PARK CITY, Utah – A long-awaited documentary about disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month.

“Casino Jack and the United States of Money” will have its world premiere the evening of Saturday, Jan. 23 – a prominent spot in the film festival’s schedule that indicates the film has a good chance to win top awards in the U.S. Documentary Competition.

“Casino Jack” was written and directed by award-winning director Alex Gibney, whose documentary films include “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a 2007 Oscar winning film about U.S. torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

“’Casino Jack and the United States of Money’ is a comedy – but the joke is on us,” Gibney said on a promotional video on a Sundance Web site.

“While Jack Abramoff was a gonzo character and he lived a life that was wild – one woman said he was Walter Mitty on steroids – it seems he was kind of a spy master, he was a movie producer, he was a man who lived through his imagination, he was fiercely idealistic, but also corrupt.”

But the story is bigger than a single individual corrupt lobbyist, Gibney said.

“As peculiar as he was, I think he had become a kind of emblem of everything that was wrong in one person. So if you got rid of that person everything is okay. The interesting part of the story is that Jack actually is not a rotten apple. He’s proof that the barrel is rotten. He’s like the guidebook for how Washington works.”

The film’s advance publicity promises to tell the Abramoff story from his early years as a gung-ho member of the GOP political machine to his “final reckoning as a disgraced imprisoned pariah.”

The Abramoff story is a tale of international intrigue involving Russian spies, Chinese sweatshops, sex slaves in the Mariana Islands, and a mob-style killing in Miami.

But the importance of the Jack Abramoff story to Indian country was its lessons about unrestrained greed, and its unmasking of Washington lawmakers and their staff, nonprofit leaders, and federal agency officials, who were willing to accept Abramoff’s gifts, fees, and donations in exchange for legislation or administrative decisions that would help his Indian clients or harm their perceived tribal opponents.

The Abramoff scandal was the largest ever to hit Indian country. Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon defrauded Michigan’s Saginaw Chippewas, California’s Agua Caliente, the Mississippi Choctaws, the Louisiana Coushattas, the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo of Texas (Tigua), and the Pueblo of Sandia of New Mexico for an estimated $86 million by grossly over billing them, splitting profits and even scheming to secretly lobby against their own clients in order to squeeze more money out of them.

Thousands of pages of e-mails and other documents made public during an investigation by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs showed not only how Abramoff and Scanlon’s influence peddling injured tribal nations, but also revealed the insult of their expressed racism in contemptuous remarks they made about their Native clients.

The SCIA’s investigation was published in a report, “Gimme Five” – Investigation of Tribal Lobbying Matters.

The scandal pulled in both elected officials and Bush administration appointees. Among them are former Congressman Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the Abramoff investigation and spent 17 months on a 30-month prison sentence; Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who managed to evade charges, but whose two former aides were convicted in connection with Abramoff; and J. Steven Griles, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during the investigation, and served time in prison for it.

Abramoff pleaded guilty in early 2006 to three criminal felony counts related to defrauding the tribal nations and corrupting public officials. He is scheduled to be released Dec. 1, 2010.

While the film’s creators are keeping the film’s details closely under wraps, some information about how the Abramoff story unfolded – and the American Indians involved in getting the story out – was told in an Indian Country Today story in September 2008.

The overarching theme of “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” is how money corrupts the U.S. political system.

“This was an interesting story, it was wild, it was colorful, and it also had at its heart a very important issue, which is campaign finance and political corruption. And as bad as we think it was, it’s getting worse,” Gibney said.

The money flowing through the political system “is off the chart.” People think they can’t do anything about it, but they can, Gibney said.

“The only hope, I think, for us people is to really get angry. If they start holding representatives to account, it’s the only way, because if we don’t do that we’re done as a democracy.”

The film has inspired Take Part, a social justice Web site, to launch “Follow the Money: The Social Action Campaign for Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”

The campaign highlights the corruptive role of money in politics with initiatives designed to educate citizens about their elected officials ties to special interest groups and provide tools to create a movement to bring real and meaningful campaign finance reform, according to the
Web site.

“Casino Jack and the United States of Money” will open in cinemas around the country May 7.