It’s no easy feat to become a political hero by yelling at schoolteachers, and yet Christie has managed it. Just as he carefully cultivated his image as an anti-corruption crusader while he was U.S. attorney, as governor, Christie has presented himself as the implacable enemy of fiscal irresponsibility. Even his weight, so often the subject of disparaging speculation among national reporters, has worked to his advantage in these settings. Christie utterly dominates a room—planted center stage, an immovable force. His willingness to get in the face of his critics, his refusal to budge—it all gives the impression of a rare politician who cannot be co-opted or cowed.

And yet right from the outset, Christie was working as closely with the machine as any recent governor. Well before his election, the Democratic bosses had met at the U.S. Open in Queens to divvy up the leadership spoils. Sheila Oliver, who worked under Joe D. in Essex County, would become the speaker of the Assembly. Sweeney would get the Senate presidency. Sweeney was a union man—an ironworker—but he was a Norcross man first and foremost.* When it came time for the vote on Christie’s proposal to cut public-employee pensions and health benefits, Sweeney delivered the numbers. It was a coup for Christie—national pundits hailed him as a politician more interested in getting results than scoring partisan points.

In hindsight, what is notable is how openly Christie embraced the bosses. He sent massive resources in their direction; when they came under fire, he vouched for them. In early 2011, it emerged that Stack’s wife, now estranged, had been allowed to use city SUVs for personal use and fill up for free at the city’s natural gas pumps. Christie defended him: “I have no reason to question Brian Stack’s integrity.” (Stack returned the compliment, calling Christie “the greatest governor the state has ever had.”) On paper, Union City embodies the kind of waste that Christie has vowed to eliminate—it paid its police chief a handsome $248,000 in 2011 and provides health benefits to part-time elected officials. And yet it has been showered with cash from Trenton—about $12 million per year in discretionary “transitional aid.”

Christie’s bond with DiVincenzo was just as overt. Corzine’s attorney general had led an investigation into voter fraud by election workers in Essex County, after reams of absentee ballots were filled out to benefit Joe D.-approved candidates. Following Christie’s election, the case was quickly wrapped up with a handful of light sentences for low-level workers. During his term, Essex County has been deluged with millions for big capital projects. The relationship has thrived despite 2012 revelations by The Star-Ledger that Joe D., who makes $153,000 per year on top of a $68,000 pension for the same job (via a legal loophole), has claimed an astonishing list of reimbursements from his campaign funds for personal expenses, such as a trip to Puerto Rico and more than 100 meals over the course of three months. In 2011, Christie observed that Joe D. had been with him “right from day one.”

As for George Norcross, he is more powerful than ever. “It’s not just South Jersey anymore. Now it’s way beyond that,” says the longtime Jersey hand. Christie consented to Norcross’s pick to lead the patronage goldmine that is the Delaware River Port Authority.* The following year, the authority gave a $6 million grant to a cancer center at Norcross’s Cooper University Hospital. Next, Christie pushed through a controversial measure that granted Norcross his desired merger between Rutgers-Camden and nearby Rowan University. The result was a well-funded university that will further expand the Norcross empire—boosting beleaguered Camden, yes, but also putting even more jobs, money, and development projects at his disposal. (A former Navy SEAL attending Rutgers-Camden challenged the merger at a town-hall meeting. As he was escorted out by police, Christie hollered after him: “After you graduate from law school, you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end is going to be thrown in jail, idiot!”)

Christie’s administration had set out to change the way Trenton did business. But its behavior has turned out to be all too familiar. Those with close ties to the governor have thrived. According to one senior lawyer, it was made clear to supplicants that their prospects would improve if they hired the lobbying firms that employed Samson (now the Port Authority chairman) and Palatucci (the Bush connection). A Louisiana company that wanted to win the $68 million contract for overseeing Sandy relief funds brought on Glenn Paulsen, the GOP power broker from Burlington County. Last May, Paulsen’s law firm made a $25,000 donation to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie leads, and soon afterward the Louisiana company got the Sandy job. Torricelli, too, has flourished as a lobbyist in the Christie era.

Any hard feelings Michael Guadagno might have had about his 2002 move to Trenton would seem to have been allayed: Christie named Guadagno’s wife to be his running mate in 2009 and he himself was elevated to an appellate judgeship three years later.* But there was no lenience for those who bucked the system. Take Democratic State Senator and former Acting Governor Richard Codey, a Norcross nemesis. First, Christie slashed funding for an anti-postpartum-depression program founded by Codey’s wife. Then, Codey’s former chief of staff lost his state job and Codey’s cousin was fired from his high-paying post at the Port Authority. A personnel report on the cousin’s sexual harassment of another man, years earlier, was leaked to the press. Legislators told me of seeing GOP colleagues who had threatened to defy Christie on key votes leaving his office in tears or drenched with sweat.

In early 2013, as Christie’s reelection neared, the operation kicked into overdrive. Christie was fixated on securing Democratic endorsements to bolster his image as a Republican with crossover appeal. It didn’t matter that he was expected to waltz back into office—people needed to get on the list. The administration’s intergovernmental-affairs staff, who knew which mayor or county official had gotten which grant, was moved almost wholesale to the campaign. Christie himself made repeated calls to mere county-level officers: clerks, sheriffs, registers of deeds.

For those who got behind the governor, there were incentives. To give but one example: The close-knit Orthodox community in Lakewood had endorsed Corzine in 2009. In March, a coalition of the town’s rabbis and businessmen announced it would be backing Christie this time around. Two months later, the state granted $10.6 million in building funds to an Orthodox rabbinical school in Lakewood, one of the largest expenditures for any private college in the state. (The yeshiva was not exactly cash-strapped: A copy of its application I obtained noted that its endowment “far exceeded” the $1.84 million it was expected to contribute to the project.)

As Election Day neared, you could be forgiven for mistaking Christie for a Democrat. State Republicans were frozen out; candidates were told not to include his name or picture on their literature. “We didn’t get the support,” says George Wagoner, a losing Assembly candidate. Meanwhile, the weight of the Democratic machine swung behind the Republican governor. More than 50 Democratic elected officials endorsed Christie, including Brian Stack (who was hit with a $68,725 fine in July for failing to properly disclose campaign spending) and Joe D. (who also has a large fine looming). In photos and media appearances, Christie kept showing up smiling alongside Sweeney and other prominent Democrats. Norcross didn’t formally endorse Christie, but he made his approval clear. At one event, Norcross said he’d recently seen a man in a “Chris Christie: too big to fail” t-shirt. He told Christie: “You’re not too big to fail—you’re too good and too important to fail us.”

Meanwhile, Barbara Buono, the state senator who had volunteered to challenge Christie when more prominent Democrats, such as Cory Booker, declined, was unable to raise anywhere near enough money for a credible campaign. Numerous Democratic donors refused to give above the $300 threshold where their names would be disclosed, fearing Christie’s retribution. “I’d say to people, ‘What is going on?’ ” Buono recalls. “This is an election, not a military junta.” She attended one campaign rally in a North Jersey church, at which Sheila Oliver, once a reliable ally of the bosses, railed against unnamed powerful people who were supporting Christie only because he had a “dossier” on them. A month before the election, a picture surfaced on Twitter of Christie and Norcross, arm in arm at a Cowboys-Eagles game in Philadelphia. “I didn’t think [Norcross] would embrace me,” says Buono. “But I didn’t think he’d work directly against me.” In the end, Christie won by 22 points and Republicans gained not a single seat in the state Senate.

And now we come to the national uproar over the mother of all traffic jams in Fort Lee. Christie has denied any knowledge of the ruse. But it has become increasingly hard to credit his ignorance, given how deeply involved he had been in his team’s political outreach to local officials, not to mention that the names of many of his closest aides were surfacing in communications about the closures. Among national Republicans, even some of Christie’s most vocal backers have started to waver. One Republican strategist told me: “No one’s rushing out there to defend him, because they don’t know where this could go next.”

The Democratic bosses, though, are standing by their man. Norcross declared that, instead of obsessing over the bridge, national Democrats should be “pretty concerned about circumstances involving the implementation of Obamacare right now.” Joe D. struck a blasé tone: “Every place I go, people say, ‘What do I care? Why are we talking about it?’ ” And Brian Stack blasted the claim that Christie had threatened to withhold Sandy aid from Hoboken as “far-fetched.” “My relationship with the governor and his staff and this administration has been one of the best,” Stack said—as if that wasn’t part of the problem.

What Bridgegate has laid bare is the skill and audacity with which Christie constructed his public image. “It’s almost like people were in a trance,” Buono told me. Christie may have been misunderstood for so long because his transactionalism diverted from the standard New Jersey model. He wasn’t out to line his own pockets, or build a business empire. He wasn’t even seeking to advance a partisan agenda. And yet it was transactionalism all the same. Christie used a corrupt system to expand his own power and burnish his own image, and he did it so artfully that he nearly came within striking distance of the White House. When he got cozy with Democratic bosses, people only saw a man willing to work across the aisle. When he bullied his opponents, they only saw a truth-teller. It was one of the most effective optical illusions in American politics—until it wasn’t.

Alec MacGillis is a senior editor at The New Republic.

*Corrections: This article initially misstated Steve Sweeney's former trade. The title of the Delaware River Port Authority official whom Gov. Christie consented to keeping on, John Mattheussen, was CEO, not chairman. And Michael Guadagno's promotion to an appellate judgeship was made by the state's chief judge, a gubernatorial appointee.