Billmon: 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.