BALTIMORE, Md. -- Former New Jersey Rep. Frank Thompson Jr., whose entanglement in the Abscam scandal ended his 26-year term as Trenton's charismatic representative in Washington, died Saturday. He was 70.
Thompson died at John Hopkins Hospital, where on July 19 he underwent an operation for throat cancer. He would have been 71 on Wednesday.
'He called me Monday and said the bad news that they had found malignance, but the good news was they thought they could get it with a laser,' said William Deitz, his longtime administrative assistant in the House.
The silver-haired politican, known as 'Thompy' to friends, had risen to chairman of the powerful House Administration Committee before he was indicted in the federal Abscam investigation, in which FBI agents posed as wealthy Arab businessmen trying to buy influence in Congress.
He was defeated in the 1980 congressional race and, in December of that year, convicted of bribery, conspiracy and accepting an unlawful gratuity.
Thompson, who consistently maintained he was innocent of wrongdoing, served 23 months of a three-year sentence at the federal corrections center in Lexington, Ky.
In 1985, he retured to his home in Alexandria, Va., and worked as a consultant to labor unions and insurance firms.
Richard Hughes, a former New Jersey governor and chief justice, called Thompson 'a great human being with a great heart.'
He was born in Trenton on July 26, 1918, the son of Frank Thompson, a reporter, editor and librarian for the Trenton Times, andnephew on his mother's side to Crawford Jamieson, a state senator and Mercer County Democratic leader.
In World War II, Thompson served as a Naval officer, then attended Wake Forest University and Law School.
In 1949 he was elected to the New Jersey Assembly, and in 1954 to the House of Representatives. Thompson was re-elected 12 times, usually by overwhelming margins despite the redistricting of the Mercer, Hunterdon, Warren and Sussex counties in the 1960s and 1970s.
With seniority, he rose to the chairmanship of the House Administration Committee and the Education and Labor Committee's Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations.
Thompson was a political ally of the Kennedy family when John F. Kennedy was president, and headed Kennedy's national voter registration drive in 1960.
A leader of Democratic liberals in the House, Thompson oversaw the passage of major education and labor bills, and fought for federal aid to education, a major issue at the time.
Funeral arrangements were pending.
