Follow the Money: The Corporate Jet Set

If you want to know what's really going on, don't follow the gossip.

Follow the money.

It's as true today as it was back during Watergate, when "Deep Throat" whispered the advice to the young Bob Woodward.

So today TheStreet.com is launching this column. I'll be digging through the fine print -- in company filings, government documents and other obscure places -- to bring you the stuff that no one wants you to know.

Like who's making money? Who's losing it?

Who's buying the next president?

And who's flying to Wimbledon or Paris -- on your dime?

Corporate rackets didn't go away after Sarbanes-Oxley. They just got smarter. So long as company directors disclose information somewhere in their filings, it's legal. It's in there -- but hardly anyone ever looks. Which is why, until now, the first time investors hear about a scandal such as Bob Nardelli's payoff at Home Depot(HD Quote), it's too late to do anything about it.

By now, everyone has heard about Nancy Pelosi's plane. Until this flap blew up a few weeks ago, most Americans probably assumed that speakers of the House of Representatives flew commercial like everyone else. We now know that after 9/11, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert was given access to a special Air Force jet -- for security purposes, of course.