White worked for Lewis for 21 years before joining Lowery's lobbying firm in 2003. Lowery, a former San Diego congressman who sat on the Appropriations Committee, is one of Lewis' closest friends and his principal fundraiser.

Companies that hire the two lobbyists, including Karangelen's Virginia-based Trident Systems Inc., follow a pattern that has become common Capitol Hill practice in recent years.

They make substantial investments in lobbying fees and campaign contributions to key legislators, then wait for their projects to be tucked into bills in line-items known as earmarks. Trident's projects involve software programs that Karangelen's engineers develop for military use.

In Karangelen's case, the contractor-lobbyist-legislator connection has taken on several more layers of financial ties and political connections.

White became Trident's lobbyist in February 2003, a month after she left Lewis' office, where she had helped Lewis shape the earmarking of the Pentagon's budget.

In April, $8.4 million in earmarks for a Trident project were inserted into an emergency spending bill to fund the war in Iraq. The project used digital maps and laptop computers to improve troops' ability to monitor changing battlefield conditions.

Just eight months later, Karangelen and White bought a $1 million Capitol Hill townhouse together. The house eventually became the address for a political action committee they launched to encourage congressional support for small businesses like Trident that seek Pentagon contracts.

They chose Lewis' stepdaughter, former Las Vegas wedding planner Julia Willis-Leon, to be director of the Small Biz Tech Pac. The PAC has paid Willis-Leon $42,000 of the $115,000 it has raised. Meanwhile, it has directed just $15,600 to political campaigns.

The PAC's biggest contributors have been Letitia White and her husband, who also lobbies on behalf of defense contractors. They contributed $15,000, while Karangelen kicked in $10,000, and other White clients added $11,500.

According to Trident's former chief financial officer, Karangelen has yet another financial tie with White: He has arranged to pay her a bonus based on the company's profitability. The former executive spoke on the condition that her name not be used, saying publicity would complicate her job search given the controversy swirling around the company.

Keith Ashdown, who tracks earmarks for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, said that between 2002 and 2006 Trident received at least $23.6 million in defense-related earmarks inserted into appropriations bills that Lewis supervised.

FBI agents have been investigating the personal and financial ties among Lewis, Lowery and White. Also included in the probe is Jeffrey Shockey, who worked for Lewis in the 1990s, became a lobbyist with Lowery in 1999 and then returned to work for Lewis last year at the Appropriations Committee.

The scrutiny has become so intense that last week the firm – Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and White – announced that it is breaking up. The three Republican partners, including White, Lowery and longtime Lowery ally Jean Denton, will form one firm, and Democrats James Copeland and Lynn Jacquez will form another.

Karangelen and White did not respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment. A spokesman for the lobbying firm defended its work as typical of Washington advocacy in an era of explosive growth in earmarking.

“Our work is consistent with the laws, rules and regulations that govern federal lobbying, Capitol Hill lobbying and campaign finance,” Patrick Dorton said last week, before the breakup announcement.

Lewis, who managed the earmark-rich Pentagon budget from 1999 until he took the helm of the Appropriations Committee in January 2005, has vehemently denied wrongdoing.

Speaking mostly through his press officer, Lewis defends earmarking as essential to the work of Congress in managing the nation's budget. And he says he's proud of every road, flood control project, visitor center and swimming pool his earmarks have bought for government agencies in his district, which covers most of San Bernardino County.

Many of those agencies, including the county government and Murrieta, Loma Linda and Victorville, pay hefty fees to White and Lowery's firm. Several entities have received grand jury subpoenas for records relating to the firm's work on their behalf.

In a December interview with Copley News Service, Lewis, 71, praised White, 48, as a talented lobbyist and called her a part of “the Lewis family,” the group of staffers and insiders with whom he has developed lasting friendships during his 28 years in Congress.

During White's two decades with Lewis, she rose from receptionist to principal gatekeeper for the earmark requests that poured in from contractors, their lobbyists and congressional allies.

By the time White joined Lowery's firm in 2003, Lowery was established as one of the highest-paid lobbyists who specialize in earmarks. Testifying in his divorce case, Lowery said he earned “just under $2 million” in 2003 from a long client list of defense contractors, universities, hospitals and government agencies, most of them in Southern California.

Lowery built a network of his firm's partners and their defense contractor clients who since 2000 have raised $480,000 for Lewis' political action committee.

Lewis, who routinely waltzes to re-election in his Inland Empire district, hasn't needed the money for his own campaigns. But in 2004, when party leaders made fundraising talent a prime qualification for committee chairmanships, Lewis contributed $650,000 in “excess funds” to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Much of the money was directed to the campaigns of vulnerable Republican incumbents, helping the party protect the House majority it has held since the 1994 election. It also helped Lewis win the Appropriations Committee chairmanship over rivals who raised far less for the NRCC.

Fundraising partnerships between politicians and lobbyists have traditionally been shrugged off as business as usual on Capitol Hill. But after the scandals involving former Reps. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and Tom DeLay, they are drawing more scrutiny.

“It's a fine line between a contribution and a bribe,” said Larry Noble, former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission. “But it's a line that keeps you out of jail.”

Jump in contributions

Karangelen founded Trident in 1985, but the company grew slowly until 2003, when he became one of White's first lobbying clients and began donating heavily to political campaigns.

In the 2000-02 election cycle, he donated just $15,500, according to records kept by the Center for Responsive Politics. But in just the past two years, he has contributed $104,000. The biggest individual recipient was Jerry Lewis, who received $72,000 from Karangelen and Karangelen's wife.

Meanwhile, federal contracts helped Trident recover handsomely from a sales slump it suffered in 2002, according to its former chief financial officer.

Trident “has gone from 11 million (in contracts and sales) in 2002 to 30 million last year” the former Trident executive said. Nearly 90 percent of the company's revenue comes from federal contracts, she said.

The former executive said she and two other company officials were fired after they questioned the company's financial relationship with Letitia White. The other two, former chief operating officer Gary Grosicki and former corporate attorney Brian Dinning, declined to be interviewed.

Some of Trident's growth came through earmarks inserted into appropriations bills Lewis oversaw. A particularly important source of cash has been the federal Small Business Innovation Research Program, which Karangelen's PAC supports. The program funnels about a billion dollars each year to companies with fewer than 500 employees.

As Trident's business has grown, so have its lobbying expenses. In 2003, it paid $80,000 in fees to White's firm, according to lobbying disclosure forms. Last year the figure jumped to $160,000.

A similar path

Karangelen's company appears to be following a path to riches that has been followed by other companies that hire White and Lowery to be their advocates in Congress. After accumulating tens of millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, they become attractive acquisition targets for defense industry giants.

One such company was San Diego-based Orincon, another software engineering company whose customers have included the Navy and several intelligence agencies.

Orincon grew slowly after it was founded three decades ago by former UCSD professor Daniel Alspach. But in the late 1990s, after it signed on with Lowery's firm, the privately held company's growth curve turned sharply upward.

Early each year, as the defense appropriations subcommittee was assembling the annual Pentagon spending bill, Alspach and Lowery would visit Lewis' office, meeting with Letitia White and sometimes with Lewis himself, according to records examined by Copley News Service.

The ability to arrange such meetings is a hallmark of high-powered lobbying firms, which profit handsomely from their ability to market their insider contacts.

Lowery and White's firm boasted of its connections in a 2002 entry on the company's Web site.

“When you need to negotiate the complexities of government policy and elicit attention of pivotal representatives, an advocate with exceptional credentials and expertise can provide crucial assistance,” stated the pitch to prospective clients.

The firm dismantled the Web site last summer, shortly after the Cunningham scandal broke.

Orincon paid $720,000 for the firm's services between 1998 and 2003. Lowery was given a seat on Orincon's board of directors.

Alspach and his Orincon colleagues also invested heavily in political contributions to Lewis – at least $102,000 between 1998 and 2003 – and provided first-class hospitality for the congressman and his staff.

In April 1999, White, Lewis and Lowery traveled at Orincon's expense to San Diego to visit the company's headquarters. They stayed two nights at La Valencia, one of La Jolla's most prestigious resort hotels. Lewis' eighth-floor, oceanfront suite cost $700 a night. White reported that lodging for her and her husband cost a total of $1,000.

Orincon's sales, heavily dependent on federal contracts, zoomed from $10 million in the mid-1990s to $52 million in 2003, the year Lockheed bought the company.

Terms of the sale were never announced. But Lowery received part of the proceeds as owner of several thousand shares of Orincon's closely held stock. When Alspach went on to start a venture capital company, Homeland Venture Partners, he named Lowery to its advisory board.

Orincon's defense industry work has been praised by the Pentagon, and even the most outspoken critics of earmarks acknowledge that sometimes they fund worthy projects.

“There are some perfectly fine earmarks,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former defense appropriations aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

But Wheeler says the process is riddled with opportunities for abuse and insider dealing, especially since the earmarked proposals seldom receive careful congressional scrutiny before they are embedded in law.

“The fundamental problem is that nobody knows if it is a good idea or a bad idea,” Wheeler said. “And that is not an accident. Congress doesn't want to know.”

Staff writer Dean Calbreath and Union-Tribune researcher Erin Hobbs contributed to this report.