BOSTON (AP) — The speaker of the Massachusetts House said Sunday that he would resign during an investigation of accusations that a close friend used their relationship to push ticket-scalping legislation and paid off legal bills for the speaker’s in-laws.

The speaker’s name is Salvatore DiMasi; a buddy of his is being investigated for what the state attorney general says was being an unregistered lobbyist.

Mr. Vitale has pleaded not guilty to concealing his work as a lobbyist and having contact with the speaker while promoting changes to the scalping laws on behalf of ticket brokers.

Ticket reselling is a louche business. Vitale and DiMasi are poster kids of the old way of doing things, which besides the potential corruption at its best involved systematic suborning of the ticket-selling process and at its worst involved big guys with a lot of cash and presumably guns haranguing passers-by.

Today, we have eBay (StubHub) and even Ticketmaster (TicketsNow) getting into the market. The latter situation is a gem. Ticketmaster can sell tickets to, say, music fans on a relatively fair basis, leaving aside its utterly reprehensible fee system. Or it can sell the best seats in the house to itself … and resell them later at a scalper’s premium.