Whom do you trust?

Dan Moldea, an investigative reporter for Larry Flynt, claims that he is "shopping around" a story about "major Democratic leader" being "mobbed up."

If the tale is true, then -- as the saying goes -- let justice be done though the heavens fall, and never mind who belongs to which party. Even so...

I do not trust Dan Moldea. I like some of his works (especially Dark Victory), but I can't say that he is on my "most trusted" list.

I know from a first-hand source -- whom I will name, if legally pressed -- that Dan Moldea had privately complained that the major publishers had "blackballed" him after he wrote a book called Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. The blackballing stopped the moment he agreed to write a book about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination pushing the "lone nut" hypothesis.

For more on that work, read Jim DiEugenio's brief review here.

As for Larry Flynt: He has fallen for this sort of thing before.

Few people know that when Flynt went through -- well, let's call it his "wacky" period (wearing flag-colored diapers to court and so forth) -- the day-to-day operations of his business had largely fallen under the control of a man I call Gordon N. Gordo, as some researchers refer to him, had acquired Flynt's confidence by peddling video tapes which allegedly showed Vicki Morgan using a strap-on to have kinky sex with Ronald Reagan. Although the tapes did and may still exist (Frank Zappa, of all people, saw them and described them on the radio), Gordo later told confidants that they were produced with lookalikes.

I no longer have the article, due to the loss of my files, but in a Vanity Fair piece from the 1980s, Flynt referred to Gordo as his "chief of everything," or words to that effect. As Gordo and Mitch WerBell (another sweetie-pie of a guy) became entwined with Flynt's operation, the publisher's public behavior became stranger and stranger.

I am not claiming that anyone spiked Larry Flynt's milk and cookies. I'm simply saying that, before he entered his let's-wear-diapers-into-court phase, Flynt had advertised his willingness to fund investigations into the JFK assassination.

WerBell died in 1983, and Gordo went off to pursue other "career opportunities" many years ago. For much of his life, he claimed to be a detective. He has spent decades searching for the secret of anti-gravity. No, really.

So now Flynt has Dan Moldea, who helped expose Vitter's connection to the DC Madam's escort service. That coup gives Moldea "street cred." He'll be impossible to dismiss as a partisan hack when he delivers a devastating blow to the Dems just in time for the 2008 elections.

(By the way, Oliver Stone produced three movies in succession -- JFK, Nixon, and the People Vs. Larry Flynt -- in which he took great care not to mention a certain "novel" individual. I'd like to see Stone make a film about the Cotton Club affair. Maybe he could drop the name of the fellow who, according to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, hired Bill Mentzer to work for Flynt's security detail...)