Jack Abramoff was born on February 28, 1959 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, into a Jewish family. His parents were Jane (nee Divac) and Franklin Abramoff, who was president of the Franchises unit of Diners Club credit card company. Abramoff's family moved to Beverly Hills, California, when he was ten (in 1968). After seeing the film version of Fiddler on the Roof at age twelve, Abramoff decided to practice Orthodox Judaism.

At the CRNC, Abramoff developed political alliances with College Republican chapter presidents across the nation. Many would later hold key roles in state and national politics and business, and some would later interact with Abramoff in his role as a lobbyist. Some of those relationships were at the core of the federal investigation.  At the CRNC, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed formed what was known as the "Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate". After Abramoff's election, the trio purged "dissidents" and re-wrote the CRNC's bylaws to consolidate their control over the organization. According to Easton's Gang of Five, Reed was the "hatchet man" and "carried out Abramoff-Norquist orders with ruthless efficiency, not bothering to hide his fingerprints".  In 1983, the CRNC passed a resolution condemning "deliberate planted propaganda by the KGB and Soviet proxy forces" against the government of South Africa, at a time when the country's government was under worldwide criticism for its apartheid regime.  In 1984, Abramoff and other College Republicans formed the "USA Foundation", a non-partisan tax-exempt organization which held two days of rallies on college campuses around the United States celebrating the first anniversary of the invasion of Grenada. In a letter to campus Republican leaders, Abramoff claimed:  While the Student Liberation Day Coalition is nonpartisan and intended only for educational purposes, I don't need to tell you how important this project is to our efforts as [College Republicans]. I am confident that an impartial study of the contrasts between the Carter/Mondale failure in Iran and the Reagan victory in Grenada will be most enlightening to voters 12 days before the general election.

Who else did he develop alliances with ?