The Foley Trail

Don't Ask … Don't E-mail

The half-open closet in which Mark Foley spent his life was a recipe for disaster, say those few who tried to intervene. Investigating Foley's pre-teen seduction by a priest, the "ladies' man" mask he wore in Palm Beach society, and his love-hate relationship with the gay community, the authors uncover the ambition, delusion, and hypocrisy that corroded both the politician and his party.

by Gail Sheehy and Judy Bachrach

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, former representative Mark Foley, President Bush, House majority leader John Boehner, and Representative John Shimkus.

Everyone knew Mark Foley was gay. Everyone. And everyone who had a stake in his success—party, press, parents, staff, supporters, and pages—conspired for their own purposes to keep the closet half closed.

Born at the peak of the baby boom, in 1954, he grew up near Palm Beach, in the scrappy little town of Lake Worth, Florida, which in recent years has become a popular refuge for gay retirees. That subculture most likely did not enter into the consciousness of his parents, Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. "One of the biggest psychological problems for him was he was never able to be who he was with his parents, and they were his No. 1 campaigners," says Eric Johnson, the openly gay chief of staff for Florida congressman Robert Wexler and an old friend of the Foley family's.

In the early 70s, Foley developed the veneer of a charming, heterosexual party boy, and a high-school yearbook caption depicted him as "noted for—being a ladies man." But the formative experience of his passage through puberty, as the world now knows, was his seduction by an authority figure whose attentions may have been a guilty pleasure. A priest at the Sacred Heart Catholic School took him biking and skinny-dipping and massaged him in the nude, often bringing him to saunas for fondling. Unlike a peer of his who ran away from another priest's overtures, young Foley apparently did not resist. The Reverend Anthony Mercieca, who was 17 years older than Foley, claims they became "attached to each other .… almost like brothers." Foley's mother welcomed the priest into their home for Christmas dinners and his parents allowed him to take their adolescent son to the beach and on sleepover trips to New York and Washington.

The priest rejects Foley's latter-day charge of abuse and defends their relationship as one of "naturalness.… For some people, it's molestation. Maybe for other kids, it's fun, you know?" This arrested sexual development, with its titillating mix of secrecy and shame, Foley would reproduce in his adult years. And just as his parents had been totally unaware of the sexual advances to which their son was surrendering, right under their noses, so, years later, were Foley's "girlfriends" and his longtime gay partner unaware of his adult addiction to fraternizing with and fantasizing about sex with teenage boys. Foley was able to juggle a triple life—as a political chameleon, a semi-closeted gay power broker, and a secret sexual predator.

Trapped in the Closet

Mark Foley's ambition to be a politician became the family dream. He was always in a hurry. His doting parents had no problem with his dropping out of Palm Beach Junior College at age 20; they helped him open a diner in downtown Lake Worth and turn it into the platform for his grandiose goals. "Mark never actually did any work at the Lettuce Patch, no cooking or busing. He was the face, while Mom worked like a slave in the sweaty kitchen, making pies; Eddie, his older brother, worked the cash register; and his dad managed the business," according to Rodney Romano, who twice presided over Lake Worth as mayor and knows the Foley family well. In his early 20s, even before he won his first local election, Foley was telling people he planned to be a U.S. senator by age 50. He joined a circle of idealistic progressive Democrats, all under 30, who became known as the Kiddie Car Gang. "I also see myself married with a family," Foley proclaimed publicly back then, in 1976. But his personal life took a very different course.

Mary McCarty, a Palm Beach County commissioner, remembers first hearing about Foley's sexuality back in the 80s, when "the rumor mill already had it that he was gay." At the time Foley was close to a very well-known man, Roy Talmo, the chairman of First American Bank and Trust in Lake Worth. Talmo, like Father Mercieca, was a powerful man, more than 20 years older, who lavished attention on Foley. "Mark was known as one of 'Roy's boys' in his 20s," says a friend of Talmo's. "Roy was the go-to guy in this county for whatever you needed, either financial or political," says André Fladell, a well-connected chiropractor in Delray Beach. Talmo put young Foley on the board of his bank, which became the largest stockholder in Cenvill Development Corporation, builder of Century Village, a chain of the biggest retirement communities in southeast Florida. Talmo's bank went under during the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 80s, and Cenvill went bankrupt. But not before Talmo reportedly put Mark in a number of high-stakes real-estate deals and taught him the art of the quick flip. Foley's most spectacular land shuffle was in 1986, when Talmo lent him $2.45 million to buy an abandoned golf course to turn around and sell to the school district for $2.91 million. In a matter of hours, Foley walked away with nearly a half-million dollars.

Before he turned 30, Foley was already driving a Mercedes and offering to be the gofer and fund-raiser for Democrat Dennis Koehler, who was running for Congress. Sean Strub, Koehler's campaign manager, welcomed Foley as a fund-raiser because he had lucrative social connections. "Mark invited me to fancy society parties," Strub recalls. "I'm very much driven by my passion for issues and wanting to change things. Mark had a very different set of values. He wore gold chains and liked to go to parties. He was about his ambition and his Mercedes. It was clear that, more than anything else, Mark wanted to be a player."

According to Strub, Foley volunteered that he was bisexual, but hastened to add he was never going to act on it. "It was apparent that he saw his sexuality as an impediment to his career in the same way he saw being a Democrat at that time as an impediment to his career." (Strub later became an openly H.I.V.-positive congressional candidate and founded Poz magazine, for people with H.I.V. He recalls that Foley, as a congressman, was one of the few Republican members to support needle exchange to curb the spread of the disease among drug users.) Strub says he once later saw Foley in a Key West gay bar on Duval Street. "That was the Aha! moment," he says.

In 1984, when Foley ran for county commission, despite proclaiming he was a committed Democrat and outspending his primary opponent, the party slapped him down and told him, "It's not your time," according to Rand Hoch, a Democratic Party activist. Months later, Foley switched opportunistically to the Republican Party, accepting the price to his private life. At a gay party in Palm Beach Gardens in the late 80s, Foley recognized Hoch. He crossed the room, according to Hoch, and blurted, "I wish I could be out like you are and [still] involved in politics. But I can't because I'm a Republican." Hoch told him that of course he could come out, but Hoch himself didn't believe it. "Palm Beach is somewhat accepting of alternative lifestyles, but you don't talk about the gay elephant in the room," he says.

Foley collected an A-list of rich Palm Beach supporters, some of them Democrats, who spent lavishly to throw him fund-raising parties. He always wanted to be in the picture. And his picture was seldom missing from "The Shiny Sheet" (as the Palm Beach Daily News calls itself), in which he cozied up to visiting celebrities, from Sly Stallone and Clint Eastwood to the Clintons and President George H. W. Bush. He started quietly dating a wealthy and attractive dermatologist, Dr. Layne Nisenbaum, who owns a popular anti-aging institute in Palm Beach, but he was always careful in the early years to appear at events with beautiful women.

Robin Bernstein, a vivacious socialite, who worked on Foley's fund-raisers in 2000, accompanied him to many political functions. "He was the perfect date—debonair, articulate, and there wasn't a charity he didn't help," she says. Another favorite escort was a gorgeous former Miss Germany, Petra Levin. "Mark thought it was useful to take me out as 'a mask,' but he didn't make me feel like that," says Levin, a nearly six-foot slender blonde, in her mid-40s, who dresses like a model and drives a sapphire-blue Aston Martin convertible. "The moment I met Mark, there was an instant chemistry," she says emphatically. They were introduced by Dr. Nisenbaum, who was her new neighbor. Immediately she and Foley were talking and laughing, and he began calling to ask if she would like to "go along" to some of his political events. "I'd say, 'Is it one of the boring ones?' He'd say, 'No, this one might be exciting.'" She had zero interest in politics, but as a divorced mother new to town, she welcomed invitations to the Red Cross Ball and glamorous events at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago. Once Foley was elected to Congress, she would stay over at his Washington town house when he wanted to be seen with her at fashionable restaurants or at parties with celebrities. "He talked from the beginning about wanting to be a senator," says Levin. "He was really politically ambitious."

Petra Levin, like many others who spoke for this article, says she never raised the issue with Foley of whether he was gay, "but I knew it right away. He was very flirtatious. If people watched me with Mark—we'd hug each other, he'd give me a kiss and hold me—they'd never think he was gay."

"See, that's what puzzles me about this whole thing," says Hoch, who founded the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council, a gay-rights organization, and seems comfortable in his own skin. "I never regarded Mark really as being in the closet. Whenever I bumped into him, whether it was at a gay event or just at City Place, our outdoor mall in West Palm, he was pretty aggressive about going for whatever he wanted It's not like the party structure here didn't know [he was gay], but they didn't care because he got them access and social connections. He was excellent at networking."

On the rare occasions when Foley took Nisenbaum to a dinner event, they sat discreetly at separate tables. Appearing as handsome single men, they were always welcome additions. When they were photographed, there was usually a buxom babe between them. This fiction was duly noted and appreciated by local Republican Pooh-Bahs, including the current chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, Sid Dinerstein, who says, "If Mark Foley had his boyfriend and lived a committed monogamous life, he could have been elected until he couldn't walk anymore."

The Secret Lives of Congressmen

In 1994, Foley was swept into Congress with Newt Gingrich's right-wing revolution, and he worked hard at making a mentor of Gingrich. It would be 10 years before Florida senator Bob Graham's seat would open up, but Foley hired a chief of staff to help him begin long-range planning for ascension to that higher body. Kirk Fordham, who was openly gay, found his new boss to be "notoriously friendly all across Capitol Hill. I was always conscious of the fact because he was gay; if he struck up a conversation with a younger staffer or intern or an assistant in Congressman DeLay's office and lingered too long, I would nudge him."

"I did see him with younger men, riding bikes or at the gym," realizes Petra Levin in hindsight. "It angered him that his lives had to be so separate."

The earliest complaint by a page was in either 2000 or 2001, when a young man went to Arizona Republican congressman Jim Kolbe's office to describe an e-mail from Foley that had made him uncomfortable, and asked that something be done. Kolbe has said he recalls notifying both Foley's staff and the page clerk's office, but saw no evidence of any follow-up. Fordham recalls that "Foley never, ever went to gay bars in Washington. He had a limited number of gay friends in D.C. My suspicion is that part of the reason he engaged in some of the late-night instant-messaging is because he could never have a healthy, out gay social life."

A very different picture is suggested by Eric Johnson, who says, "Kirk was a not-want-to-know-about-it conservative. It was common knowledge Mark was very flirty and promiscuous in Washington; it was only gossip fodder because everybody knew he had a partner in Florida. But I didn't know his interest went to 16-year-olds."

In a later interview, Fordham expressed his own frustration: "Mark is a caring, compassionate, real guy, but there was also a dark underside that he never let anyone see."

Foley often held fund-raisers at his Washington town house. Once, when Fordham showed up early to check on the caterer, he found Foley hanging out in the kitchen with two good-looking young guys. One of them, Fordham says, was the head of the College Republicans at his school and clearly gay. "I gave the congressman that You-oughta-know-better kind of look. Lobbyists were already arriving. He gave me that sheepish grin—half See-what-I-found and half I-shouldn't-be-doing-this. Stuff like that was stupid, reckless, and unnecessary." Fordham says he was aware that Foley continued to be friendly with the student, "but I have no idea if there was any physical contact."

Foley also resisted repeated exhortations from his gay political friends to declare himself honestly. Fordham explains, "He was always concerned about being referred to as 'Mark Foley, comma, openly gay Republican congressman,' much like he perceived [Massachusetts congressman] Barney Frank and Jim Kolbe as being identified first as being gay rather than by what issues they were advancing." Voters and colleagues have long since seen beyond Frank's sexual orientation, but Foley's folly was to hide his sympathies by voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Perhaps cowed by threats from some in the gay community to expose his hypocrisy, Foley went on to support various pro-gay measures, voting to expand health benefits for homosexual couples and include gays in federal hate-crime legislation, among others. "It became a love-hate relationship between Mark and the local [Palm Beach] gay community," says Hoch.

Romano, the former Lake Worth mayor, who is revolted by the dishonor Foley has brought to his town, acknowledges, "He didn't stand for anything—he toed the party line—but you couldn't beat him as a politician. Plus he had a built-in campaign team in his family. His parents never missed a local event." Foley's married sister, Donna Winterson, 60, spent every weekend during campaign seasons traveling around the state with him, employed as his paid political director after years of working for him on a volunteer basis. "She liked seeing him successful," says Levin. "That was her success."

While Foley was still deliberating whether to run for the Senate, Fordham says he wrote him a long memo warning him to expect people going through his garbage, and private investigators hired to follow him home and hunt for men he may have had encounters with. "He came back to me saying, 'Do you really think they would do all that?' I think part of him was still in denial that they would really go to those lengths."

The Kids Aren't All Right

In 2002, Congressman Foley was re-elected with an astounding 79 percent of the vote and appeared to be on top of the world, which he traveled both freely and for free. As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and a popular speaker, he was royally entertained by private organizations and interest groups that paid for his travel to destinations such as Scotland and Pebble Beach, California. "I don't feel any embarrassment about doing the trips," he has said. Since he never took Nisenbaum, he would take his parents. He was especially proud of bringing them to see the Vatican.

With a wealthy boyfriend and without the burden of the bills of a family man, Foley enjoyed two houses of his own—a prized historic town house a short walk from his Washington office, and a condominium near West Palm Beach, which was perhaps for appearances only, since most weekends he stayed over in Nisenbaum's luxurious Palm Beach home. Sources say the couple was recently considering buying a summer home in the gay-friendly resort of Ogunquit, Maine.

By now, apparently believing he was totally protected by his institution—like the depraved priests protected so long by the Catholic Church—he was using his position to repeat with congressional pages the priest-pupil dynamic of power and control. Around 2003, Fordham recalls, he took a call from Jeff Trandahl, then clerk of the House: "We have a problem The congressman showed up at the page dorm last night. He appeared to have been drinking, and he was turned away at the door." Fordham remembers agonizing with Trandahl over what to do about this overt display of uncontrolled behavior. Obviously his mild warnings to Foley were not having an impact. Fordham asked for a private meeting with Scott Palmer, chief of staff to Speaker Dennis Hastert. According to Fordham, Palmer said it didn't bother the party that Mark was gay: "We think he's a rising star here, he's got so much potential, and he's great on television." Fordham says of the meeting, "We sat facing each other. It was pretty uncomfortable. I'm going behind my boss's back. I knew that Scott knew that I was gay. I told him I was concerned that Foley seemed to be too chummy with pages, interns, and young male staffers I asked Scott if he wouldn't mind either speaking with the congressman himself or having Speaker Hastert have a chat with him. That might alarm him enough to realize other people were watching, and not just his staff." A couple of days later, Fordham says, he checked back with Palmer to see if he had met with Foley: "He said he had taken care of it, and he had brought the Speaker in the loop. I believe it happened, but apparently it didn't have any effect." (Trandahl and Palmer did not respond to requests for comment.)

Matthew Loraditch, now a senior at Towson University, in Maryland, who worked as a page from 2001 to 2002, has said that a supervisor told him Foley was "a little odd" but never warned him to stay away from the congressman. He claims he later saw sexually explicit messages that Foley had sent to former pages after they left the program. Perhaps on some deep, subconscious level Foley understood that his compulsions were leading him toward certain self-destruction.

Most perversely, Foley took up the cause of protecting youngsters from predators, becoming a particularly vocal and punitive member of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, which he co-founded in 1997. He referred to pedophiles as "America's most depraved." Psychologists see reactions like Foley's as classic—publicly criticizing the selfsame unacceptable behavior he was committing, which he could not personally control. More recently, he helped to write the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which President Bush has said would "make the Internet safer for our sons and daughters." It became law two months before Foley's downfall.

By the time, in 2003, Foley began full-time campaigning to unseat Senator Bob Graham, the periodic threats from his opponents to out him reached a peak. After a Florida alternative newsweekly reported he was gay, he called an unusual press conference in May of that year specifically to address the issue, but refused to reveal his sexual orientation. He suggested that Democratic activists were behind the mounting rumors. The Palm Beach Post chose not to make mention of the press conference, later writing that their policy was to report on a politician's sexual orientation only when it was "relevant to a news story." Eric Johnson was astonished. "I thought the media made a real mistake in keeping Mark's secrets for him. They played into his sense of invulnerability."

That summer, Foley's Senate primary campaign looked like a sure winner. A statewide swing with his sister in August brought even some conservative Republican state officials on board. Then, it seems, national G.O.P. officials got wind of Graham's intention to retire, so the seat was more seriously in play. Out of the blue, at summer's end, Foley stunned just about everyone by withdrawing from the race. He called political editor Brian Crowley at The Palm Beach Post and gave as his reason the health of his father, who was in the hospital with prostate cancer. (Edward Foley died in November.)

"For the real political types, it just didn't ring true," says Sid Dinerstein, the chairman of the Republican Party in Palm Beach County. "The reason he wound up with a couple of million dollars in campaign money was because we [the state party] were funding his Senate bid. He barely had opponents." Even this passionate party man is among many who speculate that the White House shut down Foley's campaign. "Maybe there's a belief by the powers that be, which is code for Karl Rove, that a gay couldn't win a Senate seat in Florida," says Dinerstein. (A spokesperson for Karl Rove says, "Not only did Karl never say that, he doesn't believe that to be true, either.") "One could argue it's untrue, since there's plenty of rumors about Charlie Crist. [Crist, Florida's governor-elect, has publicly denied he is gay.] But there were enough whispers that the Foley campaign could have produced embarrassments—and maybe the same embarrassments that we just saw, maybe exactly the same." Commissioner McCarty goes even further: "I believe somebody took him into a room and showed him a videotape or something pretty definitive, because without a smoking gun, he would have denied it." Eric Johnson believes the White House possibly knew something about the messages to pages and cut a deal with Foley and Fordham. "Then Foley could stay in the House, Martinez would run in his place [Mel Martinez, who later won the Senate seat], and Kirk could move into a Senate race [by becoming Martinez's finance director]." Fordham, however, says, "No one ever called—the president, or Karl Rove, or the head of the Republican Party—to discourage him in any way from running."

After 25 years in public life, Foley had hit the glass ceiling, and he still couldn't be himself. Within a week, back in his office on the Hill, after the summer recess, he began brooding on the scuttlebutt that he had dropped out because he couldn't deal with the gay rumors. In front of his sister and Fordham, he broke down. He sobbed out the story of "repeated abuse that he had received from the priest at his church"—not in anger, according to Fordham, but in shame. One thinks of the priest's version: For some people, it's molestation. Maybe for other kids, it's fun, you know? That conflict is precisely what breeds the toxicity of shame, and shame is what spilled out 35 years after Foley's first gay encounter, when the psychological barriers between his public self and his shadow self began to dissolve. He reportedly tried to tell the story to his parents. His mother could not believe such a thing of a Roman Catholic priest. His father refused to acknowledge the conversation. "[Foley] went into a funk," says Fordham. "He was disengaged from his job. He had in some ways lost his purpose for serving"—his purpose having been to get to the top of the power structure.

Foley was struggling. Fordham, his chief of staff and confidant, had deserted him. Some in his party were shunning him. "I think it started unraveling for Mark when the White House didn't support him in running for senator," says Robin Bernstein. Petra Levin, now remarried, says she noticed that Foley was drinking a lot around this time, privately, when he would be at her house playing cards with Nisenbaum. "I don't know if the drinking stopped when he went home," she says. Foley had always liked a glass or two of red wine, says Fordham, and kept a wine-storage cooler in his kitchen. But Levin, who is on the board of the Renaissance Institute, an addiction-treatment center in Palm Beach, was keenly aware of alcoholic patterns and at this point she thought of suggesting to her friend that he needed help.

The E-mail Trail

At the end of August 2005, a 16-year-old page forwarded e-mails Foley had sent him to Danielle Savoy, a 29-year-old scheduler for Louisiana representative Rodney Alexander. As the page had worked with her in Alexander's office, the two were friendly, Savoy says. The e-mails' style was not really lurid, but alarming enough that the page called them "sick": "Send me an email pic of you as well," suggested the 52-year-old congressman. "What do you want for your birthday coming up ? what stuff do you like to do." There was talk of Foley's intended visit to the gym, as well as of the excellent physique of another teenager. Savoy says simply that Foley's language made her "curious." She forwarded the e-mails to another friend, with the note, "Hey, what do you think about this?"

In early November, the St. Petersburg Times, of Florida, received Savoy's e-mail. "From that day to this I have no idea how the media got to see it," says Savoy. "Who knows?" Adam C. Smith, a St. Petersburg Times reporter who was working on the story with Bill Adair, phoned the office of Representative Alexander, but, as executive editor Neil Brown would later point out in an oblique letter to readers, "We were unsuccessful in getting members of Congress who were involved in the matter ? to acknowledge any problem with Foley's ambiguous e-mail." The Miami Herald, which also received the e-mails, barely touched the story. "We didn't go as far as attempting to reach out to other pages," its executive editor, Tom Fiedler, later admitted, because the e-mails were "too ambiguous to lead to a news story." (Fox News also got the e-mails, but chose not to share them with its viewers.) Nonetheless, the newspaper's calls to congressmen had their effect.

After Representative Alexander was contacted by the St. Petersburg Times, he demanded to see exactly what his former page had sent Savoy—and he wanted it very quickly, judging by his staff's next actions. Savoy, who was home ill, was phoned by Alexander's press secretary, Adam Terry, who roused her from her sickbed so she could come to the office at once. Instead, she gave him her password, and the Foley e-mails were promptly ripped from her computer. (Savoy is quick to acknowledge that she is a registered Republican—contradicting Hastert's early response when the scandal erupted this past September, blaming "a lot of Democratic operatives" for the leak.)

A wave of panic swept through Congress as Republican leaders and staffers suddenly realized that Foley's predatory activities were attracting attention. As one deeply knowledgeable source tells V.F., "In November [2005], why did the whole issue of Foley come up at all? Was it self-enforcement on the part of Congress? No! The St. Petersburg Times was calling around, asking tough questions! It created the spark. Even though they didn't publish [the story], the act of reporting was the only oversight there." Within days of the calls from reporters, everyone went into action. Royal Alexander, chief of staff (but no relation) to the Louisiana congressman, swiftly informed a lower-level Hastert aide about the e-mails, although, citing the concerns of the boy's family, he did not reveal their exact contents. The Hastert aide, in turn, quickly talked to Mike Stokke, the Speaker's deputy chief of staff, as well as to his chief counsel, Ted Van Der Meid.

Foley's new chief of staff, Liz Nicolson, asked her boss for the e-mails, but she was out of luck, too. "I delete all my e-mails," he told her. So Nicolson called Representative Alexander's office for a copy of her own boss's e-mails. The response she got, according to one knowledgeable source, was "very odd." First Alexander replied, "Sure. Send someone over right away, and we'll give you a copy of the e-mail," according to the source. "Then they said, 'No, we're not going to give you the e-mail.'"

"Why not?" asked Nicolson.

"The congressman doesn't want to get involved," Nicolson was told. ("Apparently Representative Alexander's office had been advised by an attorney not to show the contents," Fordham says. Royal Alexander declined to comment.)

Jeff Trandahl, the House clerk and Capitol official who was most concerned about the pages, and Representative John Shimkus, a tall West Point graduate and Illinois Republican who heads the five-member House Page Board, confronted Foley in his Cannon House Office Building office, and the tenor of their dispute was swiftly communicated to various staffers, one of whom reveals what was said. "Why are you e-mailing kids? Stay away from the kid and stay away from the pages," warned Shimkus.

"It's important to me to mentor kids. These are kids who care about our government," Foley protested. "I was just being friendly, that's all."

Shimkus never told the other members of the page board about Foley's e-mails.

In the spring of 2006, Representative Alexander discussed the Foley e-mails with Majority Leader John Boehner and New York representative Thomas Reynolds, the quick-tempered head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Reynolds says he, in turn, went to Hastert. Boehner claims he also informed Hastert around the same time. But after the Foley affair exploded in the media, in September 2006, Hastert said he had no recollection of any of this. Not of Boehner's conversation with him, nor of Reynolds's. "If Reynolds told me, it was in a line of things, and we were in another crisis this spring," said the Speaker. "So I just don't remember that."

On July 21, 2006, Melanie Sloan, a slender, dark-haired former prosecutor who heads the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan government-reform organization, received copies of the same e-mails. Unlike the two Florida newspaper editors, Sloan, who had spent four years as an assistant U.S. attorney specializing in sex crimes, didn't find the contents ambiguous. On receipt of the e-mails, she focused on the Foley query "What do you want for your birthday coming up?"

"Grown men don't send e-mails to young men they hardly know asking for a 'pic' or what they want for birthdays," she says. "Those e-mails had PREDATOR stamped all over them. Obviously."

That July afternoon, Sloan says, she contacted Leanna Saler, of the F.B.I.'s Washington, D.C., public-corruption office ("because she had once been in touch with me and said if I learned of things that might interest her I should let her know"), then forwarded Saler the eight pages of e-mails. Saler called back that afternoon simply to inquire if Foley had written those e-mails. That was the last Sloan says she heard from the F.B.I. Then, on September 28, ABC's chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, posted excerpts from the same e-mails on the network's Web site.

A few days after the ABC scoop, an F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post that the F.B.I. had not opened an investigation into Foley all summer long because the e-mails "did not rise to the level of criminal activity."

"And that's true—it didn't rise to that level!" Sloan concedes. "But that's why you open an investigation. To see if there's anything else to find."

Next, F.B.I. and Justice Department officials, again speaking on condition of anonymity, informed The Washington Post that another reason the bureau couldn't investigate Foley was that Sloan had heavily redacted the e-mails and may have sat on the document for months before sending it their way. "They are lying," Sloan says flatly. "And I think the reason they're lying is because the F.B.I. is a cover-your-ass agency, and they don't want to be responsible if, in the intervening months, some kid got hurt while they did nothing."

V.F. received a copy of the e-mails Sloan sent to the F.B.I., but from a different source. On it are all the names, unedited: Danielle Savoy, the distressed boy whom Foley was wooing, and the page with the excellent physique. "This is an issue that's being investigated, and it's not going to be debated in the press," says F.B.I. spokesman Richard Kolko.

Getting to the Bottom

Toward the end of September 2006, Foley's staff heard that ABC was investigating the e-mails received by the Louisiana page. (Stopsexpredators.blogspot.com was actually posting them, but at least this outlet attracted a more contained, less influential audience.) ABC's Ross was appealed to on various levels not to go with the story, the investigative journalist recalls. One Foley staffer, he says, informed him, "This is bad judgment on your part. Other media outlets have those same e-mails and no one's using it." In addition, Ross was told, "Foley was just being friendly. He liked kids. Brian should meet Mark. They'd like each other and then he'd understand."

At this recollection, Ross laughs. "Yeah, I'd understand all right."

Foley's staff began organizing consulting sessions with Foley pollster Dave Sackett and media adviser Sam Dawson. Even Fordham, who had quit more than two years earlier and was by then chief of staff for Reynolds, was pressed into service. After all, in two days Foley was due to fly back to his home district to start campaigning. "We decided Mark should mainly speak to local TV stations in Florida to discuss the e-mails," says one of those present at the sessions.

On September 28, as the ABC News Web site posted its first e-mail story, Liz Nicolson sat talking to Foley about what else the media might discover. Walking into the office, Fordham observed how uncomfortable his former boss was with this line of questioning. He says he pulled Foley aside and pushed him hard. "Mark, we need to know," he began, "was there ever any other instance of inappropriate behavior toward any other page? A dinner? Inviting someone to your house? Offering to buy them drinks? Any sexual activity with pages? We need to address the specifics, because it will probably all come out."

"No, no inappropriate behavior like that," said Foley. But he looked terrified, Fordham thought.

That night there was voting in the House, and Representative Ginny Brown-Waite, another Florida Republican and a good friend of Foley's, agreed to cheer him up, walking him to the floor of the House. After the vote, Fordham recalls, she came back, looking stern. She had just spoken to Peggy Sampson, who supervises the Republican page program, and received an earful about Foley, which she imparted, unvarnished and cold, to her friend.

"Mark, there was an occasion when you showed up in front of the page dorm, late at night," the congresswoman said evenly.

"Oh, you know—I guess all kinds of stories are going to come out now," Foley replied. "You just never know what people are going to say."

At noon the next day, Nicolson, Fordham, and another aide met with Foley at his D Street house to discuss campaign strategy. The house is small and compact, bordered by a pretty garden and a wrought-iron gate, its walls covered with paintings by Foley's mother. A lunch of portobello sandwiches was interrupted by ringing cell phones. On the other end of Fordham's was Foley's communications director, Jason Kello, calling from Florida. "Kirk, I just got off the phone with ABC News, and they have 36 pages of instant messages between Mark and former pages. They're sexually explicit" is how Fordham recalls the communications director's opening remarks.

"What do you mean 'sexually explicit'?" asked Fordham.

Kello glanced at his notes and began reading passages that dealt with hand jobs and lotion. But there was more.

Messages, in which Foley used the screen name Maf54, were posted on the ABC Web site. In one, he presses for details about the boy's genitalia and his sexual habits:

Maf54 (7:46:33 PM): did any girl give you a haand job this weekend
[Teenager] (7:46:38 PM): lol no
[Teenager] (7:46:40 PM): im single right now
[Teenager] (7:46:57 PM): my last gf and i broke up a few weeks agi ?
Maf54 (7:47:11 PM): good so your getting horny
[Teenager] (7:47:29 PM): lol ? a bit
Maf54 (7:48:00 PM): did you spank it this weekend yourself
[Teenager] (7:48:04 PM): no
[Teenager] (7:48:16 PM): been too tired and too busy
Maf54 (7:48:33 PM): wow ?
Maf54 (7:48:34 PM): i am never to busy haha ?
Maf54 (7:58:59 PM): but it must feel great spirting on the towel
[Teenager] (7:59:06 PM): ya
Maf54 (7:59:29 PM): wow
Maf54 (7:59:48 PM): is your little guy limp ? or growing
[Teenager] (7:59:54 PM): eh growing
Maf54 (8:00:00 PM): hmm
Maf54 (8:00:12 PM): so you got a stiff one now ?
Maf54 (8:01:21 PM): i am hard as a rock ? so tell me when your reaches rock ?
Maf54 (8:03:47 PM): what you wearing
[Teenager] (8:04:04 PM): normal clothes
[Teenager] (8:04:09 PM): tshirt and shorts
Maf54 (8:04:17 PM): um so a big buldge
[Teenager] (8:04:35 PM): ya
Maf54 (8:04:45 PM): um
Maf54 (8:04:58 PM): love to slip them off of you
[Teenager] (8:05:08 PM): haha
Maf54 (8:05:53 PM): and gram the one eyed snake
Maf54 (8:06:13 PM): grab
[Teenager] (8:06:53 PM): not tonight ? dont get to excited
Maf54 (8:07:12 PM): well your hard
[Teenager] (8:07:45 PM): that is true
Maf54 (8:08:03 PM): and a little horny
[Teenager] (8:08:11 PM): and also tru
Maf54 (8:08:31 PM): get a ruler and measure it for me
[Teenager] (8:08:38 PM): ive already told you that
Maf54 (8:08:47 PM): tell me again
[Teenager] (8:08:49 PM): 7 and 1/2
Maf54 (8:09:04 PM): ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Maf54 (8:09:08 PM): beautiful
[Teenager] (8:09:38 PM): lol
Maf54 (8:09:44 PM): thats a great size

Another conversation, with an 18-year-old former page, took place as Foley was waiting to vote on appropriations for the Iraq war.

Maf54: I miss you
[Teenager]: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too

After apparently engaging in cybersex with the boy, Foley concludes:

Maf54: ok ? i better go vote ? did you know you would have this effect on me
[Teenager]: lol I guessed
[Teenager]: ya go vote ? I don't want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
[Teenager]: :-*
[Teenager]:

After Kello had read Fordham only a few lines, Fordham cried, "Stop! That's all I need to know!" He heard female campaign workers weeping on the other end of the phone. When he hung up, he says he saw Foley, who was joining him on the patio, looking scared. Fordham told him the news.

"Are those instant messages authentic?" he asked Foley, who turned away, mortified.

When Foley looked back, he said, "Probably."

"Probably?"

"Yeah, I'm sure they're real," said Foley.

Nicolson joined them. "Liz, I've been stupid," said the congressman.

"Mark, I don't know how you can go on in this race," said Fordham. "Do you really want to spend the next 40 days of the campaign running around your district explaining sexually explicit e-mails to pages to your constituents?"

Fordham thought he made it clear that his old boss needed to quit, but Foley couldn't bring himself to do that. The N.R.C.C. headquarters was around the corner, and Fordham made it his next stop. There he found Representative Reynolds and Speaker Hastert. But before he could finish relaying the awful news, Reynolds's face got purple and he began to shout, "He needs to resign, and he needs to do it right now!" The Speaker just sat there, silent, according to Fordham: "He didn't react at all. This was weeks before the election, and they're thinking how this is going to impact us."

Everyone agreed that Foley needed to resign. They weren't sure how. A lawyer was called in and advised that Foley sign a letter to be delivered to Speaker Hastert on the floor of the House. Just then, Fordham was alerted that Foley's sister Donna Winterson had arrived at the congressman's office, totally unaware of the meltdown. He ran over and found Winterson sitting on the sofa, "looking like she was in a coma." Her life, having been devoted to her brother's campaigns, would be crushed, too. It took Fordham five minutes to get her composed enough to walk back to the house, where they would finally have to swallow the bitter pill.

"You have to get out," Fordham told Foley.

"You mean I have to drop out of the re-election race?

"No, you need to resign your seat in the House. Today. Now."

Fordham says that Foley dissolved into hysterics. His sister wrapped her arms around him, and they rocked together, in tears. Foley wailed to his sister, "I'm so sorry I've done this to you." Fordham says, "He thought he'd ruined everyone's life." Eventually, Foley asked what he needed to do next. "You need to sign this letter and then you both need to get out of here and go to a safe place," Fordham warned them. "Reporters are going to be staking you out." Foley and his sister took five minutes to pack and headed south toward Florida in his BMW. Fordham reached them on his cell phone. "Neither of you is in any state to be driving to Florida. You shouldn't even be behind the wheel!" he said. "Just go to a hotel somewhere in Virginia. Don't turn on the TV. Call your friends."

Damage Control

'You have to be curious—you have to ask all the questions you can think of," Republican whip Roy Blunt, of Missouri, said in early October. He was furious, because, he insisted, like a number of his senior colleagues, he had not been informed of Foley's misdeeds until the day before his resignation.

Hastert, believing the leadership needed to present a united front, as one by one his colleagues were repudiating his foggy recollections, called a Republican-leadership meeting. That same day, an ethics-committee investigation was pressed for by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (over the objections of those who wanted an independent counsel), its purpose to discover who knew what when about Foley. Blunt, Boehner, and Reynolds were all summoned "to basically get their stories straight for the press," according to a knowledgeable source, who adds, "That to me is where Hastert attempted a cover-up."

Reynolds balked at having such a meeting. "This is stupid! We can't all go and meet privately and try to get our stories straight, because this matter was just referred to the ethics committee," he told Hastert, according to the same source. "In fact, none of us are supposed to be talking to each other, because we are not supposed to talk to potential witnesses." Worse, added Reynolds, "I can tell you anything we say at this leadership meeting is something we have to share with the ethics committee."

The meeting eventually became a conference call, but without Reynolds's participation. Days later, on October 5, the often moribund ethics committee, a subject of frequent and widespread Hill derision, opened its investigation, without a lot of optimism about what would be accomplished, especially since practically the first utterance from ethics-committee chairman Doc Hastings, a Republican from Washington, was that he thought Hastert "has done an excellent job as Speaker."

President Bush, who called Foley's behavior "disgusting," agreed. "Denny is very credible, as far as I'm concerned. And he's done a fine job as Speaker."

‘My desire, which I don't think will take place," says Florida representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an outspoken Democrat, "is that there's an independent investigation so we can make sure this doesn't happen again, so that the callous are held accountable." But there'll be no independence on the Republican side, she feels. "I think they'll try to leave this Foley matter in the ethics committee," the congresswoman adds bitterly. California Democrat Howard Berman, who sits on the ethics committee, is also concerned. Hill sources say that Pelosi had to strong-arm him to join the committee, and it's clear he isn't thrilled to be there. Although there had been early promises the committee would release its findings before the midterm elections, this did not happen. "I said when I took the committee job that if things go back to the way they were, with issues going partisan or stuff being swept under the rug, I would quit," Berman says. "For me, this is a huge test for us."

In mid-October, Fordham says, he learned that the Speaker's office was trying "to throw me under a bus." There were leaks to the press, he says, suggesting that he had tried to block a page-board investigation of Foley. As there never was an investigation to block, he found this accusation unsettling. "I was trying to be the loyal Republican and do this behind closed doors with the F.B.I. and the ethics committee in a way that probably wouldn't have hurt them—until after the election," says Fordham. His shoulders sag. He is very pale, clearly tired—of everything. "It's a pretty significant move for a staffer to go behind his boss's back," he says. "You know, it's not like we had a tip line to the courts, where you can call about congressmen who behave inappropriately to staffers," he says wearily.

After he resigned, Mark Foley was treated for sexual compulsion along with alcoholism at the Sierra Tucson treatment center, in Arizona. A full criminal investigation into his behavior was opened in Florida, where the age of consent is 18. Dennis Hastert, after the Democrats won the House, decided not to run for minority leader. Foley's House seat, despite a valiant defense by Palm Beach Republicans, fell to Democrat Tim Mahoney.

Will the Foley scandal prompt significant reform of the page program that failed to prevent these abuses? "As of this point, there are not any proposed changes for the program," says Salley Collins, a spokesperson for the Committee on House Administration. (The committee oversees the Office of the Clerk, which runs the page program.) "However, there are still multiple ongoing investigations, so I think we're still in a wait-and-see pattern," she adds. "We're always looking to improve the program."

Gail Sheehy and Judy Bachrach are Vanity Fair contributing editors.