From this foray into the concert trade, Carton learned a little bit about the secondary market for tickets. Scalping, thanks to StubHub and the like, had gone semi-straight—what formerly could be a Class D felony was now legit, though still in many ways legally murky. Carton approached B.S.E. again, to ask about buying tickets in bulk. “There’s three ways to get tickets—from the arena, from the promoter, and from the artist,” Carton told me. “So, if you have a relationship with any one of those three, then you can get access to the best tickets and you can sell them for a big profit on the secondary market.” Referring to B.S.E., he said, “It guaranteed them ticket sales, and then a piece of the profit on the secondary sales.”

The extent to which this did or did not happen was not fully litigated during Carton’s trial. Correspondence indicating that it did happen was not allowed into evidence, because it was deemed hearsay: B.S.E. executives said on the witness stand that they did not remember certain e-mails, and Carton never testified. In his kitchen, he showed me a bunch of e-mails from B.S.E. executives. One included a term sheet offering him two hundred tickets to every future concert, with B.S.E. getting twenty per cent of Carton’s profits on the secondary sales. If B.S.E. introduced Carton to other arena operators and promoters, B.S.E. would get 7.5 per cent of that profit. This term sheet was not presented at the trial. Another e-mail, from Fred Mangione, Yormark’s chief of staff, in November, 2016: “This will start the beginning of our deal and rev”—apparent shorthand for revenue sharing. Mangione said he couldn’t remember what it referred to. B.S.E. executives seemed to be minimizing their involvement with Carton, and with the practice of turning over tickets to secondary dealers. (The B.S.E. spokesperson said that the company never had any agreement about profit sharing, and didn’t receive any payments from Carton.)

It didn’t help Carton’s case that he doctored some e-mails—along the way, misnaming the company he was supposedly representing and misspelling Barbra, as in Streisand. (Mangione testified that he would never have made that mistake, because it had happened previously, on his watch—before a Streisand concert at Barclays—and “it wasn’t a good day, let me put it that way.”) Whatever ambiguity there was about whether any kind of deal or revenue sharing between Carton and B.S.E. really existed, there was no question that Carton had misrepresented such an arrangement to his investors and then misspent their money. Therein lay the crime. Carton sent investors forged contracts that an associate of Joe Meli’s had worked up (and that Carton had further doctored) in an attempt to make an apparently improvised relationship with B.S.E. look like a contractual partnership.

In December, 2016, Brigade Capital, a twenty-billion-dollar asset manager, committed to an investment of ten million dollars, through a hedge fund that the company managed. The investment was a revolving loan with a return of ten per cent and a share of the profits. A score for Carton, an afterthought for Brigade. Even though the deal with Brigade specified that the loan be used only for ticket purchases, Carton used a portion of the initial investment, at least two million dollars, to pay another investor, and his own gambling debts.

Two of Carton’s personal lenders testified at the trial, under immunity deals. One was Desmond Finger, an employee of the Sapphire club, a midtown strip joint. The other was Harvey Klein, from Monsey, New York, who ran an array of businesses, including an energy company that had been sued or sanctioned by several states for overbilling and consumer fraud. In 2016, these two extended Carton more than a dozen loans, of as much as half a million dollars each. Carton viewed them as investments. As he wrote to Klein before a holiday blackjack trip to Bimini, “Would be remiss if I didn’t offer you first dibs.”

By the end of that year, Carton, between these liabilities and others at the casinos, was facing a pileup of debt. The Brigade money was a lifeline. As he wrote to Meli around Christmas, “We survived the death bullet.” But another always loomed. As Meli texted, “We use Brigade money to repay debts. Where do we get the money to buy tickets?” Carton replied, “Agreed.” He seems either to have believed it was O.K. to do this (he told me he’d relied on the old idea that “money is fungible”) or to have knowingly been running a Ponzi scheme. Carton maintains that it was the former; the court ruled otherwise.

The F.B.I. arrested Meli at the beginning of 2017. He’d defrauded investors by falsifying bulk-ticket deals with producers of Broadway shows and with concert promoters, and then used the investors’ money to pay off earlier investors or to enrich himself. At first, Carton led Brigade to believe that he was a victim of Meli’s, not an accomplice. Brigade stuck with Carton, who one day showed up at its offices with a bag of Streisand tickets.

Last April, Meli was sentenced to six and a half years in prison and ordered to pay his victims almost sixty million dollars. Carton says they haven’t spoken since Meli’s arrest. “He was the smartest guy in every room I was ever in,” Carton told me. “If that makes him a world-class con man, then maybe that’s what he is, but I’d never seen anything like it. It was Columbo-esque.”

Over the summer, Carton missed a payment to Brigade. The firm had been coöperating with the F.B.I., which had apparently decided that Carton wasn’t Meli’s victim, after all.

Among the many baffling elements of the whole affair are why a firm of Brigade’s size and stature would muck around in such shallow, muddy waters, with such slippery fish, and why Carton, a man who by his and others’ accounts loves his family and his job, would risk both on so flimsy a play. As to the former, it may have had something to do with the allure of concert tickets, whose scarcity is often treated as currency in certain ardent, privileged circles, and with the charm and the celebrity, such as it was, of Carton. (A strip-club owner named Michael Wright, who was charged as a co-conspirator in the case, wrote to the judge prior to his sentencing, in March, that Carton “radiated energy and drive that drew me in. I was a bit awed and flattered.”) As for Carton, maybe it’s just that he liked the speed of the numbers, the playing of multiple hands—or the prospect of a whole new cast of naysayers, to whom he could eventually, in his dreams, say fuck you.

In “Loudmouth,” Carton writes that his biggest fear is going to jail. His only experience with prison is having once played softball against inmates at a penitentiary on Staten Island.

On Friday, April 5th, at Carton’s sentencing, the judge, Colleen McMahon, remarked that she was a fan of “Boomer and Carton,” and that she was listening the morning of his arrest.

The Post had just run a column by Phil Mushnick, the paper’s longtime sports-page scold, who’d got his hands on a video that Carton had made, called “The Reckoning,” in which Carton discusses his addiction to gambling. (The video had been made by Marie McGovern and Martin Dunn, the former editor of the News, friends of Carton’s who were present at the sentencing. “It was just a sizzle reel,” Dunn told me.) McMahon said that she looked forward to watching it. But, she said, “today comes the legal reckoning.” She handed down a prison sentence of three and a half years. ♦