A few sessions ago, state Sen. Kelvin Atkinson chaired a committee but had a smaller office with no anteroom.

Soon, a couch appeared outside his office in the Legislative Building hallway, and if anyone dared to stop there to rest or chat, the senator’s assistant shooed them away. This was his makeshift waiting room, and he wanted to send a signal for all to see: “I am the chairman. People are waiting to see me. I am important.”

A few sessions later, after scoring the largest office in the building, with a capacious area for supplicants to cool their heels, Atkinson did not have much time to enjoy it. Instead, he is going to prison, sentenced Monday on federal charges of wire fraud, likely to be incarcerated for months and forced to pay six figures in fines and restitution. His sense of entitlement, his craving of and demand for respect, his criminal conversion of campaign funds to pay for his lifestyle, have forced him to trade his bow ties and nice suits for an even smaller room where few will visit and no one will feel it necessary to wait outside to kiss his ring.

It’s easy to say this was a fitting end for someone who had grown so arrogant, often described as a bully by lobbyists and legislators and someone who used his official Twitter account to promote his private business. It’s easy to say it was inevitable after Atkinson advertised all of his trips in social media posts and seemed to be living a flamboyant lifestyle. It’s easy to say his corruption is like all other corruption in corrupt Carson City.

But you know what’s hard in this age of 280 characters and big broad brushes: To step back and see this is not a simple or black and white story, an idiom that is both apt and unfortunate here as Atkinson is the second African-American elected official in a year (ex-Las Vegas Councilman Ricki Barlow is the other) to plead guilty to similar federal wire fraud charges.

I can only imagine the pain felt by two African-American leaders in the state – Attorney General Aaron Ford and Speaker Jason Frierson – both models of rectitude who surely are lamenting the unfortunate succession of elected black criminals and the long history (Morse Arberry, Frank Hawkins, Yvonne Atkinson Gates and others) who ascended to power and abused it, thus ending their public careers.

But Kelvin Atkinson is not synecdoche for all African-American elected officials or all lawmakers or all politicians. He is unique, and his story is not simple.

Atkinson surmounted much adversity to get where he was, including the murder of his father when he was in college, relocating to Las Vegas because he had nowhere else to go and being a closeted homosexual for most of his life. One of the more memorable moments in all of my years covering the Legislature was Atkinson’s “I’m black, I’m gay” speech during the 2013 capital debate over gay marriage.

He cared about the less fortunate and showed it in public and private ways. He had a progressive’s heart as a lawmaker.

But Atkinson also became more and more haughty and dismissive of those whom he felt were lessers, demanding genuflection and flaunting a status he believed he had earned. After he bought a downtown Las Vegas bar, he began to tout it on social media, making many uncomfortable – I can only guess how many lobbyists felt the need to patronize the Urban Lounge, how many Democrats felt they had to have fundraisers there.

He became a bigwig in the Council of State Governments, and his traveling increased, often celebrated on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts. His constant use of emojis and “SMDH” and excessive exclamation points created an image of a frivolous man taking advantage of his position.

Everyone noticed, including, it seems, the feds.

Lobbyists and some of his colleagues kept quiet because he was powerful. His peers whispered sour somethings about him, but did nothing. Indeed, they made him leader knowing all of this, praying a shoe wouldn’t drop — until it did last week.

This is how it works everywhere. It's easier to sit silent than stand up. At a time when schadenfreude trumps sympathy, most legislators probably are either sad to see him fall or happy to see him gone.

I have always believed that a process whereby people are paid a pittance ($10,000) and don’t have a professional staff will affect the quality of candidates willing to go to Carson City, with many of them suddenly somebodies after being nobodies, reveling in the attention and basking in the power. This does not excuse Atkinson’s behavior, but it helps explain the atmosphere that makes it possible.

And because of what one observer called the “continuing devaluation of the Legislature,” which is partly their fault and partly a sign of the times, no one really notices until someone does something egregious.

A Mark Manendo, who has been a leering harasser for years, is finally forced out. A Ruben Kihuen, who was just a smoother incarnation of Manendo, climbs another rung before he tumbles. It’s no surprise that neither of them ever had a serious job before coming to Carson City.

But for every Manendo, for every Kihuen and for every Atkinson, there are scores of lawmakers who are not criminals or harassers. Sure, they are of differing intellects and work ethics; but they come to Carson with the best of intentions and grapple with an imperfect, often corrupting system.

It is a system designed to detect people’s weaknesses and exploit them, and too many are susceptible to the temptations. The best solutions – make them full-time, pay them more – are politically untenable. So holding the ones who stray accountable – by the attorney general, not an obsolescent ethics tribunal – will allow the state to police its own so the feds don’t have to occasionally swoop in and sweep up.

The detritus of the L’Affaire Atkinson will be there after he is sentenced Monday. And the pain for other African-American elected officials and the community will not ebb so quickly.

Sure, this will enliven the government-haters and, alas, the racists. But the fact is that when the feds have found more serious corruption here – Operation G-Sting in the first decade of the new millennium, for example – the perpetrators have not been African-American.

This is not about race, nor is it about party despite the opportunistic and hypocritical attacks last week by the state GOP, which is headed by the ethically bankrupt Michael McDonald, and can boast of upright citizens such as disgraced former Gov. Jim Gibbons and U.S. Sen. John Ensign.

Sometimes shutting up is the better part of….partisanship. But with partisan hit squads on both sides of the aisle also polluting the building and making legislating more difficult, I have no such illusions.

But I do have hope.

There are some excellent young legislators who seem honest and hardworking, including some African-Americans with promise such as Assemblywoman Danielle Monroe-Moreno. And Frierson and Ford are the kind of stalwart leaders who eventually will make the community forget Atkinson.

To his credit, Atkinson did not make this about race. He began his floor speech with the unfortunate and telling phrase, “Regretfully it has been discovered…” But he eventually took responsibility and said he had no one to blame but himself.

Regretfully, it has been discovered that human beings are imperfect, that some lawmakers are better human beings than others and that systems only get reformed after scandals — and if enough people are willing to do what it takes for the greater good.

Jon Ralston is the founder and editor of The Nevada Independent. He has been covering government and politics for more than thirty years. Contact him at [email protected]