The forensic team turned over everything they had compiled, and it was, I was told, unusually complete — the kind of record that leaves very little room for a story.

Damian held out for a while.

Men like him believe, nearly to the end, that there is an angle, a technicality, a deal that cleverness can still produce.

But the figures did not care how clever he was, and the federal contracts meant the matter was never going to quietly disappear.

In the end, facing evidence he could not argue with, he pleaded guilty rather than let a courtroom hear the whole of it read aloud, and he was sentenced to a term in a federal facility and ordered to make financial restitution he would spend years repaying.

The restitution mattered to me more than the prison term, if I am honest, because the restitution was the part that actually went back to the people it had been taken from.