Feature

La Dolce Alfonse!

Wayne Berman is Alfonse D'Amato's business partner in Washington, D.C. Berman used to have his own K Street lobbying firm, Berman Enterprises, but last winter the two formed Park Strategies, a corporate-consulting firm.

"Did you tell him what I said? It's death and destruction . . . DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, that's just, just, just crazy. . . . No, no. No, it'll be worse. She'll take whatever she wants to take and destroy you. . . . Hey, listen! I fired that guy. . . . Yeah. . . . Asshole, asshole. . . . Oh, yeah. He's bad, he's bad, he's bad. He is BAAAD. . . . So take the appropriate course of action, all right? He's just really not a good person. . . . DONE. OVER. So let our friends know that, okay?"

Together, D'Amato and Berman represent about 40 or so clients, including Bell Atlantic, Continental Airlines, Group Health Incorporated, Cablevision, Metromedia Fiber Network, the Greater New York Hospital Association, and American International Group. Some are paying more than three times D'Amato's old annual salary of $133,600 to secure his firm's services.

"Whaddaya have in Chile? Anything in Chile? . . . Good! . . . Oh, very good! Okay! Señor Wayne, SEÑOR! So did you talk Pépé out of it? . . . Hey, by the way, did you ever get an opportunity to get a call back from What's-his-name on the mission of mercy for me?"

D'Amato would like to make this clear: He is not a lobbyist. Even though he is an ex-senator with no business experience. Even though his partner, a former Reagan-administration appointee, is . . . a registered lobbyist. Former senators are not allowed to lobby -- i.e., contact old colleagues in Congress on behalf of business clients -- for a full year after their departure from office. They can, however, "consult" and give "strategic advice."

"Yeah, yeah. . . . Berserk, yeah. . . . Hmmm. . . . Yeah, yeah. Good. . . . All right, baby. Oh, by the way, I'm gonna be down in Washington on the twenty-first. It's Royer's birthday. . . . Don't be such a WEENIE. Of COURSE you're going to go. Why do you think I mentioned it? So you could put it on your CALENDAR! . . . Okay, yeah, I called the governor. . . . Huh? . . . Okay, all right. Bye."

D'Amato's telephone never stops flashing and screaming like a pinball machine. He takes calls from Ed Koch, Governor Pataki, and Senator Pete Domenici ("Pietro!"). He talks to a representative for Continental Airlines, a client, and mentions, along the way, that the airfares to St. Martin, where his son has a time-share, are outrageously expensive -- can something be done about this?

The New York office of Park Strategies, on the twenty-fifth floor of a building on Park Avenue, is comfortable, cozy even, but a startling step down from D'Amato's previous fiefdom, which included the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Banking Committee, five offices around the state, and the vast suite he had in the Hart Building on Capitol Hill. All told, the senator had more than 120 people working for him. Here, in this small office without a view, there is just one room, a reception area, and a staff of four.

In a few years, D'Amato hopes, his operation will have expanded some. "I get the sense Al's treating his new job the way he treated politics -- working in overdrive, trying to get as many new clients as possible, " says King. "This is his new obsession. He's like a kid with a new toy."

D'Amato's office is stuffed with stately furniture, including his chair from the Senate chamber. (He paid to take it with him.) On his desk, he still keeps the sign saying mr. d'amato, chairman from his days on the Senate Banking Committee. The walls are coated with New York Post covers and photographs of himself with pretty much everyone: Al Pacino, Ronald Reagan, the pope, Boris Yeltsin. There's even a photo of him with Charlize Theron. (The two of them were both in the movie The Devil's Advocate -- though his role was slightly smaller. Which one was she? I ask. "The hot one," he says.)

So what does corporate America think it's getting when it hires D'Amato as a consultant? He was, after all, the crazy Uncle Louis of the Senate, the guy who sang "South of the Border" during a fifteen-hour filibuster and always managed to stay just inches ahead of the Senate Ethics Committee. The answer, assuming it's not lobbying, is some serious muscle and shrewd political calculating. D'Amato is a bulldog negotiator, an absolute master at getting what he wants. As a fund-raiser, he had no equal. "If people only sent him $500," recalls Congressman Eliot L. Engel, a Bronx Democrat, "he'd call back and say, 'Why didn't you send a thousand?' If they sent a thousand, he'd call and say, 'What's wrong with your wife? Why can't she send a thousand, too?' You gotta love that. It's so New York."

Watch him on the phone for an hour, and D'Amato's overnight success as a corporate consultant makes perfect sense. In the Senate, he says, "I loved the battles. I loved winning things that everyone thought were impossible to win. Now I do the same thing for clients. I'm the best. I am. If you want an advocate, and you're bein' wronged, you want me, because I'll find where to go, how to go, and what to do."

On the stump, D'Amato may have been a rabble-rouser and an ideologue, but behind closed doors, the man was an absolute pragmatist; he knew just how to cut a deal. In fact, New York Democrats in the House privately claimed to find him much more approachable than their fellow Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As Charlie Rangel puts it: "D'Amato's kissed me. Pat Moynihan ain't never kissed me."

In his new role as paid consultant, he has arbitrated between Cipriani and the unions and advised Continental Airlines when they were caught in a turf war between the governors of New York and New Jersey over a $1 billion project at Newark Airport. He was appointed by a federal court to facilitate settlements between Holocaust victims and the German and Austrian banks, a project he also pursued while still in Congress.

And the private sector makes for even stranger bedfellows than politics -- which may be why D'Amato seems to be thriving. On the negotiations with the German and Austrian banks, he's now working closely with the lawyer Mel Weiss, former national finance chairman for the Schumer campaign. Weiss, in fact, showed up at that first meeting at Limoncello, hoping to talk business with the senator and share a glass of wine. Over the course of the conversation, the two men discovered they shared the same birthday.

"This is crazy!" exclaimed D'Amato, thumping his fist on the table, then leaping up to give Weiss a big hug. "I love this guy. This guy was trying to kill me a year ago. Now we're . . . I mean, you see? That's what life is about. Life is not about being petty."

D'Amato doesn't watch C-SPAN anymore, not even late at night. And he no longer subscribes to the Washington Post. Asked if he has bittersweet feelings when he visits Washington now, he turns reflective: "I'm gonna tell you about bittersweet -- " The entrance of his executive assistant, a lovely and patient blonde, interrupts him. "Look at you, you little devil!" he sings. "You look so beeeeauuuuteeeful. You want to come out and rrrrumba with us tonight?"

Indeed she does, and they agree to convene at Brown's, a trendy new haunt on the Upper East Side, later that evening. He turns back to me: "I do not miss the Senate, the trappings of the Senate, and all that came with it."

Most of D'Amato's friends dismiss the possibility of his ever reentering public life. D'Amato prefers to play it coy. A run for governor? Forget about it. Ditto for senator. "I could be anointed mayor," he says mischievously. "Maybe they'll work out a system where they'll have a mayor/ strong-manager system, where a board will appoint me as city manager. How's that?"

Don't misunderstand: D'Amato is naturally, chromosomally, a political creature, and it's still true that nothing gets his juices flowing more than a nice provocative screed about the latest local or national controversy. He still answers political questions in "Ask Alfonse," his new advice column in George magazine, and he has a regular commentary gig with Fox News. In his office, between calls, the senator can't help working himself into a new tizzy about Bill and Hillary Clinton; he maintains the First Lady still may decide not to run for the Senate.

"He's not gonna give her bad advice," says D'Amato, referring to the president. "The last thing he wants to do is see her run and lose -- although maybe he might get a certain perverse pleasure from that. You can't tell." He laughs, transported by his own mischief. "Now, having said that, I don't believe that he's gonna want to have her lose, so they're going to continue to monitor this . . . and guess what? If she's in trouble in the polls, don't be a bit surprised . . ." He trails off. "You'd be naïve to think that she'd continue to run into a mountain."

And what if she were to win? "I think that she'd be in for a rude awakening," he says. "You think the Senate leadership is going to be happy that she's there? You kidding? They all have egos. You really believe that the senior senator from New York is gonna be happy that he's going to be totally eclipsed?"

D'Amato is never more than one degree away from the sultans of Republican power. He says he and Pataki speak once a week, but Larry Elovich says it's more like once a day. Before D'Amato helped broker this month's deal that got the state Republican Party behind Giuliani's bid for Senate, it was widely assumed that the senator was gleefully (albeit quietly) trying to subvert the mayor by fueling the upstart Senate campaign of Rick Lazio. The Post even reported that D'Amato was discouraging potential GOP donors from attending a fund-raiser for Giuliani in Washington.

"That was the most incredible piece of nonsense," D'Amato sniffs. "That whole story came about because they ran a ridiculous, silly fund-raiser that didn't raise any money . . . so what happened? Some idiot, all right, and I know who it was, a jackass in Giuliani's political campaign, Dopo, El Dopo -- " His eyes twinkle. "That was pretty good, huh? El Dopo?" He continues: "El Dopo, who is empowered by the mayor, said, 'Well, the reason this happened is because of Al D'Amato.' "

El Dopo may have had a reason to be paranoid, though, because D'Amato still wields considerable political influence. Just before Michael Forbes the Long Island Republican jumped ship and became Michael Forbes the Long Island Democrat, D'Amato got frantic phone calls from Republicans in the New York State congressional delegation, hoping they could get the senator to dissuade him. When Representative Bob Livingston was thinking of challenging Newt Gingrich for the position of Speaker of the House, he asked King if he could speak to D'Amato, just to get his political advice. (The senator happily obliged, though it was just days after his defeat, and he was baking on the beach in Puerto Rico at the time.)

There's also the small matter of fund-raising. New York State's giant GOP cash machine, after all, is an engineering wonder that D'Amato built himself. "How is Alfonse D'Amato still influential?" asks William Powers, chairman of the state Republican Party. "I'll tell you how: He helps me raise money."

And for anyone who doubts the senator's continuing political potency, just consider this: the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee still has eleven boxes of D'Amato research tucked away in a basement in Washington, boxes that party officials can't quite bring themselves to throw out. They're not sure -- not absolutely, positively sure -- that the man won't one day return.

Back at the W Hotel, the crowd is thinning, though there are still a few glamorous people milling about. I ask the senator if he wants to meet any, and he waves his hand dismissively, as if there's no one there who'd really impress him. I confess to wanting to meet one particular actor myself. "Which one?" he asks, perking up. "C'mon! I'll introduce you to him. I'll tell him you're my cousin and that you want to marry him and have babies with him. You think I wouldn't tell him that story? I would! I love making up outrageous stories!"

But the actor in question is nowhere in sight. Instead, he marches me up to a random fellow with an earring who works at William Morris. D'Amato points to me. "This girl tells me, 'Alfonse, see that man with that earring? I tell you, I've never felt this way about a man before.' " By the end of this little exchange, he has nicknamed the fellow Big Johnnie.

A woman timidly approaches the senator and tells him she loved what he said on television about "John-John." Another man, a Hungarian refugee, sputters in broken English that D'Amato is "the greatest ever" and shakes his hand. Then a reporter comes up to him and asks if he can talk to him for a profile he's doing of Ted Kennedy. D'Amato introduces me as his fiancée.

The room is close to empty now. The senator wraps his arm around my waist and looks ruefully into space. "I gave you way too much tonight," he says, meaning too much gossip, access, everything. Then he gives me an affectionate squeeze and pulls me close, so that he can whisper in my ear. "If you savage me," he gently says, "I'll kill you. Understand? I. Will. Kill. You."