Unplugged. As he is. Not jumped by Linden MacIntyre in a street, then edited for the fifth estate. And boy is he different from the views of the pundits of the haute media, sniffing and wincing at any mention of his name, as if they never before encountered pungent odours in the barnyard of politics.

“One of the slipperiest characters alive,” who’d sell his own mom, wrote Margaret Wente. “Shady,” said Lysiane Gagnon, citing a European reporter who stopped talking to the creep because he “systematically led him down blind alleys.” Awful thing for a journalist, having to figure out which alleys are blind and which aren’t. Former Liberal Party president Stephen LeDrew, in a term worthy of rich airhead Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie, called him unsavoury. Wait, that’s unfair. Margaret always had a surprising weakness for Groucho’s sly appeal (Ooh, Mr. Firefly … Ooh, Mr. Schreiber).

That’s it, he’s the Rufus T. Firefly of the Mulroney era, and who can resist? He’s the model of an enduring type in life or I may mean literature, the rogue or scoundrel or scamp — subtype: the con man or flim-flam man — who can be annoying but (if you’re not directly involved) awfully appealing.

Here’s what I mean. He starts off yesterday telling a parliamentary committee he won’t answer questions till his extradition appeal is done and he gets access to his papers, and maybe a decent night at home. They schlepped him to Ottawa, shackled, in the back of a police van, nobody’s idea of how to prep for TV. It looked like going nowhere, I almost turned it off. Then one MP sort of belittles him for not answering even simple questions, and KH seems to reconsider, this doesn’t look good for him, he can make something better of it.

He starts answering a few questions, then more, it’s going okay. You spend your life handing envelopes stuffed with schmiergeld to the noble leaders of the free world, you won’t be intimidated by some backbenchers getting their seven minutes of glory on cable TV. A Bloc MP asks why he gave $300,000 to Brian Mulroney. He says the guy had money problems, he and Mila even sold off some of the furniture at 24 Sussex, they had to be bailed out. The Bloc member asks, “If I was having trouble making ends meet, would you give me $300,000?” He looks around, the situation he’s in, the rest of his life on the line, these people could help salvage it, and says, “Under the circumstances, yes.” It’s true, it’s wry, it’s sheer BS, it’s the flim-flam man and Rufus T. Firefly at the top of their game.

He can pull this off — the thing that puts the confidence in the con man — because he knows what they don’t, or would rather not: that they’re all part of the same system. They ask disjointed questions about who got money and why and he lectures back, in his rumpled, accented way: This thing is so complex, I’ve got thousands of files, it took my genius lawyer Eddie Greenspan five and a half months to understand. He gets it in a way they don’t, how money greases everything in our economy and politics. He and they need each other the way cops and crooks often need each other, till it can be hard to tell the difference, or like armies at war.

The other side are always “scumbags,” just as we are for them, or no one would get a chance to kill and be soldiers. I don’t mean the world could never be different, but, in the world as it is, it’s often the flim-flam man who sees it more truly and, once in a while, shadily half-reveals that truth to us. That’s why he’s hard to resist.

My long-time pal, actor Eric Peterson, has created characters from the noble lawyer Leon on Street Legal to grumpy Oscar on Corner Gas. Lately, he’s been recreating Karlheinz Schreiber each morning as he reads the paper. Eric is the king of the one-man play in Canada and I dearly hope he gives us Karlheinz! in the future. If the guy gets shipped back to Germany, he won’t be easily replaced.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.