I will assure you that she was not cast for her acting ability.
I saw her in a Alex Cox movie, Straight to Hell. She was horrible. And only marginally better in the Larry Flynt thing.
To the subject of the thread. In NYC there are ten thousand old guys running around City Hall and the courts who know, literally, everything. They know where every political body is buried going back to Peter Stuyvesant. Many of them are part of the old time democratic machine who will not blink before spilling the beans on Rudy.