The Confession (24 page)

Or so we thought. One day in early July, a local reporter reached Ray by cell phone while he was on the golf course. Torricelli was declaring for governor, the reporter said. “That's impossible,” Ray said. “That would make him the biggest hypocrite in the world. And Bob Torricelli's not like that.”

I immediately called Giblin to ask him to freeze the money, but it was too late. Torricelli, it turns out, had been lured into the race by my $3.2 million good deed. He'd already asked for a contribution, and Giblin, with a misguided sense of fair play, promised parity. That one infusion would be enough to jump-start the senator's campaign. Giblin couldn't see the unfairness of it. Only a few did. Chuck Chiarello, the Atlantic City chairman, was one of the good guys; he called it an “outrage” that, now that the state party finally had a rainmaker, his own party leaders were using the money to run the rainmaker out of town.

I was furious; this was a huge problem. Torricelli was a very powerful senator, as attractive to voters as he was to the ladies (he was known for dating the likes of Bianca Jagger and socialite Patricia Duff). In our polling, his approval ratings were fourteen points better than mine. People knew him better than they knew me. He was a
900-pound
gorilla.

Over the next few days, my endorsements began unraveling. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of a pair-up involving me and Torricelli, whom we all called the Torch. I picked up the
New York Times
one morning to find Rocco Mazza, the executive director of the Democratic committee of Bergen County and an old friend of mine, singing Torch's praises. “The party senses that McGreevey would make a fantastic candidate, but the difference is that Torricelli has statewide stature and national stature, and is far superior in the gravitas department. It's the difference between filet mignon and New York strip steak.”

That really hurt.

Then Bergen, which had already committed to me, suddenly announced for Torricelli. So did Camden, Morris, and Burlington counties. We had to move fast. In Hudson, Bob Janiszewski, who'd already given me his support after my tireless lobbying, switched to Torricelli. I begged him to hold off any announcement, then got Bob Menendez on the phone. I had great respect for the congressman, who represented parts of Hudson, and I knew he held a grudge against Torricelli. The last time a Senate seat was open, Menendez had gotten Torricelli's backing to run for it, but at the last minute the Torch double-crossed him and switched his allegiance to Jon Corzine. Surely he'd understand that Torricelli's mercurial politicking wasn't good for Hudson County.

Menendez agreed to back me publicly. He called up the mayors and other party leaders in Hudson and got their support as well, then called Janiszewski. “If you're with Torricelli, you're looking at a full-scale revolt,” he said. Thanks to him, Hudson came back to my column.

Then I marched through the seven southern counties and got the chairmen, at least, to hold off their commitments for a few days. I was buying time; sooner or later Torricelli would have to return to Washington, and perhaps his lights would dim by then. But Torricelli was already claiming he controlled the south. In the long run, I knew he'd get the line there. George Norcross, the warlord from Camden, told me as much himself.

The only thing I could do was let Torricelli know how bloody a battle it was going to be. One day in late July, he sent out a press release announcing endorsements from five southern union locals. We went into rapid-response mode. Kevin McCabe pulled together a press conference with 150 labor heads and militants from South Jersey: locals representing most of the state's building and construction workers, along with communications workers, civil servants, firefighters, teamsters, and electricians, all squeezed into a Trenton conference room. They accused Torricelli of dividing the Democratic Party with his self-serving efforts and promised their votes for me in South Jersey.

The newspapers were already calling this a party civil war. The point we wanted Torricelli's people to hear was this: every place he gains a little, we'll gain too. When Torricelli announced that the mayor of Bayonne was with
him, we convinced dozens of leaders in four South Jersey counties, including many mayors, to join me, threatening a sweep through the south. He was going to need a strong constitution to take us on—and as much energy as we had, which of course was impossible.

Instead, he began hammering away at Essex County, with its cache of votes in Newark. We already knew Giblin was vulnerable; I tried reasoning with him, to no avail. If Giblin went with Torricelli, I was sunk.

For the third time in my career, I had to turn to Ray Lesniak to save my career. Once again, he felt the key was Sharpe James.

Ray arranged a dinner for us one Friday night at the Millennium Club, a nightclub in Newark owned by Sharpe's son. The place was so dark inside, it took a while to adjust our eyes—and as soon as we had we were blinded by the pulsing laser lights. Then the sound system went on, so loud we couldn't hear a thing. Walking through the main dance hall we came upon a smaller room with cabaret tables. My friend Calvin West, Sharpe's chief of staff, was there already. So were Sharpe and Regena Thomas, the party operative. Ray and I were the only whites in the place.

Ray began by sharing a piece of news. Earlier that day, East Orange chair Catherine Willis had told us she wanted to announce for McGreevey, but she was waiting for Giblin's “permission.” This irritated Regena Thomas, who played adroitly to her audience. “What? That white boy thinks he can tell people who to support?”

Ray and I got down to business, pushing Sharpe every way we knew how. We tried policy, we tried loyalty, but none of it seemed to be working. Finally, Ray asked Sharpe to step outside for a walk, just the two of them. I don't know what went on out there, but when they returned to the table, Sharpe was ready to give me his backing in the primary.

We went back to Giblin with the news. He hadn't yet declared for Torricelli, but he'd been making increasingly derisive comments to the press about my chances. He was impressed by our fortitude, he told us, but he wasn't about to go out on a limb. He commissioned his own poll that weekend, and fortunately it gave me a slight lead over Torricelli among likely Democratic voters, thirty-five to thirty-one. That was a good sign—Gilbin wanted to back a winner.

But what sealed the deal happened that Saturday, twelve days into our skirmish with the Torch. Robert Bowser, the mayor of East Orange, was holding his annual picnic, one of the major political gatherings on Essex County's calendar. When Torricelli showed up in the morning, he had no individual relationships with anybody there. When I arrived in the afternoon, my friends chanted my name.

That was the last straw. Torricelli's candidacy died in Mayor Bowser's backyard. He withdrew on Monday.

A few months after the Twelve Days War, as it came to be known, I asked Ray what he and Sharpe had talked about that night outside the Millennium Club. “I made Sharpe a commitment that he never called me on,” was all he would say.

These days, Ray Lesniak is a changed man and a role model for me. He's recommitted himself to a spiritual quest and turned his back on the kind of soulless political wheeling-dealing we both practiced with such gusto back then. Among the stalwarts in my life since I quit the governorship, he has been the most demanding and the most supportive. “Welcome back to the human race,” he said back then.

But during my years in politics I never saw a better fighter than Ray.

Since then, we've both walked away from the battleground, each in our own way. Ray has taken on the Twelve Steps as a way of life, their own spiritual movement. For me they serve as a way to recover from my drive to be liked at all costs, which sometimes allowed me to make decisions based on self-interest and not ethics. For instance, when Sharpe James later ran a difficult campaign against a young reformer named Cory Booker, I stood by his side as he vituperated against Booker—an African American Rhodes Scholar—for not being married. He actually called him a “faggot white boy” in a public address. Thank God I wasn't at his side that day.

Thanks to Ray, and the road we've since traveled together, I know I'd never let things like that go unanswered again.

One day recently, I asked him what he and Sharpe James had talked about that night in Newark. “That's going to have to stay between Sharpe and me,” he said.

 

WHEN GOLAN FIRST CALLED, I WAS ECSTATIC TO HEAR FROM HIM.
I half expected he'd forgotten about my job offer, but he'd already made his travel plans. We talked about the sort of work he'd be doing and how much we both looked forward to seeing each other again. Through the summer, his calls became more frequent, and I always looked forward to them. But soon they shifted from personal matters and were more about the logistics of moving halfway around the world. He was having trouble obtaining a work visa and said that I'd need to sponsor him. But my campaign office was months away from bringing in minority coordinators, so I couldn't do it that way.

As time went on, I grew disenchanted with our plan to import Golan, but I never wavered from it. I had two full-time jobs, as mayor and as candidate, but in my spare time I tried to intercede with the INS on Golan's behalf. Meanwhile, he became increasingly demanding, raising his voice with me, challenging my commitment to him joining my staff. I started putting his calls through to Sean Nolan, my administrative assistant, with instructions to say I was out of the office.

I can see in retrospect that these phone calls were premonitions of what was to come. But I wasn't heeding the warnings then. I was trying to fix his visa problem, but coming up with no solution. Ultimately, I hit a brick wall.

“It's not gonna work,” I told him finally. Part of me was relieved. His calls were a huge drain on me, and besides, I wasn't looking forward to cultivating a full-on longing for something I couldn't have. But a bigger part of me was disappointed.

I also knew he was right about my campaign strategy. I'd gone back to study the polls. My results were mixed, as he'd said. I didn't have an outreach program to the diverse Jewish community. Having an Israeli aboard would help me cross into conservative enclaves. In one move, I could create a unifying strategy.

Golan was disappointed, too. “Is there anyone else who might need someone who's versatile in Hebrew?” he asked. “They could sponsor me and I could work with you.”

The only person I could think of was Charlie Kushner. I'd been meeting
regularly with Charlie since the last campaign, and he remained my heaviest contributor. The next time I saw him, I told him about this smart young Israeli. “There's something very attractive about Golan coordinating the Jewish vote, because it's a tough and diverse community.”

I showed him the demographics charts. “I did very well with ethnic Catholics and middle-class groups. Whitman did well with the affluent—the vote divided mostly along economic lines. She did well with upscale Protestants, too. But look here. She also did relatively well with the Jewish community. I still carried it by a mile, but for a Republican she made tremendous inroads with the Reform vote, and look at her numbers with the Orthodox.”

Charlie was interested. “Could he work with the Lakewood Yeshiva?” he asked. He was close with the religious leadership of Lakewood, New Jersey, home to one of the largest yeshivas in the world. “If the rabbi there says, ‘I'm voting for John Smith,' everybody votes for John Smith. Not ninety percent—
everybody.
In 1997, they all went Republican.”

“That's exactly what we'd use him for,” I said. “Not just Lakewood Yeshiva, but the whole community: Reform, Conservative, Orthodox—all the sects. But I can't sponsor him. Can you find a job for him?”

It was a lot of work for Charlie, who had to handle all the INS filings, but he managed to bring Golan to New Jersey by early fall 2000, putting him to work part-time in one of his real estate offices. Someone on my staff found him an apartment, a few doors down from me in Woodbridge. Immediately he began directing my campaigning in Jewish strongholds around the state, doing just the kind of work he promised to carry out.

But there was a problem. My campaign staff loathed him. For one thing, he didn't think he had any hierarchical relationship to the rest of the staff. He billed himself as occupying a separate orbit altogether. He dialed my cell constantly and nagged Kevin Hagan, my political director, on nearly a daily basis to get on my calendar. Kevin complained to me directly. “The guy's an asshole. He doesn't work well with others. He doesn't understand that this is a team. You can't allow him to circumvent the process and go directly to you. It undercuts our authority. It undercuts the campaign structure. This is a very important constituency, obviously. But
we're running a statewide campaign here. You're not running for mayor of Jerusalem.”

I knew what he meant, but I defended Golan. “To be fair,” I said, “everybody else on the campaign is American—African
American
or Irish
American.
This guy dropped in here from I don't know how many miles away, just to do campaign work for this guy he met only once in Israel. That says something to me. My God,
I
wouldn't pick up and move to Israel to work on somebody's campaign.”

The truth was, Golan was good at what he was doing. He was befriending all the powerful rabbis in the state, getting to know their congregations, their families, their personal interests. He was working Jewish women's groups, schools, and athletic clubs. There wasn't a prominent Jewish leader in the state he wasn't lobbying or planning to lobby. In no time, he delivered every major Jewish organization in New Jersey.

Watching him work was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. I knew it was going to produce the deciding votes. And once or twice, climbing back into the campaign car after an endlessly long day wearing yarmulkes, I kicked off my shoes and spread out on the backseat, resting my feet across his knees. He didn't seem to mind. With my eyes closed, I could allow myself to pretend I had it all: the governorship, the family, the male lover—and the final piece of the puzzle, love. I thought he was my angel.