Interesting article in Toronto's National Post today featuring one of our city council members...

'Rich & crooked yet?'

Allen Abel concludes his four-part series looking at political venality in America, from sea to slimy sea.

Allen Abel, National Post Published: Wednesday, May 19, 2010


In 2006, the winner of the Audience Award at the Silverdocs Documentary Festival in Maryland was the inspiring true story of a political neophyte entitled Can Mister Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

This fast-paced 84-minute video was a riff on the 1939 Jimmy Stewart movie about an idealistic Midwesterner thrust into the corrupted maw of the U.S. Senate. The real-life Mister Smith chronicled the campaign of a nice Jewish boy named Jeff Smith for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri.

"Funny, engrossing ... deeply absorbing," said The Washington Post.

At almost the same moment, a nice Jewish boy named Steven Fulop was gunning for a seat on city council here in Jersey City, which, by any measure, has been one of the most thoroughly rotten jurisdictions anywhere in America for the past 200 years. (Four of its recent mayors have gone to the penitentiary. A city councilman was sentenced last week to a year and a day in prison for accepting a US$5,000 bribe. It goes on and on.)

Both Mr. Fulop, who was born in 1977, and the latter-day Mr. Smith, who was born in the Watergate winter of 1973, were newcomers to the red-toothed reality of politics in Corrupt Nation. Both ran on platforms of honesty, truthfulness, and devotion to solving the everyday problems of ordinary people. Both used social media, a network of impassioned young liberals, and old-fashioned door-to-door canvassing to make their names and reputations known.

One was elected, and still serves today.

The other is still serving as well: a 12-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Manchester, Ky.

"You're never going to legislate ethics," says one of them -- and he's the one who's not in jail!

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Steven Fulop, who grew up slaving (to hear him tell it) in his parents' delicatessen in Newark before he earned his MBA, was employed by an alleged criminal organization in the autumn of 2001 when he saw the Twin Towers fall. (He was at Goldman Sachs.) Within a few days, he had joined the U.S. military, and soon found himself on the road to Baghdad with the 6th Engineer Support Battalion of the U.S. Marine Corps.

"I won't just sit behind a desk," he said at the time. "I will fight for my country."

When he came home in one piece, Mr. Fulop was courted by the Democratic Party power elite of Jersey City, which is just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. He was urged to run for Congress, which he did, with no success, then to contest for a seat on the famously corrupt city council, which he won at the age of 28.

"The Young Lion," Mr. Fulop was labelled by The New York Times, which praised his decency in hiring campaign workers from a homeless shelter and called him "a studious overachiever."

Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service were tightening the screws on the solons of Northern New Jersey with the help of a couple of Orthodox Jews, one of whom was going around the Garden State boasting he just might have a human kidney to sell. The Feds called it Operation Bid Rig.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/story.htm ... 3045824&p=1#ixzz0oNP5vgw2