To live with the constant threat of personal peril requires a healthy dose of denial. Manafort behaves as if he believes everything will eventually fall in his favor, that problems will inevitably resolve themselves. When the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska accused him of stealing $20 million in 2011, Manafort simply didn’t respond to the aluminum magnate’s calls or emails for several years, according to a lawsuit filed by Deripaska earlier this year. Instead of trying to assuage Deripaska, who carries such a fierce reputation that the U.S. has denied him a visa, Manafort acted as if his pursuer didn’t exist. It wasn’t an entirely foolish bet. When Manafort eventually joined up with the Trump in 2016, he sent emails to Deripaska via an emissary promising him privileged access to the campaign, perhaps providing a tidy moment to settle their old differences. (Deripaska denies having seen the emails and denies any recent contact with Manafort.)

This pattern of flagrance runs through his biography. We can see this in his daughter Andrea’s hacked text messages, posted on the dark web by activists irate at Manafort’s meddling in their country. When his family caught him in affair in 2015, he promised to end his infidelity. Yet the fact that his daughter had nabbed him once before, and that his marriage very nearly collapsed, didn’t preclude him from continuing the dalliance. (Inevitably, his daughters busted him again several months later.) And it was this sense of impunity that permitted him to join up with the Trump campaign in the first place, even though his friends warned him that a career of dodgy dealing would ultimately catch up with him and doom him.

As Manafort pushed forward with these risks, he always had Rick Gates by his side. Gates had come up through the ranks of Manafort’s firm, starting as an intern. One of Manafort’s former colleagues told me that he could never allow his protégés to grow into their own: “He always saw us as the young people he hired.” Most of his deputies I spoke with would come to resent being treated as such junior partners, always assigned arduous and relatively menial tasks. They would eventually leave Manafort’s fold, many of them quite bitterly. But Gates tended to his boss with unusual devotion and patience. Mueller’s most recent indictment shows the extreme measures that Gates would take to protect him. According to the indictment, if Manafort asked Gates to concoct a phony letter for a bank to procure a fraudulent loan, Gates wouldn’t blink. According to the indictment, he fabricated one tale about how he had borrowed Manafort’s card and run up a $300,000 bill without paying back the balance, in order to explain away the overdue debt. Gates kept taking personal risks on behalf of his risk-happy mentor.

They were in the mud together for years—and when their alleged misdeeds were finally exposed by Mueller, Manafort could reasonably have convinced himself that Gates would remain loyal to the end. But now Gates has peeled away from his father figure, and that couldn’t be any worse for Manafort.