Profile: He had the ways and means: Dan Rostenkowski, powerhouse US politician charged with fraud

HE STILL looks like a cross between a barman and a marshal of the Soviet Union. The huge, creased face could be made of rhinoceros hide, the lumbering gait as menacingly genial as ever. But take a second glance and you notice a change in Dan Rostenkowski. The shoulders are stooped, swollen pouches hang beneath reddened eyes.

More than 36 years in Congress, the past 13 of them as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rostenkowski has dealt with nine presidents and written a large part of his country's tax laws. But now one of America's most powerful men is powerful no longer: merely an indicted felon in his hour of humiliation, charged with ripping off those taxpayers he was supposed to serve, for upward of dollars 500,000.

For Rosty, as he is known, this was the week the roof fell in. For a year or more, the timbers have been groaning, whispering of the calamity to come. But the accusations formally levelled against him on Tuesday were no less of a shock for that. This was no mere political scandal, but a morality tale of different generations, cultures and two contrasting cities. The denouement will be played out in a Washington DC courtroom. But its origins lie 700 miles away, in the Chicago of legend - in the old Polish neighbourhoods of the Northwest side, where Rostenkowski was born 66 years ago, and which, in truth, he never left.

Much has changed in those parts since a green 24-year-old was first elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1952, after a brief tryout as a minor league baseball pitcher. These days up on Milwaukee Avenue, which bisects his congressional district, you'll hear as much Spanish as Polish or Ukrainian. But Rosty still keeps his home there, a modest three- story redbrick, where he has installed his mother and two sisters.

This area was the domain of that most formidable of political organisations, the Chicago Machine. Mayor Anton Cermak built it in the Thirties, Richard J Daley perfected it, and throughout his career, Daniel Rostenkowski has played by its rules. He revelled in its tough talk - 'You might as well kick a guy's brains out if he's not for you,' is one Rostyism. If a guy is for you, he is to be favoured, rewarded, often from the proceeds of services you as office-holder are able to dispense. 'Quod in hoc mihi?' (roughly, 'What's in it for me?') was Chicago's unofficial motto. Rostenkowski's lifelong knack has been to ensure there was plenty in it for his state, his city, his allies, and himself.

His father was 'Big Joe Rusty', alderman and boss of the Northwest side's 32nd ward, a post he passed on to young Danny. Between them the two Rostenkowskis represented the ward for more than half a century, from 1935 to 1987. Then, by the standards of a city which deems the presidency of the US a poor second to the job of Mayor of Chicago, Rostenkowski did a most unusual thing. He decided to become a US Congressman. Mayor Daley, who owed Big Joe more than one, obliged. And thus in 1958, at the age of 30, Rosty went to Washington to represent Illinois' Eighth District, covering the neighbourhoods where he grew up.

For graduates of the Machine, Washington in those days was a pushover and by 1966 Rosty had wheeled-and-dealed his way to election as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Then everything went wrong. After supporting Daley's strong-arm tactics at the traumatic 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Rosty was shut out by the party's ascendant liberal establishment. As his career foundered, the safeguard of congressional perks and privileges became his prime interest. For his resurrection he had to thank a Republican.

Ronald Reagan's landslide buried half the Democratic leadership, leaving Rostenkowski a choice of becoming party whip or chairman of the Ways and Means. The first would have put him on the fast track to the job of Speaker, but Chicago's ways spoke louder. The Ways and Means was where the money was, arguably the most powerful single committee in Congress. Every tax bill, every major domestic legislative proposal passed though it. In 1981, Rostenkowski became chairman. By common consent, he has done the job outstandingly.

His philosophy all along was simple, to get the best deal available. 'The main thing is to do something. I don't like to sacrifice the good in pursuit of the perfect.' His finest hour came in 1986, when he saw through the biggest tax reform bill in US history. The performance was vintage Rosty: to secure a measure closing tax loopholes, he granted dollars 10bn of 'transition rules', temporary loopholes to sway key votes. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

Perhaps that is why some liken him to the walrus: ungainly and uncomfortable on land, yet swift, sure and effective the instant he glides into the opaque underpools where legislation is finally crafted: here a backroom threat, there a wheedling phone call: always the realisation that politics is the art of building majorities.

As befitting the monarch he became, Rostenkowski learnt to appreciate the finer things in life. He has never flaunted his power and influence in Chicago. In Washington, however, you would find him of an evening at plush Morton's steakhouse in Georgetown, where a spot near the bar is marked 'Rosty's Rotunda'. There he would dine surrounded by his courtiers - aides, fellow committee members, lobbyists looking for tax breaks - consuming gargantuan steaks, washed down with a couple of Martinis, followed by his favourite Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

He rarely settled the bill. When you're chairman of the Ways and Means, people will pay to get on your better side: not just the odd dollars 30 filet mignon, but campaign contributions, all-expenses-paid trips for speaking engagements at golf resorts in Florida or Hawaii. Rosty saw nothing wrong with that - nor, incidentally, did the federal prosecutors. There are 17 felony counts against him, but taking the lobbyists' silver is not among them. The problem is the taxpayers' silver.

In Chicago in the good old days, personal and official spending were one and the same thing. A politician was expected to look after his constituents; in return he was permitted to look after himself. Not so ethics-obsessed Washington.

Rostenkowski's error was not to grasp how the rules had changed. The alleged offences - essentially using his Congressional expense account to cover personal bills as well as perks, presents and even phoney jobs for family, friends and supporters - were standard operating procedure in Chicago. 'I have committed no crime,' Rosty said this week as he rejected a plea bargain, and he surely believes it.

'Chicago ain't ready for reform,' was the immortal utterance of Paddy Bauler, another ward boss, back in the Forties. Half a century later, Dan Rostenkowski isn't either. Indeed, almost alone, he has consistently opposed curbs on financial perks for Congressmen and stronger disclosure laws. Why couldn't his campaign fund pay his golf caddy dollars 500 during a four-day winter break, say, or pick up dollars 300 of dinner bills a week?

The stamp vouchers-for-cash scam at the House Post Office, under which Rostenkowski is said to have skimmed dollars 50,000 of taxpayers' money, is harder to explain. Under amended regulations, Rostenkowski could have retired in glory after re- election in 1990 and kept a dollars 1.5m war- chest as his own. Instead, he soldiered on, and the downward slide into disgrace began. Rostenkowski's name cropped up in the stamp scandal in mid-1992. Thereafter it was torture by a thousand leaks: how the grand jury had subpoenaed documents, how he was the 'Congressman A' referred to by a key government witness, finally the ignominy of 'taking the Fifth', exercising a suspect's right to say nothing self-incriminatory. Even the hometown press, which once forgave everything, turned on him: 'The boss of bosses,' wrote the Chicago Tribune, 'operates like a shifty precinct captain on the make.'

John C Smith, a former House Post Office superviser who testified against Rostenkowski in return for immunity, gave the Chicago Sun-Times this judgement: 'He's a larger-than-life figure, almost Shakespearean, a noble man with a tragic flaw. He gives thousands of dollars to charities, he's a good Congressman. He just has some human frailties.' Frailties, unfortunately, of the kind a moralising era finds hard to forgive.

Few would seriously defend the practices on which he stands arraigned. But Rostenkowski has borne his ordeal with uncommon dignity, culminating in the scornful dismissal of the deal worked out by his lawyers - though defiance will cost him a fortune in legal fees and, if he loses, a long prison term.

But American politics will be a loser, too. Rosty may be no saint, but some believe the good he has done outstrips the bad. Among today's bland legions of blow-dried, tele- guided politicians, their every thought ironed away by media handlers and consultants, he is different - and proud of it. 'I could have walked away three years ago. Instead I stood my ground and what happened? I put my head into a noose.'