Congress Joining Ranks of D.C. High-Crime Areas : Ethics: Some observers say latest scandals are result of greater public scrutiny. Others blame a corrupt system.

For years, the neighborhood surrounding Capitol Hill has been a high-crime area. Now the crime wave looks to be moving under the Capitol dome itself.

With the indictment Tuesday of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the number of criminal proceedings involving members of Congress has grown to imposing lengths.

Two former lawmakers are currently in federal prison for financial misdeeds, another is free pending appeal of a bribery conviction last fall and still another is awaiting sentencing on charges of misusing public funds. Three other former legislators recently served time for bribery and related offenses.

In addition to Rostenkowski, two other senior legislators also are under indictment and at least two more appear to be the targets of FBI investigations.

In this century, only in the late 1970s--when Congress was rocked by the so-called Koreagate and Abscam bribery scandals--have so many members simultaneously been in prison, just out of prison or facing the prospect of prison.

Even that accounting does not include the ethical lapses that did not lead to criminal prosecutions: the House post office and banking scandals, which implicated dozens of members; the sexual-misconduct allegations against Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.); the exertions to protect savings and loan owner Charles H. Keating Jr. by five senators; or the questionable financial transactions that forced the resignations of Democratic leaders Jim Wright and Tony Coelho in 1989.

Some attribute this confluence of scandal not to declining ethics but to intensifying scrutiny from the press, public and prosecutors, which has made behavior criminal that once was tolerated, if not endorsed. But others insist that the climate on Capitol Hill is encouraging legislators to confuse incumbency with immunity and power with license.

“There is a clear environment up there that the rules aren’t to be enforced,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, a group that monitors government ethics. “It does enormous damage to the institution because it allows lowest-common-denominator ethics to set the public standard for the institution.”

The flow of charges has been steady enough to guarantee a good living for lawyers who specialize in defending public officials charged in corruption cases. “For me, it’s been constant,” said attorney Stan Brand, who has represented more than two dozen legislators since leaving his post as counsel to the House of Representatives to open his own firm 10 years ago.

Over the years, congressional scandals have covered the gamut of human misbehavior. Legislators have fallen into the bottle or the arms of prostitutes. A handful have been hauled into court on matters of high principle.

In 1919, for example, socialist Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee was convicted of violating the Espionage Act for opposing World War I and was denied his seat in Congress. But the Supreme Court later overturned his conviction and Berger served three more terms in the 1920s.

For almost all legislators who have gone astray, though, the path from lawmaker to law-breaker has involved no principle prouder than greed. Almost all the prosecutions of sitting legislators in recent years have involved bribery, tax evasion or misuse of public funds. The list includes:

* New York Democratic Rep. Mario Biaggi, who served 26 months in a medium-security federal prison for an extortion conviction in a case involving Wedtech Corp., a South Bronx company that spent lavishly in its search of defense contracts. Fellow New York Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia was twice convicted of extortion in the case and at one point served three months in prison, but each conviction was later overturned by a federal appeals court.

* Former Rep. Lawrence J. Smith, a Florida Democrat who served three months last year for tax evasion and lying to the Federal Election Commission about using campaign funds to pay off a gambling debt.

* Pat Swindall, a former Republican representative from Georgia, is scheduled to remain until February, 1995, in the minimum-security U.S. penitentiary camp in Atlanta after a perjury conviction in a case involving a personal loan. Undercover agents told him that the loan involved the proceeds of laundered drug money. Swindall has filed a brief with the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals claiming new evidence and seeking to reopen his case.

* Former Democratic Rep. Nicholas Mavroules of Massachusetts is to be confined until September at a medium-security federal institution in McKean, Pa., after pleading guilty last year to an array of bribery and tax-evasion charges.

* Albert G. Bustamante, a former Democratic representative from Texas, was sentenced last fall to 42 months in prison for accepting a bribe but is free on bond while appealing his conviction to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

* Carroll Hubbard Jr., a former Kentucky Democratic congressman, pleaded guilty in April to falsifying campaign reports, using public employees to work on his wife’s campaign for Congress and obstructing justice. While awaiting sentencing on June 30, Hubbard has solicited his former colleagues to send letters to the judge urging leniency.

* In addition to Rostenkowski, two other legislators are currently under indictment: Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) on charges of fraudulently billing the Senate for use of a condominium he secretly owned, and Rep. Joseph M. McDade (R-Pa.), who was indicted in May, 1992, on charges of accepting bribes and illegal gratuities from defense lobbyists.

Published reports also have indicated that the FBI is investigating at least two other legislators: Rep. Jay C. Kim (R-Diamond Bar), on charges of illegally funneling money into his 1992 campaign from a business he owned, and Walter R. Tucker III (D-Compton), as part of an investigation of corruption in Compton, where Tucker formerly served as mayor.

Does this constitute a congressional crime wave? Compared to other professions, the frequency of ethical transgression in the contemporary Congress appears relatively high but not entirely out of line.

During the last 20 years, about three dozen members of Congress either have been convicted of criminal offenses or censured by the House and Senate. That averages out to about 3.5 legislators in any two-year congressional session--or put another way, about one serious ethical sanction per 150 sitting legislators at any given time.

Compare that to lawyers. In the 1989-1990 period, the latest for which complete figures are available, about 4,500 practicing lawyers were publicly sanctioned by the American Bar Assn. That averages out to roughly one serious ethical problem per 190 accredited lawyers during the two-year period.

Among securities dealers, serious ethical violations have been more rare: During the two-year period of 1992-1993, less than one out of every 500 licensed securities dealers at the time was disbarred.

But compared to historical standards, today’s Congress might not look so bad. Throughout the 19th Century, and even well into this century, Rostenkowski might have had considerable company in the activities for which he was indicted--allegedly padding his payroll and diverting official accounts to his personal use.

In those years, the intimacy between money and power, like a particularly impetuous infidelity, was often consummated in plain sight. When Daniel Webster defended the Bank of the United States against President Andrew Jackson’s crusade to revoke its charter early in the 19th Century, for instance, the famed Massachusetts senator had more incentive than ideology: He was on the bank’s payroll as an attorney for its president.

It is against the backdrop of such history--and the 20th Century equivalents involving the now defunct urban political machines--that attorney Brand labels the current surge of congressional prosecutions “part of the over-criminalization of life in America.”

Brand attributes the rising number of cases not to deteriorating ethical standards but a “higher level of scrutiny, more rules, less tolerance for old ways--not illegal ways but mores--and more aggressive prosecutorial theory, taking peccadilloes and violations of House rules or Senate rules and making them into criminal cases.”

Prosecutors are devoting more energy than ever before to rooting out public misconduct. Since 1976, the Justice Department has operated a public-integrity section that investigates members of Congress and other public officials.

To most reformers, the real measure of Congress’ ethical problems is found not in such egregious examples of misconduct, but in the corrosive workaday trading of money and favors permitted under current campaign-finance and gift laws. For these critics, the workings of Congress testify to journalist Michael Kinsley’s maxim that in Washington the real scandal almost always involves behavior that is legal.

Wertheimer turns Brand’s argument on its head: One key reason prosecutors have become more aggressive in dealing with public officials, he maintains, is that Congress has been so lax about enforcing its own ethics rules.

More important than individual criminal prosecutions, Wertheimer argues, are system changes--such as the reforms in the laws governing gifts and campaign contributions now facing an uncertain future in House-Senate conference committees.

“While these individual cases of criminal prosecution are a serious warning signal,” Wertheimer said, “the entire system up there is designed to allow improper conduct to occur under the guise of proper conduct.”