April 15, 2005
Accusations Against Lobbyist Echo Charges in 70's Scandal
By TODD S. PURDUM 

WASHINGTON, April 14 - Back then the commodity in play was rice and this time, a criminal complaint alleges, it was oil. But nearly 30 years after Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, stood at the center of the Koreagate influence-peddling scandal that rocked official Washington, he has emerged at the center of the United Nations' Iraqi oil-for-food scandal - accused in a strikingly similar scheme.
Mr. Park is 70 now, no longer the brash Georgetown host and bon vivant known as the Onassis of the Orient and famous in the eight-track era for his $32,000 stereo system, chauffeured limousine and a guest list that ran the gamut from Gerald R. Ford to Frank Sinatra. But the complaint unsealed in Manhattan on Thursday suggests that age may not have slowed his approach.
In 1977, Mr. Park was charged with 36 counts of conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud, failure to register as a foreign agent and making illegal political contributions. A long investigation found that he had concocted a scheme, with the help of high-ranking Korean Central Intelligence Agency officials, to collect inflated commissions from sales of American-grown rice to South Korea, and to use some of the money to buy support for South Korea in Congress.
The charges were later dropped, after Mr. Park testified at Congressional hearings and in front of federal grand juries. His testimony led to ethics proceedings and criminal charges against several members of Congress and former members and made him a boldface name in the string of post-Watergate corruption inquiries conducted here in the late 1970's.
Now, federal prosecutors in Manhattan say in a criminal complaint that he was paid at least $2 million by Saddam Hussein's Iraq for lobbying United Nations officials to create the oil-for-food program. That program waived the economic penalties imposed after the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and let Iraq sell oil, ostensibly to buy aid supplies. The complaint charges Mr. Park, who is believed to be in South Korea, only with failing to register as a foreign agent, as required by law. He could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.
The complaint also makes the even more tantalizing assertion that Mr. Park told a fellow lobbyist for Iraq, who has since become an informant for the government, that he needed money from Iraq to take care of expenses and his people, which the informant understood to mean an unnamed, high-ranking United Nations official.
The informant also said Mr. Park told him that he had invested $1 million of the money he received from Iraq in a Canadian company established by the son of another unnamed high-ranking United Nations official.
It was not immediately clear why Mr. Park had not already been arrested. The complaint says that he entered the United States at Dulles International Airport outside Washington as recently as December and that a copy of the passport he presented then showed that he was in Jordan twice in 1997, around the time the informant remembers his discussing trips to Baghdad, via Jordan.
Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, Mr. Park, who was a Sunday school teacher and a violinist in the Tacoma Symphony while he was in college in Washington State, would periodically return to the capital, for parties at the private George Town Club, which he had helped found in his heyday. Regulars there included Thomas G. Corcoran, the New Deal aide who became a lobbyist, and Anna C. Chennault, the widow of Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault, the commander of the famous Flying Tigers in World War II.
I would never abandon Washington, Mr. Park once said. Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me. Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do?