On the shelf next to my desk in the state Capitol you'll find dog-eared copies of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People," John Le Carre's trilogy of novels about the quest for the KGB spymaster known as Karla.
They initially ended up there because I was too lazy to haul them home after lending the books to a friend. But now I think I'll leave them on the shelf — as handy reference material.
Though set during the Cold War, Le Carre's variations on the theme of betrayal have lost none of their chill moral rigor in the post-9/11 landscape. All three concern moles, traitors planted deep within organizations by rival entities.
Last week, Albany learned that a mole had for years been working only a few steps from my office. Assemblyman Nelson Castro, D-Bronx, played a key role in the federal case that snapped shut Thursday on Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, a Democrat from the same borough, and four adult day care facility operators who allegedly bribed Stevenson in exchange for favors — including custom-tailored legislation designed to eliminate competition.
It's unclear how long Castro had been working for the authorities. It will surprise no one to learn he was motivated less by a hunger for justice than by his desire to shake loose of a July 2009 sealed indictment on perjury charges related to election fraud.
The Bronx district attorney's office offered him up to the feds for deployment. Where and against whom Castro was aimed has been the prime topic of discussion at the Capitol since his resignation from office — another condition set by his handlers — was announced hours after charges were filed against Stevenson. Castro's farewell statement said he had cooperated in other investigations; there could be enough shoes still left to drop to swamp Imelda Marcos' closet.
I wonder if the U.S. Attorney's office ever thought of flipping Democratic state Sen. Malcolm Smith, who was instead arrested on Tuesday for allegedly trying to offer cash and political favors in exchange for Republican Party leaders' support for his run for New York City mayor.
The reason why that didn't happen brings us to the real difference between the world of the Karla Trilogy and the denizens of the Capitol: Le Carre's characters are wily, calculating and immaculately gifted in the use of language. The figures sketched out in last week's federal complaints are as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks or bag of hammers.
In dialogue included in the case against Stevenson, the lawmaker and a cooperating witness natter on endlessly about the fates of fallen elected officials like Pedro Espada Jr., Joe Bruno and Alan Hevesi, who had just been released from prison.
"If half of the people up here in Albany was ever caught for what they do, (they) would probably be in the same place," Stevenson is quoted as saying — a line that I'm seriously thinking about putting on a T-shirt or bumper sticker.
The assemblyman warned a cooperating witness about the dangers of recording devices; he was speaking into one.
And what can we say about Malcolm Smith? When Democrats took the majority in the Senate in 2008, he was the guy who tried to buy off Espada and the rest of the Gang of Four with chairmanships and staff. The same sort of deal was offered to Smith by Sen. Jeff Klein of the Independent Democratic Conference after last year's elections.
The truth of the matter is that I have a better chance of becoming the first African-American Republican mayor of New York City than Smith ever did. And so do you, dear reader, no matter what race or party you identify with.
Midway through "The Honorable Schoolboy," a CIA officer explains a complication in a joint American-British effort to extract a Russian mole from China. "In our game," he tells Le Carre's bedraggled hero George Smiley, "there's two views of history: conspiracy and (screw)-up."
This is valuable wisdom in the worlds of law enforcement and politics, and many other realms. But last week's revelations suggest a third view of history, as well as current events: that much of what goes on in Albany is the product of the marriage of conspiracy and screw-up.
This hybrid is perpetrated by the people we entrust to represent us in the corridors of power, marble hallways that can begin to increasingly look like dark warrens — the preferred habitat of the mole, and of far slimier creatures.