The Confession (13 page)

Two possibilities seemed open to me: private law practice or a position with Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical giant that was one of the largest employers in the area. As a child I'd been awed by Merck's huge manicured campus on Lincoln Avenue in Rahway; surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, it struck me as imposingly grand and vibrant, our own Land of Oz. For several years running,
Fortune
magazine had named Merck America's most admired corporation. For me it was an easy choice.

I was offered a plum job as a regional manager in public affairs, involved in lobbying and some regulatory oversight. I also assumed Merck wouldn't mind if I used my work there as a home base for making a run for office, although my boss, a sagacious West Pointer named Dick Trabert, called me “transparently ambitious” in my first supervisory review. When I asked my old friend Jimmy Kennedy, an aspiring politician in town, whether he thought that was an unfair characterization, he just laughed. “Jim, everybody knows you're going to run for something.”

Little did I expect that my first opportunity would be the assembly seat held by my mentor and friend Alan Karcher. In the 1989 election cycle he was planning to make a play for governor, as I'd already learned from the
chart behind his desk, and he told me privately that he intended to leave the assembly seat either way. He encouraged me to make a run for it.

Jim Florio, a powerful and popular former congressman who'd lost his last campaign for governor by just 1,800 votes, had already declared for the Democratic primary. Karcher was facing an uphill battle; the Democrats were already unified behind Florio, including the most powerful party bosses. I'm not entirely sure why Karcher chose to take him on.

Among the bosses, there were three who wielded significant extraterritorial influence, carrying weight over other bosses in their regions the way archbishops prevail upon neighboring bishops. With respect, we called them “the warlords.” They divided the state into thirds. The South Jersey warlord was George Norcross III, from Camden, the epitome of the kind of figures who drive politics in the state. Norcross has never held elective office or expressed interest in running. But he was driven into politics after his dad, a prominent carpenters' union official with a legendary love for racetracks, expressed interest in an appointment to the New Jersey Racing Commission. The local Republican senator turned him down, even after Norcross repeated the request on his father's behalf, because it crossed party lines. This struck Norcross as venal and petty.

Norcross ultimately got his revenge. He orchestrated the senator's quick defeat in the following election, handing the seat to a Democrat for the first time in years.

The Camden party leadership was impressed, rewarding him with the chairmanship of the county operation when he was just thirty-two. Eventually, through party accounts and his own PACs, he was able to fuel countless campaigns throughout the southern counties single-handedly. One year, nearly seventy-five candidates owed their victories to his machine.

Norcross's strategic mastery was a boon to Democrats. It also increased his own stature. He quickly became a reckoning force in the state. Though he was a college dropout, his intelligence and hard work—plus a vast network of loyal connections—enabled him to build a healthy insurance division for Commerce Bank, where he was a top executive.

In Central Jersey, state senator John Lynch was the most powerful überboss—arguably, the most powerful in the state. When it came to urban
planning and redevelopment, Lynch was without a doubt the smartest man in the state, maybe the nation. He orchestrated the resurgence of New Brunswick, an industrial city that had sunk into such despair by the early 1970s that the headquarters for Johnson & Johnson nearly moved out. As senate leader, Lynch championed the principles of smart growth and urban revitalization. As the years went by, we all watched as Lynch developed a taste for the financial gain those around him enjoyed. After his service in the senate, Lynch built a consulting company that worked to help developers win government approval for their projects, a peculiar form of checkbook government, though perfectly legal under the state's tattered lacework of ethics regulations. He eventually became, as he once said, “the most investigated man in New Jersey.”

North Jersey was controlled by my friend Ray Lesniak, the Union County boss and longtime state senator. Ray's politically connected law firm dominated state, county, and municipal contract business in regions surrounding his legislative district and helped area developers advance their interests.

If Ray, Lynch, and Norcross agreed on a statewide candidate, nobody else had a chance. Knowing the odds were against him, Karcher tried to launch a reform campaign strong enough to bypass the party machinery. He went out to the left of Florio on most issues, putting together a nonmoneyed coalition of sixties progressives, liberal unionists, African Americans, and liberal Jews, as well as tenants, a potentially powerful bloc. But it didn't work: after a modest showing in the primary, he gave up the fight and drifted out of politics.

 

I WANTED TO BE MORE CAREFUL. LUCKILY, I'D MADE A FRIENDSHIP
with a man who would become the most important influence on my political life. Jack Fay was a former popular state senator raised in the North Jersey mill town of Elizabeth. A former Navy Seal, he'd worked in a local factory during the day while attending college and graduate school at night to become a teacher at Linden High School. Devoutly liberal and progressive, Jack believed passionately that rather than being neutral, government
should instead be an advocate for the public against business interests. He was what we used to call a Dorothy Day liberal, a man who believed that social service was an obligation. In Trenton, where he served from 1968 to 1978, he was regarded as a man of unflappable principles who couldn't be bought or sold.

Unlike so many other politicians, Jack was demonstrably honest. He lived in the same small home for twenty years, leaving it virtually untouched since the death of his beloved wife, Betty, some fifteen years ago. His only indulgences were a cup of coffee and the
New York Times
in the morning, and a thick cup of soup for lunch.

There was an old story that Attorney General David T. Wilentz, best known for prosecuting the Lindbergh kidnapping case, claimed credit for launching Jack's career in the 1960s, when he was still county boss. Years later, Wilentz went to the mat with him over a vote on parochial school financing, which Jack opposed. “Irish Catholics don't vote against parochial schools,” Wilentz scolded Jack—despite the fact that Wilentz was Jewish. When Jack reminded Wilentz that his son Robert, who later became chief justice of the State Supreme Court, also opposed the bill, Wilentz thundered back, “I don't care what Robert did!”

He continued, “When I found you, you had chalk all over your jacket and trousers. Now go out there and vote responsibly.” To his credit, Jack never backed down.

Jack and I were introduced at an insane political meeting in a local official's basement. Among the attendees was the tiara-wearing woman I'd seen at that meeting years before, pelting our new congressman with obscenities. Here, though, she was in her element. As she marched us through an ambitious agenda, I could see why she was so powerful; she was a tireless and agile advocate for the party.

Still, though, she seemed to take the whole process a tad too personally. We were discussing candidates for a local mayoral post when someone made the mistake of calling her favored candidate “perhaps not the best choice.” She lunged at the poor guy, wrapping her fingers around his neck. Jack left the room in disgust.

When I followed him out, he invited me for a cup of coffee at the Reo
Diner in Woodbridge, a tradition we kept up almost weekly until his death many years later. He was a spiritual and ethical man, one of the really good guys. Our conversations ranged from the philosophy of government to the purpose God had for our lives.

It may even have been Jack's idea that I run for Alan's old seat. However it came about, every facet of my campaign had Jack's fingerprints on it. I loved every minute of it, from strategizing to knocking on doors. I began by making lists of all the people whose rings I needed to kiss. The 19th Legislative District, which sent two assemblymen and one senator to Trenton, covered five towns in Middlesex County: Woodbridge, Sayreville, South Amboy, South River, and Perth Amboy. I needed the support of the political powerhouses there—not just the mayors, but the five local Democratic chairmen as well. Together, they could deliver the winning votes.

I started by focusing on Woodbridge, which accounted for 50 percent of the district, and its colorful mayor, a major political force named Joseph A. “JoJo” DeMarino. JoJo was a classic New Jersey figure. A former marine and Middlesex County Sheriff, he considered himself the Kojak of local politics, right down to shaving his head and keeping an autographed photo of Telly Savalas on his office wall. He made a comfortable income drawn mostly from rents he collected from a small apartment building he owned and other real estate deals he made periodically in the area.

JoJo never went to college. But he was innately bright and an effective mayor, at least by all appearances: heavy-handed when he needed to be, an old-school wheeler dealer with Da Boyz (as he called the contractors and vendors constantly lined up outside his door), and a father figure to his constituents. He personally tended to every problem on every block of his town, from trimming trees to fixing sidewalks and sweeping litter out of alleyways. He used to carry a little notepad around with him and write down his observations of every conversation he ever had. Then, when he got back to his office, he'd send a letter perfectly recapping the issues and sending his regards to each child and even the family pets.

For JoJo, being mayor was everything. “In high school they said I'd never amount to nothing,” he once told me. “I said, ‘I'll be back as your boss.'”

He was predisposed to backing me because I had supported him over the years. JoJo had been mayor since 1979, but in 1983 he was briefly run out of office by a well-meaning Republican named Phil Cerria. Cerria was a good guy, but unfortunately he'd acquiesced to some of the more harebrained schemes of his staff—like sprinkling a vanilla scent over leaf piles throughout the township to alleviate persistent odors in the area. Jack Fay and I had helped JoJo arrange his comeback in 1987; I worked mostly as a volunteer campaigner, reviewing campaign literature and going door-to-door on his behalf, but I knew he was aware of the energy I had committed.

But the secret to JoJo's comeback was Jack Fay. Jack was well known and respected in Woodbridge, parts of which he had represented before a redistricting change. He even offered to make a local cable TV commercial for JoJo. When we showed up at the recording studio, Jack was seated by a beat-up desk, with an American flag in the background. The production assistant pointed a fan toward the flag, causing the flag to ripple and Jack to squint. “I'm Jack Fay and I'm here to support Joe DeMarino,” he said. “Joe is a good and decent man and deserves to be our next mayor.” The spot ran almost constantly till JoJo's victory on election night.

In the two years that followed, I had worked with JoJo on a number of issues, some more successful than others. At one point, Jack and I even drafted an ethics policy plank for him in his reelection campaign. But when we tried getting him to adopt it as an ordinance after he returned to office, he all but threw us out of his office, assigning us to a kindly but secondary counselor named Herb Rosen to review the matter. Herb was a PR person. That's how JoJo seemed to view ethics—as a campaign shtick for public consumption.

 

NOW I PAID A FORMAL CALL ON THE MAYOR, WHO RECEIVED ME
in the finished basement of his home. I reminded him of my labors on his behalf and asked for his support in my assembly bid, which he delivered in a heartbeat. “You've got a lot of ambition, kid,” he told me. “Stick with me. It'll get you a good distance.” JoJo took credit for launching the career of Senator Bill Bradley, the former NBA star, over a meeting in the same basement. Now he was laying claim to mine.

Even with Woodbridge in the bag, though, I still lacked enough votes to win. My primary opponent was John McCormack, the mayor of Sayreville, who already laid claim to not only his hometown but South Amboy and South River, too. That left only one town up for grabs: Perth Amboy. I'd already spent a lot of time in Perth Amboy, a city of 47,000 near the New York Harbor. The town made history as the place where the first signature was affixed to the Bill of Rights and where the first African American in the United States was allowed to vote, but it had seen better days. Many area residents suffered in poverty, and parts of the region were blighted. One morning, as I stood outside the grocery store there shaking hands, I was interrupted by a commotion.

“McGreevey, get the hell out of here!” a man shouted. “Go home! Get out!”

Looking up, I found Ed Patten, a beloved retired congressman, in the passenger seat of his car. Patten was known for attending every funeral, bar mitzvah, and First Holy Communion he was invited to. His daughter, a wonderful Catholic nun named Sister Catherine, was driving.

“Why, Congressman?”

“Nobody here votes,” he said, stroking his hand dismissively outside the window before speeding off. “Perth Amboy is the asshole of the world!”

Besides my own efforts, Jack Fay did his damnedest on my behalf, attempting to work his charm on the leadership there. “We need Perth Amboy or we're dead,” he kept telling me. “And for some reason they're not budging. We're going to have to go see Otlowski.”

That was Mayor George J. Otlowski, the same local boss whose political dinner I crashed so many years ago. Otlowski and I had become friends—or so I'd thought—and I'd volunteered on many of his pet projects over the years. Why he wasn't endorsing me was a mystery to me and Jack alike. I'd assumed he'd sign on to my campaign instantly. Now, Jack told me, he wasn't even returning calls.