Poison Ivy in the Garden State
The glory days of New Jersey corruption, from a colonial cross-dresser to a filing cabinet stuffed with cash

JULY 24, 2009
Wall Street Journal
By BRAD PARKS

In a rite that has become as familiar to them as Springsteen selling out the Meadowlands?but, alas, far more prevalent?New Jersey voters again had to endure a money-grubbing herd of their duly elected officials being led out of a courthouse in shame and handcuffs this week, having become the latest in a huge rogue?s gallery of state politicians to face corruption charges.

Watching it makes me think of an old African proverb??a goat tied to a tree always eats from the same grass??that speaks to the deep-rooted nature of corruption in New Jersey and to the voracious greed of those who engage in it. And while it?s doubtful the Swahili Bushman who coined the phrase had ever been to Hoboken?he couldn?t find parking?it?s hard not to think of it whenever we have another day like Thursday, when a group of Jane Councilwomen and Joe Assemblymen are made to walk before the cameras with their heads bowed and ushered into an old school bus, because it?s the only vehicle large enough to hold them all.

In a state that doesn?t have its own commercial television station?New York and Philadelphia dominate our airwaves?New Jersey elected officials have been thoughtful enough to provide us their own long-running sitcom. This latest episode featured 44 people, an unprecedented number even for New Jersey, being charged in an investigation into public corruption and international money laundering. The bust included five rabbis, three assemblymen and two mayors, prompting one late-night caller on the state?s talk radio station, New Jersey 101.5, to ask, ?Where?s the partridge in the pear tree??

Answer: The partridge is actually a cooperating witness, having turned state?s evidence to avoid prosecution.

The details are still a little sketchy?something about money-laundering rabbis and a black-market kidney??but the pattern is familiar enough. The feds nabbed some smooth-talking alleged swindler, in this case a failed real-estate mogul named Solomon Dwek, who then curried favor with prosecutors by agreeing to wear a wire and fish around with cash-stuffed envelopes. Before long, he had hooked a whole school of greedy politicians, many of whom jumped in the boat before they even had a chance to swallow the bait, according to the criminal complaints against them.

In doing so, Mr. Dwek joined the likes of Robert ?Duke? Steffer, the ?demolition contractor? who snared the famed Monmouth 11 a few years back; or the illustrious Jerry Free, a cement salesman who lured in a Paterson mayor and an Essex County executive, among others, with cash, trips and Brazilian hookers?prompting the explanation from the Paterson mayor that he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and illegal gifts because he had gotten ?bogged down? in the hard work of governance.

And, yes, we laugh about it, in the same way we laugh about our landfills, our pollution and the New Jersey Nets. But it?s only funny until you realize that, as a taxpayer, you?re the rube footing the bill. So we smack our foreheads, slap down our morning papers and wonder how we once again have become a national punch line. (I say ?we? because, even though I recently moved to Virginia, my heart remains in New Jersey, where I lived for 10 years.)

Because, like the goat, we in New Jersey keep having to swallow the same pulpy stuff. Long before we had the nation?s first gay-American governor?James E. McGreevey resigned after giving his boyfriend a high-level state job?we had Lord Cornbury. New Jersey?s first colonial governor wasn?t only a cross-dresser, he was also known for taking bribes and appointing relatives to important positions.

So it began and, in many ways, has continued unabated throughout our history. We have had Frank ?I am the law? Hague, who never made more than $9,000 a year as mayor of Jersey City, and never held another job during his 30 years in office, yet died in 1956 with an estate estimated at $5 million. Or there was the 1980s? Abscam?an oh-so-clever contraction of ?Abdul? and ?scam??in which FBI informants posing as Middle Eastern businessmen doled out bribes netting themselves 31 public officials, including a U.S. senator from New Jersey. Or there was Hudson County executive Robert Janiszewski, who got caught taking a $5,000 bribe a few years back and became a cooperating witness, whereupon he led investigators to the filing cabinet he had stuffed with cash-filled envelopes, because he had so many he didn?t know what to do with them.

Lately, our jails feel like they have a revolving door just for state senators: A month after former State Sen. John Lynch got out of jail for taking kickbacks, former State Sen. Wayne Bryant was yesterday sentenced to four years in prison for taking a no-show job.

Then there?s Newark, which deserves its own chapter in corruption ignominy. You have to go back to 1962 in New Jersey?s largest city to find a mayor who completed his time in office and wasn?t later indicted for it. The current mayor, the ever-trendy Cory Booker, has positioned himself as a real reformer. Yet so had the former mayor, Sharpe James, when he came into office in 1986. After 20 years during which he and some of his handlers grew increasingly crooked ?his chief of staff, who was found with bricks of cash hidden in his floorboards, went to jail on corruption charges in the 1990s?Mr. James is now serving time for steering cheap city land to his mistress. But that still pales in comparison to Hugh Addonizio, who left the U.S. House of Representatives to reign over Newark City Hall from 1962-1970, in part because, as he was quoted as saying, ?You can?t make much money as a Congressman, but as mayor you can make a million bucks.?

There have been reform efforts, sure. But there have also been elections like the one in Hudson County in 1889, where voters?many of whom, it turned out, were not quite breathing on Election Day?were thoughtful enough to cast their ballots in perfect alphabetical order. Even our golden-domed statehouse in Trenton is a monument to graft: Originally estimated to cost $19,000 in 1881, it was completed six years late and cost nearly four times as much?including a $1,350 flagpole.

It?s true that New Jersey is by no means unique in having officials who misuse the public till. But it is generally accepted that, among the 50 U.S. states, only Louisiana compares with New Jersey in the pervasiveness of its corruption?the difference being in Louisiana, they actually know what they?re doing is wrong. In New Jersey, cash for influence has become so commonplace a lot of politicians don?t even understand it?s illegal. And so we get the spectacle of Hoboken mayor Peter Cammarano on Thursday, standing silently as his lawyer promised to fight these unfair and untrue charges?this from a guy who had been mayor all of 23 days, yet, according to authorities, he had already been caught on a federal wire tap telling a cooperating witness, who was about to hand him $5,000 in cash, he would be ?treated like a friend? when his projects came up for approval.

We have our excuses, both historical and contemporary, as to how we?ve become such a locus for official malfeasance: The state has long been an entry point for immigrants, who have tended to be easy to snooker. It is the most densely populated state with the least amount of available land, so developers and industrialists are always looking for an edge. And we are noted for having our share of, ahem, organized crime.

But the main problem?and this is the ?tree? part of the goat-tied-to-tree proverb?is that the state is enormously over-governed. In most states, the local unit of government is the county; in others, it?s the municipality. In Jersey, we have both, and lots of them. There are 566 municipalities?California, with four times the population, has only 480?and each has a mayor and/or councils. The 21 counties have their various freeholder boards and utility commissions and there are also 120 state legislators. When that many people have their hands in the cookie jar ?and there are that many cookie jars?is it any wonder that you get people selling Oreos out of their trunk in the parking lot to make a little extra cash on the side?

What?s more, much like the nation?s congressional districts, the vast majority of New Jersey?s 21 counties are either heavily Republican or heavily Democratic, with voter registrations tilted to one side by a margin of 10% or more. The result is entrenched political machinery and the kind of hubris that we heard from Mr. Cammarano, who was caught bragging, ?I could be, uh, indicted, and I?m still gonna win 85 to 95%? of certain key voting blocs, according to authorities. A Hudson County freeholder was re-elected while under indictment a few years back.
NY Historical Society/Bridgeman Art Library

A painting that is thought to be a depiction of New Jersey?s, Lord Cornbury, who dabbled in cross-dressing.

This has been a kind of golden era for corruption cases in New Jersey, where a few years back a fundraiser for George W. Bush, heretofore unproven as a prosecutor, was named U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. Chris Christie ended up making enough of a name for himself?he left office with a perfect 130-0 record in corruption cases last year?he now has a commanding lead to unseat Gov. Jon Corzine come November in a state starved for someone to clean up its mess. And while critics said he was merely collecting trophies to place on his political mantel, Mr. Christie counters it actually wasn?t that hard to catch dirty politicians in the state. It would only get complicated because the perpetrators were so gluttonous?and so dumb?that as soon as word got out a contractor was throwing around money, they started tripping over themselves to cut their buddies in on the action.

The dollar amounts are inevitably small, relative to what?s being sold, which is only one of many sad aspects of these cases. Like most morally flexible Americans, I have a price at which I would gladly sell out my most cherished ideals?mine is $10 million, in case anyone is buying, and I figure it would be enough to set me up on a tropical island where no one would have heard of my shame. But most of these Tony Soprano-wannabes sell out for $5,000 or less, which is perplexing when you consider state assembly members are making $49,000 a year for part-time work. They?re risking their reputations, political careers and freedom for a little more than a month?s pay.

The only possible explanation is that the graft is so widespread, they figure they?ll never get caught. I once had a long, off-the-record conversation with a disgraced former public official who simply started unloading all the things he had witnessed?and been a party to?during his time in office. It was the usual bid-rigging, influence-pedaling and other tomfoolery that has become the norm, and there was so much of it my notebook was practically throbbing by the time we were done. Most of it was a few years old, so I never got around to verifying it. Yet it left me with the distinct impression that, much like Turnpike speeders, the number of people who get caught is really quite small compared with the number of people doing it. George Sternlieb, a longtime head of local government studies at Rutgers, the state university, was once asked what percentage of municipal governments in New Jersey were corrupt. His answer: ?About half.?

So the crooks are everywhere. Yes, they have tended to be more urban than rural and more Democratic than Republican. But taken as a whole, they cut across demographic, racial, ethnic and political lines and suggest that there is something universal about corruption in the state. And we sometimes revel in it: We actually discuss what people wear to their perp walks like its our own Oscars red carpet. When Tamika Riley, the mistress of former Newark mayor Sharpe James, was arrested in a daring blouse that divulged about six inches of cleavage, it was buzzed about for months. She was later convicted.

But mostly we revile it. And we are revolted by it. And we are resigned to it. New Jersey corruption cases are a bit like eclipses?lunar, not solar?in that they happen with predictable-enough frequency to be mentionable but not all that remarkable. And if you happen to miss one, fear not, there will always be another one soon. The goat is always hungry.

?Brad Parks is a former reporter with The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger. His debut novel, ?Faces of the Gone,? is due out from St. Martin?s Press in December.