James Traficant: Maverick politician who became only the second person to be thrown out of Congress since the American Civil War

He was acquitted of taking bribes by arguing that he had only taken them as part of a sting

James Traficant testifying before the House Ethics Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington DC in 2002 (AFP/Getty)

James Traficant was an iconoclastic nine-term Ohio populist in the US House of Representatives who was convicted on corruption charges in 2002, becoming the second member of Congress to be expelled since the Civil War. He died following an accident on his farm; he had a suspected heart attack while driving a tractor, which overturned, trapping him underneath.

The maverick Democrat was one of the most deliberately outrageous members Congress has known. Glib and voluble, he was known for wearing cowboy boots, skinny ties and out-of-date polyester suits and for his gravity-defying bouffant hairdo. Reporters outdid themselves in trying to describe it, and to determine whether it was real. For 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, Traficant, the son of a lorry driver, was elected sheriff of Mahoning County, Ohio in 1980. Youngstown, the county seat, was a down-on-its-luck steel city that lost thousands of jobs in the 1960s and 1970s. Fought over by mobsters from nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh, it was referred to as “Crimetown, USA”. A fiery advocate for the disenfranchised, Traficant became a local 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. Prosecutors had tapes of him admitting that he accepted more than $100,000 in bribes from organised crime figures. Without legal training, Traficant acted for himself and outwitted the prosecution, arguing successfully that he had collected the bribes as part of a sting operation he was conducting in order to trap gangsters.

A year later he was elected to Congress. He brought federal money to his struggling district, but also used his seat to air grievances about what he considered government over-reach. He became known for his rambling, sometimes crude rhetoric in short speeches, often ending his free-association commentaries with a reference to Star Trek, “Beam me up, Mr Speaker.” Complaining about US 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.”

In 1987, the government won a judgment against him for unpaid back taxes on the bribe money he had pocketed as sheriff. He then launched an unceasing attack on the Internal Revenue Service and proposed a measure limiting its ability to seize the property of people charged with tax evasion. It became part of a tax reform bill signed into law by President Clinton in 1998. Many Washington insiders regarded him as an uncouth scoundrel, but he remained popular in his home district and was easily re-elected eight times. “He looked less smart than he was,” a former press secretary, Charles Straub, recalled. “It put people off guard ... He was a very shrewd politician.”

Traficant tended to ignore the Democrats’ legislative initiatives; in 2001, when he voted for the Republican Dennis Hastert as House speaker, the Democrat leadership stripped Traficant of his seniority and took away his committee jobs. By then, several of his associates has been convicted in a corruption investigation, and in 2002 Traficant was charged with 10 counts of racketeering, bribery and fraud.

Prosecutors said he required several of his congressional aides to pay him monthly kickbacks of up to $2,500 for the privilege of being on the government payroll. Others had to bale hay on his farm or repair his houseboat docked in Washington. He was also accused of filing false tax returns and of soliciting businesses in his district to provide free goods and services. After a two-month trial, in which he once again defended himself, he was convicted of all charges and became only the fifth member, and the second since the Civil War, to be expelled from Congress. The vote was 420-1.

Traficant claimed he was a victim of a conspiracy involving the Attorney General Janet Reno, grudge-bearing witnesses and a hostile federal judge. “The truth, sir, is rarely in you,” the judge told him as she sentenced him to eight years in prison and more than $250,000 in fines and restitution. “You were howling that you were going to fight like a junkyard dog in the eye of a hurricane, and you did fight that way, to protect a junkyard full of deceit and corruption and greed.”

When Traficant went to prison, he had to reveal to guards that his towering stack of hair was, in fact, a toupee. He served seven years in jail and attempted a comeback by campaigning for his old House seat as an independent in 2010. He polled 16 per cent of the vote.

Traficant often said he loved America but hated the government. He once admitted that an incendiary comment he made about the “political prostitutes” in Congress was out of line. “I want to apologise,” he said, “to all the hookers of America for associating them with the United States Congress.”

James Anthony Traficant Jnr, politician: born Youngstown, Ohio 8 May 1941; married Patricia Choppa (two daughters); died Youngstown 27 September 2014.

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