"...leased themselves some senators...."

     "It's very simple, Fran," he said in the long blue early evening gentling the cocktail hour in mid-springtime in the sunporch of the house on Pilot Hill.  "It's what I've tried to tell you about so many times before.  The long and the short of it is that this guy's out to get me and also take down along with me all the businessmen and homeowners we've got that he can lay his hands on.  And his boss wants to help him do it.  And his boss's boss's egging him on - they've all got their tails in the same crack.  After what happened in the Southwest when Charlie Keating, then the Texans, went to Washington and leased themselves some senators to scuttle auditors for them.  Treasury got blown out, may be a hundred forty billion.  And they got blamed for it.  They're a posse now.  They've got blood in their eyes.  So as a result they're taking it out on people like us, poor bastards we are.  We're trophy-heads for them, to prove to the whole world that the FDIC is on the job.  Hurrah, hurrah; we can all sleep better tonight.  Unless yours's one of the fresh scalps they plan to take, show around and demonstrate they've finally shaped up."
-George V. Higgins, Swan Boats at Four, 1995