His own worst enemy

Roger Stone’s downfall is the logical conclusion of continuing to act like Roger Stone.

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He has a brand: truculent and unjustified self-confidence, meandering trash-talking, and a penchant for lashing out at perceived enemies. These things make him a reliable eye-catcher.

But these same qualities make Stone and people like him easy targets for a ruthless prosecutor. The indictment depicts Stone acting in private more or less the way he acts in public.

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The indictment charges that Stone eagerly pitched himself to the Trump campaign as the man with connections to WikiLeaks (thinly disguised as “Organization 1” in the document); that he vigorously mined his network to suggest questions for WikiLeaks to answer, amid a media blitz in which he touted upcoming leaks about Trump's Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.

  The Atlantic

Is that an accurate reading? I thought I read somewhere that Trump's campaign went to him asking for assistance. Either way...

The common theme of Stone’s compulsive texts and emails to Corsi, Credico, and the Trump campaign was not just an appetite for dirt on Clinton, but Stone’s own relentless self-promotion. It appears he was successful in getting the attention he wanted—the indictment reveals that a “high-ranking Trump Campaign official” sent Stone a text message reading “well done” after WikiLeaks released stolen Clinton campaign emails in October 2016. [...] Stone idolizes Nixon and aspires to dirty tricks—this, too, is part of his brand. It may not have occurred to him to do anything but lie.

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The indictment says that Stone quoted Richard Nixon: “Stone wall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan.” Stone, according to the indictment, also invoked The Godfather: Part II, telling Credico to do a “Frank Pentangeli,” referencing a character who tells Congress he knows nothing of Michael Corleone and then kills himself in prison. Perhaps Stone hoped that Credico hadn’t watched the whole movie. Eventually, Stone allegedly turned to abuse and threats, calling Credico a rat and a stoolie, threatening to take his dog away, and telling him to “prepare to die,” the indictment said. Stone did all of this in writing because—again—Roger Stone can’t stop being Roger Stone. Credico, for his part, repeatedly advised Stone to smarten up, stop perjuring himself, and tell the truth. When Randy Credico is the most sensible person in your indictment, you’ve fallen upon hard times.

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The indictment says that Stone quoted Richard Nixon: “Stone wall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan.” Stone, according to the indictment, also invoked The Godfather: Part II, telling Credico to do a “Frank Pentangeli,” referencing a character who tells Congress he knows nothing of Michael Corleone and then kills himself in prison. Perhaps Stone hoped that Credico hadn’t watched the whole movie. Eventually, Stone allegedly turned to abuse and threats, calling Credico a rat and a stoolie, threatening to take his dog away, and telling him to “prepare to die,” the indictment said. Stone did all of this in writing because—again—Roger Stone can’t stop being Roger Stone. Credico, for his part, repeatedly advised Stone to smarten up, stop perjuring himself, and tell the truth. When Randy Credico is the most sensible person in your indictment, you’ve fallen upon hard times.

And that's understandable, since they think themselves incredibly smart. But even more importantly, Roger Stone (and Donald Trump and Paul Manafort) have gotten away with slime, threats, lies and crimes all their lives.

A white-collar-criminal defense attorney’s hardest job often is persuading clients to shut up. Their clients see themselves as Masters of the Universe and have and have enjoyed great success by being dynamic, decisive, and persuasive. They have a hard time accepting that the very volubility that got them where they are can send them to federal prison. [...] Lawyers used to have to make 15-year-old references to Martha Stewart’s conviction to wheedle clients into a prudent silence. In the age of Mueller, they can just point to the front page of nearly any newspaper.

And behind the actions of all the players, there's the Russian mob (and the American and/or Italian mobs) that so many of them are in some way connected to.

Trump’s invocation of the Mafia’s code of honor and omertà has been noted by many writers.

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No less an expert than Nicholas Pileggi has explained how Trump’s vocabulary often echoes the idiom of the Brooklyn mob. Trump himself has called his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat” for agreeing to cooperate with Mueller, and has praised his campaign chief Paul Manafort’s initial refusal to “break” as worthy of “such respect for a brave man!” Trump’s recent claims that Cohen is cooperating with Mueller to mask shady dealings by his father-in-law smack of a classic don’s intimidation tactics.

  The Atlantic

And it's also quite rich, since Trump is probably connected to the same shady people Cohen's father-in-law is connected to.  I'd bet that if you dig into the father-in-law's dealings, you'd find Donald Trump.

And like a spate of next-generation mobsters in the US in the late 20th century, Stone is a fool. Too interested in self-promotion, bragging and threatening in plain sight.

Stone’s language as recounted in Mueller’s latest indictment is striking. “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan,” Stone texted Credico in November 2017, according to the indictment. By last spring, Stone had escalated his tone sharply. “You are a rat,” he emailed Credico. “A stoolie. You backstab your friends—run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds.” In the next sentence, Stone threatened to “take that dog away from you,” referring to Credico’s emotional support dog, a tiny white Coton de Tulear named Bianca.

“I am so ready,” Stone added. “Let’s get it on. Prepare to die …”

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If a horse’s head turns up in somebody’s satin sheets, should anybody still be surprised?

Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss of the Gambino organized-crime family, is a mass murderer (19 bodies, maybe more, across his distinguished career), and also the most consequential turncoat in the history of organized crime. Gravano, whom I came to know while covering the Mob in the 1990s, had many thoughts about respect and loyalty, which he shared with me in a number of conversations.

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I have not seen Gravano in a very long time—he has spent most of the past two decades in prison, after having failed to hide his drug-distribution business from his federal monitors—but my thoughts turned to him [in August 2018], when I read President Donald Trump’s tweet on the subject of loyalty and respect. The president, who is obviously perturbed by the felony conviction of his former campaign chair Paul Manafort and the plea deal taken by his former attorney Michael Cohen, wrote the following: “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’”—a cutting reference to the Justice Department, which he oversees as the leader of the executive branch—“took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ - make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”

What we see in this astonishing tweet is an implicit endorsement by the president of the United States of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, which has been honored, especially over the past 30 years or so, more in theory than in practice.

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“It’s called ‘flipping’ and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump said. “I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years, I have been watching flippers. Everything is wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is or as high as you can go.”

In these statements, Trump displays contempt for the rule of law, and honors criminals who refuse to cooperate with law enforcement. He’s doing nothing less than elevating gangster ideology to the status of high principle. He’s also evincing a gauzy and archaic understanding of the nature of gangsterism. I heard, in his statements, echoes of many conversations I had while trying to understand the culture of organized crime.

A former Gambino Family soldier named Dominick Montiglio told me once, in explaining his decision to turn against the Mob, that “those guys who can stand up to the government, I respect them a lot. Nobody does this anymore. It’s too hard.” (Montiglio was Scorcese-level insightful in explaining the attractions of the organized-crime lifestyle: “When I was in the life, it was great. I mean, we got respect. I got in once at Studio 54 ahead of Burt Reynolds. That’s what we were attracted to, the glitz. It doesn’t exist anymore … The new generation ruined it.”)

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“I got a lot of respect for the guys who don’t break under the pressure, the FBI pressure, or whatever,” Gravano said. “This is the government we're talking about. They can do a lot to you in terms of pressure, but I didn’t do this for the deal, believe me. Okay? I did this because John was a double-crosser. He double-crossed me. So I double-double-crossed him. I'm the master double-crosser. He got his. He thought he was playing chess. No fucking way he was playing chess.”

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“There's no scruples anymore,” Gravano said. “No respect for rules and regulations. The Godfather has respect in it, but that doesn’t exist anymore … You think there’s respect? Some guys have balls—the real gangsters—they respect the rules we have, they’ll do the time. But most of these guys? No respect.”

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As Gravano told me, by way of illustrating his influence, “I literally controlled Manhattan, literally. You want concrete poured in Manhattan? That was me. Tishman, Donald Trump, all these guys—they couldn't build a building without me.”

  The Atlantic

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.