If I sported a hairpiece, I’d be wearing it at half-mast right about now, upon hearing that the world just grew a little less interesting. For the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress, former Ohio Democratic Rep. James A . Traficant Jr., expired today at the age of 73. Traficant—he of the Barney Miller-era suits and conspiracy theories and “beam-me-up” one-minute floor speeches and the toupee that looked like a marmot getting electroconvulsive therapy—died as he lived: crushed beneath the weight of The Machine.  A tractor he was driving rolled over on him.

I, for one, will miss him, much as I did when he went to federal prison in 2002 to serve a seven-year sentence on corruption charges. Well before Traficant became a federal inmate, I went to see him for a profile.  Though we were only in each other’s company for one day, he gave me everything a profiler could want: sex (he informed me in a crowded Rayburn Building elevator  that a lot of women hit on him and he takes them on out of a “responsibility to the American woman”), violence (he slapped me in the face while insisting on calling me “Kibosh” instead of “Labash,” accusing me of coming to do “a castration job”)  and intimacies (he spent hours insisting that Janet Reno, whose Justice Department was then bearing down on him, was a lesbian mob puppet).