Who <i> Really</i> Shot J.R.? : Jack Russ claims he was mugged. But police and Capitol Hill gossips doubt it. Somewhere in the “Perkmaster’s” messy fall lies the truth.

Amid all the talk about bad checks, imperiled perks and angry constituents, one question keeps recurring these days in the private conversations in the corridors and cloakrooms of Congress: Who shot J.R.?

It is a different J.R. they are talking about, of course. And the question of who shot him may turn out to be little more than a bizarre footnote to the sordid saga of debts, overdrafts and patronage now unfolding--with fatal consequences for some political careers--on Capitol Hill.

But for now, the mystery surrounding what happened to Jack Russ, the former House sergeant-at-arms, in a deserted park near the Capitol on the night of March 1 remains one of the more puzzling facets in a growing body of gossip and speculation as convoluted as any plot in the television series “Dallas.”

It is a real-life drama about people seduced by the privileges of power, about lives soured by bad debts or divorce, about people with six-figure incomes who could not seem to make ends meet.

And although many questions still hang over his own role in the ethics scandals emerging in the House, it is also a story about the rise and fall of Ernest Jackson Russ, 46, a macho, fast-talking Tennessean whose mastery of the patronage rules became a path to one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes positions on Capitol Hill.

From more than a score of interviews with people who knew Russ, a conflicting portrait emerges of a man described by friends as dedicated and intensely loyal and by detractors as a “loose cannon” and a “junior J. Edgar Hoover” who, like the servant in the Harold Pinter play of the same name, sought to become the master of the house he served.

“You either loved him or you hated him,” an ex-House staffer said. “With Jack Russ, there was no in-between.”

For nine years, along with the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Russ shared control of the 1,200-member Capitol police force and supervised the Capitol tour guides. At the same time, he oversaw operations at the House bank, the now-defunct financial cooperative where congressmen overdrew their accounts by hundreds of thousands of dollars in what has become the most devastating political scandal to rock Congress since the Teapot Dome affair of 1924.

The official job description, however, reveals little of what Russ really did, of what was expected of him, of how, starting as an entry-level staffer, he climbed the golden ladder of congressional patronage to a $115,092-a-year job as sergeant-at-arms and became chief courtier in what is derisively being described as the Royal House of Representatives.

Most simply put, “Jack Russ did things for people,” says one senior congressional aide. “Little things. Big things. Almost anything. When you needed something, Jack was always there to help.”

Russ--who refuses to be interviewed, saying it would “take forever” to explain his side of the story--was the Perkmaster of the House.

“He had a formidable knowledge of what made the institution tick, a keen insight into the relationships between members and their staffs and a good sense of how to serve members and get close to them,” one Democratic congressman says.

If a lawmaker was late for the airport, Russ would give him a police escort to speed his way through traffic.

If that same lawmaker’s car was illegally parked and ticketed by the metropolitan police, Russ would take the ticket and fix it.

From dispensing the choicest parking spaces to providing security escorts, he was always ready to do countless small favors for members. And, some say, bigger favors as well.

Russ saw his mission as being guided by one basic principle, says former California Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego). “It was, ‘If I take care of them (the members), I’m going to stay sergeant-at-arms.’ ”

It was Russ’ fidelity to this principle that guided his rise from doorman in 1967 to page to deputy doorkeeper and finally to sergeant-at-arms in 1983.

According to friends still searching for an explanation of what subsequently happened, it was, ironically, this same loyalty that helped bring about his downfall: He ignored orders to suspend the virtually unlimited free overdraft protection that members received from the House bank.

“Russ grew up in a system that rewarded people like him for doing favors for people like me,” says one Democratic congressman who, like most lawmakers interviewed, requested anonymity. “He was in the business of dispensing perks, not taking them away.”

Adds another lawmaker who is a close friend of Russ: “Jack did more things out of ignorance than out of arrogance. I can see how he might have ignored instructions to clean up the bank because he would not have wanted to confront members with their overdrafts. It’s unfair now to dump all of the blame on him.”

To some degree, this view is echoed by the House Ethics Committee, which noted in a March 10 report on the checking scandal that the blame for the bank’s sloppy, permissive accounting procedures had to be shared by the House leadership, previous sergeants-at-arms and the congressional committees responsible for overseeing the bank.

But the “ultimate responsibility,” it insisted, still rested with Russ, who ignored auditors’ warnings to end the widespread abuse of check-cashing privileges and who himself bounced more than $56,000 worth of checks at the bank in 1988-89.

Two days after the report was issued--and only hours before he would have been rebuked on the House floor--Russ resigned.

It is here that an embarrassed congressional leadership hopes the matter will end, at least as far as Jack Russ is concerned. But it is by no means clear that it will.

Now, three outside investigations are being conducted into affairs on the Hill--and Russ is a figure in all.

Last week Russ testified before a federal grand jury investigating the possibility of criminal wrongdoing at the House Post Office, where an earlier scandal involving embezzlement and drug dealing by employees has been uncovered.

His activities also are being examined by a special prosecutor appointed last month to look into the checking scandal. And District of Columbia police are still investigating the March 1 incident in which Russ was shot through the cheek.

Russ has told police he was shot by one of two men who stole his wallet and Rolex watch shortly after 9:30 p.m. while he was walking his dog in Garfield Park near his home on Capitol Hill. One of the men forced a small-caliber pistol in his mouth, while the second took his valuables and urged the first to shoot, Russ said. Just as the gun was about to go off, Russ added, he jerked his head and the bullet passed neatly through his left cheek, without hitting any bone or teeth.

While they are still treating the shooting as a mugging, police privately are making little secret of the fact that they don’t believe Russ’ story.

“It doesn’t withstand the smell test,” confides one source close to the investigation, who said the flash marks on the skin and the exit route of the bullet suggest that the gun had to have been carefully positioned inside the mouth so as to avoid hitting anything but the flesh of Russ’ cheek.

This source says he believes that Russ, who owns and usually carries a 9-millimeter pistol, shot himself--although judging from the size of the wound, with a much smaller-caliber gun.

Others have speculated that the shooting had something to do with debts, saying they understood Russ to be a heavy gambler.

But several close friends say they never knew him to gamble, and Deputy Police Chief Gary Abrecht, commander of the precinct investigating the shooting, says so far there is “no evidence” suggesting that the incident was related to gambling or any other form of debt.

Whatever the circumstances behind the shooting, signs that the moorings of Russ’ life were pulling loose began to appear four years ago, when he started bouncing his own checks at the House bank. The ethics committee says Russ cashed 19 bad checks drawn at other banks at the House facility between July, 1988, and August, 1989--at least five of which bounced a second time when they were presented for repayment.

The committee did not look into the motives or reasons for the overdrafts, but records show that Russ is heavily in debt. The latest financial disclosure statements for him and his wife, Susan, an administrative aide to Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.), list debts to a variety of lending institutions and individuals in the range of $515,000 to more than $1.1 million.

Last year Russ put his Capitol Hill townhouse up for sale. It remains unsold, even though he recently reduced the price to $385,000.

Besides his financial debts, there were other problems with Russ that were not widely discussed at the time. But people promised anonymity were more willing to talk about them now that he is gone.

“I felt all along that he was way out there and absolutely the wrong person for the job,” says a member of the House Administration Committee that oversees the police, the bank and other administrative offices of the House. “He was overzealous. He carried guns when he was civilian . . . and there were certainly a number of occasions where he screwed up.”

One such occasion--for which he eventually was reprimanded--occurred in November, 1989, when Russ used the Capitol Police to stage the phony arrest of a friend attending a stag party. On another occasion, he was admonished for selling flag stands in the House stationery store that were manufactured by a company he had established.

More recently, in a revelation one lawmaker said sent “chills up the spines of more than a few members of the House,” Russ was discovered to have sought the keys to the cabinets that give access to House phone lines. He ostensibly wanted to check the phones for wiretaps, but several members who made concerned inquiries to the House Administration Committee confided they were worried that it was Russ himself who wanted to tap the phones.

One source close to the Administration Committee’s inquiry into the matter says he suspects that some phone lines may already have been secretly tapped.

“You have to know Jack Russ to understand the paranoia people have about him,” the source says. “While he could be a very engaging fellow if you played basketball or lifted weights with him in the House gym, he was a junior J. Edgar Hoover when it came to running the police and security on the Hill. He liked to have information on people . . . and he regarded the committee’s attempts to oversee his operations as an insult.”

To his defenders, such sinister characterizations are overdrawn.

“Did Jack know a lot of stuff? Yes. Did he do favors for people? Yes. But the idea of his being a little J. Edgar Hoover holding all this stuff over people is absolute, unadulterated nonsense,” says one Democratic congressman who is a close friend of Russ.

Yet even this friend agrees that the rules Russ learned to live by in his 25-year journey through an insular system ruled by patronage and perks were long out of date.

“Jack really belonged in another era, when the House was a far more congenial place than it is now and where there was less press scrutiny of what we did and how we did it,” the friend says. “He never fully appreciated modern standards of ethics and fairness.”

Conceding that Russ must share the blame for what went wrong at the House bank, another friend says he is concerned that Russ is being turned into a scapegoat for the failings of a system that most lawmakers used to full advantage but are eager to denounce now that the public ire over perks and special privileges threatens to cost them their reelections.

The bank’s practice of overlooking overdrafts predated Russ’ stewardship of the facility by many years, the friend notes, and Russ himself was but one link in a long chain of executors charged with dispensing special favors.

“This is not the House that Jack built,” the friend said. “This is the House that built Jack.”

Staff writers Karen Tumulty, Ronald J. Ostrow and William J. Eaton contributed to this article.