Fresh off a campaign stop in the village of Point Hope, North Slope Borough mayoral hopeful George Ahmaogak Sr., found himself taking the long way home to Barrow. Bad weather forced him to loop through Kotzebue and continue on to Anchorage, where he had no way of knowing that an entirely different type of fall storm had just blown in.
On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted his wife and campaign treasurer, Maggie, in an embezzlement case.
George Ahmaogak, a five-time former mayor for the North Slope Borough running a strong campaign against four challengers, said the development won't derail his candidacy. And he questioned whether the timing of the indictment had more to do with him than his wife. This summer, he said, campaign opponents engaged in a whisper campaign about his wife's pending legal problems to try to discredit him.
"It is bad for me. (It's) kind of like déjà vu, like what Senator Stevens went through," George Ahmaogak said in an interview Thursday, referring to the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, who eight days before his November 2008 failed re-election bid was found guilty by jurors in a federal corruption case.
Prosecutors deny any political meddling.
"George is not going to be charged and this is absolutely not a politically motivated case against Maggie. Neither the case nor the timing of it has anything to do with the election," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Aunnie Steward, one of the federal prosecutors handling the case.
Maggie Ahmaogak, 61, is accused of stealing $475,000 from the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, where she served as the group's executive director for 17 years until 2007, when she got fired after financial irregularities were uncovered. She is also the second person charged with dipping into the whaling commission's federal funds. In July, Teresa Judkins, who took over as executive director after Ahmaogak's departure, was indicted for taking $100,000 of the group's money for her own use.
Within hours of his wife's indictment, George Ahmaogak was doing what he could to calm voters. "These accusations are baseless," he announced in a statement swiftly posted to his campaign website. "My wife has been cooperating with federal investigators for more than nine months, and we cannot believe her cooperation has ended with a sudden indictment one week prior to the election. My wife will be entering a not-guilty plea. The George Ahmaogak, Sr. campaign is still on track."
But in the 12-day countdown to the Oct. 4 election George Ahmaogak may find himself confronting questions about his role in Maggie's alleged spending sprees. Prosecutors claim more than once that thousands of dollars were directed to Maggie's personal accounts just prior to gambling outings with an unnamed "family member" in Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington state.
George Ahmaogak acknowledged that he has traveled and gambled with his wife on some of their trips together, but he declined to offer details, citing the pending case and the fact that he's already answered authorities' questions. If he did gamble with Maggie, it was on their own time and with their own money, he said.
"It doesn't appear that this was in the form of stealing and I think that we can prove that," he said.
The whaling commission is a nonprofit formed in 1976 to protect Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos' relationship to bowhead whales. It conducts whale research and promotes cultural and hunting traditions. Largely funded by federal sources, it pulled in $2.4 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between 2004 and 2007, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's office.
Maggie Ahmaogak, accused of stealing about a fifth of that amount from the whaling commission, is charged with wire fraud, two counts of theft from an organization receiving federal funds, and money laundering. She faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.
The indictment says Maggie Ahmoagak used the nearly half-million dollars to pay herself unauthorized bonuses, take cash and payroll advances which were never repaid, wrote checks and wired money to herself from whaling commission accounts, including about $32,000 diverted just before or during gambling sprees. She also allegedly bought groceries, meals, airline tickets, paid utility and medical bills for herself and family members, bought snow machines and put a down payment on a Hummer.
The ill-gotten Hummer may be the very vehicle George Ahmaogak used to relocate himself to Anchorage in early 2006 when he took a job with Shell Oil after leaving the North Slope Borough mayor's office a few months earlier. Ahmaogak "lit out of Barrow in mid-January in his wife's Hummer H2, bouncing for 17 hours across open, roadless tundra to Deadhorse, then down the highway to Anchorage," the Anchorage Daily News wrote at the time about Ahmaogak's job change.
By then, George Ahmaogak had hit his term limit, endorsed a successful up-and-coming new mayor, Edward Itta -- the very man he now hopes to replace -- and was moving on to something new.
This time period in George Ahmaogak's life coincides with when, according to prosecutors, Maggie's fraud scheme took place. In addition to not getting routine financial audits for the whaling commission from 2003 to 2007, the move to Anchorage in 2006 allowed Maggie to move the group's operations out of Barrow and farther from view.
Once in Anchorage, Maggie failed to properly document how she was spending whaling commission money, according to the indictment.
In the years since Maggie Ahmaogak was fired from the whaling commission, the group has struggled to regain stability following discovery of the thefts. It has an entirely new staff, new auditing procedures and has cooperated with authorities, said Johnny Aiken, the whaling commission's current executive director. He was at the group's office in Barrow on Thursday, where word of Maggie Ahmaogak's indictment didn't come lightly.
"It is a very sad day for our community and for AEWC," Aiken said of learning about the indictment on the group's former longtime director. "We have been having to fight extra hard to get our funding because of this," he said.
In the midst of his family's troubles, George Ahmaogak has pledged to stay on message. Campaigning door to door in the villages, he's had a chance to be reminded first hand of how tough life can be for people living in the Arctic. In Anaktuvuk Pass, gas is selling for $9 per gallon, motor oil for $25 per quart, he said. Energy costs are high. And people need jobs.
George Ahmaogak wants voters to know given the chance, he'll work to ease those burdens. He's done it before, and wants to do it again.
"I am still a candidate, I still love my people," he said.
Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com