A month ago, Tim Willis seemed agitated. He kept repeating himself, announcing vague plans to leave Memphis for Phoenix. Eager to leave town, Willis said he had a business deal brewing involving a screenplay he was working on for an independent film. He was mum on the details. To his friends, that was vintage Willis, always jumping from one job to the next, many of them ill-defined and revolving around the fronts and fringes of city politics. What they could not have known was that their buddy seemed to time his departure with arrests in Operation Tennessee Waltz, a federal sting of Tennesee politicos in which Willis played a key role.

Taurus Bailey, an old fraternity brother of Willis', had just paid him a social visit at Willis' home in Harbortown, a fashionable downtown suburb of Memphis. Bailey's family had a nagging sense that something didn't quite add up with Willis, who had two years earlier finished a four-month stint in federal prison for credit card fraud. He hardly lived the life of an ex-con. How exactly was he making a living? But when Bailey met with Willis, he left with more questions than answers, learning that Willis was making abrupt plans to leave Memphis.

"He kept on telling me he was about to get out of town, which I thought was strange," recalls Bailey, who works in the Shelby County Public Defender's Office. "We know a lot of the same people, and nobody had ever mentioned this before."

Of course, as we now know, Willis had a reason to keep quiet. Working undercover for the FBI, the 5-foot-9 34-year-old operative slyly pretended to be a representative of a bogus electronics company called E-Cycle set up to ensnare lawmakers suspected of being on the take. The phantom outfit, which even had a fake CEO and threw a party at the downtown Sheraton in Nashville, had a one-of-a-kind business plan: investigate whether various lawmakers and assorted middlemen would accept money in exchange for introducing favorable legislation. On May 26, two years after the operation quietly commenced, Memphis state Sens. John Ford, Kathryn Inez Bowers and her recently retired predecessor, Roscoe Dixon, were dramatically arrested on public corruption charges, including bribery, conspiracy and extortion. Federal agents also hauled off Chattanooga state Sen. Ward Crutchfield and state Rep. Chris Newton on corruption charges.

On Friday afternoon, a day after John Ford was handcuffed as he was leaving the elevator of the Sheraton, federal prosecutors played a recording of Willis, who taped a series of incriminating conversations with the eternally embattled state senator. To Ford and his family, the sound of Willis playing the role of a sleazy corporate hatchet man had to provoke astonishment, if not outright contempt. Willis had been close to the Ford family for years. In 1999, he worked closely with John Ford's brother, Joe, when the latter ran for mayor. He did consulting and constituent service work for Harold Ford Jr., and helped the congressman's younger brother Isaac Ford mount a failed campaign for Memphis City Council.

For the feds, they couldn't have found a more convincing player to win Ford's trust and help catch him in the act of stuffing envelopes of cash into his back pockets. On the tapes, Ford seemed wary of Willis, but not enough to turn down the money. "Well, let me ask you as question: you ain't working for none of those motherfuckers," he said to Willis, who laughed—it seemed to some—rather nervously. "If you are, just tell me. I got a gun. I'll just shoot you dead."

In yet another tape, Ford confided to his wired friend the surprisingly prescient concern about whether his actions were being watched. "Yeah, the FBI has a lot of shell companies too," the state senator, who has since resigned, said. "That's what I'm afraid of. See, I'm familiar with how they work. They have a lot of shell companies, and I mean, I just want to make certain, man...."

Obviously, he didn't make certain enough. Of course, Ford had every reason to trust Willis, who made a living forging close relationships with powerful people in Memphis. A member of the Shelby County Young Democrats, Willis knew the backwaters and front lines of local politics like a fund manager knows the S& P Index. He worked a stint in the office of the Shelby County Assessor of Property, toiled in low-level district council races and helped out in Al Gore's and Phil Bredesen's campaigns. According to an old résumé, Willis raised $100,000 for needy families on behalf of Harold Ford Jr. Intelligent, engaging and charming, Willis chose his friends wisely, attended ritzy social gatherings and generally gave off the impression that he was a man on the move.

"The power structure in Memphis is very much black, particularly within the city," says Rebekah Gleaves Sanderlin, who covered politics for the Memphis Flyer and knew Willis socially. "If you were sharp, black, ambitious and male, there were a lot of possibilities for you, and there was a crowd of people who were going after it. Tim was definitely a part of that group."

Willis' stock seemed to be skyrocketing around 2001 when he juggled lucrative political gigs for Harold Ford, Phil Bredesen and former Memphis Juvenile Court Clerk Shep Wilbun. He also worked with Joe Hall, then with the Ingram Group, as part of the triumphant NBA Now campaign to relocate the Vancouver Grizzlies to Memphis. Later, he again partnered with Hall to provide public relations services to the New Memphis Arena Public Authority.

"He was tightly involved in the local political community," recalls Hall, who describes his former partner as smart and effective. "It goes back to his involvement in district campaigns. It helps you know the nuances of the city, and it develops your relationships with the neighborhood."

But unbeknownst to Hall, his colleague was confronting serious legal problems. On March 6, 2001, even as he was smack in the middle of the fight to relocate the Grizzlies to Memphis, Willis was indicted on credit card fraud. Amazingly, Willis managed to keep this not only from Hall but also from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who had paid him over $3,000 for the first four months of the year. Even Phil Bredesen's campaign was initially unaware of Willis' troubles, paying him a total of $5,000 in late 2001 as a contractor to help organize meetings and events. When campaign officials discovered Willis' legal problems, they ended the relationship. Meanwhile, around this time, Wilbun had, astonishingly, been paying Willis over $63,000 to lobby the state legislature, according to a report from state auditors.

Hall himself learned about Willis' legal problems nearly nine months after the indictment. Around December 2001, Willis called Hall and said they needed to talk. They met along the trolley line by the mall in downtown Memphis, and Willis told him he was facing jail time for past credit card problems.

On Jan. 22, 2002, Willis, who six years earlier earned a master's degree in public finance from Jackson State University, began a four-month federal prison stint after pleading guilty to credit card fraud in Mississippi. After his release, Willis again found himself in trouble when he was linked to a federal investigation of Shep Wilbun. Willis' lucrative contract with Wilbun also made headlines. Willis wasn't charged with anything, but shortly thereafter, Operation Tennessee Waltz commenced inside the corridors of the General Assembly. The obvious question is whether Willis cooperated to avoid prison time.

"Tim is not a very tough guy," says his now former friend Taurus Bailey. "If there was anything the feds held over his head, I think he would have been terrified of going back to jail. I think he was afraid to do the time."

To Bailey and many other friends, Tim Willis is a traitor. It's not so much that he went after John Ford, but that he seemed to target other, less devious politicians, who had helped him in the past. Nearly all of them, Bailey says, rejected Willis' federally induced bribes, but for Willis to even put them in that situation betrays a dismaying lack of gratitude. Now with Willis reportedly hiding out in California with his wife, a recent medical school student, he better plan on making it big as a screenwriter. His days as a political operative in Memphis are over.

"The way he made his income was off his relationships, and that's totally tarnished," Bailey says. "No one will ever work with him again."