The Confession (33 page)

From the beginning, Lynch had put a great deal of pressure on me to appoint his people to ranking positions, particularly in law enforcement. He wanted his best friend and personal attorney, Jack Arsenault, in as attorney general, the prize law enforcement post, with a staff of 9,300. But Arsenault had represented the state troopers in the politically divisive racial profiling case, making him objectionable to African Americans. I had many other candidates in mind, especially Barry Albin, a highly regarded attorney from Woodbridge who eventually became a state supreme court justice. Lynch made it clear he would punish me if I went against him. So in a show of compromise, I appointed David Samson, a Republican with an immaculate record in political and legal circles. Though Samson was friendly with Lynch, the boss felt I had betrayed him nonetheless.

That may be one reason that Lynch never tired in his campaign against Charlie Kushner, whose appointment to the Port Authority was confirmed
by the Senate and who I was pushing for Port Authority chair. With Lynch's agitation, Bill Gormley kept investigating Charlie until he found what he alleged were irregularities in Charlie's political contributions. Evidently, one of Charlie's trusts for a few months included a regional bank, NorCrown. A long-forgotten 1911 law prohibits bank owners from supporting candidates. Charlie argued that he was a “beneficiary” of the trust, not an “owner” under the law. But the cloud of suspicion never cleared.

 

FOR ME, THE ENDLESS ATTACKS ON CHARLIE KUSHNER WERE NOTHING
but a political power play. I believed at the time that his integrity, decency, and commitment to public service were beyond reproach. I'd practically had to plead with him to take this job. The only reason he'd accepted was out of a sense of civic obligation following the terror attacks. Maybe Gormley had lingering resentment for me pushing Santiago through for the state police, which backfired on Santiago as badly as it did on me. He called Charlie before a committee meeting investigating his campaign contributions. Charlie refused to testify, and instead eventually resigned in February 2003, after just more than a year on the job.

Gormley is a friend of mine. But he is a master at his game in state politics. He made an art of creating crises in order to secure whatever goal he had in mind, or to accrue a debt he could call in later. This had nothing to do with his feelings about me—or even about Charlie, for that matter. It was just business.

I was reluctant to accept Charlie's resignation, but many party leaders around the state advised me to move on. “He's just a big headache you don't need right now,” one of them told me. Even if I'd pleaded with him to remain, I knew Charlie had had enough of government. So I thanked him for his public service, praised his tenure in the press, and consoled him privately for the pummeling he'd endured with grace.

It struck me as particularly ironic that I was considered beholden to the warlords, when our relationship was defined by these high-level skirmishes.

A few months later, on the day I stood with the St. Patrick's Day parade line in Bayonne, I saw clearly for the first time how my relationships with
Lynch and the other bosses had been a political compromise that I'd accepted in order to advance my career. Some things I'd done, or allowed to be done in my name, were morally repugnant to me, but I did them anyway and somehow found a way to tolerate my own turpitude. I did this by “forgetting” or never allowing myself to know. I had my people strike backroom deals I kept myself in the dark about or forced from my mind if I learned too much. Obviously this is one root of my memory problems.

To feed my ambition and towering ego, I had overridden my own morality, deformed my own character. I'd become something I hated. The Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl, writing in another context, called this “the mortification of normal reactions—a kind of emotional death.” For Frankl, the cause was the cruelty of endless imprisonment in the camps. I had no jailer but myself.

From that day on, I made a vow to pursue my agenda no matter what the bosses and warlords had to say about it, knowing that they'd do what it took to stop me. This decision was late in coming. I wish I'd made it from the first day of my administration. But I worried that I'd never be able to raise money for reelection without Lynch, by far the most powerful warlord in the state.

Given the way things were going, however, reelection didn't seem likely. If I had any chance, it would be as my own man, not as Lynch's apologist.

But before declaring my independence, I first called Senator Corzine and Congressman Menendez to secure their support in case this erupted into a full-scale war. They backed me unconditionally. However, aides to both men leaked news of those phone calls to the
Star-Ledger,
which ran a story about my “epiphany.”

Lynch's response was swift. He began seeking another Democrat to put against me in the next primary. I heard this in political gossip, but I know it was true. His elegant wife Deborah, a notable fundraiser for political and community causes, told me so herself. She and I had always had a separate friendship with one another. She showed me proof of his efforts to force a costly primary, to undo my legislative agenda, and to thwart any lasting change in the state's political climate.

“John's trying to hurt you,” she confided.

I tried to play it both ways. I called Lynch. “John, the
Star-Ledger
got it all wrong,” I told him. Then I canceled a contract for legal work with Jack Arsenault, knowing Lynch would take this personally.

A full-scale war was under way. The bosses were calling angrily, alleging that four or five developers were building a fund, with $1 million each, to knock me out in the next primary. This only reinforced my resolve. I ramped up the rhetoric—the only part of this campaign I think I took a bit too far. “There is
no greater threat to our way of life
than unrestrained, uncontrolled development,” I said. “No longer should communities be forced to stand helplessly by while inappropriate and unwanted development occurs.” I sounded like a Bolshevik. But I wanted to make the fight a public one, to engage the electorate. People had been against sprawl for years and years; if I could pull this off, I wouldn't need the warlords.

I'll never know if I could have survived. I never got to take a victory lap. But it's clear that the bosses never forgave me. Years later, after my resignation, Lynch told reporters he would punch me in the nose if he ever saw me again. “He ruined my life,” Lynch said, calling my administration the “worst thirty-four months of my life.” When I did bump into him at Benito's, there were no fisticuffs. I extended my hand to him genially, and he gave it a perfunctory squeeze. If Benito's were a Wild West saloon instead of the favorite Italian eatery among New Jersey pols, the flame in his eyes would have cleared the place of every living thing.

 

THE TACTIC WAS WORKING. I WAS TAKING THE INITIATIVE BACK
from the scandalmongers and spearheading an important conversation in the state, one that could change the landscape in perpetuity. Not until months later, in March 2004, did I find out that even as we were gaining ground, the U.S. attorney's office was trying to pin corruption on me personally, as part of an eighteen-month-long undercover sting operation.

It began on December 20, 2002. That day, I swung by a holiday reception, one of my first as governor. Everybody knew I was going to be there; it was on my schedule. At some point in the evening, I bumped into David D'Amiano, the guy who was holding a cell phone to his chest.

“Governor,” he called out. “Can I buttonhole you? I've got this Middlesex County farmer on the phone who's trying to save his farm. The county freeholders are trying to condemn it for development.” Mark Halper, a Piscataway farmer, was desperate, he said. The freeholders, as the state's county legislatures are called, were offering $3 million to buy him out through eminent domain, and he considered it inadequate.

I did not know then—and would only learn from the U.S. attorney—that D'Amiano had charged Halper a fee of $40,000 to get to me. Or worse, that the cash had been given to Halper by the FBI, to whom he had reported the shakedown. Apparently, the FBI and the Justice Department believed I was getting some of that money; they'd put a wire on Halper to undertake a sting, and D'Amiano fell for it.

I'd known D'Amiano for years. In retrospect, I suppose the temptation to trade on our long acquaintanceship was too profitable for him to ignore.

As a favor, I took D'Amiano's phone and heard Halper's long litany of complaints. “I want nothing less than a full reprieve,” he concluded.

“Have you spoken to the mayor of Piscataway?”

“He won't speak to me.”

Talking to the county and township people is the usual process, I explained. “I suggest you reach out to Freeholder Director Crabiel,” I said. “He's a good man. If anybody can help, he can.” I then invited him to report back to D'Amiano, not to me.

Two months later, I bumped into D'Amiano again at the East Brunswick Hilton, after a meeting of the Democratic state committee. “That farmer is here somewhere,” D'Amiano said. “You should hear what's going on with his case, it's like something out of Machiavelli. Nobody will talk to him, they just want to take his land in this Machiavellian move. He's trying to do a Machiavellian move in return.”

He introduced me to Halper, a stocky man dressed all in black. He was angry. “The council passed a condemnation resolution,” he said. “I tried to speak to Crabiel, but he won't come to the table.”

Halper had then appealed to the Middlesex County attorney, without satisfaction. The only way he had figured to thwart the seizure of his land
was to sell it to the state under the farmland preservation program, but he was displeased with the offer they made, too. “The Middlesex leadership is totally corrupt,” he said. “They refuse to give me fair market value.”

True or not, he didn't seem to be advocating well on his own behalf. “You've got to read Machiavelli on how to negotiate on this,” I told him. Then I called over Amy Mansue, my deputy chief of staff, and presented Halper's grievance to her. “There seems to be culpability on all sides, people are thinking with egos rather than about the bottom-line purpose of preservation,” I said—not the most elegant sentence, but according to the transcript that's exactly what I said.

Then I told a bad joke in mangled Yiddish and added it would be a “mitzvah” if we could look into the price offered by the state.

Michael DeCotiis, who replaced Paul Levinsohn as my general counsel, later determined that there was nothing we could do to increase the offer. Halper's farm was, as he said, “a shitty piece of land” littered with refuse, a place where nothing had grown for generations. It earned the lowest ranking on the state's list of desirable lands; we had no interest in offering more money.

But for me the issue didn't die there, as it should have. It turned out that Halper had asked D'Amiano for a sign that I was working on his behalf, something to justify all the money Halper had given him. D'Amiano promised that I would use the word “Machiavelli” as a code that the fix was in.

I learned about all of this when lawyers working for Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney in the state, sent in a subpoena for information relating to our farm ranking. Under Christie, the Newark U.S. attorney's office was developing a strong reputation for prosecuting official corruption. But in this case the paperwork makes it clear they were investigating me. Jamie Fox found me a Washington lawyer, Bill Lawler of Vinson & Elkins, to see how serious the trouble was. I showed him the state records in which we had ranked Halper's farm 151 out of a possible 151, as low as any farm could be ranked.

“I don't get it,” I told him. “This must be some sort of misunderstanding. Let me talk to them.”

“It's too big a risk, Governor,” Bill Lawler said. “The problem with these guys is, even if you tell them the truth, if they decide not to believe you they can stick you with a 1001 false statements charge.”

He was referring to 18 US Code Section 1001, the law that makes it a crime to lie to federal law enforcement officers. It's the section under which Martha Stewart was convicted—they couldn't find that she committed insider trading, the crime they were investigating, but they proved she misled them in an interview. According to Bill, such cases are a common outcome of freely cooperating with federal prosecutors.

I didn't care. I knew I had nothing to hide, well, not exactly
nothing.
“There is one problem,” I admitted to Bill. “D'Amiano used to set me up with women. Do I have to talk about that?”

Bill felt we could contain that fact, so I had him call and make an appointment.

We all gathered around the library in Drumthwacket one morning and listened to the tapes. I remember the surprised look on Bill's face when all was said and done.

“These are unremarkable,” he said. “There's nothing bad there.”

One of the assistant U.S. attorneys asked me point blank. “Were you prompted to say anything to Halper? Did you use a code word?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. In no uncertain terms I said no. The whole thing seemed absurd. I didn't know until a few weeks later that they were focusing in on the word “Machiavelli.” I honestly thought I'd said it of my own volition. It's a word I've used before and since, many, many times—after all, this is New Jersey, as close to Machiavelli's cutthroat Venetian principality as any place on earth. But it turns out that Halper had been promised I would say it. I can only assume that D'Amiano's repeated use of the word while introducing the farmer (which I've struggled to re-create here as accurately as I can) planted it on my tongue.

Thankfully, the assistant U.S. attorneys accepted my explanation—but not before going public with a damning series of allegations, in which I was referred to coyly as “state official number one.” Debates about why I'd said “Machiavelli” jammed the radio waves. For his part, D'Amiano—who repeatedly declared I had nothing to do with his illicit schemes—was indicted
and ultimately surrendered to serve a jail term. In a way, that made him the lucky one. Having been publicly branded a corrupt politician, I never had the chance to defend myself, to dismantle the state's shoddy allegations. As long as I stayed in government, they would stick to me like glue.