Hillary Clinton's Money Man

"[Chris is a] smart, assertive guy who knows what he wants and doesn't take no for an answer," says Joe Garcia, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. "And being friends with the President of the United States is nothing to shake a stick at."

But Korge, who declined to comment on the record for this story, has a long history of controversy. Though never charged with a crime, he has been at the center of four questionable deals at Miami International Airport that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars. One of them spawned a criminal investigation.

The 52-year-old La Salle High School alum started in politics with the help of his father, who served decades as campaign treasurer for late Democratic Rep. Dante Fascell. At age 15, Korge spent the summer in the nation's capital as a congressional page. In a 1998 New Times cover story, he said of the experience: "From that point on, I knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. I fell in love with the legislative process."

After graduating from Temple University law school, he joined the Miami Beach City Attorney's Office in 1981. Four years later, he took a similar job with the City of Miami. In 1988, he left public employ to join the law firm Holland & Knight, and soon established a working relationship with Rodney Barreto, an ex-Miami Police officer who had started his own successful lobbying practice.

Soon Korge and Barreto found their political prince in Alex Penelas, whom the pair helped win a seat on the county commission in 1990. From that moment on, especially during Penelas's eight-year run as Miami-Dade's executive mayor, virtually everyone with designs on a county contract hired one or both of them to gain access to the halls of power. To ice his role, Korge began fundraising. In the past two decades, he has collected millions of dollars for county politicians, including at least two who were forced from office owing to scandal: Miriam Alonso and Pedro Reboredo.

Along the way, Korge amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune, much of it from lobbying fees paid by county vendors, including heavyweights like AT&T and Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction Services. "He certainly was a big player at one point in time," says executive director of the Miami-Dade ethics commission, Robert Meyers. "The perception is out there that you have to hire a lobbyist to get access to county officials."

Some of Korge's deals that raised questions at county hall include:

• In 1992, he was the lobbyist for Sirgany International, which was vying for a contract to run airport newsstands. Korge business associate Sergio Pino, a Cuban-American, was a minority partner in Sirgany's proposal. Though the joint venture was ranked second and third in two impartial evaluations, the county commission chose it for a 10-year contract. A 2002 Miami-Dade Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report concluded that minority involvement in the deal was "neither real, meaningful, nor legitimate."

• The next year, Dade Aviation Consultants, a consortium of engineering firms overseeing Miami International Airport's maligned and oft-delayed $6.2-billion expansion, paid Korge, Barreto, and a third lobbyist each $16,000 a month. A 2002 investigation by the OIG claimed the trio received $1.3 million over nine years whether they worked or not. The OIG report terms the county relationship with Dade Aviation "unhealthy for the long term."

• Though a county study in 1994 showed airport passengers would spend millions more if gift shops offered better merchandise, two years later Korge persuaded airport officials to block opening a Disney retail store that would compete with Sirgany's gift shops.

But perhaps most controversial was the airport's $40-million food and beverage concessions contract, which county commissioners in 1998 awarded to Host Marriott Services Corp. and a minority joint venture known as World Wide Concessions, which were represented by Korge and Barreto, respectively.

Four years later a federal grand jury began to probe allegations the deal was rigged to circumvent minority participation rules. County and federal public corruption investigators discovered both Host Marriott and the minority firm had privately agreed to give Korge and Barreto 10 percent of their profits, according to grand jury information reported by the Miami Herald and New Times in 2004. In addition, World Wide Concessions received $33,225 per month to do virtually nothing.