Within Hours of George Bush's May 3, 2007, announcement that he was naming Charles Millard head of the $64 billion Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), Rick Lazio got an e-mail about it from a fellow JPMorgan Chase executive.

"Assume you know Charlie Millard," wrote Tom Block, the bank's top in-house lobbyist, attaching the White House press release.

"I do know him well," Lazio replied.

Lazio would boast in subsequent internal Morgan e-mails obtained by the Voice that he was "very friendly with the head of PBGC."

How friendly? Lazio and Millard would soon start down the path of a near-billion-dollar deal that eventually ensnarled both in multiple federal probes that looked into their apparent efforts to game a government bidding process, as well as subsequent attempts by Lazio to get Millard a job.

This is the story of that stunning deal, Lazio's biggest score at Morgan, which earned him a $1.3 million bonus in 2008 and another $300,000 in the first four months of 2009, in addition to a combined $585,000 salary.

These details of Lazio's exercise in insider influence are emerging just as his gubernatorial campaign boasts that he's the man who should be elected to clean up Albany. The key facts about his conduct crawl from his own computer in an e-mail trail that reaches as high as America's number one banker, Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who was drawn in as Lazio pushed to win Morgan a lucrative contract that would put retiree benefits into risky investments.

No one will be prosecuted for this chummy dealing, because neither the quid (the allocation of the $900 million Millard awarded Lazio's firm) nor the quo (Lazio's efforts to get Millard a job) came to fruition, nipped in the bud by investigations that began almost as soon as the deal began to come together, leaving prosecutors with nothing more than compelling proof of intent. But a botched scam can be a blessing in disguise, as the electronic fingerprints of these two clumsy conspirators prove beyond a click of a doubt.

It is one thing that all of this risk was worth it to Millard, who will never be heard from again in public life.

It is quite another that a would-be governor, hungry for a deal and a bonus, cared so little.