His name was James Giuffre, and he was then in his late thirties, earning his livelihood selling insurance, according to published reports at the time. Whether he actually had cocaine in his possession at the time of his arrest is an open question. In a 1997 interview with the Courier News, he made no effort to deny the charge. Guiffre could not be reached for comment for this story. But Giuffre's guilt or innocence was beside the point.

In the end, the Giuffre affair turned out to be much more than a simple cocaine case. Arguably, if there was one incident that led to Bissell's downfall, it was the circumstances surrounding the Guiffre case.

According to court records and published reports, Bissell had offered to drop the charge against Guiffre but he wanted two things in return: First, he wanted Giuffre to work as a confidential informant. That was hardly unusual. Prosecutors often cut the small fish loose in the hopes of luring in the sharks. But the other thing Bissell wanted smacked of impropriety, to say the least.   The way authorities would later describe it, Bissell pressed Guiffre to forfeit two valuable lots to the prosecutor's office. It was, after all, the kind of thing that was sanctioned by the state's forfeiture law, and it was the sort of maneuver that Bissell had often used in the past. The way Guiffre figured it, he was in a weak position to bargain, and Bissell's offer was one he couldn't refuse. He signed over the two lots, valued at $174,000. They were later sold at auction for a fraction of that amount. The buyers were acquaintances of one of Bissell's underlings.

In the end, Guiffre did not take the loss of his land lying down. Two years later, he filed a civil suit in federal court, alleging that Bissell had used strong-arm tactics.

It was only a matter of time before federal investigators caught a whiff of Guiffre's allegations. Coupled with other things they had heard and seen with regards to the brash, big-talking prosecutor, authorities decided that, perhaps the time had come to take a closer look at Nick Bissell.

If Bissell was at all rattled by the gathering federal probe, he took pains not to show it. As he told the Courier-News in a 1994, "If you're asking me if I'm concerned about (the probe) my answer to you is I'm unconcerned."

Kelsey Grammer

   

In the office, it was business as usual. Bissell still ran things the way he always had, browbeating those who had somehow failed him in his estimation, while keeping his allies close. He still pursued the spotlight. In fact, it was while federal investigators were closing in on him that he launched his ill-fated probe of Kelsey Grammer.

In hindsight, it now almost appears that everything that Bissell did during that period was calculated to send the message that he had nothing to worry about from the feds, and above all that he was in control. The gambler, it seems, was putting on his best poker face.

But federal investigators were getting a very different picture of Nick Bissell.

According to published reports of testimony in Bissell's trial, Bissell was a habitual if not compulsive gambler who was deep in the midst of a six-year streak of horrible luck.

An IRS agent would later testify, according to the Courier News, that between 1989 and 1995 Bissell and his wife racked up $41,680 worth of debt in credit card advances taken at gambling resorts from Atlantic City to the Bahamas, with $18,000 of that occurring in just 10 days in the summer of 1994. On another occasion, in 1993, Bissell gambled away $3,700 in Atlantic City, almost a month's net pay on the average prosecutor's salary.

As the IRS agent told the court, when it came to gambling, Nick Bissell "was a loser."

But the money kept coming. Soon, the investigators would find out where it was coming from.