http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/18/drugs/In his journal-writing over the next few months, Gosinski would alternately complain about Cindy McCain and express concern for her well-being.
In January 1993, McCain fired Gosinski. She told him that AVMT was having financial problems and couldn't afford him.
Gosinski had already come to suspect that Cindy McCain had gotten volunteer doctors with AVMT to sign prescriptions for her, and had used employees' names to fill them. Worried his own name had been used (he would eventually learn that it had), Gosinski approached DEA agents in the spring of 1993 to report McCain's suspicious behavior. The DEA launched an investigation.
Almost a year later, with the statute of limitations about to run out, Gosinski hired a labor attorney and sued Cindy McCain for wrongful termination. He intended to claim that she fired him because she suspected he knew about her addiction, but the lawsuit never got that far. Instead, Gosinski's attorney wrote to the McCains, asking for a settlement of $250,000.
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The entire story would likely have gone unreported if attorney John Dowd hadn't entered the picture. He wrote to Maricopa County attorney Richard Romley, a political ally of McCain, and asked him to investigate Gosinski for extortion.
"We believe that Mr. Gosinski is aware that in the past Cindy had an addiction to prescription painkillers ... Given Cindy's public position, exposure of this sensitive matter would harm her reputation, career, the operation of AVMT, and subject her to contempt and ridicule," Dowd wrote on April 28, 1994.
Thus began the inadvertent outing of Cindy McCain. Although the federal investigative materials were not public, the county investigative materials were. Romley launched an investigation, and one of the first things his people did, naturally, was ask the feds to turn over their investigative materials.
Among the questions asked: Did Cindy McCain get preferential treatment by the feds? True, Cindy was a first-time offender, which partially explains the fact that she did no prison time; instead, she entered a diversion program. But at the time, defense lawyers told New Times that if Cindy McCain had been a poor minority and not married to a U.S. senator, she likely would have been locked up.
Did Gosinski intend to blackmail Cindy McCain? He told New Times he didn't. Other AVMT employees told county investigators that he did. But the time line makes extortion hard to believe, since Gosinski had already gone to the DEA before he brought his lawsuit against the McCains.
In any case, Tom Gosinski didn't out Cindy McCain. John Dowd did, and then Jay Smith was called in for the clean-up.