Smokey and the Bandit: how a secret government sweetheart deal for Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder wrecked a great park ranger's career.

• Author: Murphy, Tim
• Position: Robert M. Danno

There are sports franchise owners who, through civic-mindedness and steely pursuit of victory, win the admiration of their fans. Then there is Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins. Since the self-made advertising mogul bought the storied football franchise fourteen years ago, the team has had only two winning seasons, a sorry record widely attributed to Snyder's penchant for micromanaging coaches and throwing money at expensive past-their-prime veterans rather than finding new talent. Yet that losing record hasn't kept the billionaire Snyder from reaping record profits by exploiting every conceivable revenue stream--from jacked-up ticket prices to luxury skyboxes for lobbyists to charging fans to watch hitherto free team workouts. He sued a seventy-three-year-old grandmother who, after losing most of her assets in the housing crash, couldn't afford to keep up payment on her season tickets. And when a Washington City Paper writer protested, Snyder sued him, too.

Two recent events further highlight Snyder's imperiousness. The first is a renewed chorus of demands by everyone from Native American activists to the D.C. city council that the team change its inherently offensive name--to which Snyder last year responded, "NEVER--you can use caps."

The second is the settling last fall by the National Park Service (NPS) of a whistleblower complaint over a secret sweetheart deal Snyder extracted nine years ago to give his Maryland home an unobstructed view of the Potomac River. It was a small concession in the grand scheme of things, the kind that the rich and powerful frequently wheedle out of government, especially back then, during the presidency of George W. Bush, when such favors were flowing like booze in a skybox. But its discovery set off a decade-long campaign of bureaucratic retribution over two administrations that nearly sent an innocent man to prison. The story of that little favor wonderfully (if depressingly) encapsulates the essential character of our times, in which average people who play by the rules are made to suffer by the blithe manipulation of those rules by the people at the top.

The tale begins in 2000, when Snyder paid $10 million for a riverside estate in the Washington suburb of Potomac, a posh neighborhood in a posh community typified by the recently deceased gray-haired government worker whose property he had purchased--King Hussein of Jordan. Hussein had outfitted the grounds with a sprawling side house for the servants, in which Snyder would force prospective Redskins hires to stay when they came in for interviews; the maroon-and-yellow basketball court was Snyder's addition.

It was a nice enough house. The home had a helicopter pad out back and a white colonnade along the porch on a hill a few hundred feet from the historic Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, a charming waterway first envisioned by George Washington that, along with a towpath and surrounding forest, is now owned and managed by the NPS. Among Washington's ruling class, the bluffs flanking the Potomac River northwest of the city are the closest one gets to a penthouse on Central Park, but Snyder quickly encountered a problem: he couldn't see any water from his waterfront property. The park's trees were in the way.

Since the park was designated a national historic site in 1971, any alterations to the land, no matter how small, have had to first pass through an intensive period of paperwork, environmental impact statements, and waiting. For thirty years, no modifications were granted.

But Snyder caught a break. President George W. Bush's new administration was placing well-connected, industry-friendly officials in powerful positions, nowhere more so than at the Department of the Interior. The new interior secretary was Gale Norton, a loyal Republican who would eventually leave her post to become a lobbyist for Shell. Her number two was Steven Griles, a coal...