Tongsun Park, an urbane, amiable international lobbyist who stood at the center of two bribery scandals separated by nearly 30 years, and who was once a Gatsby-like figure in Washington whose flamboyant parties were attended by lawmakers, officials and the occasional Hollywood celebrity, died on Thursday in Seoul. He was 89.
His death was reported by Yonhap News, South Korea’s major news service, which said he had been admitted to a hospital about a week earlier with an unspecified chronic illness.
Mr. Park, a Korean-born graduate of Georgetown University, leveraged a family fortune and an easy gregariousness to seduce the power brokers of Capitol Hill in the 1970s.
All along, in secret, he was working for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Besides giving lavish parties, he gave out some $850,000 to dozens of members of Congress, often in white envelopes, in an influence-buying scheme known, perhaps inevitably, as Koreagate.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“I thought I was taking part in the American political process,” Mr. Park told the House Ethics Committee in 1978.
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