Remember Foley?

Vanity Fair has just published the Mark Foley piece. The article indicates that Dennis Hastert engineered a cover-up. Although the authors do not accuse Hastert of sharing Foley's weakness for les boys, the Speaker's actions make a lot of sense if we keep in mind his unusual domestic arrangements. Have I ever mentioned them...?

Oh. It seems that I have.

The most interesting passages concern Foley's descent into corruption. Why and how did he, as a young man, fall in with a Savings and Loan wheeler-dealer?

At the time Foley was close to a very well-known man, Roy Talmo, the chairman of First American Bank and Trust in Lake Worth. Talmo, like Father Mercieca, was a powerful man, more than 20 years older, who lavished attention on Foley. "Mark was known as one of 'Roy's boys' in his 20s," says a friend of Talmo's. "Roy was the go-to guy in this county for whatever you needed, either financial or political," says André Fladell, a well-connected chiropractor in Delray Beach. Talmo put young Foley on the board of his bank, which became the largest stockholder in Cenvill Development Corporation, builder of Century Village, a chain of the biggest retirement communities in southeast Florida. Talmo's bank went under during the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 80s, and Cenvill went bankrupt. But not before Talmo reportedly put Mark in a number of high-stakes real-estate deals and taught him the art of the quick flip. Foley's most spectacular land shuffle was in 1986, when Talmo lent him $2.45 million to buy an abandoned golf course to turn around and sell to the school district for $2.91 million. In a matter of hours, Foley walked away with nearly a half-million dollars.

"He polished that handle so care-fullee..." So to speak. (Do a little Googling on Talmo and you'll come up with some very suggestive items -- for example, here and here and here.)

I should have mentioned earlier that Mark did his sexual compulsion rehab work not at a Scientology clinic in Florida (as originally reported) but at the Sierra Tucson clinic in Arizona. This page claims that former clients of the clinic have included Julie Andrews, Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Martin Lawrence and Patrick Swayze. Julie Andrews...? Seems our "Mary" was poppin'...