JIM GERAGHTY: Eric Adams Indictment a Window into Pernicious Foreign Bribery Operations.
The name “Samuel Dickstein” really ought to be more widely remembered and loathed:
Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City who served in the House of Representatives from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s, conducted himself in public life with none of the refined elegance that his self-presentation suggested. . . .
So over-the-top as to be ineffectual — he had the poor taste to call for Noel Coward to be barred from the country because the English wit made a quip about the manliness of Brooklyn soldiers — Dickstein left Congress in 1946, and served as a state Supreme Court justice until his death in 1954. In 1963, a portion of the street grid close to where he used to live on East Broadway was christened “Samuel Dickstein Plaza.” No controversy attended the occasion. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten.
That is, until 1999, when Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev published The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — the Stalin Era, which through the use of previously unavailable KGB records went a long way toward convincing those who could be convinced that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were in fact working for the Soviet Union. The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook. . . .
According to Weinstein and Vassiliev, Dickstein had earned a total of $12,000 during his time on the Soviet payroll, about $200,000 when adjusted for inflation. [Emphasis added.]
(I just want to point out that if I had a corrupt representative working for the Russians with the codename “Crook” in one of my novels, readers would complain it was a little too on the nose.)
At a recent speech while accepting an award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the legendary George Will observed, “The way you lower the temperature of politics is to lower the stakes of politics.” Similarly, if you want fewer opportunities for foreign corruption, reduce the size, power, and personnel in government. A big, sprawling government, whether it’s federal, state, or local, with Byzantine regulations and lots of staffers who can do favors or ensure paperwork gets approved, creates lots of motive, means, and opportunity for bribery and illicit favors.
Read the whole thing. As Milton Friedman once said, “It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.”
Related: “Where the hell does Eric Adams live?” We Staked Out Eric Adams’s House in Brooklyn.