Defending dictators, counseling killers.

The Reagan era "boom," which left the rich richer and the rest of the country poorer, has long since faded. But for many of the shock troopers of the Reagan Revolution, the good times are still rolling.

Take Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general to Edwin Meese between 1981 and 1983. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Fein played a big role in formulating the Reagan administration's policies on civil rights, school prayer, abortion and crime. He backed the failed bid to grant tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University, which does not accept black students.

After leaving government, Fein linked up with right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. He also cashed in on his government experience by lobbying for foreign clients. Though Fein was a strong critic of leftist governments, like Nicaragua's Sandinistas, he had no qualms about taking money from peace-loving nations such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Fein hit the jackpot in 1991 when he signed on to represent Mozambique's notorious guerrilla army, RENAMO, which was seeking to overthrow its country's leftist government. When Fein came on board, RENAMO's reputation has hit bottom. This was just a few years after the State Department had issued a report denouncing the guerrillas for the wholesale slaughter of civilians, using such methods as "shooting executions, knife/axe/bayonet killings, burning alive, beating to death, forced asphyxiation, forced starvation, forced drownings and random shootings."

Even the Reagan and Bush administrations kept their distance from RENAMO, despite their anti-Communist rhetoric. So reviled was the group and its president, Afonso Dhlakama, that Reagan held several face-to-face meetings with Mozambiques's president to demonstrate his support for his Marxist government!

Fein, however, eagerly signed up to flack for Dhlakama's terror army. Like most foreign lobbyists, he bilked his client for huge sums of money while performing virtually no work. Fein's chief endeavor was writing The Dhlakama Papers, a collection of the wise leader's theoretical musings, and RENAMO's constitution. The latter document is a loose plagiarism of the U.S. constitution with a few pet projects of Fein's - the death penalty and privatization - thrown in for good measure.