Murthaville

One night last August, John Murtha, the U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania’s Twelfth Congressional District, paid a visit to the LBK Game Ranch, a private hunting camp in the hills above his home city of Johnstown. About 60 people had gathered in the ranch’s lodge--a luxury five-bedroom log cabin decorated with deer antlers and flat-screen televisions--to raise money for his 2008 campaign.

There were two odd things about the event. One was that the host was a former drug dealer. Bill Kuchera, a stocky man with a balding pate and a bristle-brush mustache, had run a bar near Johnstown in the mid-1970s, but, after a catastrophic flood in 1977--the third such flood to hit Johnstown since 1889--the bar had tanked along with the local economy. So Kuchera headed to Wisconsin, where he eked out a living hawking fireworks before moving into a more lucrative line of work: transporting marijuana from Miami for sale up north. He was busted in 1981 and served the better part of a year in federal prison.

No less strange was the political situation facing the guest of honor. Murtha was first elected to the House in 1974 and had long been one of the Democrats’ most entrenched incumbents. On several occasions, the GOP had not even fielded a candidate to run against him. But ever since calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in November 2005--and, a few months later, alleging that Marines there had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood”--Murtha, a former Marine himself, had been the target of conservatives’ ire. For his 2008 race, Republicans had not only fielded a candidate--a retired Army lieutenant colonel who moved from Virginia to Johnstown for the express purpose of unseating Murtha--but were in the process of showering him with more than $3 million in campaign contributions.

With his career on the line, Murtha had turned to Kuchera and other local supporters in Johnstown because, put simply, they owed him. Like Kuchera, Johnstown as a whole had experienced a remarkable reversal over the past two decades. And, in both cases, it was John Murtha who was largely responsible. For more than a century, beginning in the 1850s, steel had been king in the southwestern Pennsylvania city. “Along toward dusk tongues of flame would shoot up in the pall around Johnstown,” Charlie Schwab, chairman of Bethlehem Steel from 1904 to 1939, once wrote. “When some furnace door was opened, the evening turned red.” But it had been years since Johnstown’s sky burned so bright. Bethlehem began shuttering its twelve miles of mills there in the late 1970s, closing the last one in 1992.

Unlike other Rust Belt cities, however, Johnstown was not completely decimated by the steel industry’s collapse. From his perch on the House Appropriations Committee, Murtha had, over the years, directed $2 billion in federal spending to his district. Kuchera, who, following prison, had moved back to Johnstown and reinvented himself as an entrepreneur specializing in electronics and defense contracting, was just one of the local businessmen who had benefited from this largesse. “I’m certainly a Republican . . . and I don’t think Mr. Murtha and I would agree on everything,” Mark Pasquerilla, a Johnstown businessman who attended the fundraiser, later told me. But “on an economic-development level, he delivers.” In steel’s place, Murtha had become Johnstown’s economic engine, keeping it afloat with a steady stream of government cash that flowed to the city’s private businesses, its hospitals, even its airport--which, like so many things in Johnstown, now bore his name. Murtha was not just Johnstown’s congressman; he was its savior.

That night in August, Murtha would raise as much as $100,000 for his reelection bid. And, in the weeks to come, others who owed their good fortunes to Murtha would direct portions of those fortunes toward his campaign. Ultimately, he matched his Republican challenger in the fund-raising contest. And, although polls taken just a few days before the election showed a neck-and-neck race, Murtha used his war chest to mount a last-minute ad blitz that propelled him to a 16-point victory. For the time being, it appeared that Bill Kuchera and the rest of Johnstown’s business community had managed to save their savior, and themselves. “It’s like we were sitting here with four aces and we weren’t sure if we were going to bet it all or fold,” Bill Polacek, the CEO of a local defense firm, told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. “With that kind of hand, why would you let the opportunity pass you by?”

But Johnstown’s return to business as usual would prove short-lived. In late January, little more than a fortnight after Murtha was sworn in to his nineteenth term, federal agents raided the offices of Kuchera’s two companies, as well as the LBK Game Ranch; they seized not just computers and boxes of records but Kuchera’s seven rifles and one handgun, which, as a convicted felon, he was prohibited from owning. The raids, according to The Washington Post, were part of a federal investigation into allegations that Kuchera and his family had improperly used money from his company’s Pentagon contracts for personal expenses, including renovations of his hunting ranch.

For much of the last year, federal law enforcement officials have been investigating not just Kuchera but a number of defense contractors and lobbyists with ties to Murtha; at the same time, the House ethics committee is said to be probing Murtha’s and other lawmakers’ relationships with a now-defunct lobbying firm that was helmed by a former congressional staffer who once worked with Murtha. As a result, Murtha’s decades-long appropriations of phenomenal sums to his home district--and the campaign contributions he has received from some of the beneficiaries of those appropriations--are now at the center of one of Capitol Hill’s biggest ongoing scandals. The controversies cut to the heart of what Polacek, who knows Murtha well, calls the congressman’s “life’s work--the continuation and survival of this community.” Sitting in a conference room just a few hundred feet from an old Bethlehem Steel plant where his company now makes armored plating for military vehicles, Polacek framed the issue in stark terms. “If there weren’t earmarks,” he told me, “this town would be dead.” Murtha, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this story, has been similarly blunt. “If I’m corrupt,” he recently said to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “it’s because I take care of my district.”

Earmarks, of course, are perfectly legal, and most congressmen go out of their way to bring home money to their districts. “What Murtha is doing everybody else is doing,” says Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s just to such a higher degree that it becomes shocking.” And, while Murtha’s radical approach may well have saved Johnstown--a place that, due to natural or economic forces, always seems perched on the edge of extinction--it also created a city unduly dependent on one man: himself. If other congressional scandals in recent years have primarily revolved around individuals, from Jack Abramoff to “Duke” Cunningham to William Jefferson, the Murtha scandal involves the fate of an entire city.

Johnstown lies just 65 miles east of Pittsburgh, but both its geography and psychology have long conspired to isolate it from the larger world. Nestled in a deep valley at the confluence of the Little Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers, Johnstown is surrounded on all sides by mountains, as if the city had been dropped from the sky and landed with such force that it punched a giant crater in the Alleghenies. In the 1950s, when federal highway officials were trying to place interstates by all 237 American cities with populations of 50,000 or more, Johnstown (population 65,232 at the time) was one of just seven cities to successfully resist those efforts, its civic and business leaders evidently believing that the thoroughfare would harm the local economy. Even when Johnstown has tried to break out of its isolation, the effort has been largely for naught: The John Murtha airport--the recipient of $200 million in federal spending over the past decade, most of it courtesy of its namesake--currently offers just three commercial flights a day, all bound for Washington’s Dulles airport some 120 miles south. After I spent a few days in Johnstown last month, a reporter from the Tribune-Democrat got in touch with me in the hopes of writing a story about my stay; Johnstown, evidently, is not accustomed to many visitors.

Murtha’s ancestors first came to the Johnstown area from Ireland in the 1840s to work in the coal industry. Born in 1932, he was just a boy when his father and three uncles all went off to fight in World War II. After three years in the Marine Corps and various postings throughout the South, Murtha settled with his wife, Joyce, back in Johnstown, where he ran his family’s car wash and commanded a Marine Reserves company. In 1966, the 33-year-old father of three volunteered for active duty and served a tour in Vietnam as a Marine intelligence officer. “Ever since I was a young boy, I had two goals in life,” Murtha, a hulking figure with a six-foot-six-inch frame and gruff countenance, once confessed. “I wanted to be a colonel in the Marine Corps and a member of Congress.” The first goal attained, Murtha set about achieving the second. When Johnstown’s Republican congressman of two decades, John Saylor, died in office, Murtha ran for his seat in a special election in 1974. He won by 122 votes.