The Confession (34 page)

“It's one thing to have everybody know you had an affair with a man,” my father recently told me. “Worse than that is this allegation that McGreevey defrauded people, that McGreevey was corrupt. That really hurts.”

To imply that money or greed would ever motivate me to break the law is an insulting misunderstanding of who I am. Money was never important to me; it still isn't. Senator Gormley once said that I could “live on grass alone,” and that isn't far from the truth. Other than the old Woodbridge condo, I've never owned a home, and after leaving office I bought my first car in decades—a Buick Century. My meager savings came from my governor's salary, $157,000 a year. Every previous governor in the fifteen years before me had brought personal wealth to the office, allowing them to give back all or most of their salaries; with child support payments and the vast wardrobes required for a chief executive and his family, I could afford to give back only 10 percent without having to borrow money. A simple perusal of my bank accounts would have borne this out. At the time, I had $7,000 to my name.

 

WHY WOULD THE U.S. ATTORNEY'S OFFICE GO PUBLIC WITH ALLEGATIONS
when conclusive evidence already existed that I was innocent? Pure politics, though I hate to say it. Before George Bush appointed Chris Christie, a civil litigator with no experience as a criminal prosecutor, he had personally raised over $100,000 for Bush's campaign. Just days before the appointment, Christie's brother began ladling out donations to Bush and Republican causes that eventually topped $400,000 before his own indictment for illegal trading practices—earning him one of those George Bush nicknames: “Big Boy.”

What's more, Chris Christie was openly contemplating a run against me. In fact, he'd been meeting with Torricelli and David Norcross, the high-ranking former chairman of the Republican Party. He was visiting senior
citizens clubs, Chambers of Commerce—the fairways of electoral politics. I didn't need proof of Christie's ambitions, but I wasn't surprised when he seized the opportunity of a funeral for Glenn Cunningham, the mayor of Jersey City, to make a campaignlike speech.

I once talked to BJ Thornberry, former head of the Democratic Governors Association, about Christie's campaign against me. She believed his conduct fit a pattern of Bush-appointed prosecutors who seemed especially eager to pursue investigations of Democratic governors. At least in my own case, I felt I was innocent until investigated.

A subsequent study by the
Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics
, looking at Christie's professionalism and that of his counterparts in Maryland and elsewhere, found exactly what I'd suspected. “His investigations into those surrounding McGreevey have raised questions about Christie's intentions and his integrity,” the study concluded. “The role of the prosecutor…is to seek justice, not merely raise inferences about an individual's guilt. Christie's decision, thus far, not to prosecute McGreevey simply furthers suspicions that Christie lacks a case against him and that his motives are political.”

 

AS IF IN TOTAL PARALLEL TO MY OWN LIFE, MY OLD PAL JOE
Suliga's political career took its own worst blow in late September 2003. Late one night he was arrested at the Trump Marina Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, touching off an awful spectacle that played out in headlines and television news stories for days. It seemed that Joe had never tired of the hard partying he and I used to get away with a decade earlier. That night, at the slots, it all caught up to him.

Apparently, he took an interest in an attractive young patron. But he'd had way too much to drink, and didn't notice when she rebuffed him. He made her a lurid proposal, which she swore to in a police statement; his vulgar words were duplicated on websites across New Jersey within a few hours.

Understandably, the woman called casino security, who attempted to escort Joe outside; he responded by starting a fight that was unfortunately captured on the hidden video cameras. Joe threw the first punches. The
guards were forced to knock him to the ground and drag him off the casino floor by his feet. Joe was charged with assaulting the officers and with public intoxication, in addition to the sexual harassment allegation.

In his defense, friends of Joe's told the papers there was a swingers' convention at the casino that night and he'd mistaken the patron for a swinger. But that didn't matter. Now it was open season on Joe, and stories began surfacing about his longtime drinking and womanizing problems. A fellow senator told reporters that the state's budget would have been passed sooner if the lawmakers hadn't been distracted trying to sober Joe up. Then an old harassment allegation and police report surfaced, eerily like the current one. It was clear that Joe's life had spun out of control.

To his credit, he held a press conference to admit to his drinking troubles and announce he would not seek reelection. My heart broke for Joe. I know being a senator meant the world to him. Leaving politics behind—and doing so in scandal—must have broken his spirit altogether.

I also suppose it destroyed Ray Lesniak's spirits. Ray was as much a mentor and rabbi to Joe as he was to me. But Ray wasn't the type to let a friend sink into despair. I heard through the grapevine that he took Joe under his wing, even helped find a rehabilitation facility to dry him out.

 

THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, GOLAN KEPT CALLING AND CALLING.
He'd grown increasingly frantic over time, always obsessed with the same themes: he should have spoken to reporters, I should have denied he was responsible for homeland security, he never should have been forced out of his job. We had this conversation literally a hundred times or more. Every time his name appeared in the papers or on radio, where the Golan Cipel caper was an unending source of fascination, it drove him to despair.

I came to the conclusion that he loved his infamy as much as he hated it. He admitted clipping the articles, creating a voluminous record of the scorn that was being heaped on him.

It made me sad to see what had become of him. But he wasn't doing anything to help himself, either. The job at MWW Group of East Rutherford hadn't panned out for him; he rarely showed up for work and lasted only a few weeks before Sommer encouraged him to look elsewhere.

Fearing he would be deported, Golan was apoplectic. Eventually State Street Partners, the lobbying firm where Jimmy Kennedy was a partner, extended him an offer. They gave him a hefty salary, $150,000 plus commissions. But Golan was still pulling his old tricks, handpicking the office he wanted—turned out it belonged to Jimmy, who gracefully moved his things to another space. He filled it with his Trenton memorabilia and two small Israeli flags. This time, though, he went into the office every day, entertaining a stream of rabbis and other power brokers. But he never signed a client—at least not for State Street Partners. Jimmy wondered if he was doing a side business from his office.

Eventually, Jimmy's partners terminated Golan for nonperformance. Part of me hoped that would be the end of it. Without a sponsor, he would lose his work permit and be forced to return to Israel. Jimmy even gave Golan airfare out of his own pocket.

During his last visit to Drumthwacket, I encouraged him to consider going back home for good. I felt I'd done right by Golan at every stage in our relationship, but now I was exhausted. But he said he wasn't finished in Jersey yet. He had lined up a job working on business deals with Israel and Russia for Shelley Zeiger, a Trenton-based developer and Jewish philanthropist. What he really wanted, though, was to return to government, something anybody with sense would have considered impossible.

“Golan, do you forget?” I asked.

“You destroyed my life,” he shot back, his eyes filling with tears. “I made this enormous sacrifice, coming all the way here. You should never have listened to the people who said ‘Get rid of Golan.' I never wanted to quit, Jimmy.”

“It was the only option,” I reminded him.

“For what? What good did it do? I read these clips every day. I read everything that's written about me. It's absurd what they say.” When he left State Street Partners, the papers ran front-page stories. Golan obsessed over the coverage; he knew how many inches each paper had given the story. It was true, they made him seem silly, frivolous, and mysteriously ill-suited for any position. His reputation was in tatters. But he was doing nothing to rebuild it.

“Golan,” I said, “I think you have a perverse attraction to being beat up by the press. They're saying the same things about me, but I'm not focusing
on it. I'm looking forward. I'm moving a thousand miles in the opposite direction.”

Ironically, my years in the closet had insulated me from any emotional damage the papers could cause. I was able to look at my presentation in the press as though it had nothing to do with me, as though it were pure fiction—because I alone knew for sure who I was. I'd made my divided self into protective armor. I never stumbled; my imposter sometimes did. I wouldn't wish this sort of immunity on anyone. It muted all sensation of one's self in the world. If the press was good, I could take little pleasure in it, either.

But Golan had been less scarred by the closet, and he felt his grief viscerally. “Bring me back to the state house, Jimmy. Please.”

“Frankly, I pushed the system as far as I could, Golan, to make it accommodate you. If you're not going to work with it, the game's up. That doesn't affect my personal relationship with you. I still care about you, I still have warm feelings. I still
look
at you, sometimes, Golan….That's what you don't understand.”

He was disgusted. “You destroyed my life,” he reiterated.

I was terribly weary of the fight. It had been two years since our last kiss, and more than a year since he left the public sector, yet he seemed incapable of handling either loss.

 

HAVING DRIVEN THE WARLORDS AROUND THE BEND, I FELT CURIOUSLY
free to come up with creative solutions to the state's troubles. Local property taxes, for instance, were an unending vexation. Since I'd taken office two years earlier, they'd risen by 13 percent. An average tax bill in New Jersey was $5,259—a crippling figure for people living on normal incomes. This was caused mostly by our system of “home rule,” in which every tiny township is responsible for everything from schools to police to sanitation—a system that produces grotesque duplications and inefficiencies, as well as a steady stream of business for companies controlled by the bosses.

At a rare joint session of the legislature in April, I presented an innovative three-part plan to fix it. I'd push for a constitutional convention in which voters could rethink “home rule,” impose spending caps at the state
and local level, and—at least temporarily—increase income taxes on the wealthiest residents in order to allow property tax relief for the poor and working class.

The millionaire's tax, as we came to call it, was the cornerstone of my $26.3 billion budget, targeting not millionaires, exactly, but residents who earned more than $500,000 a year. They made up exactly 1 percent of the population, and the change would raise their rate from 6.37 percent to 8.97 percent, pulling in about $800 million toward the state budget. Bush's federal tax cuts had just delivered a windfall to these same people. On average, they had received $19,000 in federal cuts. My tax would force them to pay an extra $850 in income taxes to the state. They could afford it.

As a direct consequence, about a million and a half homeowners would see increases in their property tax rebate checks. Taxpayers who earned less than $125,000 would get checks for $800, more than triple what they'd gotten the year before. Households with incomes between $125,000 and $200,000 would receive checks for $500. And—most important—about 450,000 senior citizens would see a 55 percent increases in their rebates, from $775 to $1,200.

No one in the party wanted the millionaire's tax. Dick Codey, by now the Senate president, didn't want it. He knew, as everyone else in the party did, that Florio's tax plan had set the Democrats back for a decade. Most of my top advisers were lukewarm about the idea. I remember the look on my staffers' faces when I pulled them aside one day in Drumthwacket and said: “You know, we're doing this.”

“Okay,” said Eric Shuffler, an energetic young lawyer I'd hired away from Torricelli to be my new counselor. He laughed nervously. “But how?”

We decided to sell the plan directly to voters. We went county to county, visiting two or three senior centers every day, sitting in people's living rooms, church basements, and VFW halls. Being from a working-class background myself, I knew they dreaded opening their property tax bills each quarter. I talked to them as someone who understood.

The road show worked. Polls showed that the people of New Jersey were so enthusiastic for the idea that Republicans didn't dare fight it. When the bill came to a vote, with Codey's and Assembly Majority Leader Joe Robert's advocacy, we won more Republican support than anyone thought
possible. When the bill became law, it marked the first time anyone had raised taxes in New Jersey in fourteen years, and incongruously touched off a statewide celebration. Seniors holding balloons filled the streets outside the Trenton War Memorial and cheered as I signed the legislation.

Later that day, we held a cocktail party back at Drumthwacket to mark the occasion. A few of the bosses showed up sheepishly, but not John Lynch or George Norcross. I gave a conciliatory toast to them for their support. “I can assure you,” I said to polite applause, “that I'm the only one in this room who won't be paying more taxes next year.”

 

I HADN'T SPOKEN TO JOHN LYNCH IN NEARLY A YEAR. HIS PUBLIC
criticism of my administration didn't abate. He complained that I worried too much about being liked and not enough about leading the state—a strange inversion of the facts. It was true that I took longer than I should have to convert from a 24-hour campaign machine into a 24-hour executive. But I felt my momentum was solid now, that this first term was finally shaping up as I had hoped.