Leave the gun, take the cannoli

 When I decided it was time to read myself into the mind of Vladimir Putin, I started with a book by Garry Kasparov, the great chess champion who had the guts to run against Putin. Kasparov, in turn, began his book by referring me to Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Before you turn to Macchiavelli, he said, if you want to know Putin, read The Godfather.
 I never had, but I immediately did. And I find it has local application as well.
 And so I was not surprised at the following section of an interview Heather Voegell of Pro Publica and Andrea Bernstein of WNYC conducted on the New York radio station with Andrew McCabe. He was the acting FBI chief, after Jim Comey, whom Jeff Sessions rubbed out, I mean "fired," 26 hours before his pension would have kicked in.

   McCabe: You know, it’s a method of operation that I’d seen many times before in my own investigative history working in Russian organized crime. The leader of the crew, the leader of an organized criminal enterprise doesn’t come out and tell someone what to do. They throw it out as an option that they want that other person to select. And so that

way after the fact they can say: “Oh, I was just doing what they asked me to do. I wasn’t forcing them to pay me $100 a week to protect their furniture store. I simply gave him the option to do that, and he selected it for himself.”

So it’s a kind of a subtle, passive-aggressive kind of bullying that comes with an unspoken threat. That’s very effective. I mean, organized criminal enterprises have been doing that for as long as organized crime enterprises have existed. And so that’s what it felt like in the Oval Office that day as I was being kind of progressively backed into the corner to state the words that they wanted to hear me state.

Bernstein: Just to follow up with that, Jim Comey in his book references La Cosa Nostra. He also says the way that the president operated reminded him of the way the mob operated. But what are you guys saying here?

McCabe: It’s impossible to interact with the president and the administration without drawing that comparison. If you’re somebody who comes from an investigative background, somebody like Jim Comey or myself or anybody else who’s had experience with organized crime, the parallels are undeniable. The parallels in the way business is conducted, the way conversations proceed, the way you are asked for personal loyalty rather than loyalty to the oath that you’ve taken, the way that everything is analyzed on this kind of black-and-white paradox: you’re either with us or you’re against us, or either on our team and a part of this effort or you are somebody that we need to destroy. It’s just such an obvious comparison. I’m not trying to undermine Jim Comey or myself, but it is an undeniable parallel between the way this president conducts himself and those around him support him and conduct themselves and the things that we have seen from organized crime groups.

The whole interview is interesting. So is following the sneaky twists and nasty turns of the Donfather with the classic crime novel as background.