ROI

The endless discursions on Uday Clownstick's moronic need to publicly confess his malfeasance are a distraction. Per usual, Charles Pierce has the correct angle on this. It is about nothing more nor less than a fake tycoon whose value is mostly trapped in the distressed properties his daddy snapped up in the '70s, when NYC was a crime-ridden shit-hole, but is mostly cash-poor.

And none of the banks down the street from him would lend to him anymore, because he'd fucked them over every goddamned time. So he had to turn to Ze Germans for his project capital, and the bratva for operating cash. You have to give the Russians some credit here -- they played the long game, the 1000:1 one-trick pony that should have been turned into glue and dog food before the turn of the millennium, and it paid off, bigly.

Uday's meeting just scratches the dismal surface; the iceberg that awaits below the waterline is so much greater. Mueller's investigation is about to go full-tilt up this sleazy crime family's collective asshole, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people. I love reading that minions such as Michael Caputo are literally having to pawn off their children's futures in order to cover their legal bills. Sleep with dogs, wake with fleas, and all that. Serves him right; Caputo sold his soul only to find out that his dark lord left him to twist in the legal gibbet.

The reckoning is coming, slowly but inexorably, and a hard rain is about to fall. These are all fucking vile people who have betrayed their country, top to bottom, and they should pay the price. I don't need to see them up against a wall; it would be perfectly satisfying to see them selling oranges at the freeway off-ramp for the rest of their scuttling cockroach lives. Let them live out their lives with the eternal blemish of their sins.