On my 10000000th rewatch and it occurred to me that Markezian might be a federal informant. When he first breaks the news re: Pussy to Tony, he talks about a big drug bust the year before where pussy was in Vegas cutting a deal… He later tells Tony how hard it is to the get the form implicating pussy as an informant but happens to know that (otherwise) very privileged information re: pussys deal w feds.

Could it be the feds leaked this info to Markezian to help get him closer to Tony and in the end he couldn’t handle the stress? When local arrest comes, Markezian gives it up because he knows that tony will suspect there’s something else going on — he already suspects his own guys have flipped — can only imagine what he’d think about the “degenerate cop gambler with a badge”?