The Confession (10 page)

With coaching, over time, I started winning my cases.

But winning isn't always the goal. Kiddie Court demanded a copious supply of compassion. Most of the cases that came across my desk involved kids charged with selling drugs. It only took me a few weeks to realize these were among the smartest kids in their neighborhoods. Without any formal education, and with precious few role models, they had figured out capitalism and the market economy, often building vast enterprises—an amazing feat given their ages. These were kids who took risks, who not only accumulated capital but reinvested it in distribution, even manufacturing. Don't misunderstand: I loathe drugs. But it seemed to me that there was a spark of real potential mixed in with the delinquency, something to encourage alongside something to punish.

Unfortunately, the system wasn't good at doing both things at once. So time after time I'd process these boys and girls, negotiating short juvenile sentences or restrictive probation for them, only to see them back in the
holding cell a few months later. Bright as they were, they hadn't learned the simplest lesson: to paraphrase Einstein, you can't do today what you did yesterday and expect different results. I hated pressing for long sentences on these cases, because everybody knew this would expose them to the worst elements of their generation. But too many kids went down that road.

I can't be sure my time at Kiddie Court changed anyone's life. I've come to recognize that we can't break that cycle without doing something about the homes and communities these kids are being returned to—hopeless landscapes that prevent even the smartest young kids from seeing promise on the horizon.

After a few months, my supervisors granted my request for transfer to the criminal prosecution division on the ninth floor.
Now
things were getting fascinating. These were the dark days before specialized sex crimes divisions, so I got a number of rape cases to try. Having had a friend who had suffered the emotional trauma of sexual abuse, I did everything I could to alleviate any increased burden on the victims, meeting with them and trying to offer not just legal representation but emotional support as well. It was rewarding work. But one case challenged the way I thought about sexual assault cases.

The complainant in the case was white, the defendant black. They had been close friends through high school. After a graduation party, they had had a sexual encounter of a disputed nature in a car parked outside a local nightclub. At the time the woman had not called the encounter an assault. Only later, after her father discovered the encounter, had she filed charges.

It was a difficult proceeding. The woman was noticeably conflicted about the charge, but she appeared to be motivated by her family's anger toward the young man. Ethically, I was concerned about the State's case, and I went back to the woman to try to ascertain her true feelings. But she assured me that she wanted to prosecute.

I was duty bound to accept her at her word. The jury, however, wasn't, and they returned a verdict of not guilty. In all my time in the prosecutor's office, I saw, almost categorically, the effectiveness of the justice system. This is one of the rare cases—certainly the only one I prosecuted—where I believe that the failure of the State's case led to a just verdict.

 

WHEN I FIRST GOT BACK TO CENTRAL JERSEY—AFTER A FEW WEEKS
back in my old bedroom in Carteret—I rented an apartment fifteen minutes away in Woodbridge, the state's fifth-largest city, and joined the Catholic Lawyers Guild, eager to get acquainted with the area's legal community. Only a few years old, the Guild was the brainchild of Bishop Theodore McCarrick, who had been brought in from New York to found the new Metuchen Diocese after it split off from the burgeoning Diocese of Trenton in 1981.

An intelligent and well-read gentleman who understood the importance of the Church's role in the modern world, McCarrick took our young diocese by storm. I loved hearing his homilies at the new cathedral, and his speeches before our Guild, pushing us to address socially progressive issues like poverty and war. No one who knew him then was surprised that he later became the cardinal leading the powerful Washington, DC, archdiocese—or that he eventually became one of the voices of reform and compassion who helped the Church through the sexual abuse scandals of 2002.

Before long, the Guild's presidency fell vacant—and I saw my first opportunity to run for office. As a Catholic group, however, the Guild was hardly a democracy. The choice of a new president would be heavily influenced by McCarrick himself. I had no idea how to lobby him—and even though he was relatively young, and Metuchen was not especially important in the national Church, it was still difficult to get him on the phone or pin him down for a meeting. So I began to make it my business to know the priests who worked for him in the chancery. It took a while, but I figured out which priest was advising the bishop on this matter; graciously, he allowed me to make a case for my leadership directly to him. My plank, if you could call it that, was my interest in the financial plight of seniors in our community, who were pinched between skyrocketing nursing costs and a Medicaid system that subsidized the most expensive care in nursing homes but refused to bankroll home health care, a cheaper alternative preferred by many. The system kept people sicker and poorer—which were hardly Catholic principles.

Ultimately, though, I developed a good relationship with McCarrick,
and he looked kindly upon my bid for the leadership role. Some called this “the work of the Holy Spirit”—a little too cynically, I thought. Sure, I campaigned. But I was excited about the job, and I went on to serve aggressively for a number of years.

A very attractive, witty, and talented lawyer named Deborah Venezia was named secretary-treasurer, thanks to her own efforts at the chancery, and together we organized professional gatherings, social mixers, discussion breakfasts, and the like. We also organized a legal clinic for senior citizens, helping them with health directives, wills and estates, reverse mortgages, and any other services they needed pro bono.

And for a brief time Deborah and I dated, if halfheartedly. Our relationship came to an ignoble end one day when a mutual friend told me that Deborah had taken up with a vet. “Of what war?” I asked. Turns out he was a veterinarian. She made a wise choice: Deborah and Barry Adler, a well-loved Woodbridge vet, are married to this day.

Besides, Laura and I were still “steadies.” She was living in New York City at this time, working as a page for NBC and
Saturday Night Live
, a perfect place for a woman of her urbanity and wit. From time to time, she'd sneak me into the cast parties after the broadcasts. Way in the back of the crowded snapshots from that historic time in the show's long run, I'm sure we can be seen dancing together. Those were crazy affairs, with earsplitting music and all the excesses of the early 1980s. When someone offered us a snort of cocaine, piled on the tip of a tiny spoon, we declined.

“I put people in jail for that during the week,” I said, none too politely.

Laura was mortified.

WITH PERMISSION FROM MY SUPERIORS IN THE PROSECUTOR'S
office, I started to attend overtly political local events. These were lavish affairs, and to me they were thrilling. In those days, the most powerful gatherings were held twice yearly for local Middlesex County officials and businessmen. I decided to go to the supper after work one night that fall, figuring I could buy a ticket at the door. But when I arrived at the fancy Pines Manor catering hall in Edison, it seemed I was wrong. Everybody there had come with their tickets in hand—no doubt doled out by county chairmen as demonstrations of their affection, or else by large contractors and vendors with proposals they hoped to advance.

I wasn't about to slink back into my car, revealing that I'd misunderstood the rules. So when I saw a large unruly party push through the door with a blizzard of tickets, I crowded in behind them.

Looking around inside was eye-opening. The ballroom was packed with hundreds of people, almost all of them Democrats—in my county the Republican Party was considered an extremist group. The attendees were buzzing around like yellow jackets at a county fair, clustering at one table, then racing off to another corner of the room in a swarm of new allegiances.

At the front of the hall was a large, three-tiered dais. On the lowest level sat the party apparatchiks; on the second level the municipal party chairmen; above them, closest to heaven, sat our elected officials. Even among them a surprising hierarchy was apparent: the most powerful and sought-after officials weren't state senators or even congressmen, but local mayors.

For one thing, the mayors outnumbered everybody else—our mid-sized county was home to twenty-five mayors ruling over villages ranging in size from tiny Helmetta (population 1,961) to bustling Woodbridge (100,421). This proliferation of sovereignties made for a large-scale redundancy of services in the area. Every mayor has his or her own road crews, code inspectors, trash haulers, and the like. And their local power came from their total control over municipal contracts—from the age-old practice of patronage.

New Jersey has taken many hits as the patronage capital of the country. Patronage is the coin of the realm. I can't defend it, as I've said. But at the time I was convinced it wasn't all bad. It certainly breaks no laws, and it can have some social benefits. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has extolled patronage as a tool for promoting political stability and easing the integration of marginalized groups. I believed it could do that, and more. The great old mayors of New Jersey still run their domains like magnanimous despots, taking care of the citizens, keeping the trains running on time, and maintaining cool heads through careful appointments.

But when the system goes bad, it can be disastrous. Courts in the state are crowded with politicians charged with bid rigging, bribe taking, and sundry crimes against the public trust. In fact, New Jersey leads the nation for mayors in prison.

Even more powerful than mayors are the party chairmen, or “bosses,” as the media has dubbed the top officials from either party in each of New Jersey's twenty-one counties. Our boss system is a throwback to an earlier time in America, when the parties doled out jobs, housing, and food to immigrants in exchange for votes. New York City's notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall in the nineteenth century and Chicago's Daley machine in the mid-twentieth were perhaps the best-known examples of this. No one in New Jersey is handing out food in exchange for votes anymore, but the bosses still hold tremendous sway over an election's outcome.

Perhaps their most obvious source of influence comes from the bosses' control of what's known as the “party line”—that is, the line of candidates appearing in the first column on the ballot during a party primary. Nominally, of course, New Jersey holds open primaries, in which each candidate appears on the ballot and has an equal chance of being selected by the
voters. But the party bosses have long realized that they could heavily weight the outcome of a primary by giving their favored candidates pride of place in a column at the far left of the ballot, bestowing on them the party's imprimatur while maintaining the illusion of an “open” race. The party line almost always wins.

Another source of power stems from the state campaign finance laws. These laws allow bosses to raise and spend fourteen times the amount of money the candidates can, cementing their Svengali-like powers. For many candidates, financial support from the bosses is essential, and most of them are all too willing to cut backroom deals in exchange for it.

This practice makes bosses the most powerful players in statewide politics. They pull strings inside town halls, the State House, the governor's mansion, and Congress. The personal payoffs can be extreme. Many bosses become multimillionaires, thanks to lucrative contracts they negotiate with officials they've helped elect. Best of all, they never have to face voters themselves. Some of them choose to hold elected office, but most of the time they're ordinary citizens tapped by their countywide party machine as chairmen—typically after they've already wrestled total control over the party. Sometimes that control lasts for many generations, and being boss becomes the family business.

This was the circus of New Jersey politics, and I'd just stumbled into the center ring.

 

“YOU NO GOOD SON-OF-A-BITCH!”

Looking across the banquet hall, my eye fell on a red-haired woman of forty or so, poured into a dress that put her feminine assets on display. Her makeup was running, and every time she gesticulated she threatened to dislodge the rhinestone tiara that teetered atop her elaborate coiffure.

“Who's that?” I asked a man standing next to me. He told me her name, and I recognized it from the local papers. She was a powerhouse in local Democratic politics. On the receiving end of her outburst was Bernie Dwyer, who had won his congressional campaign and was heading to Washington. Tonight he was the man of the hour.

From across the room we heard Dwyer's voice: “This is not going to happen!”

“What's she upset about, do you know?” I asked my interpreter.

“She thought Dwyer made a promise to her and she came to collect. Obviously he sees it differently.”

Now the woman was growling at Dwyer. Before long she was gasping for air and sobbing. With a final shriek, she ran behind the dais to hide while she gained composure. Unfortunately, the dais's wooden structure worked like a drum, amplifying her sobs even louder. “I'm going to get him,” she blubbered. “He'll never be reelected!”

“What kind of promise did he make her?” I asked, thinking it must have been monumental.

“He was going to make her director of the district office,” the guy said.

Director of the district office?
That was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. Who on earth would throw that kind of public tantrum at a congressman for a miserable little job like that?

Yet I was the only one in the room who seemed surprised. They all knew local politics was a cutthroat business, a place for people with ambition in their veins, not altar-boy types with squishy ideas about doing good.

 

I WENT TO DINNER AFTER DINNER, STUDYING THE LOCALS LIKE AN
anthropologist. I slowly realized that there weren't many spectators like me present, but I never felt excluded. Not that I was officially welcomed, either. To be honest, I crashed those suppers for years. And slowly but surely it paid off, as I started making sense of the dynamics there: who was up and coming and who was on the way out, who was in charge and who was irrelevant.

My big break came at another one of those circuit stops, the George J. Otlowski League Dinner in Perth Amboy. Otlowski was Perth Amboy's mayor as well as an elected member of the New Jersey General Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature. That's another thing about New Jersey: as a state with a part-time legislature, we have a high proportion of legislators who hold other jobs in the public sphere, and power tends to concentrate in a very small number of hands. It's a small state, and it's a small
political class. We all know each other's business—which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

One thing it certainly creates is the potential for conflicts of interest. The state constitution also allows legislators to hold down private-sector jobs—so, for example, an assemblyman on the finance committee might also be a bank vice president. The state has very few laws regulating conflicts of interest. For the most part, lawmakers who stand to profit from a bill can still vote on it; all they have to do is write a note to the chamber secretary assuring him they are unbiased. You can see how tempting it would be for some to behave in a purely self-interested way.

Not Otlowski. As chairman of the Assembly's Health and Human Services Committee, Otlowski was known for his forward-thinking and almost activist-like approach to public health—proof that the system sometimes works.

His League Dinner was held at a banquet hall named Seven Arches, the very model of a New Jersey political venue until it burned to the ground in 1988. The walls of Seven Arches were draped in heavy red velvet, the furniture covered in plastic. Italianate statuary, complete with spilling fountains, was scattered about on white marble bases. Absolutely everybody was there.

The most prominent guest was Alan Karcher, the speaker of the assembly, who also ran his late father's law firm. From the newspapers, I'd gotten a good impression of Karcher as a liberal Democrat in tune with the average guy. That night, asked to make a few remarks, he proved as urbane and intelligent as his reputation suggested. Karcher was a kind of Renaissance man, able to drop meaningful references to linguistics, the French Revolution, classical music, and a host of other subjects in the course of a simple toast.

Afterward, I approached him with congratulations. Within a few minutes, he asked if I'd be interested in working for him. I was taken off guard: being offered a job in the Assembly Majority Office was like being handed a miracle from heaven. The Majority Office was the locus of power for the majority party, the perch from which it enacted its legislative platforms and lent support to all party lawmakers. I had no idea what caused Karcher to select me right there; perhaps a little shy about my abilities, I responded coolly. “I'd be happy to talk about it further,” I told him.

A week later, I lit a candle at Our Lady of Victories, then knocked on the door of Karcher's law office on Main Street in Sayreville. The place was crowded with books, histories and biographies and classical literature mingling with the law texts. Karcher greeted me warmly, explaining that the office had belonged to his father, an assemblyman before him. As he spoke, I stole a glance around the dusty room. On the wall behind Karcher was a linear chart of some sort. I could make out only a few titles, but what I saw suggested it was a kind of master plan for his own career in politics. On the left were his political attainments to date. On the right were his future goals.

Glimpsing the personal aspirations of a powerhouse like Karcher was tantalizing to me. I was desperate to read every word. As he spoke, I struggled to make out the smaller handwriting on the chart, careful not to let him see what I was up to. I leaned forward in my chair. I put an elbow on his desk. Whenever he looked to the ceiling or out the window for emphasis, I stole another peek. When the words finally came into focus, I was amazed: Alan Karcher was planning on becoming governor of New Jersey.

At the end of our meeting, Karcher repeated his offer to me; this time I accepted, shaking his hand like a
Jeopardy
winner. Two weeks later, I cleaned out my desk at the Prosecutor's office, gave Caroline Meuly a big hug good-bye, and left to claim the job I had earned just by being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes that's how things happen in politics. I was on the bottom rung of a very tall ladder, and I had all the unbridled confidence of an upstart. I remember the first time I walked to the entrance of the State House in Trenton, the second oldest in continual use in the nation. I looked at the parking space marked “Reserved—Office of the Governor,” and I allowed myself to imagine one day leaving my car in that spot. For some reason, that's the job I set my sights on. And as long as I kept my secret, I thought I had a shot.

I can't say I loved everything about the Assembly Majority Office, where my job was to provide political direction to several legislative committees, including Health and Human Services and Law and Public Safety. For one thing, almost as soon as I arrived in Trenton, I felt an immediate antagonism toward me. Karcher's office was staffed entirely by political appointees he'd inherited from his predecessor, not civil service workers; they were resistant
to his ideas, which were further to the left than they were accustomed to, and reacted with stubbornness and suspicion. Being one of Karcher's men put me at a disadvantage. And the fact that I came from Woodbridge, in his legislative district, made me seem even more beholden to him.

Still, I was over the top with excitement about being in government. Every morning, as I walked into the State House I stopped and read the plaques and the inscriptions on the portraits of all the governors. And one day I was stunned to come across a portrait of a figure in a beautiful eighteenth-century gown, complete with brocaded corset and a delicately laced fan.

His name was Edward Hyde.

New Jersey's first royal governor, it turns out, was a cross-dresser. Appointed by Queen Anne during colonial times, Viscount Cornbury, as he was also known, served as governor of New York and New Jersey despite being, as we now know to say, transgendered. It's unclear how he managed to survive, but a letter from Lewis Morris, the political opponent who ultimately did in Hyde's career, suggests how he was looked upon by his contemporaries: as “a wretch who by the whole conduct of his life has evidenced he has no regard for honor or virtue.”