A sign inside the front door of Miami Velvet, a night club of sorts in a warehouse-style building a few minutes from the airport, states, “If sexual activity offends you in any way, do not enter the premises.” At first glance, though, the scene inside looks like a nineteen-eighties disco, with a bar, Madonna at high volume, flashing lights, a stripper’s pole, and a dancer’s cage. But a flat-screen television on the wall plays porn videos, and many clubgoers disappear into locker rooms and emerge wearing towels. From there, some of them go into a lounge, a Jacuzzi room, or one of about half a dozen private rooms to have sex—with their dates or with new acquaintances. Miami Velvet is the leading “swingers’ club” in Miami, and Roger Stone took me there to explain the role he may have played in the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York.

For nearly forty years, Stone has hovered around Republican and national politics, both near the center and at the periphery. At times, mostly during the Reagan years, he was a political consultant and lobbyist who, in conventional terms, was highly successful, working for such politicians as Bob Dole and Tom Kean. Even then, though, Stone regularly crossed the line between respectability and ignominy, and he has become better known for leading a colorful personal life than for landing big-time clients. Still, it is no coincidence that Stone materialized in the midst of the Spitzer scandal—and that he had memorable cameos in the last two Presidential elections. While the Republican Party usually claims Ronald Reagan as its inspiration, Stone represents the less discussed but still vigorous legacy of Richard Nixon, whose politics reflected a curious admixture of anti-Communism, social moderation, and tactical thuggery. Stone believes that Nixonian hardball, more than sunny Reaganism, is John McCain’s only hope for the Presidency.

Over the years, Stone’s relationships with colleagues and clients have been so combustible that his value as a messenger has been compromised. Stone worked for Donald Trump as an occasional lobbyist and as an adviser when Trump considered running for President in 2000. “Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told me. “He always tries taking credit for things he never did.” Like Nixon, Stone is also a great hater—of, among others, the Clintons, Karl Rove, and Spitzer. So what happened at Miami Velvet one night last September, he said, amounted to a gift.

“She was sitting right over there,” Stone told me, pointing to a seat at the bar, as we sipped vodka from plastic cups. (Miami Velvet is B.Y.O.B., to avoid the trouble of securing a liquor license, so Stone had brought along a bottle of the brand p.i.n.k.) “We were just having a casual conversation, and I told her I was a dentist,” Stone said. “She told me she was a call girl, but she wasn’t working that night.” Miami Velvet prohibits prostitution on the premises, a point that is emphasized in the four-page single-spaced legal waiver that everyone must sign to be admitted. (Another house rule, which is reinforced by signs on the wall, is “No means no.”) “She told me she had a very high-end clientele—she kept using the word ‘high-end’—athletes, international businessmen, politicians,” Stone said.

“ ‘Like who?’ I asked her,” Stone went on. “She named a couple of sports guys, some car dealers I’d heard of because of their commercials, and then she said, ‘I almost had a date with Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New Jersey.’ ” Stone laughed. “She didn’t know much about politics. So I asked her, ‘Did this guy have a beard?’ ” (Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, has a beard.) No, the woman said, he was a skinny bald guy—a description that fit Spitzer. According to Stone, the woman told him that Spitzer had reached her through her escort service, which listed her as a brunette, but she had dyed her hair blond. So the agency referred the governor to a dark-haired colleague, the woman said, who met up with Spitzer in Miami.

“I asked her what her friend said about Spitzer,” Stone told me. “She said he was nice enough, but the only odd thing was that he kept his socks on. They were the kind that went to the middle of the calf, and one of them kept falling down.”

Stone said that he decided, after hearing the story, to keep the conversation with the woman to himself for the moment. But there was never any doubt that he would eventually deploy it. As Stone puts it in one of the many rules he lives by, “He who speaks first, loses.”

Stone spends most of his time in Miami these days, but he’s still greeted warmly by the staff at the “21” Club, the venerable former speakeasy on West Fifty-second Street. “I love it here,” Stone said, as we settled into a corner table. “It’s like time stopped in about 1975 in here—my kind of place.” What appeals to Stone is not just the red-meat-and-red-wine gastronomy but also the jackets-required formality. Stone has had his suits tailor-made since the nineteen-seventies, partly because he has a bodybuilder’s physique, which makes it difficult to buy clothes off the rack, but also because he is fastidious about what he wears. He owns more than a hundred suits. For many years, he bleached his hair to an almost fluorescent yellow, but he now keeps it a more banal brown. For dinner, he wore a chalk-striped double-breasted suit, a starched white shirt with a spread collar, and a silver-colored tie, and, outside the restaurant, a homburg. His outfit comported with two of the rules in his book, “Stone’s Rules for War, Politics, Food, Fashion, and Living,” which he hopes to publish soon: “Never wear a double-breasted suit and a button-down collar” and “White dress shirts after six.”

Stone ordered a Stolichnaya Martini. “The key to a good Martini is you have to marinate the olives in vermouth first,” he said. “Nixon gave me the recipe. He said he got it from Winston Churchill.”

Stone believes that Nixonian hardball, more than sunny Reaganism, is John McCain’s only hope for the Presidency.

Stone did not grow up in such rarefied company. He was born in 1952, half Italian and half Hungarian, and was raised in Lewisboro, New York. His mother wrote for the local newspaper, and his father dug wells. Before he was a teen-ager, a neighbor gave him a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and Stone was hooked. In 1965, when he was thirteen, Stone was taking the train into New York to work weekends on behalf of the ill-fated mayoral campaign of William F. Buckley, Jr. “The key thing about Lewisboro is that it is just across the border from New Canaan,” Stone said, referring to the wealthy Connecticut suburb. “So early on I saw myself as living in kind of a bridge between two cultures, the white working class and the white upper class.” In Stone’s political world view, both groups are, or ought to be, united in opposition to the meddling hand of government.

Stone moved to Washington to attend George Washington University, but he became so engrossed in Republican politics that he never graduated. He was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to “prove” that Nixon’s adversary was a left-wing stooge. Stone hired another Republican operative, who was given the pseudonym Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone’s Watergate high jinks were revealed during congressional hearings in 1973, and the news cost Stone his job on the staff of Senator Robert Dole. Stone then moved into the world of political consulting, to which he was temperamentally better suited than government service. He co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which spent money in support of candidates, including Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, and Dan Quayle, in Indiana, who were instrumental in the G.O.P. takeover of the Senate.