquired a host of helpful friends in South Africa. When he
approached acquaintances in the Johannesburg Jewish community,
though only novice film investors, they shelled out a hefty pile of
rands. All told, he raised

$16 million for Red Scorpion--quite an impressive budget for the
genre.

In 1987, Abramoff bought a house in Johannesburg and began commuting
to the film's set in Swaziland. The idea of living with the cast
and crew apparently never crossed his mind. "It's hard enough to
find kosher restaurants in Washington," says Pandin. "Besides,
Jack's not the roughing-it type." But the Swaziland location was
just across the border from his old friends in the South African
military, which had supplied him with between 30 and 40 troop
transports and armed personnel carriers to make a film celebrating
their Angolan ally.

Despite Abramoff's knack for making friends and acquiring military
hardware, he showed early signs of his deficiency in the political
sensitivity department. The implications of South African soldiers
moving armor into a neighboring black country escaped him. But they
didn't escape the Swazi king. Carmen Argenziano, who played a Cuban
colonel, told me, "When they started bringing in military
ordinance, [the Swazi government] said, `What are you doing? Are
you crazy?'"

The king's obstreperousness posed a problem for Abramoff: He could
either abandon his patrons or move to another country. The South
Africans urged the latter, proposing he set up shop in Namibia, on
their northwest border. But this carried risks. "I strongly advised
him against filming there," Leon says. That's because South Africa
controlled the territory in defiance of the United Nations. And
shifting to Namibia may have been bad politics, but it was worse
business. The contract with Warner Brothers stipulated that the film
have nothing to do with South Africa.

When lawyers like Leon pointed out the possibilities for calamity,
Abramoff brushed them aside. He calculated that nobody in Los
Angeles would ever learn of his Namibian move. "It was a huge
country, and the chances of getting spotted--that somebody from the
West would find them--was not great," Kleinberger told me. That
might have been a reasonable calculation--if Abramoff were making a
film with someone other than Grace Jones's boyfriend.

Lundgren and Jones had a tumultuous relationship, and, when a moment
of tumult coincided with the filming, Jones traveled to the set to
patch things up. At the time, following her star turn in Conan the
Destroyer, it was hard to miss Jones. And her appearance in an
apartheid country caused the stir you would expect. Argenziano
recalls staying at the Kalahari Sands Hotel in the city of
Windhoek. "Any time in the day, these old African bush people,
people who had never seen an escalator, would hang around the
escalator, jumping on and off. Then there were these old Boers, you
know how they tolerated the black people. ... And into this scene
walks Grace Jones." Following her visit, The Namibian, an
independent weekly, ran a story on the film, from which The New
York Times caught wind of Red Scorpion's shooting location. Dismayed
by Abramoff's transgression, Warner Brothers canceled their
distribution agreement.

Without studio backing, the project spun out of control. The South
African investors panicked that the movie would never get made--and
that they would never see their tax deduction. "Jack kept
sweet-talking the [investors] about everything coming right," Leon
says. But, back on set, "he was overwhelmed," Kleinberger
remembers. When he saw extras milling about, waiting for their
scenes, he would kvetch they were wasting his money.

Indeed, he had reasons to worry. Although the film's director,
Joseph Zito, had a long history of churning out B-movies, including
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, he directed Scorpion at a
slower pace. The logistics of shooting in Namibia, where even basic
props were difficult to procure, delayed production. "You had to
travel back to South Africa to get something like a nail," says
Kleinberger. The production extended months longer than
anticipated, stranding the cast in Namibia.

Lundgren's discomfort in Namibia was the least of Abramoff's
problems. Abramoff had no way to pay mounting expenses. Actors and
catering companies went without pay, as did military consultants
from the South African Defense Forces. All he could provide was the
promise that money would arrive after the film's release. But
Abramoff must have known this money would never materialize. His
new distributor was Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment, whose
highest- grossing film to date had been Maniac Cop. And, thanks to
the Times, the film faced the wrath of anti-apartheid activists.
Before its release, the tennis player Arthur Ashe, who chaired
Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, declared, "If you have part
of the South African Army as extras, it's hard to see the film as
anything less than an endorsement of South Africa's policies."

In the end, not even Lundgren's rising star could save the film.
Critics panned it--"The movie's reflective moments belong to Mr.
Lundgren's sweaty chest," the Times quipped--and the public skipped
past it. Red Scorpion grossed

$4 million, leaving a $12 million debt. Instead of staying in South
Africa to clean up this mess, Abramoff returned home. When actors
launched a bankruptcy inquiry against Abramoff, he failed to show
in court. "He just disappeared into the wilderness," says Leon.
When his creditors reached him, he struck the same hangdog pose
that he wore last year before John McCain's committee. Monyeen Lee,
who cast the movie, says, "He took the calls, but he just said,
`There's nothing I can do. We're insolvent.'"

This experience would cause most aspiring moguls to seek a new
career. Not Abramoff. Five years later, he released Red Scorpion 2,
albeit without wattage comparable to Lundgren. But, in a sense,
Abramoff never truly produced a sequel until he began lobbying, a
vehicle that permitted him to properly replicate the chaos and
antics of the original Red Scorpion. It is the rare sequel even
more spectacular than the original.

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