Clutching a bag of nails in one hand and wielding a hammer in the other, Marshbaum broke out of semi-retirement and into my office. It could mean only one thing.

In the three decades I have known my faux friend, he always had a scheme for how to live the affluent life of a no-talent pop celebrity. He did extremely well on the first part of it. Now and then, he came up with a scheme that brought him a comfortable living—until his next scheme drained him of his savings. But, at least he was persistent.

That fancy office, I learned, was in the high-rent posh office suite of Joseph Allbaugh, who ran George W. Bush's first presidential campaign. For his loyalty, but certainly with almost no knowledge of emergency management, Allbaugh became Bush's first FEMA director before he resigned to become a consultant and lobbyist, bestowing the nation's disaster response to his college buddy Michael Brown. One of Allbaugh's clients, the Shaw Group, received two $100 million contracts, much of it for nailing FEMA blue tarpaulins on houses and buildings at a cost about ten times the normal rate.

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