You’ve been reading a lot about Governor Spitzer’s nemesis Roger Stone around here lately. He’s very good at getting in the papers.

It does seem, though, that the guy who worked for everyone from Nixon to GWB is playing a smaller room than he used to

The crew slowly materializes. Stone’s lawyer and webmaster are available by phone. Miss Money-penny, Stone’s Australian-born assistant nicknamed after M’s secretary in the James Bond films, arrives to sort out the tax filings and artwork. A piercing horn sounds from across the bay, as a solar-paneled tugboat flying a peace flag and blasting Grateful Dead music anchors within 100 yards of Stone’s house. The captain, in a white skipper’s hat, disembarks, paddling his kayak the rest of the way ashore. It’s August West, Stone’s frequent co-conspirator, pseudonymously named after a character in the Grateful Dead song "Wharf Rat."

While casually attired in Key-West-wear (a dancing-bears Grateful Dead T-shirt and swimsuit), West has picked up some of Stone’s attention to sartorial detail. He switches his skipper’s hat for a straw number modeled after the one worn by Darren McGavin in the ’70s show Kolchak: The Night Stalker. "Wear a captain’s hat on land," West says, "and you look like a dork." Having started as Stone’s driver back during Stone’s days as a D.C. political consultant, West has gone on to do crisis communications work for everyone from the contras, to the party linked to the Salvadoran death squads ("not my proudest moment," he admits), to the Afghan freedom fighters ("getting Ladies’ Home Journal editors to ride camels through the Khyber Pass," he says, his dignity restored).

He, like Stone, has engineered a slew of 527s, the organizations named after the tax code section of the same number. In these puritanical McCain-Feingold-stricken times, such groups (from MoveOn.org to the anti-John Kerry Swiftboaters for Truth) have rapidly come to resemble the Wild-West outlaws of political speech. They are allowed to solicit unlimited contributions and practice all manner of often thinly veiled "issue education," so long as they don’t explicitly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate.

"It’s the last vestige of political free speech rights in this country," Stone says, bitterly and defiantly. "Money is speech," the First-Amendment absolutist rails. "It’s incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It’s absurd."

Despite the constant meddling of campaign-finance-reform busybodies, there is a certain liberation that comes with staying out of political campaigns proper and running your own 527. "A 527 doesn’t have a wife," Stone explains. "It doesn’t have a brother-in-law who knows a lot about politics, or a union president who calls and doesn’t like the color of the suit, or bimbo eruptions. It’s the perfect candidate, because it has no personal characteristics."

Both Stone and West are mostly mum, at least on the record, about the 527s they’ve run, saying they handle everything from agricultural interests, to "marking up" industry opponents (driving their negatives), to keeping slots out of racetracks, to getting slots into racetracks (the 527 racket is not the province of moral absolutists). When I ask why all the secrecy, and why I have to refer to West by an alias out of the Grateful Dead’s songbook, West responds, "Each one has a small reason why we can’t talk. There’s not a thematic reason."

Roger’s doing OK – he got a big chunk of native american gaming lobbying business as payback for leveraging his wife’s cuban-american family connections in service of the Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami that held up the count long enough for the court to stop it (he was allowed to help Abramoff staff the Bureau of Indian Affairs).

It’s kind of small potatoes for Stone, though – he was a big man in Dole’s campaign until his extracurricular activities sidelined him

Stone’s time-bomb tendencies brought a major life-change for him in 1996, effectively ending his career in mainstream presidential politics. While Stone was serving as an unpaid adviser to Bob Dole, the tabloids got hold of photos of Stone and his second wife, Nydia, striking come-hither poses in swinger’s ads, putting out the call for bedroom playmates with exacting specifications: "no smokers or fats please."

His denials were adamant, his alibis elaborate. There was lots of talk about disgruntled employees and frame-ups and credit-card fraud. When I bring this up to Stone, he looks pained. He says the revelations really hurt his wife, which is what bothers him the most. As for the alibis, he shrugs, "I did the best with what I had–which wasn’t much."

This is the kind of stuff he does admit to

The thing it’s important to remember, though, is that what he isn’t is competing for big money jobs.

There are tens of millions of dollars in presidential races, and he’s not touching them (sounds a bit peevish about it, doesn’t he?). I doubt it’s because of an ancient sex scandal.

 I suspect it’s because you can’t afford to get a paper cut in a feeding frenzy, and his nice friends who share his values ate him.

Karma’s a bitch, neh?

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