The Private Eye grew up with the Neighboring Mayor, kids from the same hood, who did everything together, legal and illegal, best of friends through the rough years, including the Neighboring Mayor’s rise to power.
The Private Eye was in the Neighboring Mayor’s inner circle, along with another hood buddy named Woodchuck Phil, who were privy to all the mayor’s dirty little secrets, helping him to get and keep power.
The three of them made a tight little circle into which nobody else was welcome.
The mayor loved the private detective, but merely felt sorry for Phil, yet kept both of them close – perhaps, too close.
Not everybody felt comfortable around Phil or dealing with the mayor while Phil was around.
Phil was bossy and tended to take over things when the mayor was not around, and insisting people go through him to get to the mayor.
As loyal as Phil was, he alienated some of the other mayor’s key people, many of whom urged the mayor to sever ties with him. Phil tended to push himself into every conversation and sometimes edged otherwise loyal people out.
Phil served a number of low-level roles, such body guard and driver, but because the mayor loved him, he tolerated some of Phil’s misbehavior, hoping the steady jobs would keep Phil out of serious trouble.
The mayor even kept Phil around when Phil became the target of political propaganda, as the mayor’s enemies pointed out Phil’s violent past and drug conviction.
This is some of the stuff the Private Detective fed us later, hoping our boss and our writer would use Phil to get at the mayor. RR also apparently wanted her to pursue some of this.
Phil was straight out of the first Godfather movie, a dim but loyal soldier who liked the fact that he had someone like the mayor to protect. He was a chain-smoking tough guy whose temper often got him into scrapes, even among some of the mayor’s other loyalists.
For a time, Phil got along with another tough guy, Hector, who did most of the money work, but many other of the mayor’s crowd didn’t trust – mostly because Hector did business with the State Senator which everybody saw as the mayor’s sworn enemy. some believe the Senator eventually bought Hector off with a job in the county sheriff’s department – as the Senator managed to do with many of the others disillusioned with the mayor or Phil.
Hector became the Private Eye’s chief sources of information about what went on in the mayor’s inner circle and felt confident Hector would eventually become the instrument by which the Private Eye (and his employer the Senator) could eventually bring the mayor down.
If there was corruption to be found, the Private Eye was convinced Hector would lead him to it.
“Phil was always with the mayor and the mayor used Phil to send messages,” said the PR person for the congressman, claiming that the mayor frequently used Phil to lean on people got get political contributions.
Others on the county level believe the mayor is basically honest, and that Phil frequently acted on his own.
“The mayor doesn’t tolerate corruption among his people,” another political consultant told me and claimed Phil operated as a free agent, doing things in the mayor’s name that the mayor did not know about, sometimes well-meaning, other times with his own agenda, leaning on business people for bribes that may or may not eventually made their way to the mayor’s charity.
As pointed out earlier, the Private Eye’s falling out with the mayor came when the mayor picked someone else to become police chief instead of appointing the Private Eye.
A very competent investigator, the Private Eye had used his skills and his friendship with the mayor to rise rapidly through the police ranks without taking any of the required testing, a fact that made him more than a few enemies among the rank and file in the department. What he wanted most was to become the police chief and fully expected the mayor to get that for him – at which point he ran into a road block when the police chief he hoped to replace was a black man, and this black chief went to the NAACP to block being replaced.
The mayor tried to appease the Private Eye by appointing him deputy chief and even gave him a separate office in the Department of Public Works so as to be out from the scrutiny of the black police chief and gave the Private Eye a salary that was the highest in the state for that position.
It was not enough.
The Private Eye opened a private investigation agency and focused his whole attention in bringing down the black police chief and on getting his vengeance on the mayor.
It was not difficult to bring down the police chief, since he was moonlighting full time as the head of a corporate security firm and could not explain how he could be doing both jobs full time.
The mayor, rather than firing the chief, allowed him to retire – with an outrageous pension, the Private Eye brought out.
Around this time, she started to cover the scene for our office, although it was our boss who broke the story a month earlier (with information fed to her by the Private Eye).
But it was she (our writer) who followed up with a serious of stories that made the Private Eye look like an avenging angel and continued to get information from him to continue the attacks on the mayor for most of the following year.
Both RR and the Private Eye both used her for their own ends, feeding her enough information to satisfy their personal agendas.
Then, Phil got caught by the feds taking a bribe from a local auto dealer, which the auto dealer had tape recorded, and then took the tape to the feds.
The Private Eye knows about the tape and is desperate to use it to try and connect the mayor to it.
But two events occurred. The Feds took Phil into a witness protection program, and she quit her job with us, leaving him only access to our boss, who for some reason isn’t willing to run with the story without a lot more documentation.
The indictment when it finally came down didn’t even mention Phil by name – although the feds did raid city hall, removing a number of records with which Phil was associated.
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