You might have thought Kim Seung-youn had everything a business titan could want. He sat atop his family's multibillion-dollar Hanwha Group, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates, running an empire of chemical, finance and energy firms and a chain of resorts. He had his own baseball team, the Hanwha Eagles, and loved to sip soju, a fiery libation, as he and his employees watched them play. But apparently one thing was missing: international prestige. So Kim turned to Republican heavyweight Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Ed Buckham, in early 2001 to develop what Buckham's lobbying firm described as a "work...
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