The fall and winter before last, Daniel J. Halloran III, a Republican city councilman from Queens, met with two men: an undercover F.B.I. agent who was posing as a businessman called Raj and a real-estate developer named Moses Stern, who was coöperating with the F.B.I. in exchange for a reduced prison term. (Stern is facing a four-hundred-and-fifty-five-year sentence for bank fraud, among other charges.) During meetings that were secretly recorded, Raj and Stern gave Halloran almost forty thousand dollars in cash, including hundred-dollar bills crammed into unmarked envelopes, and sixty-five hundred dollars in checks made out to his congressional campaign: in 2012, Halloran ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The checks were written from other people’s accounts, Raj allegedly told Halloran, because he didn’t want his name to appear in any campaign-finance report. “I can take green,” Halloran said, after he lost the congressional race and was no longer eligible for campaign matching funds. “That’s politics, that’s politics,” he told Stern at a restaurant in Manhattan on a night when he accepted a wad of cash, adding, philosophically, “You can’t do anything without the fucking money.”

Much of the money, in this case, was payment to Halloran for brokering a deal with two Republican Party officials, Vincent Tabone and Joseph Savino, buying their support for Malcolm Smith, a Democratic New York State senator who wanted to run for mayor of New York as a Republican. (Smith’s party switch required the approval of three of the city’s five Republican Party borough chairmen.) Stern warned Smith that getting onto the ballot would cost “a pretty penny.”

“It’s worth it,” Smith said.

On February 14, 2013, in a car parked outside Sparks Steak House, on East Forty-sixth Street, Savino accepted fifteen thousand dollars from Raj. (Tabone, a harder bargainer, got twenty-five thousand.)

“Tell me you love me,” Halloran texted Savino, after the handoff.

“U are my fucking valentine,” Savino texted back.

In April, 2013, the office of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, indicted Halloran, Smith, Tabone, and Savino on federal corruption charges. After the news broke, the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, urged the Legislature to pass a package of anticorruption reforms, including a Campaign Finance Reform Act. The Legislature failed to pass a single measure. That summer, Cuomo announced the formation of a twenty-five-member panel, the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, “to probe systemic corruption and the appearance of such corruption in state government, political campaigns, and elections.” He said, “Anything they want to look at, they can look at: me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman.” The commission was given eighteen months to conduct its investigation, but in March, 2014, apparently as part of a budget deal with the Legislature—a deal that did not include any meaningful campaign-finance-reform provisions—Cuomo shut it down. In April, Bharara, concerned about possible malfeasance, seized the commission’s files.

This spring, while the U.S. Attorney’s office launched an inquiry into the possible corruption of the corruption commission, the Times began its own investigation. Reporters discovered that, after the commission issued a subpoena to a political-consulting firm called Buying Time (“How and where campaigns spend their money on media is more important than ever,” the firm’s Web site reads), Cuomo’s top aide called one of the commission’s co-chairs, told him that Cuomo was one of Buying Time’s clients, and said, of the subpoena, “Pull it back.” The subpoena was withdrawn. (It was later reissued.) The Times report appeared in July. In a thirteen-page response, the Governor’s office insisted that by law the commission had never been independent: “A commission appointed by and staffed by the executive cannot investigate the executive.”

Cuomo is up for reëlection in November, but first he has to win a Democratic primary, on September 9th, against an improbable challenger: Zephyr Teachout, a constitutional-law professor at Fordham University. The week before the Times published its report, nearly ninety per cent of New York voters either didn’t know her name or had no opinion about her. Teachout has never held an elected office; she has little experience and less support. She’s not so much campaigning for office as campaigning for reform. Shortly before the primary, her first book will be released. It’s called “Corruption in America.”

Running for office, a vital civic act, costs money. How much it costs and who pays for it are legitimate matters of public concern and legislative action. Four years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United dismantled a regime of campaign-finance legislation that had been in place for more than a century, the prospects for reform are bleak. There is quite possibly more money in American politics today than at any point in the country’s history. But there is also less agreement than ever about what can or should be done about it. In fact, there is very little agreement about whether fighting corruption is a compelling state interest, or even about what corruption is.

The New York story is important because, historically, New York is corruption’s proving ground. In December, 2013, three months before Cuomo shut down the Moreland Commission, it issued a preliminary, ninety-eight-page report describing “an epidemic of public corruption.” For instance: “One out of every eleven legislators to leave office since 1999 has done so under the cloud of ethical or criminal violations.” But those are only the people who got caught violating the scant, weak, and poorly enforced anticorruption laws that govern their conduct. “The real scandal,” according to the report, “is what remains legal.”

What remains legal includes the following: between 2009 and 2012, donors gave two hundred and thirty-two million dollars to legislators in Albany, and lobbyists gave six hundred and ninety-three million—a total of nearly one billion dollars in direct political spending. Eighty per cent of individual contributions came from big donors. (New York has hardly any small donors. Of New Yorkers who voted in the last gubernatorial election, fewer than one per cent made campaign donations.) Big donors give big money to both Democrats and Republicans; they give it to whoever holds power. In 2012, when Republicans held a majority in the Senate, they took in thirteen million dollars, while Senate Democrats took in only seven million dollars. In 2010, when Democrats held the Senate majority, the pattern was reversed. Big donors aren’t advancing an ideology or a party, the commission concluded: they’re paying for access. They give money to politicians who wield power over decisions affecting their specific economic interests, regardless of those politicians’ party affiliations or ideological positions. One example: between 2011 and 2012, the chairs of the health committees in both the Republican Senate and the Democratic Assembly each received more than half of his campaign funds from the health industry. The people and the organizations writing these checks know exactly what they’re buying. In one instance cited in the report, a trade association asked its members to donate ten thousand dollars each, because “Our future ability to adopt favorable legislation, stop terrible legislation or modify legislation to limit the pain to our industry is directly tied to our continued positive relationship with all the leaders in Albany.” A further source of corruption, according to the report, is “shadowy outside spending.” After Citizens United, a Virginia-based 501(c)(4) called Common Sense Principles spent nearly $3.5 million attacking Democratic candidates from New York. The commission was unable to identify who runs this organization, or where it gets its money.