Okay, I just now finished the lead story.
To me, "The Bogeyman" looked and sounded a heck of a lot like "Midnight" from the Golden Age Quality comics. (And yes, I know that originally Midnight was a Will Eisner creation, a knockoff of his own previous creation, "The Spirit." But "Bogeyman" doesn't talk at all like the version of Denny Colt/Spirit which I remember so fondly from the reprints of the post-war era of "The Spirit.")
Anyway, it was a fairly light-hearted and entertaining story. I didn't like the "Bogeyman" alias for an ordinary guy in a blue suit who just happens to wear a domino mask -- it didn't seem to fit. (Of course, I also used to think "The Spirit" was a silly name for a man with nothing mystical about him, but it gradually grew on me.)
About the mayor -- at first, I was leaning in the direction of "the mayor simply thinks he is playing high-stakes poker in an honest game, but the poor fool doesn't realize that Dirty Dan is setting him with a big win in marked bills in order to use them as false evidence that the mayor 'knowingly took a bribe from the notorious Dirty Dan.'"
After all, Dirty Dan is heard bragging, as early as Page 4 of the story ("Page 6" of the online scan of the entire comic book): "I'm going to break the mayor, and I'll take care of Bogeyman at the same time!"
Now why on earth would a mobster need to go to all that trouble to "break" the mayor if, in fact, he already had the man in his pocket, with the mayor gleefully taking bribes in exchange for whatever services Dan wanted from him? Why waste such a golden opportunity?
Far more logical, from my point of view (if I were a big figure in organized crime), would be to invest $50,000 in the cause of making an honest mayor appear corrupt, so as to get him out of the way!
Perhaps because the deputy mayor was already in Dan's pocket, or was so weak-willed and gullible that it would be much easier to manipulate him without his understanding what was really happening, provided he "inherited" the job of mayor for the next couple of years? Alternately, the incumbent mayor could have been up for reelection soon, and expected to win by a comfortable margin according to the latest polls, and Dan could have been planning to damage his credibility a few weeks before Election Day so that the rival candidate (Dan's stooge) would start a full four-year term after winning in a landslide.
P.S. As Crashryan already pointed out, even if the mayor were guilty as sin, it made no sense for him to laughingly acknowledge this fact in the presence of the police chief as soon as it became clear that the chief had strong suspicions of what had really been going on in that poker game. The mayor's obvious best bet would have been to claim that the facts were approximately as I had previously assumed they were, to wit: "I never in my life held my hand out for a bribe, and if you can establish in court that Dirty Dan carefully marked some bills and arranged for a crooked dealer to make sure I 'won' them, that will prove all sorts of nasty things about Dirty Dan, but it doesn't mean I had any notion of what the scoundrel was doing as he amused himself by playing puppetmaster and trying to make me look bad!"
I mean, let's face it: Suppose someone searched through my wallet right this minute, and found that some of the money in it had, at some previous time, been marked in a way that would only manifest itself under ultraviolet radiation. How would that mildly interesting physical fact, in and of itself, "prove" anything at all about whether or not I had acquired the money in a corrupt fashion? As opposed to winning it in a friendly game of chance, or receiving it when I cashed a paycheck, or having recently sold a used car or something in exchange for cold cash, or some other legitimate transaction?
