The Wrong of Wright’s Close Aide

One evening in 1973, when she was a 20-year-old college student still living with her parents, Pamela Small entered a discount import store in suburban Annandale, Va., to buy some furnishings for her first apartment. It was just before closing time. The manager, a freckle-faced 19-year-old she had never seen before, was the only person in the store.

Small took $31 worth of purchases to the cash register, but discovered a flaw in the window blinds she had selected. The manager said he had more in the storeroom and suggested she come and pick out the ones she wanted.

But once inside, he blocked the door and ordered her to lie face down on the floor. When she refused--when, with growing panic, she tried to talk her way to freedom--he grabbed a hammer and slammed it into her skull. She immediately lost consciousness but he continued pounding, exposing the skull in five places. Then he grabbed a steak knife, stabbed her five times in the left breast and shoulder near her heart, and slashed her repeatedly across the throat.

Bundling her limp body into the car she had left parked out front, he drove around for a while, then left the vehicle in an alley behind the store, keys in the ignition. Then he went to the movies.

‘He Thought I Was Dead’

“He told the police he thought I was dead,” remembers Small, who, to the astonishment of the doctors who later treated her, was not. Regaining consciousness about eight hours later, she managed to start the car and drive a mile to an all-night Exxon station, where an attendant, wide-eyed at the sight of the gory figure in the blood-soaked seat, summoned help.

It took a general surgeon, a plastic surgeon, a neurosurgeon and a thoracic surgeon seven hours in the operating room to repair the damage. Her left lung had collapsed and her head was a mass of lacerations and exposed bone. She spent 24 hours in intensive care with a tube in her lung, five more days in the hospital, weeks convalescing at home with her own nurse and more than a year undergoing plastic surgery and hair transplants.

Her assailant was arrested the following day, pleaded guilty to malicious wounding (“that he did . . . stab, cut and wound one Pamela Small with the intent to maim, disfigure, disable and kill”) and was sentenced to 15 years (seven suspended) in the Virginia State Penitentiary.

But in what Fairfax County, Va., Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert F. Horan remembers as “highly unusual” treatment, the assailant never did time in the penitentiary. Instead, he spent less than 27 months in the more civilized confines of the Fairfax County Jail. He then was paroled to a job as staff assistant in the congressional office of Rep. Jim Wright (D-Tex.).

Offered Him a Job

Wright, in fact, had offered him a job even before he was sentenced, a fact pointed out repeatedly to the sentencing judge. Wright’s daughter then was married to the assailant’s brother.

Today, at age 35, that man, John Paul Mack, is executive director of the congressional Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. He is Wright’s right-hand man and, since Wright became Speaker of the House, has been arguably the most powerful staff member on Capitol Hill.

As a convicted felon, Mack is barred by law from voting or obtaining a security clearance. But as the Speaker’s closest aide he helps enact the nation’s laws. Salaried at roughly $89,500, he earns approximately as much as a federal district judge or the director of the CIA.

Crime Known by Many

The crime in Mack’s past--if not the details of it--is known to many on Capitol Hill. Two years ago, a number of anonymous letters calling attention to Mack’s conviction circulated on the Hill, purportedly written by an indignant former law enforcement officer. The ultraconservative Liberty Lobby magazine published a sketchy article headlined “Mack the Knife.”

Most legislators, however, appear to accept his and Wright’s word that Mack’s was a single mistake committed under stress a long time ago, for which he paid his debt to society. “I have never tried to hide it,” Mack said in a brief phone conversation in which he declined to be interviewed further for this article. “This has been public record for 16 years.”

While Mack has progressed without interruption to his position of influence, an apparent model of rehabilitation and an example of society’s ability to forgive, what of his victim?

The Victim

Cosmetic surgery long ago erased most marks of the attack, but Small favors high-neck blouses to hide a faint horizontal scar on her neck and still has days “when I feel like nothing but a mass of scars.” She has watched with mounting alarm and anger the growing power of the man who tried to kill her. Now an executive with the Washington office of a major corporation, she finds herself increasingly pushed by her job toward the receptions and committee rooms of Capitol Hill. She finds excuses not to go, having no wish to find herself suddenly face-to-face with the man she last saw in court.

Though Mack said in a statement, “I will always regret deeply my actions that day,” Small says she has never heard that from him, either directly or indirectly. She has received no restitution.

“Rightly or wrongly,” says House Majority Whip Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), who describes himself as “very close” to Mack, “under our system of law John Mack owed his debt to society, not to this young woman.”

Small has never before talked about the attack for the record. She feels the system has rewarded her assailant and says that he was offered the post in Wright’s office only because he needed a job for his parole.

“He had no direction toward Congress,” she says. “He never even went to college. But he’s got a very powerful, very important job now and he wouldn’t have it if he hadn’t tried to kill me. I find that more than a little bizarre. And I can’t believe the people of this country, if they knew about it, wouldn’t think that’s outrageous.”

Though it has surfaced in Wright’s current rash of problems on Capitol Hill, the story of the assault on Small encompasses a larger societal issue. It strikes to the heart of the much-debated issues of crime and punishment and rehabilitation and redemption that have roused increasing passions nationwide. And it comes at the end of a decade of multiplying state and federal legislation designed to guarantee rights and restitution to victims of crime.

Pamela Small remains unconvinced by John Mack’s clean record and steady rise within the corridors of government. She cannot shake her conviction--reinforced by the detective who investigated her case--that “people who do something like that once will do it again.”

To Wright and Mack, however, the story is rehabilitation.

“When I was 19, I made a terrible, tragic mistake,” Mack said. “I regret it every day. I accepted the judgment of society then and I accept it now. I have to put that behind me. All I ask is that I be judged by what I’ve done since in terms of trustworthiness, loyalty to my country, my family and those who depend on me.”

He was married in 1979 to his second wife, Kim, who is an executive assistant and appointments secretary to Rep. Nicholas Mavroules (D-Mass.). They live with their two young sons in suburban Virginia. He golfs on those rare days when he is not spending 12 or 13 hours on Capitol Hill.

Wright’s Right-Hand Man

He is Wright’s major traffic cop in the House. Mack decides which legislation to put on the agenda and which to keep off, handling major responsibilities under considerable pressure. By almost all accounts, he is good at his job, dedicated and hard working, liked and respected by both Democrats and many Republicans normally at odds with the Speaker.

“There are very few staffers that are treated as colleagues by the members,” Coelho says. “John Mack is one we’ve grown to know and trust. He knows the legislative process and he’s mastered it with long years and lots of effort. If you had to pick the top five staffers on the Hill in terms of competence, John would be on everybody’s list.”

In the unlikely event Wright were to let him go, Coelho says, “members would be lined up to hire him.”

“This society believes in forgiveness,” Coelho adds. Mack has not only paid his debt to society by his time in prison, he says, but “by working conscientiously since then to be a good husband and a good citizen. That’s supposed to be what rehabilitation is all about.”

Wright declines to be interviewed for this story or to answer specific questions about any role in Mack’s sentencing, imprisonment or parole. The letters he wrote on Mack’s behalf, in accord with Virginia law, remain sealed from public view as part of the pre-sentencing report considered by the judge who presided in his case. But two years ago he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “I have never regretted giving John an opportunity all these years. I don’t suppose anybody is immune from mistakes.”

When you meet Pamela Small, if you know her story, the most remarkable thing about her is how unaffected by the attack she appears today. She has striking looks and the trim, athletic body of a dancer. She skis, swims and has an active social life. Associates describe her as “gutsy,” “uppity” and “a breath of fresh air.” An old boyfriend, still close, calls her “no less open or trusting than any other woman I know . . . maybe more so.”

Small shrugs off the descriptions. “You just can’t live in fear,” she says. “I decided long ago I wasn’t going to let John Mack ruin the rest of my life.”

She never lost her impish sense of humor and remembers “all this joking and giggling” with doctors and nurses in the emergency room, even as they were putting her back together.

“She was amazingly calm for someone who had been through what she had,” recalls Dr. Eugene Stevenson, who was part of the surgical team that worked on her. “I remember being shocked at both the unusual brutality of the attack and the fact that she lived through it. . . . Any one of those hammer blows alone could have killed her.”

Today, few people who know her know about the attack. “It’s not exactly something you brag about,” she says. “I don’t want people treating me differently because of what happened.”

For this article she agreed to tell her story only on condition that where she lives and whom she works for be left vague, that her parents’ names and addresses not be given and that pictures not make her identifiable. She allowed her name to be used only because “reporters have been calling (she’s since unlisted her phone) and it’s on the public record. They’ll find it anyway.”

She remains troubled by the many questions still unanswered nearly 16 years after the crime.

There never has been, for example, any satisfactory explanation for why Mack attacked her. There was no evidence of drug use and none of sexual assault.

During his sentencing hearing, Mack testified that he “just blew my cool for a second” under what his attorney portrayed as intense psychological pressure from 72-hour work weeks and a failing three-week-old marriage.

Court-appointed psychiatrists judged him sane at the time of the crime, saying he clearly knew right from wrong and understood the gravity of his act. A psychiatrist who examined him almost a year after the attack said Mack still felt he had “reacted in a way in which any man would perhaps react under similar circumstances” of pressure.

Small says Mack never exhibited any agitation, uncertainty or impatience before he struck her: “If he had, I never would have gone to the storeroom with him. He just looked and acted like a clean-cut kid.”

“In a way,” she says, “I wish he had acted crazy. Then I could at least understand it. . . . I kept asking him (during the attack), ‘Why are you doing this? You can’t be serious.’ And he just kept looking at me and put his fingers to his lips and said calmly ‘Shhh! Shhhhh! Be quiet!’ I can see that face and those eyes now. He was totally in control. He knew exactly what he was doing.”