The Israeli Attorney General said yesterday: "I confess that I can't get to sleep at night, and I wouldn't advise the public to sleep soundly either. In my opinion, anybody who wants a proper functioning society in Israel ought to be worried right now."
Mr Elyakim Rubinstein, the country's top legal official and a man known for his good humour and optimism, was speaking (in a newspaper interview) at a time when the rule of law in the Jewish state appears to be under threat from a small group of enormously influential and wealthy individuals.
The key figure is Mr Ofer Nimrodi, son of an Israeli arms dealer, who has been in police detention for the last few days, suspected of a horrifying catalogue of offences, from seeking to pervert the course of justice and bribing police officers, all the way to conspiracy to murder.
Mr Nimrodi is the owner and was the publisher of Ma'ariv, Israel's second highest-selling newspaper. He has already served jail time, for illegal wiretapping in the mid-1990s, when his attempts to compete with the top-selling tabloid, Yediot Ahronot, extended to tapping the phones of rival reporters and editors.
The present case against Mr Nimrodi stems from that previous conviction. One of the private investigators he hired to help fight his illegal circulation battle is reported to be alleging now that Mr Nimrodi planned to murder a key witness in the wiretapping trial, and also conspired to kill two rival publishers.
The notion that a purported pillar of society, feted by top politicians, would sink to conspiracy to murder is horrifying enough. But the police chief investigating him, Mr Moshe Mizrahi, alleges that Mr Nimrodi's ruthlessness has extended to the bribing and attempted bribing of so many of his officers that Mr Mizrahi has had to withhold information from his own colleagues and has been reduced, at some points, to conducting the case from his car. What's more, the police suspect that Mr Nimrodi has involved his lawyers - some of Israel's foremost criminal defence attorneys - in attempts to subvert the investigation.
In an almost unprecedented move last week, Mr Nimrodi's lawyers were barred by court order - later overturned - from meeting him. In court yesterday, one of those lawyers, Mr Dan Avi-Yitzhak, petitioned for Mr Nimrodi's release from detention on the basis that he had been denied access to his legal representation. The judge dismissed the petition, observing that a freed Mr Nimrodi represented a potential threat to the well-being of various individuals and to the course of justice.
The Nimrodi affair is the gravest, but not the only, current case of alleged misdeeds in high places. Also being investigated by police are the former head of the Israel Bar Association, over a suspected money-laundering operation; the head of a nation-wide school system, over the disappearance of huge sums of money; and the former prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and his wife Sarah, in a sprawling case involving suspected non-payment of bills and retention of gifts that should have been returned to the state when Mr Netanyahu was defeated early in the summer.
"If the suspicions are borne out," Mr Rubinstein said yesterday, referring to the Nimrodi case, "this would be an unprecedentedly grave phenomenon . . . I am deeply worried."
And what may be especially worrying is that Mr Rubinstein was only appointed to his key post after Mr Netanyahu, when prime minister, had tried to install a mediocre party hack in the position - another move that allegedly strayed into illegality and for which one of Mr Netanyahu's top political allies, the former interior minister Mr Aryeh Deri, is now facing indictment.