Actor Kevin Spacey, who plays disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the new film “Casino Jack”, has some insights into the morally corrupt Abramoff after visiting him in federal prison.
“I read what everyone read about him, and then I started reaching out to him, and it was two different people,” Spacey recalled, according to the Los Angeles Times. “On the one hand he’s funny, almost comedian-like funny, and you can see how he owned a room. And then you look at what they said about him and he’s the devil incarnate. And then there’s the facts.”
The film is set to premiere Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, and will hit theaters in the fall. Abramoff pled guilty in 2006 to the defrauding of American Indian tribes and corruption of public officials. He is in a halfway house and set to be released by year’s end.
“Abramoff wasn’t stealing money,” Spacey told the paper.” Yes, he was doing underhanded things. But he wasn’t buying Swiss chalets and helicopters.
“So then it’s like: OK, [Abramoff] is the greediest man on Earth who doesn’t have any self-interest. He was giving money away to build schools. He was giving so much money away he wasn’t even paying his mortgage.”
Director George Hickenlooper also met with Abramoff in prison in Maryland, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Jack feels really betrayed by President Bush,” Hickenlooper said of the scandal, according to the Times. “His kids used to play in the Oval Office and then he’s saying he didn’t know him?”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2oZcpOB07U
