http://www.washingtonpost.com/fa98868a-4431-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html?hpid=z1
By Matt Schudel September 27 at 1:56 PM
James A. Traficant Jr., an iconoclastic nine-term Ohio populist in the U.S. House of Representatives who was convicted on corruption charges in 2002, becoming the second member of Congress to be expelled since the Civil War, died Sept. 27 at a hosptial in Youngstown, Ohio. He was 73.
A family spokeswoman, Heidi Hanni, confirmed his death to reporters. The former congressman was injured in a tractor accident on his farm near Greenford, Ohio, on Tuesday. A former aide told reporters in Ohio that he apparently had a heart attack while driving the tractor, which overturned inside a building and left the former congressman trapped underneath.
Mr. Traficant, a maverick Democrat who found his own path politically and seemingly in everything else, was one of the most deliberately outrageous members of Congress in history. Glib and voluble, he was known for wearing cowboy boots, skinny ties and out-of-date polyester suits and for a bouffant mound of hair that seemed to defy gravity.
Reporters outdid themselves in trying to describe Mr. Traficant’s pompadour — and to determine whether it was real. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, it was a “Planet of the Apes sort of hair helmet” or, as Washingtonian magazine put it, “a creature from Lake Erie before it was cleaned up.”
Before he served in Congress, Mr. Traficant was elected sheriff of Mahoning County in 1980. Youngstown, the county seat, was a down-on-its-luck steel city in northeastern Ohio that lost thousands of jobs in the 1960s and 1970s. Fought over by mobsters from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Youngstown was called “Crimetown, U.S.A.” by the Saturday Evening Post magazine in the 1960s.
A fiery advocate for the disenfranchised, Mr. Traficant became a local folk hero when he went to jail for three days rather than obey a court order to foreclose on the homes of unemployed mill workers.
In 1983, he went on trial for corruption, charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Federal prosecutors had tapes of Mr. Traficant admitting that he accepted more than $100,000 in bribes from organized crime figures.
Although he had no legal training, an undaunted Mr. Traficant acted as his own attorney and outwitted the lawyers making the case against him. He argued that he had collected the bribes as part of sting operation he was conducting in order to trap gangsters in the act.Mr. Traficant was acquitted.
A year later, in 1984, he was elected to Congress. He brought federal money to his struggling district, but Mr. Traficant also used his congressional seat as a bully pulpit to state personal grievances about what he considered government overreach.
He became known for his rambling, sometimes crude rhetoric during short speeches on the House floor, often ending his free-association commentaries with a reference to “Star Trek”: “Beam me up, Mr. Speaker.”
“Let us tell it like it is,” he said in 1997. “When you hold this economy to your nosey, this economy does not smell so rosy. If there is any consolation to the American workers, I never heard of anyone committing suicide by jumping out of a basement window.”
Complaining about U.S. support for other countries, he said in 1998: “Russia gets $15 billion in foreign aid from Uncle Sam. In exchange, Uncle Sam gets nuclear missiles pointed at our cities, two tape decks and three cases of vodka. Beam me up.”
