◆ SpookStack

for example, of the "sheik" scenario, complete with yacht, airplane, private hotel suites and other trappings of wealth, and to secretly record the resulting bribe transactions. a Middlemen are a necessary part of the ovérall investigative effort, for a corrupt politician would be most unlikely to respond directly to a stranger's bribe overtures. More likely, he would prefer to work through a “bag man" or at least through someone in whom he has confidence, generated perhaps by past personal experience in similar matters. In these Abscam cases, the government presented no independent evidence of any prior arrangements between these middlemen and the defendant congressmen. The govern- ment did have, however, confident assurances by the middlemen that they had the contacts and that they could and would produce congressmen ready to take bribes. With these defen-. dants, those assurances must have been based on something more than mere hope, be it actual knowledge, past experience, or whatever. But on whatever the middlemen~relied, it | | obviously combined with ready corruptibility on the part — ‘ of the defendants. The agents had no. duty to independently verify . the middlemen's claims of access to corrupt congressmen; simply waiting to see what happened was verification suffi- cient -to provide reliability. In some cases the middlemen's