House Revenge by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online

more defective than those of his fellow politicians. But in this case, DeMarco figured that Emma and Mahoney would be in total agreement.
    DeMarco’s assignment had to do with an Alabama congressman named Clayton Sims. Sims represented Alabama’s Seventh District—the only congressional district in Alabama represented by a Democrat. Sims, who was fifty-five, had held the job for fourteen years and in order to get elected, and stay elected, in a state that voted overwhelmingly Republican, Sims was basically purple—the color you get when you mix red and blue. He voted with the House D’s, however, at least most of the time, and Mahoney had always thought he was a pretty good guy, although not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The problem was that Sims claimed to be the recipient of a Purple Heart—and Mahoney suspected he might be lying. And if he was lying, this was no small matter to John Mahoney.
    There was nothing unusual about men—and it was almost always men—claiming to be recipients of military medals they’d never earned. There were in fact numerous documented instances of men showing up at public events wearing a uniform, their chests bedecked with phony medals they’d purchased online—sometimes even the Congressional Medal of Honor—when, in fact, these imposters had never been in the military at all. Most men who lied about their military service did so because they wanted to impress people. They wanted the slaps on the back; they wanted to hear “Thank you for your service”; they wanted, these least heroic of men, to be thought of as heroes.
    Others, however, lied for financial gain. In one case a guy who’d never been in the military claimed to have been wounded in Vietnam and racked up over two hundred thousand dollars in VA benefits before he was caught. DeMarco had initially thought that the VA should easily be able to verify if a guy had served or not, or had been injured in combat or not, but the fact was that the records were so screwed up that this wasn’t always the case.
    The practice of people lying about their military service was in fact so egregious and offended so many veterans—John Mahoney being one of those veterans—that Congress, in a rare act of bipartisanship, passed the Stolen Valor Act in 2005 saying these liars should get up to a year in prison. But the act was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2012 in a 6 to 3 decision, the Supremes essentially saying the right to lie was protected by the First Amendment. In 2013, Congress, still pissed, passed a second Stolen Valor Act saying that if someone benefited in some tangible way by lying about his service, then he could end up in prison. Which made DeMarco wonder why they bothered passing the act at all since fraud had always been a crime.
    Anyway, like all politicians who’d served in the military, Congressman Clayton Sims was proud to be a veteran—and made a big deal of his service record when he was campaigning. Sims, like Mahoney, had been a marine, and in 1983 he was in Lebanon. He was there the morning Hezbollah exploded two truck bombs destroying buildings housing American and French soldiers. Of the 241 American servicemen who were killed, 220 were marines. According to Sims, he’d been walking toward the barracks to meet a friend for breakfast, and had been less than a block away when the bombs went off. He was knocked briefly unconscious and was struck in the leg by a long piece of glass that he said was curved “like one of those Muslim daggers.” He pulled out the piece of glass, used his shirt to bandage up a wound that was bleeding profusely, and then spent the next thirty-six hours trying to save marines buried and dying in the rubble.
    When Sims first came to Congress, while Mahoney was still the Speaker of the House, Mahoney met the freshman congressman, and during their initial meeting, they talked about their shared experience as