This week, Paul Manafort began the first of two trials. This one, prosecuted in federal court in Virginia, is for tax and bank fraud. A later trial, to be held in Washington, D.C., will focus on money laundering and Manafort’s work as an unregistered agent of the government of Ukraine. Neither trial, on the surface, has much to do with the Trump campaign. Many of the charges against Manafort cover crimes committed years before he worked for Trump’s campaign. However, this trial will likely play a central role in the investigation into collusion between the Trump camp and Russia. This prosecution will almost certainly show that the man running the campaign in its crucial period, as it shifted from a long-shot lark to a serious effort, was desperate and taking wild and irresponsible risks.

The trial, at its core, is about several dozen financial transactions that occurred between 2008 and the present, which, documentary evidence has already shown, seem likely to be instances of both bank fraud and illegal tax avoidance. These transactions can be cleanly divided into two: there were the wild, flush years, in which Manafort appears to have had more money than he knew what to do with, and the broke years, in which Manafort was taking increasingly frantic risks to find a few bucks. The nadir of his hunger for cash came just days before he became Trump’s unpaid campaign chair.

If you ignore the seeming illegality, Manafort’s financial records from 2007 to 2014 suggest that he was having a lot of fun. Manafort owned and controlled several shell companies in Cyprus, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the U.K., and some in the U.S. Many seem engineered to disguise their owner. (Why would he have needed to create four different shell companies in Cyprus in August, 2007: Black Sea View Limited; Global Highway Limited; LOAV Advisors Limited; and Leviathan Advisors Limited? Why did he need a total of thirty-three different corporate entities?) Every few weeks, for years, these entities would wire tens of thousands of dollars to the same handful of American companies. More than five million dollars—eighty thousand one month, ninety thousand another—to a home builder in Long Island, nearly a million to an antique-rug store in Virginia, eight hundred and fifty thousand to a men’s clothier.

Manafort sent at least $13,214,000 from shell companies overseas to the U.S. Few of these payments seem to be for actual goods and services. For example, in 2010, he made seven payments to two clothing stores, all but one of the amounts ending in multiple zeroes: $15,000, $39,000, $5,000, $32,500, $11,500, $85,000, $128,280. At a glance, these don’t appear to be real amounts paid for actual items complete with sales tax. There are millions of dollars of similar transactions to antique stores, home-improvement companies, and the like. Prosecutors make clear that the transactions they describe in the indictment are only a small subset of what they claim is a total of seventy-five million dollars that flowed through these accounts. Prosecutors say more than thirty million of that was laundered—deliberately hidden from U.S. authorities to avoid paying taxes.

It is hard to understand how a man with such means became so desperate just a few years later. Manafort’s condominium on Howard Street, on the border between SoHo and Chinatown in Manhattan, helps explain what happened. He spent $2.85 million on the property in 2012, though he disguised much of that as a loan, which prosecutors argue was an attempt to hide his income from the I.R.S. That same year, he spent a total of nearly six and a half million on residences, including one in Brooklyn and another in Virginia.

After Manafort’s primary client, Viktor Yanukovych, lost the Presidency of Ukraine, in 2014, Manafort’s income appears to have dried up. By early 2016, the man who previously had been sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to the U.S. each month seemed to be in a self-destructive frenzy, making the desperate moves of a man who needed some cash, right away, and had run out of options. He was renting that condominium on Howard Street through Airbnb. He applied for a mortgage, but, knowing that banks give smaller loans for rental properties, he allegedly lied, telling the bank it was a second home, and convinced a son-in-law to confirm this falsehood. Around the same time, he took out another bank loan to pay for construction on the Brooklyn property, without disclosing that he would be using a significant amount of that cash for his own personal use. Just after committing these acts, Manafort began discussions with the Trump campaign. By the end of the same month, March, 2016, he joined the team.

Manafort’s earlier schemes, the ones from before 2014, are fairly dramatic, involving tens of millions of dollars and apparently a brazen effort to avoid paying taxes. By contrast, his alleged crimes in 2016 are quite small, by international criminal standards. They amount to misleading a bank to squeeze a few hundred thousand more out of loans. This is not the sort of thing that normally gets prosecuted criminally, certainly not by a special counsel.

The idea that Manafort committed big crimes before he was in Trump’s orbit and minor ones around the time he joined the campaign has inspired some to wonder if Mueller is desperate, himself, grabbing a few lame charges because he can’t find anything more substantive. The judge in the case, T. S. Ellis III, ruled that the trial could proceed but warned Mueller against overstepping his mandate. “Although this case will continue, those involved should be sensitive to the danger unleashed when political disagreements are transformed into partisan prosecutions,” he wrote.

There is another way to see the trial. Besides applying pressure on Manafort to coöperate, it could be something of a prelude. The indictment and the opening statement by Uzo Asonye, an assistant United States attorney, paint a vivid picture of a man under enormous financial strain, just as he took control of the campaign. Suddenly, he was given a valuable asset—proximity to Trump—and, for a bit, his ability to influence the man who could be President. The fact pattern laid out by the prosecutors raises the question: What did this desperate man do when he was handed a lifeline at the moment he most needed it? He took no payment, directly, from the Trump campaign. So, what did he get and what did he offer in exchange? Though these questions are unlikely to be asked directly in the trial, Mueller and the public want them answered.