He needed the sentence.

Because when a mid-sized facilities firm is trying to get onto a teaming arrangement with a large prime, and the prime’s business development director is deciding between four subcontractors who all cut grass adequately, a bulleted line about direct relationships at the contracting officer level and a chairman who mentions, in the right tone, at the right moment, that his wife is in the business — that is worth something.

It is worth, on the government’s own reconstruction, somewhere between six and nine million dollars of subcontract revenue over three years, and it cannot be proved to a dollar, and nobody ever tried.

The investigator who eventually walked me through it — a special agent from the inspector general’s office named Marisol Tejeda — put it to me in a way I have repeated since.

She said: “He wasn’t selling your access.

He was renting your name and never telling you the property was on the market.”