Ted Sherman - The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money-Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought It All Down

For Rosanne and Karen;

Aliza and Matthew;

Brooke, Julianna, and Rebecca

Contents

Your rulers are rogues, and cronies of thieves,

every one avid for presents and greedy for gifts.

ISAIAH 1:23

Prologue

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS: THE CANVAS ON WHICH WE PAINT

Robert Janiszewski, Dewars-and-water in hand, stood at the bar under a night sky aboard the Lightship Barge & Grill, a converted vessel moored along the Jersey City waterfront. His face said he did not want company. The veteran politician and once-formidable boss of the powerful Hudson County Democratic machineknown by all as Bobby Jlooked tired and gaunt. It was an August evening in 2001 at the marina at Liberty State Park. The backdrop was the brightly lit lower Manhattan skyline. Bobby J had lost so much weight that some friends thought him seriously ill.

Then, he mysteriously disappeared, only to show up months later as a cooperating witness in a federal sting. His targets were friends, political associates, elected officials, and contractors. Janiszewski had been caught taking a cash payoff from a county vendor in an Atlantic City hotel room during a New Jersey League of Municipalities convention. It is an annual event. Three days of glad-handing, networking, government seminars, and contractor displays for companies selling everything from accounting software to blacktop to municipal services. Outside the convention center, the gathering often hosts golf outings, political dinners, drunken parties, sex, and, at times, corrupt deals that go down behind closed doors.

Deals sometimes captured by hidden FBI surveillance cameras.

Just moments after the cash was slipped to him, Janiszewski was arrested. The payoff had been orchestrated by the FBI. No way out. And then he faced a decision. He could go away to prison for a very long time, or he could make his own deal. When you get caught, the only currency you have is information. Thats the way one federal informant described the sensation. Janiszewski reluctantly agreed to wear a wire and spent the next year secretly recording conversations in his car, office, and elsewhere while setting up others not cautious enough to smell the trap.

The covert criminal probe prematurely became public after federal investigators used the tapes in a failed effort to turn a prominent North Jersey developer who had secretly been implicated by Janiszewski. They hoped he would do the right thing and cooperate as well. Thats not what I do, the developer replied.

It was then that Janiszewski promptly left on a vacation from which he never returned, ending more than a dozen years as one of the most powerful political bosses in the state. He pleaded guilty and testified against others, including his best friend, and recounted in court how he would get plastic envelopes stuffed full of cash that he would stash away in a file cabinet in his home.

* * *

Politics and business come together in New Jersey like nowhere else, a universe that looks, sounds, and smells familiar but is at the same time strange and foreign. It is a place where there are few good guys and the ones there are often earn little, if any, respect. It is a place where there are real bad guys, actual crooks, colorful villains, and even dangerous characters seduced by money and power. But they are so interesting, engaging, and quick with a tale that they are downright impossible to stay away from.

There are political bosses who, when theyre not ordering the assassinations of careers and reputations, are philanthropists and businessmen, running schools and banks and insurance companies and law firms. There are the rabbis who lead cloistered communities and use seminaries as power bases to extract their tribute from the politicians. There are the priests who negotiate communion rights based on political stances. There are the lawyers who (as Al Pacino declares in The Devils Advocate, have the ultimate backstage pass because the law, my boy, puts us in everything) know everything about everyone, and get paid for it to boot. There are the bagmen, the go-betweens, the intermediaries who ensure that the skids are greased, the meetings are set, and the beer is cold.

Long before the story you are about to read, corruption seemed to be synonymous with New Jerseyand especially with Hudson County. It is a place once so renowned for stuffing the ballot boxes with the votes of dead people that former governor Brendan Byrne still gets laughs on the dinner circuit when he says he wants to be buried in Hudson so I can stay active in politics.

At the same time, Byrne, a former judge, notes that corruption is a game fraught with peril for those willing to cross the line. Eventually, he cautions, the chances of getting caught are high. One of the cardinal rules of New Jersey politics is theres no such thing as a private conversation. Somewhere along the line, you are going to be taped by someone wearing a wire, he explains. This is why so many political meetings start with a big bear huga New Jersey pat-down among friends.

The title of most corrupt state has been claimed by Louisiana, Illinois, even Rhode Island. But seriously, even the feds and the prosecutors agree that New Jersey has few peers. Around the State House, as the Legislature convenes, jokes regularly suggest that yellow crime-scene tape ought to wrap the whole building. Around the state, people generally accept the reality that graft is just part of lifesort of unavoidable, like a traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike.

In the last decade alone, one governor resigned in a gay-sex scandal, the states only medical school was taken over by the feds because of fraud and corruption, and officials from Atlantic City to Bergen County have been put behind bars or are awaiting trial. Jerseys history is one of legendary graft and fraud. Mayors are constantly getting indicted. One former state senator faked his own death in a Bahamas scuba-diving accident to avoid prison, a fate that finally overtook him after a two-year cat-and-mouse game in which he taunted authorities as he hid out in the open with his photographer girlfriend, enjoying a life on the run that took them from the luxury ski slopes of the Alps to sunny Mediterranean beach resorts, on a string of phony passports. He was finally captured in the tiny island republic of the Maldives off the west coast of India, where he was running a chain of highly successful dive shops.

These guys are for sale and they let you know it, declared one former political operative. He recounted tales of Sharpe James, the former mayor of Newark, who would throw his support to those who rented the offices of the Sharpe James Civic Association for three months (and who spent 20 months at Petersburg Correctional Complex in Virginia as federal inmate 28791-050, before being released last year to a halfway house).

Another former key Essex County legislator sought $5,000 from one gubernatorial campaign for rent of his legislative storefront office just for Election Day. How much am I going to get? he demanded. They didnt need his district office. But they could afford to pay him to go away. They offered him $3,000. He took it.

James, who was one of the states most influential politicians during his five terms as mayor and two as a state senator, would later be convicted of illegally steering city land to his mistress, Tamika Riley. She, in turn, made hundreds of thousands of dollars by quickly flipping the lots instead of redeveloping them, as required under the terms of the land sales.