COLUMBUS, Ohio – It was early 2019 when two FBI agents and a former NFL player hired as an informant sat for a meeting in the office of a lobbyist who they suspected was a crook.

The gathering was organized to discuss influencing sports betting legislation in Ohio. But after the undercover agents and the lobbyist moved to a nearby steakhouse, the conversation turned to Larry Householder, at the time the newly chosen speaker of the Ohio House .

Householder is on trial next week on allegations of running a $60 million racketeering enterprise to pass House Bill 6 in 2019, a public corruption case prosecutors have described as the largest in state history. Two alleged conspirators have pleaded guilty, as has one nonprofit used in the scheme. FirstEnergy Corp., an Akron-based Fortune 500 utility company, admitted to prosecutors that it paid off Householder, who will be tried alongside Matt Borges, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party.

In a case bogged down in the finer points of campaign finance and utility law, the FBI agents’ cloak and dagger approach yielded statements the government is using as express proof of the men’s participation in a bribery scheme.

“Nobody knows the money goes to the Speaker’s account,” Neil Clark, a powerful GOP lobbyist, allegedly told the undercovers in one of their many conversations. “It is controlled by his people.”

Clark, who was criminally accused of serving as Householder’s proxy in the scheme, was the…