Traficant just one piece of House history

The hair.

The crazy sound bites.

The wacky behavior.

Traficant is still the only lawmaker to ever put me in a headlock in the Capitol Rotunda.

He is probably the only member that my friends could still quote years after he left office.

He was the only member to grab me by the jacket and seemingly threaten me with bodily harm.

He was one of only two members over the last 35 years to call me, "Red."

He was a real political character in a legislative body filled with faceless and somewhat boring elected officials.

Traficant was the embodiment of what my father had warned me about on the day he dropped me off at the Capitol for my first day of work as a Page in the U.S. House of Representatives - that lawmakers were no different than regular Americans - good and bad, smart and dumb, straight and narrow or completely crooked, you name it.

On the House floor, Traficant was hilarious. He dished out more sound bites than most lawmakers could ever dream of:

• "I say it's time for the Congress to tell the President to shove his veto pen up his deficit."

• "The truth is we have an intelligence network that is so dumb they could throw themselves at the ground and miss."

• "I ask today on the House floor, who is drafting our economic policies in America? Larry, Moe and Curly?"

• "Madame Speaker, my question today, is Alan Greenspan smoking dope or what?"

Those outlandish - but punchy - sound bites won him a lot of attention in the Press Gallery, and back home in his district, anchored by Youngstown, Ohio.

In fact in 1996, Traficant received the most votes of any U.S. House member running for election that year - in the entire country.

He even ran for President in 1988 - and had a few delegates at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta that year - one wore a Carmen Miranda fruit hat on the floor of the Omni.

Off the House floor, he was always engaging, with his big smile and crazy hair. The talk of him playing football in college with Mike Ditka. The endless fist bumps and crazy stories.

He made the place seem fun.

But underneath the somewhat crazy facade, you couldn't shake the basic story, that Traficant wasn't exactly on the up and up.

In the early 1980's, Traficant was the Sheriff of Mahoning County, Ohio. He was accused of taking bribes to protect local mobsters engaged in criminal activity.

But, acting as his own lawyer, Traficant convinced the jury that he had taken the money to fund his own official investigation into who was offering him the $163,000 in cash.

The jury sided with him, and Traficant rode the attention to victory in Congress.

But soon after arriving in Washington, D.C., the feds decided if they couldn't get him on bribery and corruption charges, they would get him on taxes - so they found that Traficant hadn't paid taxes on the $163,000 in bribes.

Traficant lost that case in U.S. Tax Court, and spent the rest of his legislative career railing against the tax agency.

Fast forward 15 years later, and Traficant was on trial for racketeering and corruption, found guilty of taking kickbacks from his staff and taking bribes from local businesses and filing false tax returns.

In other words, Traficant had been dabbling in the seedy side of politics before he came to Congress, and found himself unable to change his ways once serving in the U.S. House.

But his over-the-top personality, crazy hair (which turned out to be a wig) and penchant for saying just about anything made him a popular figure on and off the floor of the House, obscuring the story that was playing out before us.

One of my first jobs in the mid-1980's on Capitol Hill was to cover Traficant for a radio station back in Youngstown, Ohio - which gave me a front row seat to his antics.

One day I was walking across the Capitol to attend a news conference of Ohio lawmakers; I ran into Traficant as we walked through the Old House Chamber, now known as Statuary Hall.

By the time we reached the Rotunda a few steps later, Traficant had his arm around my neck, with me bent over in what I can only best describe as a walking headlock, finally letting me up to give me one sage piece of advice.

“Have you been outside today, Red?” he asked, on a very warm Washington day.

“No, I haven’t, Congressman,” I replied.

"That’s good, because you gotta save your energy for after dark.”

I asked the only question that seemed obvious.

"Why?"

"So you can kick people’s asses after sundown!" Traficant said with a flourish, smacking me on the back and heading off without telling me who those “people” might be.

A few years later, I saw him outside on the steps of the Capitol, and called after him, wondering how his plan was doing to build a canal to link Lake Ontario with the Erie Canal.

He stopped in his tracks, raced down the steps to catch up with me and grabbed me by the lapels of my suit coat, pulling me nose-to-nose with a very serious look on his face.

“Are you fer me, or agin’ me on the canal, Red?” he asked.

Never quite knowing whether Traficant was fooling with you or ready to beat the crap out of you, I told him I was all for his canal.

That drew me a slap on the back and a big laugh as he raced back up the stairs.

But by 2002, Traficant's act had grown old. Found guilty in his corruption trial, the funny one-liners and the fist bumps for reporters were gone as the House prepared to vote to expel him.

It was a sad sight to watch him walk through the Speaker's Lobby, just moments away from becoming only the second member since the Civil War to be thrown out of the U.S. House.

Security officials were worried Traficant might go out with a flourish. One rumor had him dropping his pants and mooning the TV cameras from the Well of the House.

But when one friendly member of the security detail approached him, Traficant said he wasn't going to go out in a final blaze of glory.

"I'm not going to drop trou," he said.