Frank Prewitt's Last Bridge to Nowhere

[Dennis Zaki called me Wednesday afternoon saying he had an advance copy of a book about the trial, could he come by and drop a copy off for me. It had a little note to me written by the author. (He had two other books to deliver, one to Shannyn Moore and one to Philip Munger at Progressive Alaska. (Dennis had exclusive rights to talk about the book until Saturday when the book would be officially announced. I could post about it then. You can see Dennis’ Thursday and Friday posts already at AlaskaReport.com.)

Shortly thereafter, he pulled into our driveway and gave me a copy of Frank Prewitt’s new book Last Bridge to Nowhere. As an amateur journalist, I haven’t studied the protocol or ethics of exclusive stories. Obviously, I’m being used to promote this book. It seems that various people have been told that they have gotten first shot at the book so I guess Prewitt will have different outlets dealing with the book for a number of days in a row. Given that ABC, as I prepare this for a Saturday posting, is also sitting on an exclusive to promote Sarah Palin in as controlled a way as her handlers think they can get away with, I think the whole idea of exclusive stories would make an interesting post in the near future. So read this with a grain of salt. Prewitt knew that I, having sat through the three trials, wouldn’t be able to resist reading this. I did toy with the idea of just posting this intro and not going into the book. So my pay for shilling his book is one free copy. Here are my first impressions.]

Synopsis:

1. Brief Overview
2. Excerpt of what Prewitt expects to happen (there isn't that much new in the book, just more details, like adding color to the black and white)
3. Purpose of the book.
   
4. Will the real Frank Prewitt please stand up?
5. Self-publishing thoughts
6. Fact of Fiction?
7. Conclusions
   

1. Brief Overview

Think of this book as a work of historical fiction, based on real events and people, but with everything skewed slightly to make the author appear to be the person who ran the FBI’s corruption probe with the assistance of Special Agent Kepner who he pretended was in charge. (OK, I stretched the last part a bit to give you a sense of how things seem to be stretched in the book.) This impression comes from the first part of the book, which is heavy on unflattering descriptions of people. Toward the middle and end he gets more into moving the story along and the snark meter blips less frequently. At the very end, the tone changes completely as he quotes the bible and discusses his conversations with God. Basically, most of the things I knew about were accurate, but for someone who doesn't know the stories already, it would be hard to determine where Prewitt is embellishing.

To his credit, there are no pretensions about the book itself here. It's like you are in a bar with Prewitt drinking beers as he's telling you about his experiences as a confidential source for the FBI in Alaska's biggest political corruption case.

2. Excerpts. There's little that we don't already know about people under investigation. What he says about people is interesting if you like catty gossip, but nothing particularly important in terms of public policy. What is useful is the deadlines for when cases have to go to trial :

Crimes committed in 2003 and 2004 ... didn’t technically have to be charged until 2008 and 2009. (p. 136)

So, things need to be wrapped up by next year. So what's left? Here's his synopsis done a little while ago.

The way things were shaping up, I figured indictments or plea deals on John Cowdery and Jim Clark (former governor Murkowski’s chief of staff) were right around the corner, the shoe would probably drop on Senators father and son Stevens by mid-summer or fall and the case building against Congressman For All Alaska Don Young would slide past the August 2008 primary elections, and that was a big problem…

Then there were the cases sitting on federal ice for lack of immediate concern or stature. Alaska Senator Donny Olson, for example, was named in the Kott trial as the senator that John Cowdery could deliver for a mere twenty five thousand dollar contribution; investigations into former Alaska senator Jerry Ward and multimillionaire businessman Bill Weimar had been completed at least a year before; political cash handouts from Alaska fur-trading entrepreneur Perry Green were burning a hole in prosecutors’ pockets; former representative Bruce Weyhrauch’s trial was stalled on a procedural appeal; former representative Beverly Masek’s alleged quid pro quo relationship with Bill Allen and Perry Green was approaching the statue of limitations for prosecution; the lingering charges against the remaining VECO executives were simmering on a back burner; and a small handful of residual affiliations could prove up after the cooperators’ cooperation. (p. 135)

Presumably this is what's left. But he also said early on he had to be careful not to jeopardize ongoing operations, so possibly there are others. There's also a little bit on Palin, but nothing that hasn't already been picked through by the national media on when she decided she didn't like earmarks.

3. Purpose of the book

Why did Prewitt write this book?

• To clear his name - Prewitt tells us that as an undercover agent he was unable to respond to the various people who saw him as a slimeball lobbyist who made some deal with the FBI to escape jail.
  
  
• Revenge - Particularly the beginning of this book is full of acerbic comments about all sorts of people. I get the sense of the smart guy who has had to put up with fools, finally gets to say what's on his mind without concern for consequences. I can just see Prewitt relishing everyone rushing to the bookstore to read all the gossip about well known Alaskans. At one point he even writes,

  And the key to special friends in politics is money, and right about now a lot of Weimar’s former special friends are breathing deep sighs of relief as they read my generic passing reference to their special relationship with the big guy. (p. 49)
  

  
  
• To tell his part of this story - He writes in the Acknowledgement, "I sincerely hope this book serves as a foundation and catalyst for a more definitive work by a thoughtful, research-diligent, unbiased source.. A historic event of this stature deserves no less." And not many people could write this book. Though googling FBI Agent Memoir gives quite a few hits on books written by ex-agents.
  

4. Will the real Frank Prewitt please stand up?

My sense at the trial was that Prewitt was smarter than most of the people in the courtroom, that he'd made a fair amount of money, that there were probably some shady things in his background, and enough specific stuff that the FBI approached him and offered him a deal to help them. I didn't know this, but it was my supposition. The Anderson and Kohring defense attorneys cross examined him on these points. There was something about illegal campaign contributions and something else about a $30,000 loan from Allvest - a corrections contractor - while he was Commissioner of Corrections. I posted the exchange between Anderson attorney Stockler and Prewitt at the time:

Prewitt said he got the loan and paid it back. Stockler: Is there anything in writing? Isn't it true it was a bribe? [Prewitt:] No. [Stockler:] How did you pay it back? [Prewitt:]I worked for Allvest for four months - $7500 per month. [Stockler:] Did you pay taxes on the $30,000? [Prewitt:] No, it was a loan. [Stockler:] But you say you worked for it. [Prewitt:] No, I was paying him back. [Stockler:] So, all of us could avoid paying income taxes by having our employer loan us our pay before, and then we'd repay it by working and not have to pay taxes?

Prewitt said in court and in the book that his attorney told him the campaign contribution was past the statute of limits and the loan was not illegal and there were no issues and that he was cooperating voluntarily.

[My attorney] said they [the Feds] agreed there was no basis for federal charges against me and I was under no obligation to continue helping, but they sure hoped I would. (p. 31)

But on the very next page, he says his code name was Patient.

She never said whether the name was due to my status or long-suffering nature, but there was no confusion over the anatomy under her control, when she said to turn my head and cough, I did. (p. 32)

Why would Kepner have him by the balls if there was no basis for federal charges and he was there voluntarily?

In the last chapter, "Author's Retrospective," Prewitt tells us that he talks with God. He opens the bible - an interesting translation - and God talks back to him through the passages such as:

Mocking ballads will be sung of you and you yourselves will sing the blues...

Do chats with God demonstrate his reflective, religious nature? Or megalomania? Or are they there to convince us of his true ethical self? But a good Christian, in my understanding, wouldn't write all those mean spirited comments about all the people in the early chapters.

Prewitt was a lobbyist. He worked legislators all the time. When asked by Kepner whether he would normally attend a fund raiser at Bill Allen's house (so she could use him to wear a wire there),

I said I went to those things all the time, no problem.(p. 37)

How do we know he isn't working us the way he worked legislators?


4. Self-publishing

Self-publishing means you don't have to get your book accepted by a publisher. Nowadays, this no longer automatically dismisses the book from serious consideration. It also means you can often get it out faster. At one point he's talking about July 2008. The book has no index, but it has a list of characters (I would have added the judge, John Sedwick), and a glossary for non-Alaskans. I noticed one citation (Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board) and he has a few newspaper articles pasted into pages.

Sometimes events have dates, sometimes not.

An editor may have done something about the dark and stormy prose such as:

By 2003 this unusual compost of big oil, frontier ingenuity, and isolated lawmaking reached critical mass, seeping lethally into the cracks and crevices of Alaska public policy and under the door of FBI Special Agent Mary Beth Kepner. (p. 18)

There's a certain blog-like quality - impressions, casual language, different styles, an attempt to capture what happened in almost real time.


6. Fact or Fiction?

My take, as someone who blogged the three court cases, is that while he has taken poetic license with some of the stories and dialogues and some of the events are meshed together, the book gives a reasonably accurate overview of what happened and gives us some glimpses into the relationship between a source and the FBI agents.

The author's character is painted as a misunderstood, falsely accused, but publicly minded citizen selflessly helping to right wrongs. This may or may not be accurate. I've never talked to Frank Prewitt, I've only seen him testify in court, and I know what people who have known him say about him. (It's mixed.) So while you get the general picture, and most of the details are consistent with what I heard in court, some I don't know enough to be able to verify, and others have been revised to make for better reading. For example, Prewitt writes:

Next day Kott walks in, “Allen said he appreciated Kott’s work and handed him a thousand dollars in Cash. Kott stuffed the bills into his politically incorrect Carharts and Allen said, “There, that should keep you in broads and booze for a couple of days.” (p. 74)

That's a totally different impression than the court record. My notes have that the $1000 was a reimbursment for a $1000 campaign contribution that Pete Kott had made to the Murkowski campaign. This still is not legal, but it is not as brash as stuffing bills into his pocket for broads and booze.

And he also gives us details of events he didn't personally witness - such as Kepner and Joy's first discussion with Don Young for example. Other stories didn't seem right to me, but I had no way to check.

7. Conclusions

This is a short book - 150 pages - so it's pretty easy to get through. As someone who's followed the trials closely, I knew who all the players were and the book filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge. What we learn about the FBI's working the case is also interesting. Again, we have to be careful about buying into all the details, but overall we get more information on how things work. I suspect the book would be interesting to someone who doesn't know as much, but it will be more difficult to sense where he's stretching things and where he's sticking close to the original script. With so much national attention on Alaska right now, people may be interested in this sordid little tale.

I don't think it tells us very much about Prewitt's thinking. I'd guess that the beginning is a flip facade that he may have developed over the years. The final chapter probably gives us a glimpse of Prewitt that isn't seen in public, though it's only a glimpse.

OK, I know this is ending rather abruptly. I only had the book for two days and I'm trying to get this out. I may come back and edit when I look at it later.