In just two decades, this Hong Kong family has built a business empire there encompassing an airline, a sea freight line, a large fishing fleet, a newspaper and ventures in insurance, logistics and many other sectors. It is an empire whose prosperity has been maintained through an intricate web of money-fueled connections to powerful figures in the United States.

Family companies Tan Holdings and Luen Thai Holdings are together the leading players in the island's two main industries, garment production and tourism, as well as Saipan's biggest employer and taxpayer.

The Tans' success in the Pacific, 3,400 kilometers east of Hong Kong, flows from Saipan's status as what amounts to a special economic zone of the United States. Goods manufactured on Saipan and fellow members of the Commonwealth of the Northern Ma-riana Islands (CNMI), as US territories, can be sent to the US mainland free of tariffs and quotas. At the same time, the commonwealth has autonomy over its immigration, customs, taxes and minimum wage levels.

The Tans exploit this duality by importing thousands of young women from China and other Asian countries to work in their factories and hotels at starting wages 40 percent below the US federal level. The Chinese women sew Chinese-made cloth into "Made in USA'' clothes for Polo Ralph Lauren, Liz Claiborne and other top brands. Luen Thai produced 26.7 million knit shirts and other items of clothing on Saipan last year.

It's a cozy, profitable arrangement which the Tans have been keen to protect from meddlesome mainland US officials and legislators. Over the last decade, the Tan family and their companies have spent at least US$200,000 (HK$1.6 million) on lobbying and contributions to Washington political campaigns.

More significantly, the commonwealth government and Saipan business associations invested more than US$11.5 million between 1995 and 2002 to lobby in Washington against changes to the islands' status.

This lobbying effort, directed by conservative Republican Jack Abramoff, is now the focus of intense scrutiny in the United States. Since last year, the FBI, the Justice Department, a Senate committee and other agencies have been investigating alleged improprieties in Abramoff's lobbying on behalf of several Native American tribes.

Attention has turned towards Saipan. The Republican chairman of the House Resources Committee last month asked the Justice Department to look into possible criminal acts committed while Abramoff represented Saipan, including an alleged failure to fully account for fees received and interference in the election of the speaker of the commonwealth legislature.

Much of Abramoff's power stemmed from his close ties to Texas Republican Tom DeLay who, as majority leader, is the second most powerful member of the US House of Representatives. Through Abramoff, Willie Tan, who directs the family's ventures in Saipan, also became buddies with DeLay.

The simmering scandals in Wash-ington have cost Abramoff his job at a lobbyist law firm. He is now the target of a grand jury investigation concerning his tribal lobbying and was indicted this week on unrelated fraud charges in Florida. DeLay is under mounting pressure to resign.

Henry Tan, who as chief executive of Luen Thai and vice-chairman of Tan Holdings heads up the Hong Kong side of the family empire, declined repeated requests for an interview to discuss the Abramoff controversy.

For the Tans, the lobbying and donations were effective. Repeated moves by the Clinton administration and congressmen to change Saipan's status floundered. Luen Thai turned a profit of US$30.4 million in 2004 as its core operation remained in Saipan sewing clothes for the US market.

Tan Siu-lin, father of Henry, William and four other children, moved the brood from Hong Kong to Guam in 1972 to venture into shipping, real estate and movie distribution. The family business headquarters moved to nearby Saipan in 1983 after the elder Tan opened a sweater factory.

It was the island's first clothing factory and was followed by dozens of others opened by the Tans and companies from South Korea, Taiwan and China. Workers from the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand and other Asian nations poured in and quickly outnumbered native residents.

US labor inspectors eventually came poking around. In 1991, the US Labor Department sued six Tan companies for paying 1,350 mainly Chinese workers less than Saipan's minimum wage and forcing them to work up to 90 hours a week without overtime pay.

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) levied more than US$240,000 in fines against the six Tan companies the next year for violations including locking and block-ing fire doors and other unsanitary and hazardous conditions in the factories and dormitories such as lack of ventilation, filthy toilets and overcrowding. Though regulations required 100 square feet of living space per worker, in-spectors found six people sharing a 190-square-foot room.

In the wake of the overtime complaint, clothing giant Levi Strauss conducted its own check on the Tans' labor practices, then broke off its purchasing from them. US retailer The Gap halted further orders.

The Tans eventually settled the overtime suit without admitting wrongdoing by agreeing to pay the workers US$9 million. They settled the health and safety charges by pledging US$1.3 million in renovations and paying a US$76,000 penalty.

Saipan's sojourn in the Washington spotlight had just begun. In 1992, George Miller, a Democratic con-gressman from California and then chairman of the House Resources Committee, convened the first of several hearings to probe labor abuses on the island and consider possible changes to Saipan's legal status, such as extending the federal minimum wage or immigration controls or curtailing the privileged status of the island's exports.

The Tans and their fellow Saipan garment makers realized they needed friends in Washington. Commonwealth governor Froilan Tenorio, a Republican, hired Abramoff, who had recently joined the law firm of Preston Gates Ellis, to rally the defense.

Years spent running conservative political groups had brought Abramoff close to many newly ascendant Republican congressional leaders, especially DeLay. Abramoff augmented those friendships with campaign contributions.

He zealously took to the garment makers' cause. An Orthodox Jew, he compared proposals to alter Saipan's status to laws adopted by Nazi Germany to strip Jews of their citizenship and civil rights.

His favored tactic was organizing trips to the island for congressmen, their staff and families, conservative comm-entators and think-tank researchers. The delights of free travel to a remote, beach-fringed tropical island were an easy sell in the busy US capital. With rounds of golf, snorkeling and daiquiris thrown in, the garment makers made dozens of friends.

"There is no doubt that trips to the CNMI are one of the most effective ways to build permanent friends on [Capitol] Hill and among policy makers in Washington,'' Abramoff wrote in a 1998 strategy memo.

DeLay was Abramoff's most prominent guest. Later calling Saipan "my Galapagos Island ... a perfect petri dish of capitalism,'' DeLay spent the 1998 New Year's holiday on the island with his wife, daughter, several aides, and Abramoff.

Willie Tan hosted a dinner in DeLay's honor. .

On his return to the US mainland, a Houston Chronicle reporter queried DeLay about the wisdom of partying with Tan, given the family's regulatory troubles. He said he had "no problem at all'' with accepting Tan's hospitality.

He said that conditions in a Tan-owned dormitory he saw were a bit lacking, but added: "He's cleaning up his act if his act was unclean.''

Some time later, Tan told a human rights activist posing as a clothing buyer that DeLay had given a personal pledge to block any reform proposal. "I make the schedule of the Congress and I'm not going to put it on the schedule,'' Tan quoted DeLay in a conversation secretly taped by the activist.

The Senate unanimously passed a bill in February 2000 to extend federal immigration controls to the commonwealth. DeLay rose to the occasion, blocking the House version of the bill from ever coming to a vote.

Questions are mounting about how the guests' trips to Saipan were paid for. The Houston Chronicle reported at the time that DeLay's trip was covered by the commonwealth and the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association.

Recent investigations by Associated Press and the New York Times have uncovered documents showing that Abra-moff fronted some trip expenses for his congressional guests with his credit card.

That may have violated congress-ional rules then in force and the in-vestigations turned up an e-mail from Abramoff to a commonwealth official urging the government to repay him quickly because the House Ethics Committee was "watching the trips closely.''

Two congressmen who traveled to Saipan in January 1997 filed reports saying that a nonprofit group called the National Security Caucus Foundation sponsored their visits to the island. The former head of the foundation, which once counted Abramoff as a director, told AP that his organization didn't pay for the trips and that Preston Gates officials told him the commonwealth would initially do so and then "be reimbursed by the private sector.'' The uncovered documents show instead that Preston Gates initially covered the ex-penses.

The law firm's invoices piled up. Preston Gates reported billing the commonwealth US$1.98 million in 1997, a lobbying fee exceeded that year only by major US cigarette makers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The firm's reports may only tell part of the story. Congressman Miller pointed out in a letter addressed to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last month that commonwealth accounts show US$1.6 million more in payments to Preston Gates in 1996-2001 than Preston Gates reported receiving in its filings. A 1999 commonwealth audit found US$3.4 million of the payments made to the firm to be unlawful, as they covered services performed during periods when no contract was in place.

The firm's invoices pushed the commonwealth's budget deep into the red.

To stop the hemorrhaging, Democratic governor Pedro Tenorio curtailed Preston Gates' lobbying in late 1998. To keep Abramoff on its side, the Saipan Garment Manufacturers Association teamed with the local hotel association, the Saipan Chamber of Commerce and the CNMI Contractors Association to form the Western Pacific Economic Council. The new group paid Preston Gates US$2.4 million in 1999 and 2000.

According to public records, that was as close as the Tans got to directly funding Abramoff's lobbying. Willie Tan, however, did play a role in Abramoff's work, as documented in an e-mail sent in January 1998 by the lobbyist to Tan and two senior lieutenants, Eloy Inos and Benigno Fitial, detailing planned lobbying strategy.

"I composed this e-mail before receiving Willie's e-mail concerning the budget for the representation,'' wrote Abramoff. Later he referred to past comments by Tan about the need for extensive preparation for upcoming congressional hearings.

After the memo was leaked to the press, Abramoff told one reporter: "We don't have a relationship with Tan and we never will.''

Tan Holdings retained its own lobbyist in Washington from 1997 to 1999, a man named Ralph Nurnberger. His filings with the Senate show he billed Tan Holdings US$120,000 to lobby Congress on immigration issues, including US$20,000 for the first half of 1999 when he reported no activity on behalf of the company.

Senate records show that while maintaining his own firm, Nurnberger & Associates, Nurnberger also worked with Preston Gates on various lobbying accounts, including those of the commonwealth and the Western Pacific Economic Council.

Abramoff eventually won back his commonwealth lobbying contract after Fitial, the Tan Holdings lieutenant addressed in the strategy memo, left the company and won election to the commonwealth legislature in 1999. He emerged as the speaker after two former top DeLay aides flew to Saipan and promised two legislators they would secure federal funding for infrastructure projects in their districts.

When Abramoff left Preston Gates in late 2000 for the firm of Greenberg Traurig, he took along the commonwealth account.

In the meantime, Congress ceased to be the main battleground for the garment makers. In January 1999, a US garment workers' union and several activist groups orchestrated the filing of three lawsuits in US courts targeting the Saipan factories and their major US customers and demanding US$1 billion in damages on behalf of Saipan's foreign workers.

One group then publicized a mass food poisoning case in March involving 1,100 workers at two Tan factories.

Tan Holdings and Luen Thai re-sponded by announcing a "social responsibility'' program to upgrade treatment of their workers. In 2002, the companies agreed to chip in US$2.2 million towards a US$20 million legal settlement of the lawsuits.

Since the break with DeLay, the Tans have turned their attention to other potential Washington benefactors. Henry and Josie Tan each donated US$1,000 to George W Bush's 2000 campaign. In October 2002, two family companies on Saipan, the L&T Group and Global Manufacturing, each sent US$25,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A third, Concorde Garment Manufacturing, sent US$25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

In the run-up to last year's US federal election, Tan Siu-lin, his five sons and Josie Tan donated a total of US$13,000 to Bush. Son Jerry has also contributed US$4,000 to individual congressional campaigns. Meanwhile, former employee Fitial is gearing up to run for commonwealth governor in the fall with Tan support.

Sometimes Tan family members recorded a Hong Kong address on their donations, sometimes one in Saipan. Federal campaign regulations mandate that only US citizens or permanent residents can legally donate. Luen Thai's IPO prospectus says that Henry and brother Raymond are Chinese nationals living in Hong Kong.

DeLay, however, is speaking well of his erstwhile buddy, Willie, again. In a recent interview with a Texas newspaper, DeLay parried queries about the family's regulatory troubles in Saipan.

"Certainly, when you look at a big operation like Willie Tan has, you can find anything,'' he said. "But in general, what was going on there was legitimate and straightforward.''