Always the Dollars

"It took months for everything to calm down, but finally my guys got out on bail and the bosses wanted me to send my brother Dominick out to Vegas. With them it was always the dollars, always the fuckin' dollars."

Nicky Santoro
Casino
1995

There's been a fair amount of speculation about why the Republican House leadership studiously looked the other way when it was brought to their attention that Mark Foley had a page problem, with most concluding it was because the GOP was anxious to hold his Florida seat, and didn't want to oust a popular incumbent. Andrew Sullivan:

If Hastert didn't know, he should have . . . My guess (and I do not know for sure) is that he chose not to know, because he needed a seat in Florida.

There's obviously something to this. If you believe the undead corpse of Bob Novak (who should know) House Republican campaign chief Tom Reynolds personally persuaded Foley to run again this year after word spread that he was thinking of callling it quits.

But saying the bosses were worried about losing Foley's seat gets the emphasis very wrong. It wasn't the seat the machine was trying to protect, much less Mark Foley personally, but Foley's cash horde -- and his future income-generating potential.

Foley's district is a reasonably reliable GOP district, even in a year like this one is shaping up to be. Certainly, it wouldn't have been hard last year to recruit a Republican candidate who could defend it. If Foley's replacement, Florida state rep Joe Negron, could get his own name on the ballot, instead of having to ask the GOP faithful to cast their ballots for a virtual child molester, I think you'd still have to rate this race as leans Republican.

But it would have been much harder to replace the $3 million that Foley collected, but never used, for his abortive 2004 Senate campaign. Since 1993, retiring House incumbents haven't been able to take their left-over campaign funds with them (the golden parachute that caused so many Democratic incumbents to call it quits in 1992). But they can donate them to "charity" or just hang on to them for a future race. If Foley had quit, there was no guarantee he wouldn't have used his hard-earned bribes to finance the Mark Foley Center for the Internet Instruction of Underage Students, or horded them for a possible Senate race somewhere down the road.

More to the point, it would have deprived the bosses of Foley's demonstrated earning power. The man from Palm Beach was, to use the corporate parlance, a cash cow, in the sense that he consistently raised more money than he needed for his own races, and passed the surplus along to the party:

As head of the NRCC, Reynolds' job is to find as much money as possible to fund as many House races as possible. Foley played a key supporting role for Reynolds as the GOP's bridge to Hollywood - a part he took over after the death of his friend, Rep. Sonny Bono, R-Calif. (1995-98).

If you're Tom Reynolds, you not only want a guy like that to stick around, you want to make sure he stays sweet -- even if it means turning a semi-blind eye to his "overly friendly" ways with the pages. The last thing you want is an ugly confrontation over his sex habits.

Always the dollars. Always the fuckin' dollars.

Having spent the past eight years working for a sales organization, I can kind of understand the culture, if that's the right word. The big producers, as we call them, are the aristocrats of our little corporate world -- fawned over, courted, feted, invited to meet with the CEO and the Chairman. Until the big scandals hit in 2001/02, there was an unstated but generally understood convention that the right hand didn't look too hard at what the left hand was doing -- as long as the left hand kept its numbers up. That applied double or triple for the big producers, who, as a group (the top 100) account for a third or more of our gross revenues.

Given that a big producer can walk, at any moment, to one of our competitors, and the fact that most of our executives were themselves big producers who got promoted (the typical pattern in our industry) the incentives for management to take a hard line with misbehavior traditionally have been, shall we say, somewhat lacking. And we were far -- very far -- from being the slackest firm on the street.

Of course, things changed in a hurry after Eliot Spitzer and (finally) the SEC started breathing down people's necks -- just as things changed in a hurry for Nicky Santoro right after he said the line quoted at the top of this post. (And if you saw the movie, you know it wasn't a change for the better.) As far as I can tell, our guys are being watched pretty closely now, although I haven't seen any of the big producers actually take a fall. Maybe they were clean. I don't know. Foley, of course, wasn't.

The lesson to take away, I think, is that our Chamber of People's Deputies isn't really that much different from a '70s mobbed up casino, and not at all different from a brokerage firm at the height of the '90s bull market. Money brings power and power brings the ability to get more money, which brings the ability to get more power.

A couple of days ago I said the Foley scandal was about the power, stupid. But that also may have put the wrong emphasis on it. It's still the economy, stupid -- although not in quite the way Clinton and company meant it.

Always the dollars. Always the fucking dollars.