Former Representative Duke Cunningham, an ace fighter pilot elected to Congress from San Diego whose combat heroics in Vietnam were forever marred by a bribery scandal that sent him to federal prison, died on Wednesday in Little Rock, Ark. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was announced on social media by his family. No cause was cited.
One of only two Navy aviators in the Vietnam era to be confirmed an ace for shooting down five enemy planes, Mr. Cunningham, whose given name was Randall, was recruited by Republican Party activists to run for Congress in 1990. He was re-elected repeatedly and sat on the powerful Appropriations and Intelligence committees, where he abused his power to win favors for military contractors in exchange for at least $2.4 million in cash, gifts and benefits.
He pleaded guilty in federal court in 2005 to tax evasion and conspiracy to commit bribery. Among the favors he accepted from defense contractors were a Rolls-Royce, free rent on a live-aboard yacht, the Duke-Stir, moored on the Potomac River, and a sweetheart sale of his San Diego County home for nearly $1 million above market value.
The San Diego Union-Tribune exposed the corruption beginning in June 2005, revealing that a defense contractor bought Mr. Cunningham’s house for $1.675 million, then sold it at a $700,000 loss. Shortly after, the contractor began winning millions of dollars in defense and intelligence-related deals from the government. The newspaper’s coverage won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, which it shared with its sister organization, the Copley News Service.
Mr. Cunningham was sentenced to more than eight years in prison, one of the longest sentences handed to a former congressman for corruption. He was released in 2013. President Trump pardoned him just before the end of his first term in January 2021.
Some newspapers reported that Mr. Cunningham inspired the Tom Cruise character Maverick in “Top Gun,” but that was not the case, although Mr. Cunningham was known to tell people that the movie included some of his antics, such as buzzing the control tower at Naval Air Station Miramar.
The Union-Tribune interviewed Naval officers who had served with Mr. Cunningham and recalled him as displaying a few traits familiar to viewers of “Top Gun” — as an aviator, they said, he was cocky, entitled and given to self-promotion.
When he pleaded guilty and announced that he would leave Congress in November 2005, after earlier insisting he had done no wrong, Mr. Cunningham acknowledged in a statement, “I was not strong enough to face the truth.”
In his 15 years in office, Mr. Cunningham was outspoken on partisan politics and an opponent of gay rights. He once said that Democratic leaders in the House should be “lined up and shot.” Speaking on the House floor, he used a slur to refer to gay soldiers in the military and crudely insulted Barney Frank, the openly gay congressman from Massachusetts. (He subsequently apologized for both comments.)
Mr. Cunningham also called for stiff penalties, up to the death penalty, for drug dealers. When his son, Randall Todd Cunningham, was charged with smuggling 400 pounds of marijuana, the congressman tearfully pleaded for leniency before a Boston judge. His son was sentenced to two and a half years.
Randall Harold Cunningham was born on Dec. 8, 1941 — the day after the Pearl Harbor attack — in Los Angeles to Randall and Lela (Reed) Cunningham. His father, a truck driver, bought a gas station in Fresno, Calif., and moved the family. A few years later, the family moved to rural Missouri and opened Cunningham’s Variety Store, a five-and-dime.
Mr. Cunningham graduated from the University of Missouri in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and earned a master’s in education the next year. He coached swimming at a high school in the Chicago suburbs before enlisting in the Navy in 1967.
Trained as a pilot, he first went to Southeast Asia aboard an aircraft carrier in 1969. During a second combat tour beginning in 1971, he and William P. Driscoll, a radar intercept officer who sat in the back seat of their F-4 Phantom, flew some 170 combat missions. They regularly engaged enemy MIG fighter pilots over Vietnam.
On one remarkable day, May 10, 1972, they shot down three MIGs during a ferocious air battle before their plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile and they ejected over water. A Navy helicopter came to the rescue. Mr. Cunningham received a Purple Heart, two Silver Stars and the Navy Cross.
Back home, he became an instructor at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, known as Top Gun, in San Diego. He retired in 1987 with the rank of commander.
Mr. Cunningham gave speeches and appeared on CNN as a military commentator. His celebrity inspired local Republicans to recruit him to challenge Jim Bates, the Democratic incumbent in California’s 44th District. He won the seat and was re-elected six times as the district was redrawn and renumbered.
Mr. Cunningham was married three times. He and his third wife, Sharon Stone Cunningham, whom he wed in 2021, lived in Hensley, Ark. She survives him; his other survivors include three children from an earlier marriage.
After the initial news report in 2005 that Mr. Cunningham had sold his house two years earlier to a defense contractor, Mitchell J. Wade, and then used the inflated proceeds to buy a bigger, more expensive home, the F.B.I. opened an investigation. Both men’s homes were raided by agents.
Another military contractor, Brent Wilkes, gave more than $630,000 in cash directly or indirectly to Mr. Cunningham, according to the congressman’s plea agreement, in exchange for Mr. Cunningham’s help in landing millions of dollars in federal business.
In addition to the large cash sums the contractors gave Mr. Cunningham, they issued many smaller payments to cover a lavish lifestyle, including $7,200 to an antiques store for a Louis Phillipe-period commode and four armoires, $7,500 for his fees at the Capital Yacht Club, and $2,000 for one of his daughters’ graduation party.
Many of the bribes were paid to Mr. Cunningham’s company, Top Gun Enterprises.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Duke Cunningham, 83, Congressman Convicted in Corruption Scandal, Dies appeared first on New York Times.
