THE INFLUENCE GAME: Libya Case Gets Lobbyists $2M

J. David Hoppe, president of Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a Washington public relations and...

J. David Hoppe, president of Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm, poses in the lobby of his office, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009. Two decades after a bomb blew Pan Am Flight 103 from the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, the victims' families have finally received the full compensation Libya promised. And Hoppe's lobbying firm that helped them collect is getting its share: A tidy $2 million. The payout is rare, even for Washington's lucrative influence business. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

(AP)

Two decades after a bomb blew Pan Am Flight 103 from the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, the victims' families have finally received the full compensation Libya promised. And a lobbying firm that helped them collect is getting its share: A tidy $2 million.

The payout to Quinn Gillespie & Associates is rare, even for Washington's lucrative influence business. Of 18,989 reported lobbying fees collected last year, just 24 hit the $1 million mark, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which traces political influence in Washington.

A report the lobbying firm filed in January and interviews with participants illuminate a little-noticed side of the long battle the victims' families waged in Washington, including how they were guided behind the scenes by experts in the capital's ways.

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Quinn Gillespie's payment covers work it did from 2006 through 2008 helping the relatives plot strategy, generate publicity and arrange meetings at the State Department and elsewhere.

The 1988 blast killed all 259 people on the jetliner, including 180 Americans, plus 11 on the ground. After extended negotiations, Libya agreed to pay restitution of $10 million to each family of a victim. Payment of the final $2 million to each family became stalled, and the families hired the lobbying firm to help them collect it.

"I was a lobbyist for 30 years, and I thought the families were our best lobbyists," said Frank Duggan of Alexandria, Va., a retired attorney who helped the families and initially opposed hiring Quinn Gillespie. "It was worth it. They opened doors we could not have opened."

The Quinn Gillespie report shows the firm collected $1 million in lobbying fees, the only public disclosure the law requires. But the firm's president, J. David Hoppe, and a lawyer for the families, Douglas E. Rosenthal, confirmed that the firm collected another $1 million payment for non-lobbying work, including planning how to attract publicity for the families' cause.