A few hours after the agents departed, Smith and Brown met at a Starbucks. Brown said the FBI had visited his house when he wasn’t home; now his wife was freaking out, and he didn’t know what to do. Smith panicked. “You’re going to go home, and [she] is going to tell you that you’ve got to just tell them exactly what happened,” Smith said. “Steve, I really fucked up, I think,” he continued. “I filed a sworn affidavit with the FEC saying that I had no knowledge of this. My career’s over.” He begged for Brown’s help. “Can you shade it at all?” he asked. “Can you just put it on Artie?” Then Smith laid it out for his friend in stark terms: “I hate to say this, but I think the only way they can get me is if you or Nick says something.”

That evening, Smith gave a speech at a fund-raiser in a downtown loft. He found it difficult to focus. “As I was talking, I had an ominous sense of foreboding about what was to come,” he says. “I looked around the crowd and thought to myself, ‘This is going to be our last fund-raiser.’” Afterward, he met with Brown and Adams at a nearby outdoor plaza. Worried that they might be under surveillance, they stood near a fountain so that their conversation would be hard to overhear. Once again, Smith and Adams pleaded with Brown to lie to the FBI. “I’m alive and Artie’s dead; can we emphasize this was Artie’s deal?” Adams asked. Smith added, “Artie would totally want us to throw him under the bus here.” They were incredulous about their predicament. “Jeff, all of that shit was totally not worth it,” Adams said of the postcards. Smith replied, “I know you did it for me. Ever since the second the campaign ended, I was like, I can’t believe we did that.” Before they parted, Adams had a suggestion. He’d been watching “The Wire” and thought they should conduct future conversations on “those pay-as-you-go cell phones.” Smith approved: “Buy three at WalMart and meet tomorrow to pass them out.”

The next day, however, Brown vanished. Whenever Smith and Adams called his cell phone, he didn’t answer. After about a week and a half, Brown sent them a text message saying only that his attorney had advised him not to speak to them or anyone else. A few days later, two FBI agents arrived at Smith’s house. He refused to talk with them and went to see his lawyer. While Smith waited in her office, she called the local U.S. attorney to ask if her client was the target of an investigation. Smith vividly recalls what happened next: “She said, ‘It’s not good. Your buddy Steve has been wired for the last couple months.’” After the investigators discovered Ohlsen’s recordings, they’d approached Brown with a deal: Help them get Smith, and he might be spared jail time. From the moment Brown called Smith to tell him that he feared Ohlsen was a snitch, he was the one who had been cooperating with the feds.

Smith drove to his parents’ house in the St. Louis suburbs. “I said, ‘I’m in more trouble than you could have ever imagined and probably am going to have to go to jail, and it’s going to be a terrible few months here.’” Prosecutors offered Smith his own deal: Wear a wire to help them with some other Missouri politicians they were investigating in exchange for a lighter sentence. He refused. “I wasn’t going to go put a wire on against someone I thought to be a good person to help their fishing expedition if they didn’t have anything,” he explains. Smith began withdrawing from the life he knew, canceling the class he was slated to teach at Washington University that fall. Some of his friends and students assumed he was preparing to take an important job in the Obama administration. Instead, in late August, Smith announced he was resigning from the Missouri Senate and, along with Adams, pleading guilty to two felony counts of obstruction of justice. Brown, who also resigned his legislative seat and surrendered his law license, pled guilty to one count of obstruction of justice.