for a few years. That's why he called me on Friday, March 5, the day he resigned from Congress, and invited me to start recording his nightmare. We spoke frequently throughout that weekend — he called and talked at length about what he said was a conspiracy to run him out of Congress, a conspiracy that reached all the way to the White House. At one point, he mentioned that after he had publicly denounced the House leadership, several people had urged him to run for president; he told me this at 4:40 on the afternoon of Monday, March 8, twenty minutes before his resignation became effective.

He also mentioned that he would be traveling to New York the next day for two televised interviews. I ended up accompanying him to both Glenn Beck and Larry King Live — I sat in the studio, maybe twenty feet from him, next to his wife, Beverly. On the ride back to their hotel later, I asked if I could join them at their house, in upstate New York, the next day, to see of what it's like to return home and begin life again after a hideous public downfall. "Just give me enough time to change the sheets in the guesthouse," Beverly replied with a short laugh. The result is this profile.

It is the rarest of moments to witness. Great success typically has legions to record it, but a man in utter and sudden disgrace is beyond alone. A public death is hard to watch and is seldom seen up close. My interest in spending this time with Massa was not to get to the bottom of the ugly charges against him — official investigations and civil litigation will do that better than I could. Rather, I wanted to observe, relentlessly, what happens to a man's mind when he loses his job, his reputation, and his honor in the most humiliating way. A United States congressman had resigned in a hurry, and nobody quite understood why... and now he was preparing his guesthouse for me.

And then there was the little matter of the grave conspiracy that Massa had brought to me a month earlier — an unbelievable web of treachery involving secret meetings between General David Petraeus and Dick Cheney regarding the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2012. Massa and I had had several conversations on the topic, each more urgent than the last. We booked a meeting for February at the Esquire offices in Manhattan with the assumption that we might have a blockbuster Petraeus story on our hands.

And then the news broke of the sexual harassment charges, and the ethics investigation, and then, suddenly, Massa was gone.

I stayed at his house for three days, and in the weeks that followed, he called, texted, or e-mailed me a dozen times to offer phone numbers of friends and associates who could vouch for his honor, his sanity, his reputation. But my goal was not to find out whether or not Eric Massa is good or bad; I didn't need character witnesses. My reason for driving to Corning, New York, and sitting shiva with Eric Massa in that living room with the walls closing in all day and all night was to see what it looks like when a public man suddenly, and unexpectedly, steps off a cliff.

Some standout moments from the complete story:

• On Friday, March 5, 2010, Congressman Eric Massa, whom I had known professionally for a few years, called me and said that he was preparing to announce his resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives. He had previously announced his intention not to seek reelection this fall, citing a possible recurrence of cancer. But there were also allegations that he had sexually harassed young male staff members, at least one of whom was gay. On this same phone call, he said that he had attempted suicide two nights earlier.

• The following Tuesday, Massa traveled from his home in Corning, New York, to Manhattan, for appearances on two talk shows: Glenn Beck's, for an interview that became infamous; and Larry King's, on which he appeared via satellite. I was present in the studio during both. That night, I asked if I could join the Massas at their home in Corning to interview Eric about his ordeal. He agreed without hesitation.

• Earlier in the year, long before the allegations had been made public, Massa had called me with a potentially huge story: Four retired generals — three four-stars and one three-star — had informed him, he said, that General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, had met twice in secret with former vice president Dick Cheney. In those meetings, the generals said, Cheney had attempted to recruit Petraeus to run for president as a Republican in 2012.

• The generals had told him, and Massa had agreed, that if someone didn't act immediately to reveal this plot, American constitutional democracy itself was at risk. Massa and I had had several conversation on the topic, each more urgent than the last. He had gone to the Pentagon, he told me, demanding answers. He knew the powerful forces that he was dealing with, he told me. They'd stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out, he said, including destroying him. "I told the official, 'If I have to get up at a committee hearing and go public with this, it will cause the mother of all shitstorms and your life will be hell. So I need a meeting. Now.'"

• Massa eventually came to the Esquire offices in New York to tell us the Petraeus story. He spoke with the bluster and hyperbole I had seen in him at stump speeches, but he had credibility on this matter — twenty-four years of active service in the Navy, a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, and an increasing voice in the media as a Democrat who would speak with authority about military issues. Still, when he called the possibility that Petraeus could beat Obama in an election a "coup" and "treason," the characterization seemed odd. "If what I've been told is true — and I believe it is," he told myself and two colleagues, "General David Petraeus, a commander with soldiers deployed in two theaters of war, has had multiple meetings with Dick Cheney, the former vice-president of the United States, to discuss Petraeus's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And in fact, that's more than a constitutional crisis. That's treason."

• After he resigned from Congress and made his two uncomfortable TV appearances, I arrived at his home in Corning on the evening of Wednesday, March 10 and stayed till late Friday. For almost the entire visit, we sat in his living room or at the kitchen table, and he talked — about conspiracy ("the political overthrow of the commander in chief"), about cancer ("It was an entity, it was thing. You can't fight what's happening now."), about his two college-age children, and mostly about the shocking number of his friends and colleagues who had decided to betray him in the weeks and months that led up to his sudden, and very surprising, resignation. "You are witnessing the total and complete destruction of a man," Eric Massa told me. And I was.

UPDATE (4:30 P.M.): Petraeus Responds, Legal Expert Reviews Potential Coup

Ryan D'Agostino Ryan D'Agostino is Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Mechanics and Esquire's Articles Editor.

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