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If the season ended today by Jason Kirk Here's the best guess as to how the six big New Year's bowls would look. The top four in the rankings go to the Rose and Sugar semifinals, with No. 1 getting its closer site. Conference ties determine the Orange. The top non-power-conference team is guaranteed a spot. And the committee matches up the other three games according to geography and appeal. Peach No. 8 Michigan State vs. No. 23 East Carolina Fiesta No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 7 TCU Orange No. 6 Alabama vs. No. 21 Clemson Cotton No. 9 Kansas State vs. No. 10 Notre Dame Rose No. 2 Florida State vs. No. 3 Auburn Sugar No. 1 Mississippi State vs. No. 4 Ole Miss
Let's get to some obvious questions.
FSU might finish 10-2?
One of the most interesting parts of last week's ACC projections was the slack FSU does not get moving forward.
FSU has crept back into the F/+ top 10 and is still getting slight dings for Winston missing the Clemson game and for Oklahoma State's J.W. Walsh getting injured right after the FSU game. So all of the Seminoles' win probabilities are probably slightly low because of that. [...] A lot of our assumptions, however, are premised around the helmet FSU wears. If Clemson were 7-0 with a few close wins, we wouldn't trust that the Tigers would continue to win. If Louisville or BC were in this position, we really wouldn't trust it. Because FSU won the national title last year, and because we recognize so many star-caliber names on the two-deep, we perhaps justifiably assume the 'Noles will be just fine. I know I do.
With road games remaining against two good teams, the win projections weren't incredibly kind to FSU last week. And with Miami's dominant win over Virginia Tech pushing the Canes to 16th overall in the F/+ rankings, FSU's odds aren't any better this week. I don't think you'll find too many people willing to bet on FSU losing to both Louisville and Miami in the coming weeks, but the numbers are pointing out that it's at least a possibility.
Nebraska and Duke? What?
Nebraska has crept up to 13th in the F/+ rankings. The Huskers don't have much to offer beyond Ameer Abdullah's rushing yards, but that alone has gotten them into the top 30 of Off. F/+. Meanwhile, the defense is up to 13th thanks to a lack of true weaknesses and an occasionally great pass defense.
Here's the Huskers' remaining conference slate: Purdue (64th), at Wisconsin (29th), Minnesota (42nd) and at Iowa (49th). The trip to Madison looks a lot tougher after the Badgers' total dominance of Maryland last week, but F/+ still really likes Nebraska.
It also really likes Duke, though that's more a function of schedule than quality. The Blue Devils do rank a relatively healthy 28th overall, but that's not exactly the level of a national title contender.
But here's their remaining schedule: at Pittsburgh (38th), at Syracuse (76th), Virginia Tech (30th), North Carolina (59th and rising) and Wake Forest (89th). Pitt is occasionally great and occasionally awful -- the proverbial crazy guy in the fight, capable of ripping off 300 rushing yards or seven fumbles in a single game -- which makes that game a bit of an unknown. Survive Pitt, however, and Duke will be favored in each remaining season game, perhaps by a decent margin. That would put them in position to potentially steal a Playoff bid with an upset of FSU. And while the Blue Devils have to leap a ton of teams for this shot, remember the "we'll place extra value in conference titles" committee proclamation.
(That Duke-FSU upset obviously isn't likely. Just consider yourself warned that "Duke could make the Final Four!!!" might become a story line we actually discuss in about five weeks ... as long as the crazy guy in the fight doesn't take the Devils down this weekend, anyway.)
How does the committee react going forward?
This is a huge question.
More intrigued by next week's @CFBPlayoff rankings than tonight's, because we'll get to see how rankings react to top-10 game. — Brian Fremeau (@bcfremeau) October 28, 2014
No.3 and No.4 play one another this weekend. No.5 is definitely better than the loser of that game. - Poll Logic. Not sure about committee. — Brian Fremeau (@bcfremeau) October 29, 2014
The first iteration of this top 25 was good about giving heft to good wins, avoiding giving extra weight to recent losses, et cetera. But does it simply end up reacting to results like a poll would moving forward? It's easy to look at those probabilities above and figure out how things might shake down overall -- Oregon nabbing a top-3 spot, TCU putting itself in excellent position for the top 4, and whatnot. But now we get to see how the committee reacts to specific wins and losses in real time.
Win probabilities by week
Looking at the above list, we see that the 11-1 cutoff comes roughly at No. 16 Ohio State. After that come either teams that are all but guaranteed to lose once or twice more (Utah) or teams that already have two losses. Let's look at the upcoming slate for the top 16 teams and Duke. If you're looking for where a team might trip up, here's where you should start.
Feel afraid
F/+ sees three teams with a very good chance of losing this week: No. 2 Florida State at No. 25 Louisville, No. 3 Auburn at No. 4 Ole Miss, and No. 12 Arizona at No. 22 UCLA. If any or all of these teams survive their tricky road trips, expect their win probabilities to jump rather dramatically next week.
For Auburn, which still faces trips to Georgia in Week 12 and Alabama in Week 14, a win is imperative. One could see a 10-2 SEC West team nabbing that No. 4 spot in certain circumstances, but nobody's reaching the Playoff at 9-3. An Auburn team that beats Ole Miss and goes 1-1 against UGA and Alabama will have an interesting case.
Meanwhile, at 12th, Arizona has no margin for error whatsoever. The Wildcats are taking on an incredibly volatile UCLA team, one that has proven capable of drubbing a good team on the road (ASU), then losing two straight at home. An Arizona win would give the Wildcats two lovely road wins for the résumé (they beat Oregon earlier in the year) and would clear the path for a bit of an elimination game at Arizona State in Week 14.
Feel pretty nervous
Three teams have win probabilities between 50 and 70 percent this week: No. 4 Ole Miss (hosting No. 3 Auburn), No. 7 TCU (traveling to No. 20 West Virginia), and No. 24 Duke (heading to Pittsburgh). All three have games they'd win two of three times, but that basically means if they roll a 5 or 6 on a die, they lose. Those aren't comfortable odds, and there's only about a 29 percent chance that all three win.
Feel okay about looking ahead
The other nine teams with Week 10 games are looking pretty safe. No. 14 Arizona State has a tough game against No. 17 Utah but is still given a three-in-four chance of winning. No. 5 Oregon (Stanford) and No. 10 Notre Dame (at Navy) aren't completely out of the woods, but they're relatively likely to survive.
On deck
Ohio State, Kansas State, Baylor, and Notre Dame all have pretty safe games this week, but Week 11 will be huge for them. The Buckeyes head to East Lansing for an enormous game against Michigan State, Kansas State goes to Fort Worth for an elimination game of sorts with TCU, Baylor plays at Oklahoma, and Notre Dame plays at Arizona State in a well-timed, interesting, non-conference (for ASU) battle. I'd say Week 11 is a big one, but they're all big now.
Title games
There is, of course, a missing piece in the tables above: for teams in the SEC, Pac-12, Big Ten, and ACC, there might also be a conference title game involved. It's still a bit messy to get that involved in the tables, but here are odds for what could be some of the more relevant potential championship games.
SEC
No. 1 Mississippi State vs. No. 11 Georgia: MSU 70 percent.
No. 3 Auburn vs. No. 11 Georgia: Auburn 75 percent.
No. 4 Ole Miss vs. No. 11 Georgia: Ole Miss 76 percent.
No. 6 Alabama vs. No. 11 Georgia: Alabama 74 percent.
Each of the West's four potential 11-1 or 12-0 champions would have about a three-in-four chance of beating a Georgia team that is improving rapidly (and could cut those odds in the coming weeks). And of course, Georgia itself could be in position to nab a Playoff bid come December 6. This could easily become a win-and-you're-in game for both teams.
Pac-12
No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 12 Arizona: Oregon 81 percent.
No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 14 Arizona State: Oregon 75 percent.
No. 5 Oregon vs. No. 17 Utah: Oregon 86 percent.
Yes, Oregon has an 81 percent chance of beating Arizona, a team to which the Ducks have already lost at home this year. Advanced stats care not for previous head-to-heads, and the Ducks have improved their standing quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.
Big Ten
No. 8 Michigan State vs. No. 15 Nebraska: MSU 58 percent.
No. 15 Nebraska vs. No. 16 Ohio State: Ohio State 60 percent.
I don't think I can call Nebraska a legitimate contender here until I see the Huskers leave Madison with a win. But from a statistical standpoint, they're a lot more legitimate than we're giving them credit for being at the moment. They have a very strong chance of winning the Big Ten right now.
ACC
No. 2 Florida State vs. No. 24 Duke: FSU 74 percent.
No. 21 Clemson vs. No. 24 Duke: Clemson 75 percent.
Basically, Duke has a 33.6 percent chance of getting to 11-1 and about an eight percent chance of getting to 12-1.
***
FSU's odds are indeed probably a bit better than what you see above, once you take injuries and suspensions into account. Still, using the ratings as they exist above, you might be able to conclude that the most likely Playoff scenario at this point* might be something like this:
No. 1 SEC Champion (12-1)
No. 2 Oregon (12-1)
No. 3 TCU (11-1)
No. 4 ???
That No. 4 spot could go to a 12-1 Florida State (depending on how far the 'Noles would fall with a loss at Louisville or Miami), a 12-1 Big Ten champion (if Michigan State wins out, the Spartans are probably well-positioned for the spot, but Ohio State and Nebraska might need help), or a second SEC West team, one that is probably 10-2. We'll learn more, both about the teams themselves and the committee's reaction to big games, in the coming weeks.
* Note that the "most likely" scenario isn't particularly likely. There are hundreds of scenarios still on the table.
This is a tale of New Jersey politics. So it is only fitting that it begins — as it will end — in a courtroom. It is the spring of 1978, and a boy wants to sue the government. Charles A. Poekel Jr., a suburban attorney, is staring across his desk at his client, a Livingston High School junior who’s trying to run for a minor office but has been disqualified because he can’t vote. The 16-year-old sits next to his parents, but he does most of the talking. He knows the names of all the county bosses and town committeemen. Poekel understands impatient ambition — he ran for Congress himself at the age of 28. But he’s never met anyone like this boy, David Wildstein.
“It is very unusual that someone of that age would be that all-consumed with politics,” Poekel recalls many years later. “It was like having a child prodigy as a musician, but he was a child prodigy as a politician. I would call him a political Mozart.”
Wildstein takes his case to court. He makes the local TV news, the Times, and the front page of the Livingston weekly paper, the West Essex Tribune, which has been covering his activities since middle school. (It straightforwardly reported his defection from the Democrats to the Republicans at the age of 12.) When the judge rejects his request, the boy remains defiant. “I am in no way over the hill,” he declares, “and can assure the voters of Livingston that they have only just begun to see the name of David Wildstein.”
Video: A Brief History of “Bridgegate”
Back at Livingston High, Wildstein is considered an oddball. He is chubby, with glasses, and a strident conservative. Wildstein doesn’t fit into any of the school’s cliques, but he hangs around the margins of the baseball team. He is a baseball nerd — loves the strategy, the way the game can be broken down into numbers — and acts as team statistician. Livingston is a championship contender, and the players are popular. Everyone loves the catcher, who is the president of the class a year behind Wildstein’s, a beefy jock with a shaggy haircut named Chris Christie.
That May, as Wildstein is trying to run for office, Christie makes the paper for socking a home run into a neighboring swimming pool. Christie’s middle-class family lives in a modest brick home on the other side of town from the Wildsteins, who own a successful manufacturing business and live across the street from the estate of Tom Kean, soon to be New Jersey’s governor. But Wildstein and Christie do cross paths, working together as volunteers on one of Kean’s campaigns and taking a road trip to a rally in Trenton. They are friendly, but then Christie is that way with everyone. He wears his ambition as amiably as a varsity jacket.
Wildstein’s ambition fits him awkwardly, like a grown-up suit a few sizes too large. When he’s a senior, he runs a write-in campaign for the school board on a platform of cracking down on drug use and vandalism. He submits endorsement letters to the local paper from fellow students and his social-studies teacher. The teacher promptly accuses Wildstein of “political manipulation,” claiming he was tricked into signing a letter he hadn’t written. Though they later issue a joint statement, saying the matter was “basically a misunderstanding,” Wildstein still finishes with just 37 votes.
Christopher Christie, class of 1980. Photo: Courtesy of the Livingston Public Library, NJ
So now it’s 1984. Ronald Reagan is running for reelection, “Born in the USA” is piping out of every radio, and Christie is graduating from the University of Delaware, where he ran the student government and met his future wife, Mary Pat Foster. Wildstein has returned home from Washington, D.C., where he attended college and worked as a congressional aide. He has been managing campaigns for Jersey politicians, including a state senator named Louis Bassano. In an era before ubiquitous computers, Wildstein pores over reams of precinct-level voting results, looking for angles. (“He would spend hours and hours and hours,” Bassano recalls. “I would walk into the office and there he is, looking over the figures, making notes, making notes.”) Wildstein has an obsession with New Jersey political lore, loves the old stories of clubhouse skulduggery.
When Wildstein says he plans to run for office himself, Bassano thinks it’s a bad idea — the kid has got tactical talent but a backroom personality. Wildstein proves him wrong, winning a seat on Livingston’s town council. Two years later, amid a racially tinged uproar over affordable housing, the Republicans win a majority on the council and elect Wildstein to the rotating position of mayor. He is just 25.
“He was quite a phenom,” says Chuck Hardwick, the Speaker of the New Jersey state assembly at the time, for whom Wildstein worked as an adviser. “The talk then was that he was going to be the first Jewish president of the United States.”
But Wildstein is preoccupied with being king of Livingston. “We used to call him the Wild Man,” says his former high-school classmate Leonard Sorge. “He had some wild ideas.” The post of mayor is a part-time position with little power, but he is always at town hall, meddling with the bureaucrats. He shows up early to monitor what time they come to work. Teachers at the high school think he visits an inordinate amount, chumming around with the kids in Key Club, for which he is an adviser.
“He was into everything, he wanted to know everything, and he had something to say about everything,” says Pat Sebold, a longtime Democratic officeholder from Livingston. “He was a major disaster.”
Visiting the high school, Wildstein allegedly tells a group of students that a certain township policeman is “a bad apple.” The cop sues him for defamation. The mayor verbally attacks a municipal judge, claiming that he “continues to take the side of criminals” because he released a pair of shoplifting suspects from Brooklyn. The judge’s admirers are outraged. “I look forward to the time when Livingston will again have a mayor who puts the township first and his own political ambitions second,” Todd Christie — Chris’s younger brother — writes to the Tribune.
Toward the end of his term, Wildstein organizes a coup against the Republican councilman who is supposed to rotate into the mayor’s office next. The councilman accuses him of “terror politics” and trickery. “David’s ploy must be criticized on two counts,” he tells the public. “Most importantly, it was wrong. Secondly, the scheme was doomed to backfire from the start.” That September, facing dim prospects, Wildstein announces that he is dropping his bid for reelection. Democrats retake the Livingston council, which remains in their control to this day.
“A lot of people say that it stays Democrat because of David,” Bassano says. “He would probably have done the party a lot more justice if he had stuck to electing other people.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in New Jersey, Chris Christie goes through a debacle of his own: a term on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders full of mudslinging, infighting, and litigation, culminating in an ignominious last-place finish in his reelection bid. By the end of the 1990s, both Christie and Wildstein appear to be finished in electoral politics. Christie, an attorney, is back in private practice, working as a lobbyist. Wildstein is running his family’s company, Apache Mills, a leading manufacturer of doormats.
Christie and Wildstein share a laugh, during the third day of Fort Lee’s traffic gridlock.
On February 1, 2000, a crudely designed website appears on the internet, run by a person who goes by the name Wally Edge. The real Edge was a newspaper publisher, two-time Jersey governor, and tool of the Atlantic City machine of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration of the Prohibition-era series Boardwalk Empire. The pseudonymous Edge is a purveyor of political gossip. It is actually Wildstein, hiding behind a characteristically obscure historical reference. The same personal attributes that were liabilities to him as a politician — his obsessiveness, his lack of tact, his fascination with personal conflict — prove to be well suited to the internet. The word blogging doesn’t yet exist, but that is what he aims to do, offering readers a mix of score-settling rumors, lobbyist chatter, trial balloons, and arcane trivia.
For the next decade, the true identity of Wally Edge is the subject of much speculation in political circles, but few guess it’s David Wildstein. He’s gotten married and moved to the town of Montville, where he lives in a brick McMansion on two wooded acres. He has been selling floor coverings and doing a little political consulting on the side. One of the politicians he has stayed in contact with is Bob Franks, who represented Livingston in the state assembly during Wildstein’s mayoral tenure. Franks is a brilliant strategist who mentored many operatives. By 2000, Franks is a congressman running a long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate. In its early days, Wildstein’s site, PoliticsNJ, seems to exist, at least partly, to promote Franks’s candidacy. His regular column, “The Inside Edge,” defends Franks from his primary rivals’ attacks, suggesting they worked out a corrupt bargain to coordinate against him.
Wildstein’s agenda, though, proves to be larger than advancing any one candidate. In a posted mission statement, he says the site “means to inject our views into the political arena.” His biases, he admits, are personal: “We have favorites just like you, and there are some New Jersey pols we really dislike.” Wally Edge’s favorites include three operatives from the Franks campaign: Mike DuHaime, Bill Stepien, and Bill Baroni. All three will go on to become major players in New Jersey politics and key figures in the Chris Christie administration.
Wally Edge is not overtly partisan, though. As they say in baseball, he is a fan of the game. He disdains those he deems phonies and appreciates operators. (“Among those of us who pay inordinate attention to politics in New Jersey, Wally Edge had an unusual seat at the table,” says Robert Torricelli, the Democratic power broker known as “the Torch,” who was a U.S. senator at the time. “I always liked him because I was always one of his favorites.”) Wildstein would sometimes describe his audience as “people who get the joke.” The joke is that, beneath all the theatrics of ideology, politics is about people competing for status. In that sense — and in many others — our institutions of government are not so different from high school.
Chris Christie has found a new calling, too. He spends the 2000 campaign raising money and working as a lawyer for George W. Bush, drawing Wally Edge’s ire when he appears to be cooperating with one of Franks’s primary opponents. But then Bush appoints Christie to be a U.S. Attorney, and he begins to arrest public officeholders for corruption. In New Jersey, criminal investigations are considered to be politics by other means — that’s another part of the joke — and Wildstein is quick to appreciate how cannily Christie is positioning himself. In 2002, the website names him its “Politician of the Year.” It constantly touts his prospects for higher office, attaching “corruption-busting” before every mention of his name.
And there is so much corruption to bust! Christie obtains an indictment for Essex County executive James Treffinger, one of Franks’s old GOP-primary opponents, and has him handcuffed in front of his family home. PoliticsNJ is credited with the scoop and revels in Treffinger’s downfall. After he pleads guilty, the site publishes a Photoshopped picture of the politician in prison stripes. Christie later arrests developer Charles Kushner, a major Democratic contributor, who ultimately pleads guilty to making illegal campaign contributions and retaliating against a witness, his brother-in-law, by luring him into a videotaped encounter with a prostitute. (PoliticsNJ refers to him as a “budding filmmaker.”) Whenever Wally Edge finds out that Christie is investigating someone — as he frequently does, somehow — he writes that the target is “hearing the cellos,” a reference to the Jaws theme.
In 2004, Governor Jim McGreevey, a Democrat, starts hearing the cellos. An FBI informant has caught him on tape uttering “Machiavelli,” which is allegedly a code word signaling his complicity in an illegal fund-raising scheme. The governor hastily resigns, explaining that he is a “gay American” and has been carrying on an affair with a former aide. (PoliticsNJ has been dropping hints about the aide and his “unique skill set” for years.) Republican leaders then try to draft Christie to run for governor, and Edge has an authoritative description of Christie’s thinking as he considers, and then rejects, the opportunity. Christie will always deny leaking, but he definitely appreciates the site’s influence. Long after Wildstein has stopped blogging, Christie still calls him “Wally.”
Wally Edge has more power than David Wildstein ever did. Communicating almost exclusively by AOL Instant Messenger, Wildstein maintains a web of informants inside both parties. Over the years, PoliticsNJ evolves into a real news organization. The site hires a small staff of professional reporters, none of whom know their boss’s true identity. Wildstein turns out to be a good judge of talent. One of the website’s first hires is Steve Kornacki, who goes on to become a political analyst on MSNBC.
Wildstein has dreams of expanding his model into every state, but the site can never generate much revenue from its few ads. In 2007, he decides to sell the site to someone who can invest. An unlikely buyer materializes: Jared Kushner, Charles’s 26-year-old son. Wally Edge announces the sale with his own invocation of Machiavelli: “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.”
Wildstein’s email presented during hearings on the lane closures. Photo: Mel Evans/AP Photo
The Kushner family is also from Livingston. Charles’s reputation may be tarnished, but Jared has a plan to expand their influence by buying media properties, first in New York (he already owns the New York Observer) and now back home in New Jersey. Wildstein agrees to sell on two conditions: He wants to remain anonymous, and he wants to keep possession of Wally Edge’s AOL email account, which contains much information that might interest the Kushners. (“The repository of secrets that David collected is like nothing I’d ever seen,” says Jordan Lieberman, who managed the business side of PoliticsNJ for years.) Kushner agrees. He tells his employees at the Observer that they could learn something about digital media from Wally Edge, whom he admiringly calls “a wild man.” Wildstein swoons for Kushner, decides he is another prodigy. He ends up attending Kushner’s wedding to Ivanka Trump.
Kushner puts Wildstein in charge of building a national network, and they hire staff in 17 states. But it turns out statehouse gossip is hard to produce at scale. After the 2008 election and the real-estate crash, Kushner decides to abandon the project and lays off most of the staff. Wildstein goes back to running the New Jersey site. The 2009 governor’s race is coming up, and Kushner has a very personal interest in that, because Christie is on the ballot.
Kushner harbors a deep antipathy toward the prosecutor who locked up his father, and Wildstein knows how his new boss wants the race to be covered. “In 2009,” says a former Observer employee, “the site exists to destroy Chris Christie.” When Christie wins, though, the governor is forgiving: He has a job for Wally Edge. He needs an agent at the Port Authority. When Wildstein defects, sources say, the Kushners are furious. Someone leaks Edge’s true identity to the Newark Star-Ledger.
The near-universal reaction among the insiders he covered is: David who? But Wildstein is known to people who matter, especially Mike DuHaime, now Christie’s chief political strategist. Wildstein’s new post, at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, comes with a huge salary, by government standards, and the specially created title of director of interstate capital projects. It quickly becomes evident that Wildstein is not there to build bridges.
“Wildstein has been waiting his whole life to get into a massive government bureaucracy,” says a former colleague, “with all kinds of nooks and crannies and levers.”
Why would Christie want to turn David Wildstein into a power broker? The Port Authority may look like a boring bureaucracy, but it’s really a self-propelled patronage machine. Every time you cross the Hudson River, or land at one of the region’s airports, or swipe a MetroCard at the World Trade Center transit hub, a coin rings in the Port Authority’s coffers. It has a 1,700-member police force, an army of engineers and lawyers, and the capacity to spend billions of dollars on construction projects. The governors of New York and New Jersey jointly control the authority, and the two sides clash eternally. The New Jersey faction is convinced that it is being cheated out of its fair share of the budget.
Wildstein’s direct boss at the authority is Baroni, his close friend from the Franks campaign, but Wildstein is seen as Christie’s inside man. (“He came directly — like a missile — out of the governor’s office,” says a former Port Authority executive.) Wildstein meets frequently with Christie’s advisers, DuHaime and the other Franks-campaign veteran Stepien, and more occasionally with the governor himself.
“When David Wildstein walked into a room, it was clear that Chris Christie was represented,” says Torricelli, who dealt with the Port Authority as an attorney for an auto-importing facility that had a lease dispute with the agency. “I thought they had rather direct communication.”
Wildstein can imagine many creative ways to put the machinery of the Port Authority to use. (Stepien will later allegedly tell the governor that Wildstein came up with “50 crazy ideas a week.”) And because the Port Authority is an independent agency, Christie can maintain a deniable distance. When the Port Authority needs to raise tolls, Wildstein and Baroni come up with an elaborate ruse to make it look like Christie is heroically fighting the bureaucracy. When the city of Bayonne is about to go bankrupt, they orchestrate a land deal that bails it out, removing the burden from Christie.
Inside the authority, Wildstein makes it plain that he is watching out for the governor’s interests. The civil servants who work at the authority are accustomed to some political interference, but Wildstein’s conduct shocks them. (“It was extreme,” says a former port official. “Full intimidation: ‘I’m Christie’s guy. I rule.’ ”) Co-workers report that Wildstein is seen poking around the office before dawn. He shows up at meetings he isn’t invited to and begins tapping notes on his tablet. In an email to an aide, Scott Rechler, a powerful board member from New York, references the widespread concern that Wildstein may be eavesdropping on phone conversations.
Wildstein clashes with the authority’s professional department heads and conspires to purge low-level employees, replacing them with his own people, who are assumed to be spies. His powers reach into every area: port operations, the airports, the police. There is a rumor that he uses an emergency-access lane to cut the line every morning at the Lincoln Tunnel. One day, during a routine tour of the George Washington Bridge, he notices a set of orange cones are blocking off three toll lanes, offering direct access to drivers approaching the bridge from neighboring Fort Lee. He is annoyed and wants to know why the town appears to have its own entryway. The bridge’s manager tells him there is a long-standing deal with the mayor. Wildstein apparently files the observation away.
By 2013, everyone in Christie’s orbit is working toward one objective: the White House. He is going to run, for sure, and the only question is whether Republicans are ready for a blunt-spoken, sometimes rude northeastern populist with a flair for social media. Christie first has to get past his reelection campaign in New Jersey, but that’s just a formality. He’s so popular that the Democrats only put up a token opponent. In order to demonstrate his centrist appeal, though, Christie’s strategists want to run up the score by winning endorsements from as many Democratic officeholders as possible.
The endorsement push is coordinated by Stepien, Christie’s campaign manager, and Bridget Kelly, a state official who runs the governor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. (The two are also quietly dating.) The governor’s allies at the Port Authority are key players in their strategy. Drawing on a list of targeted mayors, Baroni raids a JFK hangar filled with debris from the Twin Towers and distributes pieces of steel to towns around New Jersey for use in memorials. He and Wildstein conduct so many VIP tours of ground zero that they demand — and receive — a new entry gate for their convenience.
The courtship is not subtle: Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, later recounts that when Wildstein offered his family a tour, he repeatedly referred to Sokolich as “the one I was told to be nice to.” But after hemming and hawing, the mayor eventually makes it clear to Kelly’s office that he’s not going to back the governor. Soon after, in what prosecutors will describe as an act of political reprisal, Wildstein and Kelly start discussing a scheme. On August 12, 2013, Kelly checks with her staff one final time to make sure they won’t win Sokolich over. Early the next morning, she sends Wildstein a terse email.

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