If Paul Manafort had not been such a crummy and absentee Brooklyn neighbor, he might not be in such hot water. He would not have crossed an urbane housewife-turned-neighborhood blogger who doesn't consider herself a journalist but smelled something fishy around an unsightly townhouse.

There's no more improbable anecdote to Manafort's indictment for laundering millions of dollars than the saga of Katia Kelly, a German-born former aspiring fashion designer who stumbled upon the curious purchase history of a Brooklyn brownstone that's now evidence in the money laundering case against Manafort.

If ever there was a tale of all politics being local—and ramifications occasionally being national—this is it.

“I am not really a reporter,” Kelly told me Tuesday as she helped her father close up his North Carolina beach house. She grew up in Germany and France and moved with the family at age 14 to Long Island, which she hated (“so dreadfully dull”).

She went to design school in Manhattan, fell in love with a Brooklyn native and moved to a then sleepy, primarily Italian neighborhood of Carroll Gardens (“After 32 years here, some of my Italian neighbors still consider me a newcomer”). She got pregnant, started a family and discarded professional ambitions in the fashion field.

She was a dedicated stay at home mom until the kids grew up and she was a bit antsy. Ten years ago she saw an article about blogs. She thought starting one would be a great (and inexpensive) way to stay in touch with European friends. She's not even sure why she called hers “Pardon Me for Asking.”

During the same period, developers started targeting her Carroll Gardens neighborhood. Proposals for 12-and 15-story developments in their low-density area worried her and others. Their City Council member—one Bill de Blasio, now the mayor—“was not very responsible and never met a developer he didn't like,” she says. So she started going to land use meetings, in part since most were in the middle of the day and she didn’t have a job that conflicted.

She started blogging about development issues and other purely local matters. Along the way, she became pretty well versed in development issues and how to ferret out information. That was helpful when she was walking around with her camera this winter. She does that often merely to document changes in the neighborhood for the blog. She always wonders what might have been in a certain place previously.

She walked past a brownstone that looked a mess from the outside. Windows were broken and the front door had been replaced with plywood and close with a huge chain. “It just looked unkempt with a lot of construction debris.”

A neighbor saw her with her camera and began chatting. Kelly said she was just taking photos for her blog. The neighbor said, “You want a scoop?” She alluded to a “celebrity” who now owned on the block. Kelly figured she must mean some Hollywood type, since they have been spotted with regularity in recent years. But then the neighbor said, “Paul Manafort.”

“Why would Manafort have a brownstone in Carroll Gardens and let it deteriorate the way it had?” Kelly recalls wondering.

She poked around and, yes, confirmed it was Manafort. And she discovered an odd series of transactions, as well as a mortgage amount of $6,803,750 that exceeded the current value of the home, all the more given its lousy condition. She got nervous and asked her husband and children if she should do anything about a man close to the president. They said go for it.

In her original post, she wrote, “Who would have thought that this once solid Italian working class neighborhood would one day attract Hollywood celebrities as well as Washington lobbyists.”