Where’s Waldholtz? Search on for Lawmaker’s Husband : Investigation: An arrest warrant is issued in probe of ‘possible bank fraud schemes.’ Utah congresswoman is holed up at her home.

Joseph Waldholtz was by his wife’s side throughout her 27-hour labor last August as freshman Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz of Utah became only the second member of Congress to have a child while in office.

With his natural promoter’s instinct, the exuberant Joe Waldholtz called Salt Lake City radio and television stations with hourly updates on his wife’s progress.

After the birth, he arranged for a beaming bedside news conference to present the very picture of happy Young Republicans in love.

Today, a scant 11 weeks after that blissful scene captivated many in Utah, Joe Waldholtz can’t be found. Rep. Waldholtz is holed up in her Georgetown home filling out divorce papers and all of Washington is spellbound by the guessing game of “where’s Waldholtz?”

Federal authorities late Wednesday issued a warrant for the 32-year-old Waldholtz’s arrest as a material witness in a grand jury investigation into “possible bank fraud schemes” in Washington and Salt Lake City.

According to an FBI affidavit accompanying the warrant, Waldholtz allegedly employed a check-kiting scheme to plunder the couple’s bank accounts of as much as $2 million.

The gregarious, 300-pound politico who won the love and confidence of a rising Utah Republican star is now denounced by his soon-to-be-former wife for “an incredible level of deception.”

She has demanded his arrest and punishment for what she alleges is his personal and pecuniary betrayal.

His father, a Pittsburgh dentist, said he is “completely baffled” by his son’s behavior and professes to have no idea where he is.

But his cousin charged that, among Waldholtz’s other misdeeds, was the looting of more than $600,000 from their incapacitated 86-year-old grandmother’s trust fund. The cousin said that he is worried about Waldholtz--and that he hopes the FBI collars him quickly.

Authorities, tracking Waldholtz’s money machine withdrawals, originally thought he was headed for Canada after giving his wife and her brother-in-law the slip at Washington’s National Airport last weekend. He took them to the airport purportedly to meet the executors of his family’s trust funds and then vanished, taking the car keys with him.

“There were no trustees, no nothing,” said Charles H. Roistacher, Rep. Waldholtz’s lawyer. “It was another of Joe’s fraudulent actions.”

Federal officials now say they have no idea where he is.

“The longer he’s gone there’s just more suffering,” said Russ Behrmann, a friend of Waldholtz who succeeded him as executive director of the Utah Republican Party. “But there will be a reckoning one way or another. And it’s better for everyone if that reckoning happens sooner rather than later.”

In the meantime, Rep. Waldholtz--who is petitioning a Salt Lake City court to have her maiden name restored--must contend with a landlord who is threatening to evict her because Joe Waldholtz repeatedly paid the $3,800-a-month rent with rubber checks.

The Waldholtzes have lived in an $800,000 townhouse in Georgetown that was once owned by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

Rep. Waldholtz’s office staff has stopped answering the phone and is communicating with the outside world only by fax machine. On Wednesday, Waldholtz’s office issued a press release accusing Joe Waldholtz of charging $45,000 in personal expenses on a staff member’s credit card.

The congresswoman faxed notice of her intent to divorce her husband on Tuesday night.

What once was the captivating love story of Joe Waldholtz and Enid Greene began in the spring of 1992, when both were active in national Young Republican Federation activities.

Joe Waldholtz was an aggressive and enthusiastic GOP volunteer in his home state of Pennsylvania, rising in party ranks to become treasurer of the national youth organization and, for a time, statewide director of the George Bush presidential primary campaign.

She was a former national chairwoman of Young Republicans and a former top aide to Utah GOP Gov. Norman H. Bangerter.

They met at a Young Republicans function in the spring of 1992. Waldholtz moved to Salt Lake City to assist Enid in her first campaign for Congress, a losing effort in 1992. It was at that time that Waldholtz family members began noticing unexplained withdrawals from his grandmother’s trust fund.

“There was an element of trust between him and our grandmother--at least at that point in time,” said Steven Slesinger, Waldholtz’s cousin, who is the grandmother’s legal guardian.

Slesinger said he suspected that money from the trust fund was siphoned into the 1992 campaign and that even larger sums were diverted to help bankroll Waldholtz’s successful 1994 campaign.

“The missing assets total at least $600,000, and I’d like to know where it is. Anything is possible and I have to figure the worst at this point,” Slesinger said.

Those funds may explain some of the mysterious money that Enid Waldholtz spent in her 1994 campaign, but it is not enough to account for the nearly $2 million she spent to unseat Democrat Karen Shepherd.

Much of the spending came in an advertising blitz in the last two weeks of the campaign. The heavy media and mailing effort cost an estimated $1 million--and the source of that money has never been adequately explained, despite repeated promises from Rep. Waldholtz to file corrected financial reports.

Rep. Waldholtz, 37, has told investigators that her father, investor D. Forrest Greene, loaned the young couple about $4 million based on a repayment pledge from Joe Waldholtz, who had bragged that he had access to millions of dollars in family assets. Those assets were fictitious and the loan was never repaid, according to associates of the young lawmaker.

David J. Jordan, a former U.S. attorney in Salt Lake City, said Wednesday that he advised the Waldholtzes in mid-1994 to remove Joe Waldholtz from management of all campaign funds. He said that the campaign’s finance reports and the couple’s financial disclosure forms were riddled with errors, inconsistencies and potentially fraudulent statements.

“I was not in a position to judge the honesty of the reports, but at a minimum there was great sloppiness and inattention to detail that was certain to invite FEC [Federal Election Commission] scrutiny,” Jordan said.

“He [Joe] had a lot of explanations and I, like a lot of other people here, assumed that this was in large measure Joe’s family money,” Jordan said. “He obviously fooled a lot of people.”

The story of the Waldholtzes’ troubled finances came to a boil earlier this month when The Hill newspaper, which reports on Congress, revealed that the FBI was investigating numerous overdrafts on the couple’s accounts at the Wright Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union and First Security Bank in Salt Lake City.

One of the bad checks--for $60,000--went to a Salt Lake City jeweler. Others, it now appears, went to their landlord, credit card companies, airlines and other creditors.

The Waldholtzes attributed the problems to “bookkeeping errors,” a late wire transfer of money from Pittsburgh and a stolen packet of blank checks, some of them already signed by Joe Waldholtz.

Enid Waldholtz also blamed Democratic opponents for raising questions about her campaign and finances. Answering lingering questions about the funding of her 1994 race, she angrily challenged her opponents to report her to the FEC.

“The Democrats have nothing to say about the issues, so they’re resorting to personal attacks,” she said.

But by this week, Rep. Waldholtz was looking closer to home for a scapegoat.

“I can’t begin to describe the anger and hurt over the incredible level of deception that we have uncovered in our own investigation of Joe’s activities,” she said in a press release this week. “I trusted him. I was wrong.”

In the end, however, a verdict will be rendered on Rep. Waldholtz herself, either by the authorities or by the voters.

“She was the candidate. She is the elected official. She has to answer all these questions,” said David Magleby, a political science professor at Brigham Young University in Utah. “Until she does, she’s in serious trouble. And I doubt that she has an answer, because if she did, we would have heard it months ago.”