When the Port Authority appointment blew up, it was a pivotal moment for both Kushner and McGreevey, though it didn’t seem so at the time. It raised Kushner’s profile significantly at a moment when his brother Murray’s lawsuit was already causing people to ask questions about his political contributions. And his very public refusal to submit to any kind of review process undoubtedly raised a flag at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Kushner had grown increasingly arrogant over time. The more important he became and the more he was able to act with impunity, the more chances he took. Kushner’s descent began when he let his lust for political influence spiral out of control. Specifically, he came up with a clever mechanism to circumvent the limits on campaign contributions.

In the development business, every time someone like Kushner starts a new project, he creates what is essentially a new company with a new name. It’s done for liability reasons. Kushner, for example, controls more than 100 separate partnerships. He began to make political contributions on behalf of each of these entities. But Kushner didn’t make them only in his name: He made them in the names of his partners in each of these deals as well. And he did this without telling them. It enabled Kushner to give much more money and to leverage his contributions. The lion’s share of these went to McGreevey, but he also contributed to Corzine, Torricelli, and Bill Bradley.

Kushner ran into a problem, however, when some of the partners began to find out what he was doing. One of these was Murray, who believed Charles owed him money and sued to get a full accounting of their various partnerships. Though their dispute eventually went to binding arbitration and both the results and all of the filings were sealed—Charles reportedly paid Murray a substantial settlement—the lawsuit shone a light on Kushner’s maneuvering.

Though Murray has a reputation as a quiet, unassuming fellow who, in keeping with the ethos of the Holocaust builders, completely shuns the spotlight, Charles, according to one ally, blames Murray for a great deal of what’s happened to him. According to this source, the dispute was a classic sibling rivalry taken to insane extremes. “Charlie was the fair-haired one, the boy wonder, the stunning success,” he says, “and Murray, egged on by his second wife, was unable to live peacefully with Charlie’s success. Even though he’s become very rich as well.”

Fueled by greed and envy, Murray set out, according to this account, to destroy his younger brother. And his weapon of choice was civil litigation. Those who side with Charles claim that Murray had a mole inside his brother’s company—a man named Robert Yontef, who was the company accountant. They charged during the arbitration that Yontef was stealing documents at night and giving them to Murray’s lawyers. Yontef ended up filing his own suit against Charles when he was fired, claiming age discrimination. Murray’s lawyer declined to comment on any specifics of the case, since everything has been sealed. (Yontef, by the way, was the other man Kushner paid a hooker to seduce. Unlike the brother-in-law, however, Yontef resisted the advances.) All of which leads to the astonishing act of mailing the videotape to his sister, Esther. Though even the spin masters working for Charles admit—how could they not?—that the act was indefensible, they argue that it didn’t happen in a vacuum.

“McGreevey said no, a word he rarely spoke. Kushner became apoplectic. When he hung up, McGreevey said, ‘Well, I guess I won’t have to put up with Charles Kushner anymore.’ ”

Charles and Esther, his younger sister, grew up the closest of siblings. Her husband, Billy, worked for Charles at Kushner Companies. But Billy was, according to one of Charles’s representatives, a somewhat less-than-perfect husband. “For years, Charles worked with Esther and Billy to try to save their marriage. He even went with them to counseling sessions,” says the source. “But finally Billy’s behavior became a problem at work. First he was demoted, and then Charles had to fire him. As a result, Esther, who had been on Charles’s side in his battle with Murray, turned against him. “Sending the tape was obviously an awful, offensive thing to do,” the source says. “But they had pushed him so far that Charles Kushner went over the edge. He simply couldn’t take it anymore.”

For McGreevey, naming Kushner to head the Port Authority meant alienating one of his staunchest backers—Middlesex County political leader John Lynch, a man who’d been with McGreevey since his days as mayor of Woodbridge and was instrumental in his successful run for governor.

Lynch had his own pick for the Port Authority post, but it was more than that. He didn’t like Kushner. Unlike the younger members of McGreevey’s inner circle, who were dazzled by Kushner’s money, Lynch saw the developer as a growing problem. The friction over the appointment and Kushner’s widening influence resulted in Lynch getting pushed out of the governor’s inner circle. “Once Lynch left, the McGreevey administration was without adult supervision,” says Marcus. “There was no sense of history, no sense of right and wrong. The governor needs someone close to him who can shut the door and tell him he’s wrong. McGreevey had no one like that. All the guys who could provide a compass were pushed out. If Lynch had still been around, the whole Cipel thing might’ve gone very differently.”

McGreevey was having an awful summer even before Cipel made his threats. In one two-week period at the beginning of July, Kushner, his top fund-raiser, was arrested. David D’Amiano, another key fund-raiser, was arraigned for extorting campaign contributions from a farmer in exchange for arranging a better price for some land he was selling to the state. In the 47-page indictment, there are repeated references to the involvement in the deal of “State Official 1,” later revealed to be the governor.

The indictment detailing D’Amiano’s plot reads like a bad B movie. State and county officials involved in the scheme would indicate they were onboard by using the code word “Machiavellian.” During a meeting with the farmer, which was taped by investigators, McGreevey just happens to mention the book The Prince, by Machiavelli. In this same two-week period, McGreevey’s Commerce secretary resigned when faced with a variety of accusations involving funneling state money to businesses owned by himself, his family members, and friends. In addition, Gary Taffet, McGreevey’s first chief of staff, and Paul Levinsohn, his chief counsel, are the subject of an ongoing federal investigation related to, among other things, several million dollars they purportedly made selling billboards on government land while they were managing McGreevey’s transition.

Given the storm of corruption that was threatening to engulf McGreevey, it doesn’t take much to put together a scenario in which one of these scandals was about to touch him directly. Rather than go down in flames over the corruption, he chooses, after a lifetime of inner conflict, to admit to the world he’s gay and resign his office in semi-heroic fashion.