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| Traficant Unplugged! | |||||||
| Our columnist deconstructs the incarcerated Congressman’s toupee | |||||||
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| Aug. 5 — You’d think that there would be nothing more satisfying than watching a lying politician publicly bared, but Capt. Claude McCutcheon said it wasn’t really that much fun after all. |
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| MCCUTCHEON WORKS FOR the Summit County Sheriff’s department in Ohio and, as such, was lucky enough to be one of the handful of people in this great nation who have seen former Congressman James Traficant (D-Oh-mygod!) without his toupee. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It happened last week, when the 61-year-old Traficant, who began serving eight years in prison for corruption, surrendered at the Summit County Jail. Rules require that all prisoners—and all toupees—be searched for contraband and weapons. Half of the country—and all of Ohio—has been waiting years to see Traficant unplugged. But McCutcheon made it sound like it was just another day at the office. “We examined it and gave it back to him,” McCutcheon told me (although he probably shouldn’t have). Emboldened, I asked whether McCutcheon and the other deputies knew beforehand that Traficant wore a toupee. “Well, you can never be 100 percent sure,” McCutcheon said. “You know what they say, ‘Only his hairdresser knows.’” (If that’s the case, every single one of Traficant’s 570,000 constituents was a licensed cosmetologist.) Not being “100 percent sure” meant that Sheriff Drew Alexander had to politely broach the subject with Traficant. “We didn’t know for sure [if it was a toupee], so we asked and he admitted it,” McCutcheon said. “You could tell that this is not a man who likes to talk about this at all, so we handled it professionally. The news media was asking for a photo of him without the toupee, but we didn’t take one. Why strip him of all his dignity?” Why? Why not? If you ask me (you did ask me, didn’t you?), Jim Traficant is the worst kind of toupee-wearer: one who wears a bad wig, lies about it, and forces his close friends to participate in the cover-up. And you know what they say in Washington: The cover-up is worse than the crime. For years, Traficant denied—and vehemently—that the misshapen mound of polyester and mesh taped to his head was what the impolitic sometimes call a rug. All the while, the repudiated former Ohio Congressman joked that the hairstyle was just the result of bad trimming with a “weed-whacker” (a canned ad-lib that dates back to 1998, according to a Nexis-Lexis database search, and was still being used by Traficant as recently as last week). And the nation’s gutless press corps played along. Just as during Watergate, we must again wonder: What did they know and when did they know it? In 1996, Traficant was one of 39 House members who participated in a voluntary drug test, surrendering either hair or urine samples. The Congressman’s office claimed that the boss had donated hair and the media didn’t even question it. (Hair sample? From a guy with a rug? Who was being drug-tested—Traficant or the Russian woman who sold her hair to a broker in Smolensk so she could buy potatoes?) In 1998, the Hotline reported that Traficant’s hair looks like a “‘Planet of the Apes’ sort of hair helmet that looks like a toupee but isn’t.” Please tell me the fact-checker was fired. Even the vaunted New Yorker (and when I say “vaunted,” I mean simply that their high editorial standards have barred the hiring of me) declined to use the word “toupee” when referring to Traficant’s faux locks, saying merely that “his hair [was a] conversation piece” and quoting former New York City mayor Ed Koch: “I must say, the haircut was intriguing. Apparently, it’s real hair.” In my own small way, I even participated in the Traficant cover-up. A couple of years ago, I wrote a big-selling book called “HAIR! Mankind’s Historic Quest To End Baldness” (coming soon to a discount bin near you!). It’s a classic, of course, but don’t lookfor James Traficant’s name in the chapter on toupees. Oh, like everyone else, I knew that the mound of matted raccoon hair on Traficant’s head was about as real as a picture in Playboy, but the lawyers at my publishing house forbade me from mentioning Traficant by name because, they said, we could get sued for libel if the toupee allegation proved false. |
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Proved false? The guy looked like he was wearing a wall-hanging from “The Flintstones” on his head. (Damn lawyers! Next thing you know, they’ll be telling me I can’t write that Attorney General John Ashcroft has a heart that’s three sizes too small. Note to lawyers: It is three sizes too small! I saw an MRI! No, I don’t have a copy of it! I had to leave it back at the clinic!) After Traficant was found guilty of corruption, Congress voted 420-1 to expel him (only Bad Hair Club for Men client Gary Condit voted against expulsion). Clearly, the House of Representatives was hoping to distance itself from the notion that all politicians are corrupt. But what are toupee-wearers supposed to do? The last thing they want is to belong to a club that would have Jim Traficant as a member. Every toupee-wearer—and seller—is suffering from a severe case of ugliness by association right now. “This guy set me back 10 years,” said Harvey Russo, a top toupee man in New York. “Anyone thinking about getting a toupee would take one look at that clown and say, ‘I don’t want one of those things on my head!’” Traficant’s attitude towards his toupee reminded Russo of a former client, a popular sports announcer who also stuck with a bad toupee despite being the butt (or, more accurately, the scalp) of ridicule for decades. “I always told him, ‘Mr. Cosell, that toupee does not look good. You need to modernize it’ and he would say, in that voice of his, ‘This is what I’m known for!’” Traficant’s close friends—the very people who are supposed to tell him things that mere lackeys can’t—were complicit in the big cover-up too. “This was a topic you just did not discuss with him,” said Dean Caputo, a close friend. “It was a private thing for him.” Private thing for him, but public trauma for the hairless. |
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Capps said Traficant—like most bald men in this country—believed the lie that you need hair, even a knitted skullcap of someone else’s hair, to look good. “It’s a lie perpetrated by this country’s $3-billion hair industry. Well, the Bald-Headed Men of America offers something cheaper: acceptance.” He’ll need it. In the next few days, Traficant will be transferred from the holding pen at the Summit County Jail to an actual federal prison, his home for the next eight years. As Michael Milken will be happy to remind you, federal prisons don’t allow their guests to retain their toupees. It will be kept for him during his stay, a prison spokesperson said. But maybe Traficant can be reformed. His lawyer, Mark Colucci, said many of his toupee-wearing clients who surrendered their wigs at the prison door ultimately followed Milken’s lead and gave up the rug permanently upon release. If Traficant follows suit, Capps promised to save him a seat at any future Bald-Headed Men of America convention—which is held every second weekend in September in Morehead City, N.C. (Get it? More head equals less hair.) And if he can’t bear to bare, New York toupee maestro Elliott Nonas promised a good-looking rug on the house. “I’ll make him something that will look appropriate for a guy in his 60s, not the Beatles-style moptop that he was wearing,” said Nonas. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and a sportswriter for The Brooklyn Papers. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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