On April 1st, Chris Christie, the beleaguered Republican governor of New Jersey, attended a celebrity roast, in Newark, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Brendan Byrne, the state’s governor from 1974 to 1982. “He’s an inspiration,” Christie told the audience, referring to Byrne, who won reëlection against long odds, because he has “shown that political comebacks can actually happen.”
Christie sat on a long dais with five former governors and five local comedians, listening to the guitarist John Pizzarelli sing an ode to the state: “I may leave for a week or two, but I’m always coming back.” Christie was seated next to former Governor Thomas Kean, a longtime supporter, but he did not say hello or shake his hand, and he glared at the comedians as they delivered their lines. “You scare the shit out of me,” Stewie Stone said to Christie during his routine.
Just five months earlier, Christie had won a sweeping reëlection, securing nineteen of New Jersey’s twenty-one counties, sixty per cent of the vote, and endorsements from Democratic officeholders. He won fifty-one per cent of the Hispanic vote and twenty-one per cent of the African-American vote. His plan was to shed part of his Jersey persona, and perhaps a few more pounds, and begin in earnest the transition from state politician to Presidential candidate.
But the past was catching up with him. In September, an unusual incident had occurred in Fort Lee, the small town on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Without warning, the number of access lanes from Fort Lee to the bridge’s toll plaza had been reduced from three to one. The lanes were closed for four days, and the resulting traffic jams caught the attention of several Democratic legislators. They opened an investigation and eventually accused the Christie administration of engineering a plot to punish the town’s Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, for his failure to endorse Christie’s reëlection. The accusation seemed so ludicrous that Christie belittled a reporter for asking about it. “I moved the cones, actually, unbeknownst to everybody,” he said during a press conference in early December. But on January 8th an e-mail surfaced showing that Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, had instructed David Wildstein, who was the Governor’s second-highest appointee at the Port Authority, the agency that runs the bridge, to engineer the gridlock. Months of scrutiny and withering criticism followed, and Christie’s approval rating fell twenty points.
From left: Bridget Kelly, Bill Baroni, David Wildstein
Christie had spent the week before the Byrne event trying to repair the damage. He hired lawyers who, on March 27th, released a report declaring that he knew nothing about the plan and placing the blame on Kelly and Wildstein. The next weekend, Christie flew to Las Vegas and met with Sheldon Adelson, a right-wing billionaire who is looking for a Presidential candidate to fund. Christie managed to offend Adelson, who is a major supporter of the conservative Likud Party, in Israel, by publicly referring to the “occupied territories,” a term to which Adelson objects. (“Occupied territories” is common parlance among both Democrats and Republicans, but Christie, fearful of losing Adelson’s favor, apologized.)
The Newark roast wasn’t going well, either. The speakers aimed much of their fire at Christie. “You knew whose ass to kiss,” Stone said, referring to Christie’s trip to Vegas. “ ‘Whatever you say, Sheldon! Whatever you say!’ ” Vince August, a New Jersey judge turned comedian, noted, “It really is an honor to be standing next to what could be the next President of the—.” He shuffled some papers on the lectern. “I’m sorry, these are the wrong notes. I’m doing a roast next week with Jeb Bush.” Even Byrne got in a dig, about Christie’s waistline. “Somebody referred to that bronze statue of me that’s in the courthouse,” he said. “Actually, that was supposed to be Governor Christie, but they didn’t have enough money to pay for all that bronze.”
Joy Behar, the former co-host of “The View,” was even more pointed. “When I first heard that he was accused of blocking off three lanes on the bridge, I said, ‘What the hell is he doing, standing in the middle of the bridge?’ ” After another barb, Christie interrupted her. “This is a Byrne roast,” he said. He stood up and tried to grab her notes. The audience laughed awkwardly. “Stop bullying me,” Behar said as he sat down. Christie said something out of earshot and Behar responded, “Why don’t you get up here at the microphone instead of being such a coward?” Christie stood up again and moved in front of the lectern as Behar retreated. “At least I don’t get paid for this,” he said.
Christie sat down and Behar continued, though she was noticeably rattled. “I really don’t know about the Presidency,” she said. “Let me put it to you this way, in a way that you’d appreciate: You’re toast.”
Joy Behar of “The View.” (Photo by Donna Svennevik/ABC via Getty Images)
Before the bridge scandal, Christie was known as a governor who transcended New Jersey’s reputation for toxic politics and toxic dumps. He took on the exploding costs of the state’s pension system, reformed property taxes, and worked with his opponents in the legislature, and he provided decisive leadership after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. But the scandal hinted at a darker story line: that Christie’s barrelling style, and the dealmaking that had secured his rise through New Jersey politics, might as easily undo him.
Recently, Governor Kean, during a long interview in his office, in Far Hills, New Jersey, forty-five minutes west of Manhattan, told me that he has reconsidered his support of Christie. Kean is now seventy-eight years old; he served from 1982 to 1990 and is a revered figure in state politics. He became well known nationally when, in 2002, George W. Bush appointed him chairman of the 9/11 Commission, the widely praised investigation into the 2001 terrorist attacks. Kean is also arguably the most important political figure in Christie’s career. Christie was born in Newark in 1962, but, after race riots there in the summer of 1967, his parents moved to suburban Livingston, which, like Newark, is in Essex County, the most Democratic county in New Jersey. When Christie was fourteen years old, he heard Kean, who was then a member of the state legislature, speak at his junior high school. He told his mother that he wanted to become a politician; she drove him to Kean’s house and told him to knock on the legislator’s door.
“Sir, I heard you speak,” he told Kean. “I think I want to get into politics. How do I do it?”
“I’m going up to speak in Bergen County tonight,” Kean told him. “Why don’t you come with me and see if you like it?”
Kean became Christie’s political mentor. Christie, who was class president throughout high school, practiced a kind of suburban political activism. When a local diner barred him and his friends, because, the owner said, they didn’t order any food, he organized a boycott. (The owner eventually negotiated a settlement with Christie.) When Christie’s position as the starting catcher on the high-school baseball team was threatened by a transfer student, Christie and his father briefly considered taking action to block the student’s enrollment. Christie was benched for most of the season.
Christie worked on Kean’s gubernatorial campaigns, and in 2001, when Christie was nominated by Bush to be the United States Attorney for New Jersey, Kean wrote a letter validating his qualifications. When Christie ran for governor, in 2009, Kean told me, he was the first major figure to endorse him. “I campaigned with him a lot, and raised money for him,” he said. On Election Night last November, Kean spent time with Christie and his family before his victory speech, which was nationally televised. But they hadn’t spoken since that evening. Christie has a way of distancing allies, and he and Kean have had a falling out.
“He doesn’t always try to persuade you with reason,” Kean said. “He makes you feel that your life’s going to be very unhappy if you don’t do what he says.” He added that one of Christie’s flaws “is that he makes enemies and keeps them. As long as you’re riding high, they’ll stay in the weeds, because they don’t want to get in your way. But you get in trouble, they’ll all come out of the weeds, and come at you.” Although I didn’t ask, Kean told me that if Christie ran for President he wouldn’t necessarily endorse him. “I haven’t decided whether I’m going to support him or not,” Kean said. “There are a lot of people I don’t know that well”—he mentioned John Kasich, Scott Walker, and Jeb Bush, among other potential 2016 Republican Presidential nominees—“and I’d like to get to know them better.”
Gov. Chris Christie and Former Gov. Thomas H. Kean
Christie has sometimes found himself embarrassed by his state’s unique political culture. He had a distant relative who was a mobster, whom he once visited in jail. On a trip to Washington in 1980, as a high-school senior, he and a classmate were scheduled to meet their senators, Harrison Williams and Bill Bradley. The day before they arrived, news broke of a major sting operation involving several members of Congress, among them Williams, who was later indicted. An F.B.I. agent posing as a representative of a wealthy Arab sheikh had tried to bribe them. (The scandal, known as Abscam, was the subject of last year’s film “American Hustle.”) Senator Williams cancelled his meeting with the students, and Christie later said that he and his friend were “ashamed, and we got made fun of all week,” according to “Chris Christie: The Inside Story of His Rise to Power,” Bob Ingle and Michael Symons’s thorough biography.
Christie went to the University of Delaware, where he became the student-body president, and where he met his future wife, Mary Pat Foster, who was also involved in student government. In 2009, a former college friend told the Newark Star-Ledger that she was awestruck watching Christie lobby state officials for extra funding for the school. He went to law school at Seton Hall, and when he graduated, in 1987, he joined Dughi & Hewit, a small firm in Union County, which was another Democratic stronghold.
In 1992, Christie volunteered for the George H. W. Bush campaign, where he got to know Bill Palatucci, the executive director of both of Bush’s Presidential campaigns in New Jersey, which was then a more competitive state for Republicans. “We spent virtually every day together in the fall of 1992,” Palatucci told me. “He had a bird’s-eye view of a Presidential campaign in a targeted state with a lot of resources.” After Bush lost, Palatucci, who had a law degree but hadn’t practiced, joined Christie’s law firm, and they became a team. “He was teaching me how to practice law, and I was teaching him how to practice politics,” he said. “From the ’92 campaign he had made a lot of friends and contacts, and so he started to investigate, with my help, finding the right office to run for.” There was little prospect of winning a race in Essex or Union County, and Christie moved farther west, to Mendham Township, in Morris County, which is dominated by the Republican Party.
Bill Palatucci, a Republican insider in New Jersey and a longtime political mentor to Christie. (William Perlman/Newark Star-Ledger)
Christie’s first attempts to get to Trenton, the state capital, as a lawmaker came to an ignoble end. In 1993, Christie tried to unseat the Republican state senator John Dorsey, who happened to be the majority leader, and therefore one of the most important Republicans in the state. Richard Merkt, a longtime G.O.P. politician in the area, told me that local Republicans were shocked. Sitting in a booth at the Morristown Diner, Merkt talked about Christie’s early years. “Chris was a brash kid,” he said. “He moves into Morris County and pretty quickly decides that he wants to be not a member of the governing body of the town, not a mere freeholder”—a county commissioner—“not even a mere assemblyman, but he wants to be a state senator right out of the box, because he used to deliver literature for Tom Kean during his gubernatorial campaigns. That was his credential. His reach exceeded his grasp.”
New Jersey has five hundred and sixty-six municipalities, made up of towns, townships, boroughs, and villages. About a third of these entities are smaller than two square miles. Christie began collecting petitions to get his name on the ballot in Mendham Borough, which he may not have known was not in the same municipality as his new home town, Mendham Township, and was outside the district he wanted to represent. Dorsey, his opponent, challenged Christie’s petition and officials found dozens of invalid signatures. His name wasn’t allowed on the ballot. “That campaign collapsed rather rapidly,” Merkt said.
Christie lowered his expectations and, for his second campaign, ran for freeholder. This time, he was a reform candidate, promising to restore honest government, and he produced a TV ad charging that three of his opponents in the nine-person Republican primary were being “investigated by the Morris County prosecutor,” a serious accusation that happened to be false. Christie won the primary and then the general election, in part by assuring a more socially moderate electorate, “I am pro-choice.” But his victory was marred by the divisiveness of the campaign. The three victims of Christie’s false ad, including a freeholder named Cecilia Laureys, successfully sued him for defamation, and, after he lost an appeal, as part of the settlement he was forced to apologize to them in local newspapers. Laureys died last July, but her son, Christopher, who was her communications director, told me, “This was beyond the pale of what anyone had ever done in politics in Morris County. He was a lawyer who said they were being criminally investigated. He looked into the camera and lied.”
Chris Christie’s 1994 campaign ad – The Washington Post
Within weeks of his swearing-in, Christie started planning a campaign for a state-assembly seat. In the open Republican primary in Morris County, the two candidates with the highest number of votes become the Party’s two nominees for the assembly, and candidates sometimes run together, as a pair. In 1995, Merkt teamed up with Christie. “It turned out to be the worst mistake I ever made in politics,” he told me. The incumbent assemblyman, Anthony Bucco, had supported Christie’s freeholder campaign, so he was surprised that Christie was trying to oust him from his job. Christie attacked him for supporting a repeal of New Jersey’s assault-weapons ban, calling the idea “dangerous” and “crazy.” After the campaign, Bucco described Christie’s style of politics as “character assassination.” In a Republican primary, which attracts the most conservative voters, Christie’s pro-choice record and anti-gun position were not embraced. He came in fourth.
Two years later, he lost his freeholder seat. “The folks he had torpedoed with the phony charge came back and used it against him,” Merkt said. Christie came in fifth out of five candidates. “ONCE-RISING STAR IN MORRIS FINDS IT HARD TO EMPTY DESK,” the headline in the Star-Ledger read, on December 21, 1997. Christie went back to his law firm and, in 1998, registered as a lobbyist, along with Palatucci. But that fall, when George W. Bush was reëlected governor of Texas, Christie saw an opportunity to reënter politics. Palatucci had first met Bush in 1988, when Bush came to New Jersey to campaign for his father and Palatucci picked him up at the airport. Ten years later, Palatucci bumped into Bush in a hotel in New Orleans just days after his reëlection as governor, and Bush introduced him to Karl Rove, his political strategist. Soon afterward, Palatucci took New Jersey’s top Republicans to Austin to endorse Bush’s nascent run for President. Christie tagged along. “He’s this former county official who got booted out of office!” Palatucci said. “Going there with the state senate president, the speaker, a couple of key state legislators, key county chairmen, and the best fund-raiser in New Jersey.” The group made three trips to Texas and locked up New Jersey, and Christie became Bush’s campaign lawyer for the state.
In mid-2000, a Bush victory looked plausible, and Christie became interested in the job of U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. That fall, Palatucci mailed Christie’s résumé to Rove, and Kean added his letter of support. Bush announced Christie’s nomination on December 7th. Christie—a lobbyist, fund-raiser, and failed local politician—had no criminal or prosecutorial experience. “He wasn’t the most qualified,” Kean told me. “Just on legal expertise and law-enforcement expertise, there were people who wanted the nomination who were better qualified.”
Palatucci said that Christie was a good lawyer and a good communicator, and “he’d worked really hard for George Bush.” He added, “Others had bits and pieces of those three qualifications, but they didn’t have all three the way Chris did.” The politics of 9/11 secured Christie’s confirmation. Democrats had no interest in fighting Bush, whose approval rating reached ninety per cent. “In light of current events and the need for strong and immediate actions by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the war on terrorism,” New Jersey’s two senators, Jon Corzine and Robert Torricelli, both Democrats, said in a joint statement, “it is important to honor President Bush’s choice for this position.”
U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie, right, looks on as former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft talks at a news conference in Newark, N.J., on Sept. 27, 2007, to announce that five makers of medical device implants have reached a $310 million agreement to resolve concerns over doctor kickbacks. (AP Photo/Mike Derer)
Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey from January 17, 2002, until December 1, 2008. Less than a year afterward, he was elected governor. By all accounts, he was adept at using the powers of the U.S. Attorney’s office, which has strict rules about engaging in politics, to build a public profile and consolidate power in an increasingly Democratic state.
One Democrat who benefitted from Christie’s ascent was Joseph DiVincenzo, the Essex County executive, who is considered the most powerful Democrat in North Jersey. “Anybody who runs statewide has to come through us,” he told me. Last year, he endorsed Christie’s reëlection. DiVincenzo, whom everyone calls Joe D., is sixty-one, and grew up in Newark. His father was a supervisor at a pickle company in nearby Perth Amboy, and his mother worked for the Charms candy company. I met with DiVincenzo in late February in his office, in Newark, during a weekly meeting with staff members from the county’s department of public works. They sat around a conference table in a room decorated with stuffed animals and faded forest-themed tapestry, reviewing a list of twenty-five major construction projects: a seven-million-dollar job to improve Turtle Back Zoo, in West Orange; a two-million-dollar bridge project for the Orange Reservoir. DiVincenzo had talked to Christie on the phone earlier in the day, and after the meeting he travelled to Trenton to meet with him privately. “The Republicans get upset with the Governor because of my friendship with him,” DiVincenzo told me. “They get upset because they feel Joe D. gets everything.”
DiVincenzo’s relationship with Christie began after F.B.I. agents raided the office in which we were sitting, in 2002. At the time, the office was occupied by James Treffinger, DiVincenzo’s predecessor, who was a Republican and was being investigated for corruption. Treffinger was running for the U.S. Senate against Torricelli, and DiVincenzo, who was president of the county board of freeholders, one floor above, was running to replace Treffinger. A few months after searching Treffinger’s office, federal agents arrested him on various charges, including mail fraud, leading him away in handcuffs and leg irons as the media took photos. The Star-Ledger reported that some prosecutors in Christie’s office “were appalled, and saw it as a cheap attempt to score political points.” Treffinger pleaded guilty to two of the charges against him, and served thirteen months in jail.
I asked DiVincenzo about his early impression of Christie as the U.S. Attorney. “Scared shit of him!” he said. “The guy was on a mission.” DiVincenzo said that his opponent in the 2002 race tried to connect him to Treffinger by running an ad with footage of the F.B.I. agents removing boxes from the government building in Newark that they shared. In the middle of the campaign, Christie sent DiVincenzo’s lawyers a letter saying that their client was “not a subject or target of the grand jury investigation.” DiVincenzo won the race.
Chris Christie, left, gets the endorsement of Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo at McLoone’s Boat House in West Orange, N.J.
Christie, intent on running for office, made corruption his central issue. Public cynicism about politicians, especially in New Jersey, was high, and the local press loved tales of political scandals. Christie already had a connection to an influential new political Web site, then known as PoliticsNJ and later as PolitickerNJ, run by an anonymous blogger, who received regular scoops from Christie’s office. In addition, New Jersey’s thirteen hundred units of local government—municipalities, school districts, fire districts, and local authorities that deal with sewage and other services—made the state a good target for political stings, with thousands of people responsible for handing out government contracts. From his days as a freeholder, when he campaigned as a reformer, Christie was intimately familiar with the patronage and pay-for-play ethos at the local level. He initiated his own Abscam-style operations. DiVincenzo recalls Christie saying, “If you’re getting an envelope with cash, it’s coming either from your mother, because it’s your birthday, or from one of my agents. Don’t take it unless it’s your mother.”
Some politicians took the envelopes, and even some who didn’t became ensnared. In 2003, Governor Jim McGreevey, a Democrat, was caught on tape using a code word that signalled to a Christie informant that McGreevey was privy to an illegal scheme for gathering campaign contributions. Christie had chosen the code word “Machiavelli.” McGreevey insisted that his use of the word was coincidental, but the scandal escalated until, on August 12, 2004, the Governor announced his resignation, revealing that he was “a gay American.” Although McGreevey’s lover had been threatening to file a sexual-harassment lawsuit that would expose their relationship, Christie’s criminal investigation seemed to be a factor in McGreevey’s decision.
Former Gov. James McGreevey announces his resignation during a 2004 press conference.
Even as Christie was investigating McGreevey, he was considering running to replace him, but when he realized that he would face a competitive primary he decided to skip the race. In 2005, Corzine, the former head of Goldman Sachs, won a relatively comfortable victory over the Republican Douglas Forrester, a former mayor of West Windsor. By early 2006, Christie had prosecuted eighty-six political figures. DiVincenzo had consolidated his power in Essex County; two people on his payroll were state senators, and still are. He told me that he regularly called Christie to vet people who wanted to work for Essex County. “If I was interested in hiring somebody,” DiVincenzo said, “I would kick it off him.” If the person had issues, Christie would tell DiVincenzo, “You should keep searching.”
As a student, Christie had expressed shame at the corruption of state politicians. As an investigator, he rooted it out with a heavy hand. In April, 2006, a con artist named Solomon Dwek was arrested for trying to cash a fraudulent twenty-five-million-dollar check at a drive-through bank window. In return for a lighter sentence, Dwek’s lawyer offered to make Dwek a confidential informant for Christie, according to “The Jersey Sting,” by Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin, a detailed insider account of the operation. Dwek promised that he could infiltrate his own Syrian Jewish community, but Christie and his prosecutors gave Dwek a second assignment: exposing political corruption. Christie unleashed Dwek on Hudson County and the surrounding area, and Dwek worked for him for the next three years.
Solomon Dwek is the central figure in a three-year undercover sting operated by the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office that became known as Bid Rig III.
Dwek’s Hudson County sting was unlike any investigation in the state since Abscam. Dwek posed as a developer seeking to fast-track construction projects by repeatedly offering politicians FedEx envelopes filled with thousands of dollars. The future mayor of Hoboken took one. The mayor of Secaucus took one. The deputy mayor of Jersey City took one. As Dwek infiltrated the county, Christie turned his attention to Robert Menendez, then a Jersey City congressman, who was running for the Senate against the former Governor’s son, Thomas Kean, Jr. In September, 2006, weeks before Election Day, Christie subpoenaed information from a nonprofit organization that rented office space from Menendez, who had helped the group receive federal funds. News of the subpoenas, and an investigation into a potential quid pro quo, leaked to the press. Kean ran ads describing Menendez as “under federal criminal investigation.” Menendez won the race, but he became an implacable enemy of Christie. It took him five years to secure a letter from the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, where the case had been transferred, clearing him of any wrongdoing.
In April 2015, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) again became the center of federal corruption investigation. He is accused of using the influence of his office to advance the business interests of a longtime friend and political supporter in exchange for luxury gifts, lavish vacations, prostitutes and more than $750,000 in campaign donations.
By the end of 2008, as Christie was preparing to run for governor, prosecutors began planning to simultaneously arrest all of their targets in the Dwek case. The lines between Christie’s political campaign and the work of the prosecutors often seemed blurry. With Barack Obama’s victory in November, Christie knew that he would soon be replaced by an Obama appointee. He resigned in December and, six weeks later, announced that he would challenge Corzine. During the campaign, Christie’s relationship with his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office became a source of controversy. Michele Brown, one of the top lawyers in the office, was sending Christie five hundred dollars a month to repay a forty-six-thousand-dollar personal loan he had extended to her. Christie failed to report the payments on his state and federal ethics forms. In February, at a campaign event hosted by Bill Baroni, then a state senator, Christie noted that he had “a group of assistant U.S. Attorneys sitting down in Newark still doing their job. They are watching the newspapers. And, after we win this election, I’m going to take a whole group of them to Trenton with me and put them in every one of the departments.”
A 2008 photo of Chris Christie and acting first assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Michele Brown. Jerry McCrea/The Star-Ledger.
In the early morning of July 23rd, three months before Election Day, Christie’s former colleagues arrested forty-four people, an odd mixture of New Jersey criminals connected by Dwek’s two-track sting: rabbis involved in money laundering and organ trafficking and local politicians ensnared in Dwek’s ruses. Among those targeted was Joseph Doria, a member of Corzine’s cabinet. F.B.I. agents raided his home, and though they didn’t arrest him, Corzine asked him to resign. It took Doria years to clear his name. “The night before the F.B.I. came to my house,” Doria, who now teaches at Rutgers, told me, “the individual who took the money said he never had given me the money and had told the F.B.I. he had kept all the money.” He added, “It wasn’t a pleasant time.”
Joseph Doria, a member of former Gov. Jon Corzine’s cabinet targeted in an F.B.I. corruption sting is currently an adjunct professor at Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics.
New Jersey corruption, Christie’s top issue, dominated the gubernatorial race. Christie insisted that he had no prior knowledge of the timing of the arrests, though he happened to be campaigning in Hudson County the day they occurred, and he made himself available to the press. Corzine considered getting out of the race. On Election Day, DiVincenzo told me, he called Christie. “Chris, you ran a great campaign,” he told him. “I just want to wish you the best. I’m going to be there with you. You’re always going to be my friend.” DiVincenzo added, “I think he was happy that I called him to show respect.”
Later that evening, Corzine, who had long been suspicious of DiVincenzo’s loyalties, called him, asking for the margin of victory in Essex County: “What’s your number?” In 2005, Corzine had won the county by eighty-eight thousand votes. DiVincenzo said it was going to be seventy-five thousand this time. “That’s not good enough,” the Governor shouted. DiVincenzo, who told me that the campaign’s goal was only sixty-two thousand, threw his phone across the room in frustration. Christie beat Corzine by three and a half points. Corzine, who tried to make a campaign issue out of Christie’s politicization of his office, later said that he lost the race because of high unemployment.
Former Gov. Jon Corzine and then Gov.-elect Chris Christie attend an event in Newark in November 2007. Matt Rainey/The Star-Ledger
Other New Jersey Democrats are less charitable to Christie. Jerramiah Healy, the mayor of Jersey City, complained that the July arrests had affected the voter-turnout operation in Hudson County. “Jersey City had a good turnout for Corzine in his first win,” he told me. “That’s why this character Dwek was sicced on us.” (Christie’s spokesperson, Maria Comella, said this was “absolutely not true.”) In a new book, “Ruthless Ambition,” which also accuses Christie of politicizing his office, Louis Michael Manzo, a former assemblyman unsuccessfully targeted by Dwek, reveals that a copy of Dwek’s psychiatric evaluation, released during Dwek’s sentencing hearing, showed that he had “a history of serious mental disorder.” Michele Brown and several other former colleagues from the Newark office joined the new Christie administration. In 2010, the anonymous blogger from PolitickerNJ revealed that he was David Wildstein, a member of Christie’s high-school baseball team who later went to work for him at the Port Authority.
Former Jersey City Assemblyman Louis Michael Manzo.
The day after the election, DiVincenzo attended a Christie event in Newark. With Hudson County’s political machine damaged, DiVincenzo was now even more powerful. Christie walked over and said hello. “Thanks for the call, Joe,” the Governor-elect said. He shook DiVincenzo’s hand and gave him a hug. “Let’s see what we can do together.”
Only about a quarter of the state’s population lives in South Jersey, an area that generally includes everything below Trenton. But what the south lacks in population it compensates for in political power, personified by George Norcross III, New Jersey’s most influential Democratic political boss. “By gaining control of the legislature, he’s brought a lot of stuff to South Jersey,” Kean told me. “He’s able to make sure it gets more than its fair share of everything.” He added, “His influence is huge around the state, greater than any nonelected leader in my lifetime. And he’s made a fortune in the process.”
George Norcross III, left, and Chris Christie speaking at the ribbon cutting for Cooper’s medical school at Rowan University in 2012. – (Aaron Houston / NJBIZ)
The few Democrats who agreed to talk about Norcross attested to his power. “He’s No. 1 in the state without a doubt—I don’t think anybody disputes that,” Ray Lesniak, a longtime state senator from Elizabeth, in North Jersey, said. James Florio, a Democrat who served as the governor from 1990 to 1994, said, “He’s very smart, very smart.” Like Norcross, Florio is from Camden and has known him for decades as both an enemy and an ally. “I got along with him reasonably well. He can be a—” He paused. “Strong personality.” Early in Christie’s first term, Kean advised him that he had to have a good relationship with the top Democrats in the legislature, which meant cultivating their political bosses. “He got the most powerful governorship in the country,” Kean told me, “but he can’t get everything he wants without the support of Norcross.”
Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, is one of the most dangerous cities in the country. But at its center is a core of new development, anchored by Cooper University Hospital, which Norcross helped to build and where he is the chairman of the board. In early March, Christie broke ground on the latest Norcross project, the KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, a charter school that will be built near the hospital. When Norcross introduced Christie at the ceremony, he teased the Governor openly. He reminded the audience that, despite Christie’s impressive reëlection, he failed to win any new Republican seats in the legislature. Then he touched on a sensitive issue. Norcross sponsors an annual ten-kilometre race across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, connecting Philadelphia and Camden. “There’s one thing the Governor, with all his power, has not been able to achieve,” he said. “I’m the one who’s able to shut down a bridge.”
George Norcross III to Chris Christie: “I’m the who’s able to shut down a bridge.”
Norcross had not warned Christie about the joke, and Christie looked surprised. As the audience laughed, Norcross went on to praise Christie for his “bold leadership.” He said, “In my lifetime there has never been a governor of either party who has worked harder and more diligently to help South Jersey, the city of Camden, and many of the things that we’re so proud of in this region.” Christie had no stinging retort. “Ol’ George is something, isn’t he?” he said. “Kicks me around, and then he says all those nice things to me right before I come up here. He’s the master.”
Afterward, I met Norcross for lunch in the cafeteria of the hospital, and then we took the elevator to the tenth floor, where he showed me the Camden skyline and outlined his plans for reviving the city. Norcross is fifty-eight, thin and compact, with a politician’s head of side-parted white hair and gleaming teeth. He told me that he couldn’t remember ever doing a taped interview with a reporter, and glared at my recording device.
In the late nineteen-seventies, the Democratic Party in Camden was divided between those loyal to Florio, then a young congressman, and those loyal to Angelo Errichetti, the mayor of Camden and a state senator. (Errichetti is the basis for the character of Carmine Polito, Camden’s corrupt mayor in “American Hustle.”) Norcross’s father had a poor relationship with Florio. “They had a bit of a falling out,” he said. “And, of course, if my father didn’t like somebody I didn’t like him, either, even though I didn’t know him. So we had this big political war, Errichetti against Florio.”
By 1981, the war in South Jersey was over: Florio became the Party’s gubernatorial candidate—he lost in the general election, to Kean, by fewer than two thousand votes—and controlled Camden’s Democratic organization. Errichetti was arrested in the Abscam scandal and served almost three years in prison. As Florio approached his next gubernatorial race, in 1989, he wanted to reform his Camden operation.
“Camden County government back in the late eighties had been the subject of a lot of ugly newspaper stories about high-level patronage, pinstripe patronage—a lot of bond houses, lawyers,” Norcross said, and added, “There’s probably some corruption involved.” In a surprise move, Florio put Norcross and Rob Andrews, a local Democratic freeholder, in charge of his machine. “He needed somebody to come in governmentally and clean it up and somebody to come in politically and clean it up,” Norcross said. “Rob Andrews became the freeholder-director of the board, and I became the political leader.”
Prior to becoming White House Chief of Staff or Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel investigated political opponents for George E. Norcross, III
Norcross brought in professional pollsters and hired opposition researchers to investigate political opponents. (His first researcher was a young Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago.) At thirty-two, Norcross emerged as a leading Democratic power broker. He became famous in New Jersey political circles when, in 1991, he executed a political-revenge plot against a politician who had crossed his family. In 1985, Governor Kean had appointed Norcross’s father to the New Jersey Racing Commission. “My father was a two-dollar bettor, loved the ponies,” Norcross said. Lee Laskin, the Republican state senator who represented the district where his father lived, in Camden County, blocked the appointment. Laskin, a conservative, was known in the legislature as Dr. No, because he voted against almost everything.
Norcross went to see him. “Senator, I come here as a son asking for a favor for his father,” Norcross said. “I don’t want my dad to know I ever came here to see you. This would mean the world to him. It would mean the world to me, and I would be forever indebted to you personally if you did this for my dad.”
“Senator, do you want to reconsider that? This is really important to me personally, and I really want you to do this for my dad.”
“No way!”
Six years later, Norcross persuaded John Adler, a Harvard-educated councilman from upscale Cherry Hill, to run against Laskin. Norcross took out a four-hundred-thousand-dollar personal loan, late in the campaign, so that Laskin wouldn’t see it on any campaign-finance reports, and created a TV ad accusing Laskin of mixing his law-office business with his official duties in the state senate. The barrage of negative ads on Philadelphia television destroyed him. Adler won, fifty-seven per cent to forty-three per cent. “We blew him away,” Norcross said. “It was the most exciting night I’ve ever had in politics in my life to this day.”
Former N.J. State Senator, John Adler, was the beneficiary of Norcross’ political revenge
Through the nineties, Norcross extended his political operation beyond Camden and solidified control over three other southern counties and several municipalities by recruiting and financing his own candidates. By 1999, he had a bloc of seats in the state assembly that owed allegiance to him. By 2007, he had a bloc of six seats in the senate. The Norcross bloc generally votes together on issues important to South Jersey, which is smaller and more homogeneous than the north. Because North Jersey bosses are often more divided, Norcross shifts his allegiances among leaders in Middlesex, Essex, Hudson, and Union Counties, or even to the Republican Party. “We have a unified political organization that knows that, in order to serve South Jersey, you must function in that manner,” Norcross said. “There are many times when we have strong differences of opinion on things, but we settle inside of a room, and we always come out unified.”
DiVincenzo told me that he envied Norcross’s power. “His people control the assembly, and they control the senators,” DiVincenzo said. “He controls their campaigns, he funds their campaigns. They don’t always all get along, but, when it comes down to a vote, they’ll all be together. I have two senators. He has seven senators, and he has about twelve assembly people.” He explained that Norcross’s power in the legislature made his own relationship with Christie all the more important. “I don’t have what George has. George has seven and twelve! I have two senators and five assembly people.”
Right after Christie’s election in 2009, Norcross and DiVincenzo worked out an arrangement: the south got to run the senate, and the north got to run the assembly. Stephen Sweeney, a childhood friend of Norcross’s, whom Norcross helped elect, in an upset victory, in 2001, became the president of the senate. Sheila Oliver, from East Orange, in Essex County, became the speaker of the assembly. “I called George, and that’s how we put it all together,” DiVincenzo said. “We got two votes for him, for Senator Sweeney. And he delivered our votes with our assembly people we had, and we were able to get the majority and she became the speaker.”
State Senator Stephen Sweeney became the president of the state senate based on a deal between Norcross and DiVincenzo.
Short of having a legislature controlled by Republicans, the Norcross-DiVincenzo deal was the best outcome for Christie. They were the two Democratic bosses in the state with whom he had the best relationships. Some observers were suspicious of the fact that, in 2005, as U.S. Attorney, Christie had declined to indict Norcross, who was under investigation after a South Jersey town councilman told the police that he was being coerced and possibly bribed by Democrats to fire a municipal employee. The councilman, wearing a wire, recorded hours of conversations with South Jersey political figures. Norcross is heard on the tapes conducting the sometimes unpleasant business of running a small political fiefdom. “Don’t fuck with me on this one,” he says at one point. “I catch you one more time doing it, you’re going to get your fucking balls cut off.” But his most telling statement was a boast: “In the end, the McGreeveys, the Corzines, they’re all going to be with me. Not because they like me but because they have no choice.”
In January, 2006, in a six-page letter to the state attorney general that became public, Christie said that he wouldn’t indict Norcross because the investigation had been mishandled. For years, Democrats have accused Christie of dropping the case in order to turn Norcross into a political ally. Norcross, who has never discussed the case in depth, insisted that Christie would have indicted him if he had the evidence. “Christie, as I’ve come to know him now, is somebody who if he has a head shot he will take it,” Norcross told me. “If I had done something illegal, he would’ve indicted me. No doubt about it in my mind.” He said he wished that Christie had fully cleared his name. “I was very disappointed that he did not pronounce my innocence,” he said. “There are those who have speculated that that would’ve placed him in a position he didn’t want to be. People would’ve said, ‘Oh, you did a favor for the guy.’ ”
Norcross and his bloc of South Jersey legislators helped Governor Christie secure the major legislative achievements of his first term, including a bill to curb the costs of pension and health-care benefits for unionized teachers and government workers, whom Christie often attacked in his first term. “In the past, when we had difficult times, people would look for scapegoats—Jews, Catholics, Irish—and Christie provided public workers, teachers, and the civil-service system,” Florio told me. “From a policy perspective, he was very commendable in being clear. Now, I might be inclined to say it’s overly simple in the clarity, but, at times such as that, that’s what people are looking for.”
The fight against public employees made Christie a national celebrity among conservatives outside the state, and fuelled talk of him as a future Presidential candidate. That reputation was solidified when, in October, 2010, Christie cancelled a new multibillion-dollar train tunnel—the Access to the Region’s Core project—between New Jersey and midtown Manhattan, partly financed by the Port Authority. It seemed to be one of the most politically deft moves of Christie’s first term. Christie used the savings from the cancelled project to fund New Jersey’s transportation trust fund, which helped him keep a campaign commitment not to raise gasoline taxes. “He injected fifty to sixty political patronage jobs, as well as strategic political people, into Port Authority, with the view that he can use this entity to drive capital projects for New Jersey and satisfy campaign promises,” a top official at the Port Authority told me. Conservatives cheered the move, but Democrats saw it as a sign that Christie was using the Port Authority as a political tool. John Wisniewski, the head of the transportation committee in the assembly, passed a resolution granting his committee subpoena power, a rarity in the New Jersey legislature, and opened an investigation.
January 16, 2014 – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gestures as he speaks to media and homeowners about the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Sandy in Manahawkin, New Jersey. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (UNITED STATES –
Christie’s popularity began to dip in 2012, and leading New Jersey Democrats, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Stephen Sweeney, the senate president, began preparing gubernatorial campaigns. Christie’s handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in October, caused his approval rating to soar into the seventies, and both Booker and Sweeney decided not to challenge him. “God was not going to defeat him,” Norcross told me. With those two Democrats out of the race, DiVincenzo enthusiastically endorsed Christie’s reëlection, against State Senator Barbara Buono. Other Democrats were shocked. “You can’t be coerced into supporting the candidate on your ticket all the time,” Bill Pascrell, a congressman from Paterson*, said. “But there is an unwritten rule: then keep your mouth shut if you can’t.”
DiVincenzo said that Christie’s priority was to win over Democrats so he could launch a Presidential campaign based on his bipartisan record in New Jersey. “That’s why he wanted my support,” DiVincenzo said. “My relationship with the Hispanic community and the black community. It wasn’t about winning New Jersey with Joe D.—it was about a national story.” On January 24, 2013, Christie’s top political advisers compiled a private list of twenty-one Democratic mayors whose endorsement they coveted. Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, was the second name on the list. “We should get the targets to ‘sign on dotted line,’ ” a top aide wrote in an e-mail.
Jersey City’s new Democratic mayor, Steven Fulop, who is thirty-seven and a former marine, quickly learned what could happen to Democrats who didn’t coöperate. After Fulop was elected, in May, 2013, Christie showered him with attention. Top Christie officials were scheduled to meet individually with Fulop on July 18th. “They were going to roll out the red carpet,” Fulop told me. He considered endorsing Christie, but decided not to, partly because he realized that, if he ran for governor in 2017, the endorsement could be used against him in a Democratic primary. Bill Baroni, Wildstein’s boss, and Christie’s top appointee at the Port Authority, called and cancelled his meeting with Fulop. Baroni gave no explanation and made no offer to reschedule it. Michele Brown and three other Christie officials made similar calls within twenty-four hours. “Yes, it’s political retribution,” Fulop told me. “And it’s amateur and immature. But if I saw any indication that they were penalizing the city on something, that would’ve been a different animal.” He added, “It’s a dick move, but it is what it is.”
Christie rarely campaigned for Republican legislative candidates, especially in the south. “He left those areas alone,” Philip Alagia, DiVincenzo’s chief of staff, said. “He was with Sweeney more in photographs than he was with any Republican senate candidate in the state.” On September 12th, as the lane closings in Fort Lee entered their fourth day, Christie unveiled his first general-election television ad of the campaign, which emphasized his bipartisan record. “They said it couldn’t be done. New Jersey was too broken, too partisan,” the ad said. “They never met Chris Christie. Working with both parties, he made tough decisions.”
March 5, 2014 – New Jersey Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, D-West Deptford, N.J., right, gestures as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, left, talks with George E. Norcross III, at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Kipp Cooper Norcross Academy charter school in Camden, N.J.. As Christie potentially prepares to run for president, the Associated Press reports that Christie has rewarded political insiders with more than $2 billion in state tax breaks . (AP Photo/Mel Evans,file)
Norcross didn’t endorse Christie, but there seemed to be an informal non-compete agreement between his organization and the Governor: Christie mostly stayed away from Norcross’s candidates, and Norcross mostly stayed out of the gubernatorial race. Norcross, who appeared with Christie at a major event in Camden on October 7th, a month before Election Day, insisted that there was no formal agreement. Christie said later, “I had no deal with George Norcross on politics.” But DiVincenzo told me there was obviously a détente. “There’s no question there must have been deals that were done,” he said. Kean said, “The Governor wouldn’t campaign in certain districts, and I know he wouldn’t raise money in certain districts in South Jersey.”
Despite Christie’s sixty-per-cent victory, the legislature remained under Democratic control. The Democrats from the south retained the senate presidency under Sweeney, and the Democrats from the north retained the speakership of the assembly. But Norcross, along with others, pressed northern Democrats to remove Oliver as speaker and put Vincent Prieto, from Secaucus, in the position. Christie also wanted to make a change. Tom Kean, Jr., was the senate minority leader. Unlike Christie, Kean, who will likely run for governor in 2017, worked hard to try to win legislative seats for Republicans, especially in seven southern districts, where Norcross and Sweeney control eighteen out of twenty-one seats. Kean even ran a strong Republican candidate against Sweeney. “It was a nasty thing between Sweeney and Kean,” DiVincenzo said.
With Sweeney’s support, Christie attempted to engineer a coup against Kean for the minority leadership. Thomas Kean, Sr., told me, “The day after the election, a friend of mine called me and said, ‘You know there’s a guy calling around saying he’s got the Governor’s support running against your son.’ And I said, ‘That doesn’t make any sense, because I was with the Governor last night, and he didn’t say anything.’ ” Kean, Jr., asked his Republican colleagues to sign a pledge of support. Kean, Sr., called “one of the Governor’s top people,” who told him that Christie had nothing to do with the plot.
On Wednesday, the night before the crucial vote to elect leaders for the new session, Christie’s chief of staff, Kevin O’Dowd, who had been a prosecutor under Christie in the U.S. Attorney’s office, asked Kean, Jr., to come to the Governor’s office the following morning. There he told him that Christie wanted him to step aside. “I don’t think I’m willing to step aside,” Kean replied. O’Dowd disappeared to talk to Christie. When he returned, he told Kean that the Governor didn’t want to see him. Kean, Sr., didn’t expect his son to prevail. “I know how tough Chris is on people, and if you cross him he never forgets,” he said. “I didn’t think people were going to have the courage to take on the Governor after his reëlection.” Nevertheless, Kean retained his role as senate minority leader. Sitting in his leadership office in the basement of the Capitol, in Trenton, he smiled as we discussed his victory over Christie, at that time the most popular politician in America. “I won the vote,” he said.
In Trenton, Christie’s failed coup attempt played as a sign of his imperfections, which the bridge scandal, already percolating, revealed more fully. “It was a mistake,” DiVincenzo said. A Democrat familiar with the episode said, “Christie thought he could snap his fingers and tell the senate what to do. It was the single most devastating thing he did in his governorship.”
Tom Kean, Sr., felt betrayed by Christie’s move against his son. “I thought at some point the Governor would call me and say, ‘Hey, you gotta understand this, I had to do this for this reason or that reason.’ Whatever. But he never called me. The last time I talked to him was Election Night.”
The bridge scandal might never have been revealed if not for the sleuthing of Loretta Weinberg, a seventy-nine-year-old self-described nosy Jewish grandmother who is also a Democratic state senator from Teaneck, New Jersey, just northwest of Fort Lee. “I bungled into the Port Authority issue, just out of my curiosity,” she told me.
In September, Weinberg read an item in the Bergen Record about the traffic jam. A commuter told the paper, “Other than after the 9/11 attacks, I’ve never seen such a fiasco of delays at the inbound, upper-level part of the bridge.” A senior official at the Port Authority promised Weinberg that he would “get to the bottom of it,” but when she didn’t hear back she became suspicious. “My training comes from having raised children through their adolescent years,” she told me. “ ‘What do you mean you didn’t have a party? You weren’t even smart enough to put the beer cans in someone else’s back yard.’ That’s my investigatory background.”
New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski and Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, special investigative committee co-chairs, are leading the panel of bipartisan politicians probing Bridgegate. Photo by Jennifer Brown/New York Daily News
Weinberg was elected to the state assembly in 1992 and to the state senate in 2005. In 2009, after the Dwek bust, when Corzine needed to prove his own anti-corruption bona fides, he chose Weinberg as his running mate. During Christie’s first term, she had several high-profile fights with him. The most famous incident came in 2011, after she criticized the Governor for defending DiVincenzo, who, through a quirk in state law, was drawing a pension for a job he still held. Weinberg, who was seventy-six years old and had lost her retirement savings to Bernie Madoff’s scam, was also drawing a public pension while still in office. Christie told reporters, “Can you guys please take the bat out on her for once?” On Weinberg’s desk, when I visited her recently, was a letter to the Governor that her seven-year-old granddaughter had written. “This is Loretaz grand datr,” it said. “I want you to ¡Stop ¡Bulieg Eevripati! Cris Cristi.” I asked if Christie ever apologized to her. “What, are you kidding me?” Weinberg said.
Throughout the fall, as Christie moved toward reëlection, Weinberg began attending the Port Authority’s public meetings. On October 2nd, the day after an article about the incident appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Baroni texted Wildstein that Maria Comella, Christie’s spokesperson, “didn’t think much of the story. Said nobody paying attention.” But other Christie aides were alarmed by Weinberg’s persistence and nervously monitored her actions. On October 16th, after a Port Authority meeting that Weinberg attended, Regina Egea, a top Christie aide, e-mailed three other senior staffers. “Sen Weinberg attended bd meeting but did not speak,” she wrote, adding, “Questions ensued on ft lee but holding to script of ‘all under review.’ She held post interview in hallway.”
Weinberg took Wisniewski, the transportation-committee chair, to one of the Port Authority meetings, and he soon joined the ranks of the bridge conspiracy theorists. Wisniewski, a tall, ambitious fifty-one-year-old lawyer, is from Sayreville, a suburb in Middlesex County. Like Weinberg, he had often opposed the Democratic leadership’s strategy of coöperating with Christie, and pursued numerous investigations of his administration, including the inquiry into why Christie cancelled the tunnel project in 2010. Although Wisniewski had the power to subpoena documents, the probes didn’t go anywhere.
Weinberg’s interest in the bridge scandal grew, she tried to persuade the senate, controlled by Sweeney, to give her subpoena authority, but he wasn’t interested. Some Democrats warned that the Party bosses were trying to protect Christie. Weinberg turned to Wisniewski, who had three months left before his subpoena power expired. Wisniewski asked Baroni to appear before his committee on November 25th to explain the lane closures. In the days before, Baroni worked with Christie’s senior aides to edit remarks he had prepared. Egea homed in on a picture with a bird’s-eye view of the bridge’s toll plaza that Baroni wanted to use. “Is there a picture from rush hour showing congestion?” she wrote in the margin. “Ideally w/little back up @ F.L. and more at other tolls?” Six days later, testifying before the committee, Baroni defended the closures as part of an important traffic study to determine whether Fort Lee had more than its fair share of access lanes. He came prepared with statistics on how many New Jerseyans from the committee members’ districts were potentially inconvenienced. “Every one of you on this committee has people in your communities who sit in longer traffic every day because of the special lanes for Fort Lee,” he said. He bombastically interrupted the committee members’ questions and changed the subject to the issue of political favoritism for Fort Lee. “Forty-two of your neighbors in Sayreville, they’re waiting in longer lines,” he lectured Wisniewski. “Maybe that’s O.K. When I was in the senate, I wouldn’t have gone back to my constituents and said that was fair.”
Wisniewski applauded the show. “Bravo to the theatre and to the turning of the tables,” he said to Baroni. “You’d always been good at that while you were a senator. You are a masterful dancer.” When the performance was over, Kevin O’Toole, a Republican state senator who is close to Christie, released a statement. “Why was a sweetheart deal done that gave Fort Lee three lanes and a dedicated exit?” he asked. The Governor’s office, where top aides listened to Baroni’s testimony live-streamed to their computers, also sent word of its approval. Charles McKenna, Christie’s chief counsel, and one of the former prosecutors Christie brought with him from the U.S. Attorney’s office, was apparently pleased. Wildstein texted Baroni, “Charlie said you did GREAT.”
But Weinberg and Wisniewski suspected that Baroni was lying. “I was willing to reserve judgment about what was happening until about ten minutes into Bill Baroni’s testimony,” Wisniewski told me. “It was so over the top and combative.” Wisniewski subpoenaed Wildstein, Baroni, and other Port Authority officials, and he brought Patrick Foye, the executive director of the agency, before his committee. Foye was an appointee of Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, and in September, when he learned what Wildstein and Baroni had done, he stopped their scheme and reopened the Fort Lee lanes. On December 9th, he was asked by Wisniewski’s committee about Baroni’s alleged traffic study. Christie listened to Foye while eating lunch. “I’m not aware of any traffic study,” Foye said.
Bill Baroni was indicted in April 2015 on conspiracy charges related to the September 2013 George Washington Bridge lane closures. (Tony Kurdzuk | The Star-Ledger)
The traffic study turned out to be an elaborate cover story. “This guy just made this up,” Weinberg said. “They tried to make this into something that everybody else would get mad at.” She added, “The coverup wasn’t even good.”
In December, as the Christie administration’s story unravelled, the Governor publicly dismissed Weinberg and Wisniewski as being “obsessed” with the issue. “It just shows you they really have nothing to do,” he said on December 2nd. But privately Christie feared that the scandal was getting too close to him. On December 5th, Michael Drewniak, his press secretary, told Christie that he had had dinner with Wildstein the previous evening. He said Wildstein had said that, on September 11th, the third day of the traffic jam, he had told Christie about the traffic issue when the two men were together at a 9/11 anniversary event. Christie told Drewniak that Wildstein and Baroni “had to go,” and the following day he forced them to resign. Christie personally edited a press statement about Wildstein’s resignation, adding language to “thank him for his service to the people of New Jersey and the region.” It still seemed as if it might all go away. “You are a great friend and this too shall pass,” Drewniak texted Wildstein on December 8th.
Incoming NJ Assembly speaker, Vincent Prieto, threatened to shut down the subpoena power of panel in GWB scandal
Despite the gathering momentum of the scandal, Vincent Prieto, the new Democratic speaker of the assembly, showed little interest in renewing Wisniewski’s subpoena authority. “We have a new speaker who wants to earn his credentials,” a Democratic legislator told me. “There was a long time there when we weren’t sure they were going to renew subpoena power.” Wisniewski knew that unless he found something explosive his investigation would be over.
In the late afternoon of December 23rd, the servers at the Office of Legislative Services, in Trenton, became overloaded as a cache of e-mails with enormous PDFs arrived. Wisniewski learned that thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents from Wildstein and Baroni had arrived. On December 26th, after Wisniewski’s family had gone to bed, he retreated to his home office and trudged through the unwieldy PDFs. He had been fruitlessly investigating Christie’s politicization of the Port Authority for four years, and he assumed there would be little of value in the new documents. “My expectation was, I’m going to go through these and there’s going to be a lot of stuff in here that’s just totally pointless,” he said. It was getting late, and he was close to giving up for the night.
Then an e-mail—one that could possibly ruin Christie’s political career—appeared on his screen. At first, Wisniewski said, he thought, “I’m not seeing this right. It just doesn’t make sense.” He started Googling the names. The e-mail was from Bridget Anne Kelly, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, to Wildstein. The time stamp said it was sent at 7:34 A.M., on August 13, 2013.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” she wrote.
“Got it,” Wildstein replied.
In April 2015, Former Port Authority executive David Wildstein, pled guilty to conspiracy, alleging he had conspired with former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director William Baroni and Gov. Chris Christie’s former Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly to “punish” Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie’s re-election bid. Kelly denies the allegations.
Christie has responded to the scandal by distancing himself from the aides who knew about the lane closures and by arguing that the incident was an aberration. After Wisniewski uncovered the evidence that the bridge plot started in Christie’s office—with someone he has described as “one of my closest aides”—Christie fired Kelly and cut ties to Bill Stepien, his campaign manager and a senior political adviser, who also seemed to know about the plot. He hired lawyers to investigate and write a report about the incident, and they pinned the blame on Kelly and Wildstein. Some of Christie’s aides regard Wildstein with particular venom, choosing to believe that he ran a rogue operation and then foisted a fake cover story on the Governor. “I could claw his eyes out, pour gasoline in the sockets and light him up,” Drewniak wrote to an unidentified recipient on January 14th. “He became deluded in his belief that he had constructed a legit traffic study.”
One problem with this theory is that Wildstein’s antics were common knowledge before the bridge scandal. “Wildstein was known by us, and we communicated to New Jersey all the time that he was a cancer,” the top Port Authority official said. “So this wasn’t a surprise that he did something bad. It was just a surprise about how bad and how manipulative it was.” He added, “There was a culture that created some of this stuff in the whole Christie world. He was running for reëlection, and he wanted the Christie-crats, to get as many endorsements as he could. There was that list of names, and the culture was to get it done.”
The greatest danger to Christie’s political future comes from Paul Fishman, his successor as U.S. Attorney, who is conducting a criminal investigation into the Fort Lee lane closures. The circle of people who could potentially coöperate with Fishman and offer damaging information about Christie keeps expanding. First, Wildstein, Baroni, Kelly, and Stepien were pushed out of Christie’s orbit. Then, after Christie’s report was released, David Samson, Christie’s close ally and the chairman of the Port Authority, resigned.
Christie’s successor as U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman, was responsible for handing down the indictments in Operation Bid Rig III.
If Christie escapes Fishman’s inquiry, as well as Weinberg and Wisniewski’s, he still must overcome the damage to his reputation. Thomas Kean, Sr., said he believed Christie when he said that he knew nothing about it. “Now, there’s another question, about whether he created an atmosphere in which some of those people thought they were doing his will because they were getting back at people,” he said. “That’s possible.” He added, “If you cross Christie, he’ll come back at you, even years later. So his people might have picked up that kind of thing.”
“What if he did know?” I asked.
“And he’s just telling a lie to everybody?” Kean said. “Well, then he’s finished. As governor, too.” ♦
*An earlier version of this article misspelled Paterson.
(*Embedded photos and captions not part of original article)
Posted: 11/19/2012 2:38 am EST Updated: 11/19/2012 9:56 am EST
CAMDEN, N.J. — On a cold autumn night, Darran Johnson, 22, stands by the police tape strung between two trees in the housing complex where he lives with his mom and siblings. On a walkway 20 feet away, a middle-aged man lies dead, shot in the throat and head, sprawled on his back beside a battered 10-speed bicycle. His face is masked in blood that gleams bright red in the crime scene photographer’s flash.
Johnson watches tight-lipped as investigators comb the grass for shell casings. “Kids play out here. Average people live here,” he says. “I’m shaking. It’s getting too close.”
Gunfire rings out often in the neighborhood, he says, a regular reminder of the crime wave that has this city of 77,000 on pace to double its homicides in just three years, and has already shattered a nearly 20-year record for killings. With 59 homicides so far this year, the murder rate is on par with levels seen in Haiti in the chaotic aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.
“A bullet has no name. If somebody shoots and I’m walking, I could be hit,” Johnson says. “People are afraid right now. You can see it in their faces.”
The crime surge coincides with new census data identifying Camden, long battered by vanishing industry, as the most impoverished city in the U.S., with 42 percent of residents under the poverty line, and an average family income of $21,191. If trends persist, Camden may soon hold the grim title of both the country’s poorest and most dangerous city.
As residents decry the violence, local leaders are readying a radical plan that they call the only practical solution at hand to calm the streets: the dismantling of the Camden Police Department and the outsourcing of policing to a new, cheaper force run by the county government, to be called the Camden Metro Division. They say the closure of the 141-year-old department and the creation of a new agency is necessary because the existing union-negotiated police contract is no longer sustainable in a time of deep budget deficits.
The plan was sold to Camden residents as a security fix: by firing the existing police force, they were told, millions of savings would be redirected into hiring about 130 new uniformed officers — a 50 percent increase over current staffing.
“It’s time to reject the status quo and ramp this police department up to a level that it needs,” Louis Capelli, director of the Camden County Board of Freeholders, which would control the metro agency, tells The Huffington Post.
City and county leaders approved the plan last year, and it cleared major legal hurdles this summer, opening the way for full implementation. Applications are being accepted for the new force, and training for the first group of hires will begin in November, according to Dan Keashen, a county spokesman. As early as next March, the old police department will be shut down for good. Other Camden County cities have been invited to join the new department, but none have shown interest yet.
On the surface, the shift to a county-run force resembles efforts in other cities around the country to save money by merging departments and regionalizing police services. But several experts say there are few specific parallels with the Camden plan, which involves a densely populated, high-crime city, and will not include any actual merger between police departments.
“I don’t know that this has been done before,” says Louis Tuthill, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University. “I have never heard of it.”
Some see the move to shut down the Camden Police Department and shift to a cheaper county-run model as a frontal attack on public safety unions. They warn the same strategy may soon be used to extract concessions from cops and firefighters across New Jersey, and ultimately the country.
“This is not a policing strategy. This is something more sinister,” says Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Every cop in America should worry about what’s happening in Camden.”
“The taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going pay any more for Camden’s excesses,” Christie said in a 2011 interview on MSNBC, as the police plan began gathering steam.
Christie has unique leverage to drive the plan, as the city of Camden relies on roughly $60 million in emergency state aid every year to close deep structural budget deficits and provide basic city services. According to local leaders, Christie threatened to slash this aid in the absence of major reforms. Since Christie has veto power over much of Camden’s budget, the threat carried weight. Chief among the governor’s concerns was the structure of the policing contract, says Ian Leonard, a member of the Board of Freeholders.
“The governor’s saying this is too expensive,” Leonard says. “And when someone else is writing the checks to you, you know, he or she — as my mother used to say — who holds the pen holds the power.”
To drive the plan forward, its backers have gone on the offensive, depicting the existing police contract as laden with extravagant perks negotiated by the union in better days and out of step with the current hard times. They say they have identified between $14 million to $16 million in savings to be had by cutting out wasteful “fringe” pay from $60 million in annual police spending in the city.
“Previous administrations, they gave the store away,” Capelli says.
Keashen, the Camden County spokesman, provided HuffPost with a one-page email briefly outlining how the $14 million to $16 million in savings would be achieved. According to the outline, fringe pay — which includes pension and health care benefits — will cost the county roughly $25 million in 2012. Under the new county plan, nearly 65 percent of this spending will be eliminated.
The outline did not break down the specific spending categories that would be targeted for savings, however. And further detail on the finances of the plan is not available to the public, Keashen says.
Under the terms of the plan, the city of Camden’s remaining cops will all receive layoff notices within the next few weeks. At the same time, they have the option to apply for a new job with the county-run force, though they have no guarantee of employment. And under the city and county’s interpretation of state labor law, only 49 percent of current officers will be eligible for hire with the new force.
It is a harsh calculus for a department that already suffered sweeping layoffs in 2010 as a result of a steep budget deficit. But city leaders say it is the only way forward.
“We’ve been encouraging officers to move over, get ready for the new paradigm,” Camden Mayor Dana Redd tells HuffPost. “This is the way we’re going.”
Backing the plan are Camden’s mayor and six of seven city council members — all Democrats — together with the Democratic-controlled Camden County Board of Freeholders, which represents the county’s 400,000 residents. Those involved say New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie has also been a crucial force behind the proposal. In interviews and town hall meetings over the past two years, Christie has repeatedly denounced the Camden police contract as “obscene” and described the county police plan as a common-sense measure to bring down public safety costs during tough economic times.
Brian Coleman is the only Camden city councilman to oppose the new metro policing plan. “The numbers don’t add up,” he says. Photo by Antonio Bolfo.
‘THE NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP’
Even as city and county leaders call the metro agency a done deal, it faces a growing outcry from critics who assail it as a harsh experiment in public sector union-busting and say it’s being forced on New Jersey’s most economically vulnerable population by state power brokers with little interest in Camden’s well-being.
They say the plan was crafted in secrecy and that basic information about the current police department’s finances, and budgeting for the new agency, have never been provided to the public.
Other critics focus on the county’s plan to replace seasoned officers with new recruits, with some community activists warning that an influx of young officers from outside the city could spark unrest on the streets.
The perception that older cops are being discarded as a cost-saving maneuver has also deeply embittered many in the department’s ranks, officers say.
“I might not have a job in a couple of months, after risking my life for years,” says one veteran cop, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation by his superiors.
Brian Coleman, the only Camden councilman to oppose the metro plan, says he has tried to get a full accounting of the police department’s current spending from city hall, but he’s had no success. The finances of the new police agency have never been provided to the public or discussed in detail by the city council, Coleman says.
“I’ve asked for an explanation and requested documents, but they haven’t turned them over,” he says. “The numbers don’t add up. That’s why they don’t release them.”
Brendan O’Flaherty, a Columbia University economics professor who specializes in urban finance, reviewed the one-page financial summary provided by the county to HuffPost and calls it “incomprehensible.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have made an intelligent decision on this based on the information they’ve shared,” he says. “It’s a serious breach of normal standards of transparency.”
Without a detailed financial breakdown of current spending or of the budgeting of the new metro agency, it is impossible to verify even the most basic claims being made about the proposal, says O’Donnell.
“They’re doing this under cover of darkness,” he says. “It’s beyond belief. This can’t be anything less than a scandal.”
Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for Christie, says the governor “fully supports” the policing plan. He declined to comment on questions about the plan’s finances or on issues of transparency.
“Those specific questions about the savings estimates and breakdown are best directed to the county and/or city,” Roberts said in an email.
At a press conference in September, Christie praised the Camden plan and called it a model for the rest of the state, according to a transcript of comments provided by the governor’s office.
“I think this should be a wave of the future in places that are challenged like this, and so we’re certainly going to be full partners in it,” Christie said.
According to Keashen, the county spokesman, the governor’s office is currently in negotiations to provide about $5 million in start-up funds for the new metro agency. Those negotiations are in their final stages, he says.
As the plan grows nearer to reality, any chance for a smooth transition between the two agencies appears increasingly dim. The Camden Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s police union, is fiercely resisting the creation of the metro agency. Its president, John Williamson, continues to blast city and county leaders for what he calls a shameless attempt to crush the union and strip away rights earned through decades of collective bargaining.
“Would you buy a car sight unseen?” Williamson asks. “This deal is not being conducted out in the open. And the math just doesn’t add up.”
County officials reject the allegation that the plan’s finances are shaky, and maintain that the metro agency’s budget is simply not ready for public consumption.
“We’re not going to go live with a budget until it’s completely done,” Keashen says. “You’ll see at the end of the day that the numbers add up.”
Efforts to block the county plan have all faltered, including a drive in 2011 to place the new police plan up to public vote. Petitioners gathered enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot, but the city sued to have it thrown out and prevailed in state court.
Opponents of the metro police plan continue to fight, however, with a new focus on building public pressure to force the city back to the negotiating table, and to forge a compromise that will save the old department. They gained a major ally in this battle in late October, when James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP, appeared at a press conference called by the Camden police union.
In brief remarks, Harris denounced the plan to disband the Camden Police Department as “wrong” and “unjust,” and pledged his organization’s full support.
“The NAACP will use all of our resources to stay on this issue and to bring national attention to the disrespect and the unreasonable approach to bringing about police reform in the city of Camden,” Harris said.
“Do not eliminate the Camden Police Department. Find ways of improving it, but do not eliminate it,” he said.
CAMDEN, NJ: A Camden police officer inspects an abandoned building looking for squatters, prostiutes, and drug dealers.
‘A WAR ZONE’
At the heart of the battle over the policing plan are Camden’s 267 cops, who face the imminent loss of their jobs, even as they contend with a city that seems to some to be spinning out of control.
Times were not always so tough in Camden, which sits on the banks of the Delaware River, across the water from Philadelphia. As recently as the 1960s, the city was an industrial powerhouse, with dozens of major factories employing thousands of residents. With a population nearly 70 percent higher than today, crime was just a fraction of its current rate.
But in 1971, long-simmering racial strife exploded into riots, accelerating the flow of middle-class whites to the suburbs. Factories closed down, taking with them about 60,000 manufacturing jobs, part of a wave of de-industrialization that hollowed out the economic heart of cities across the county. As the economy tanked, crime soared.
It has remained that way for decades, making Camden among the toughest beats in all of local law enforcement, often topping the FBI’s annual list of most dangerous cities.
Today, thousands of abandoned homes blight the streets, their porches often doubling as tombstones, with spray-painted tributes to murder victims. Across broad quarters of the city, drug dealers and prostitutes roost on stoops and street corners, scattering only for a moment at the approach of a police cruiser.
The intensity of police work in Camden can reach almost unimaginable levels. Just this September, officers handled two grisly crimes involving children that made national news. In one, a mother high on PCP decapitated her 2-year-old son, then called police to report the crime. Weeks later, a young man, also high on PCP, broke into a Camden home and stabbed a 6-year-old boy to death and savagely assaulted his 12-year-old sister. Uniformed police apprehended the killer after an intensive manhunt.
Several current Camden officers spoke about their situation with HuffPost on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation by their superiors. They describe a department crumbling from within, whose demoralized officers feel abandoned by the city they pledged to protect. Bitterness runs deep over what they feel is a long-running campaign by city and county officials to paint Camden’s cops as ineffective, unreliable and over-compensated.
“Camden is not a joke. Some parts of this place are a war zone,” says one officer. “My friend opened up a freezer and saw a kid’s head looking back at him. He’s got to live with that the rest of his life.”
“We risk our lives every day. And this is what you get in return,” he says. “See you later and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Another veteran officer warns that replacing seasoned Camden cops with large numbers of inexperienced, lower-paid recruits — as the metro plan envisions — is a recipe for disaster. He scoffs at a recent comment by Capelli, the Board of Freeholders director, announcing that the new agency had received more than 1,000 applications, including some from states as distant as Alabama.
“They’re going to be thrown to the wolves,” he says. “If some outsider from Alabama comes in and shoots a kid, it’s a potential for some civil unrest.”
In August, county leaders announced that Camden police Chief Scott Thomson would lead the metro agency once the existing force was disbanded. For months, Thomson has spoken out in favor of the new agency – while leveling harsh criticism at members of his current force, saying it is plagued by absenteeism.
Many within the department see his role in pushing the plan as a betrayal, officers say. But they add that the sense of betrayal and abandonment extends far past Thomson, from city hall to the governor’s mansion.
“It’s a feeling of being unappreciated by your boss, by your mayor, by your government,” says a long-serving officer.
Gang memorials to murder victims are a common sight on the porches of Camden’s thousands of abandoned and derelict homes.
‘PEOPLE ARE AFRAID’
In an interview with HuffPost, Thomson, the Camden police chief, did not dispute that officer morale is abysmal. He says spirits are understandably low given the challenges facing officers, from soaring crime on the streets to the looming closure of the department.
“It is tough. And nobody has it tougher than these guys on the front lines,” he says.
But he also says the department faces a crisis of absenteeism, a claim the police union calls exaggerated. According to Thomson, the department’s daily call-out rate is 30 percent — far above the average in other cities.
“There are some days when half the platoon calls in sick,” Thomson says.
Redd, the Camden mayor, regularly cites the absentee rate as a crucial reason for creating the county metro force.
“Given the recent spike in homicides and an absentee rate of nearly 30 percent within the Camden Police Department, I recently announced that the city is aggressively moving towards joining the Camden Metro Division,” Redd said in a statement in August.
Thomson, however, says the absentee problem is primarily due to abuse of a state family medical leave program overseen by the city, not any provision in the police union’s contract. He calls it peripheral to Camden’s overall public safety crisis. “You fix the 30 percent issue, that doesn’t change our situation,” he says. “We’re still at 1962 staffing levels.”
He says he has no comment on the $14 million to $16 million in fringe spending that county officials say they will eliminate by liquidating the current police force.
“I’m not intimately involved in the finance end of this. My primary focus is keeping the public safe,” he says. “I’m not bean counting in the back room.”
Thomson adds that he cannot agree with Christie’s assessment that Camden’s current police contract is “obscene” — or even say whether it is more or less generous than the average police contract in New Jersey.
“I don’t know. I don’t have a baseline of comparison,” he says. “Without knowing what the other contracts are, that’s a difficult comparison.”
Nevertheless, Thomson calls the current police contract unsustainable, given Camden’s dire economic situation. Switching to the metro agency will not solve all of Camden’s problems, but will boost the number of cops on the street and help bring crime to a more manageable level, he says.
“I don’t think there’s any other option,” he says. “The status quo cannot remain.”
Out on the streets, Camden residents call the city’s crime rate intolerable, and condemn the economic calculus by the city and state that forced deep cuts to policing even in the face of soaring violence. A few welcome the creation of the metro police force and the promised surge of cops on the beat. For many others, the move represents a worrying leap into the unknown.
“They’re experimenting with the lives of the people,” says Rev. David King, a local activist and a pastor at Community Baptist Church. “They’re using the city as a guinea pig.”
“People are afraid,” he says. “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”
[Editor’s note: A clarification has been added at the end of this post.]
Last week, while many of us were busy making plans for the summer, something much more sinister was happening in the halls of the State Capital in Trenton, N. J..
At 11 p.m., on Tuesday, June 24th, legislation was discussed and voted on by the New Jersey Senate and Assembly Budget Committees, without all the legislators understanding what they were approving. “We didn’t have the bills in advance,” complained one of the Senators, “I didn’t know what the hell the bills were.” This legislation was then quickly pushed through the full New Jersey Senate and Assembly.
The legislation revised a 2012 law known as Urban Hope in order to enable two charter chains – Mastery and Uncommon Schools – to claim a large share of Camden’s public education dollars. The charters’ efforts had been imperiled by the grassroots group Save Our Schools NJ, which had sent a series of letters in May to New Jersey Education Commissioner David Hespe. The letters detailed how the two charter chains and the Camden state-appointed Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard were violating various aspects of the Urban Hope law in their efforts to open new renaissance charter schools in Camden next fall. The violations included using temporary facilities instead of building new schools; failing to provide key information required by the application; and not giving Camden residents the opportunity to review and comment on their applications.
Rather than stopping their illegal activities in response to the letters, the Mastery and Uncommon charter chains and the Camden Superintendent turned to their friends in the legislature to “fix” the problem by amending the Urban Hope legislation so that what had been illegal could now be legal. [Editor’s Note: See clarification at the end of this post.]
Mastery and Uncommon also retroactively provided some of the information that had been missing from their renaissance charter applications, although they still did not make this information available to Camden residents, as required by the Urban Hope law. Instead, the information could only be obtained through an Open Public Records (OPRA) request.
The public education advocacy group Education Law Center filed such a request and discovered that the Mastery charter network planned to create 6 renaissance charter schools in Camden, which could enroll up to 4,654 students. The Uncommon Schools charter network planned to create an additional four renaissance charter schools, which could enroll up to 2,260 students. A third renaissance charter, the KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, had been previously approved to build 4 schools that could enroll up to 2,800 students. This could bring the total enrollment in KIPP, Mastery and Uncommon renaissance charter schools to almost 10,000 students by 2019. At that level, the three renaissance charter schools would represent a significant majority of the 14,000 students currently enrolled in Camden’s public and traditional charter schools.
As part of last week’s revisions to the Urban Hope Law, legislators also added an extra year to the program’s duration, so that a fourth renaissance charter chain – the maximum allowed by the program – could be rushed through the application process and opened by the fall of 2015. In total, the four renaissance charter school chains could result in the complete destruction of Camden’s public schools.
The negative fiscal impact of the renaissance charter program is already being felt on the Camden District’s public schools. Hundreds of teachers and staff members were fired this spring because of projected budget shortfalls caused by payments the district has to make to renaissance and regular charter schools. Over the next few years, Camden parents are likely to see many more public school teachers laid off and extensive school reorganizations and closings as the privately-managed renaissance charters open more and more schools, aggressively competing for the public school dollars.
Camden parents already lament the constant harassment by those charter chains, whose representatives approach them at every venue, come to their homes, and even try to recruit their children on school playgrounds. One Camden father recounted to me that he had repeatedly told the paid renaissance charter recruiters who came to his house that he did not want to send his child to their charter school, only to have them return the next morning and resume their recruitment efforts.
The charter chains also send marketing emails and letters to parents’ homes. Sometimes, this has been done with the assistance and endorsement of the state-appointed Camden District Superintendent, who has mailed the charter chains’ recruitment materials to parents along with District correspondence. But parents also report receiving personally-addressed mail sent directly by the charter chains. A Camden mother told me that she called the Mastery charter chain’s offices in Philadelphia after receiving such a personally-addressed recruitment letter from them and spoke with a woman who asked for her name and the names of her children and then found their address on a list in front of her. Based on such experiences, Camden parents are convinced that the Camden School District’s state-appointed superintendent is giving their children’s personal information to the charter chains in order to facilitate the chains’ enrollment growth.
Rouhanifard, the Camden superintendent, is undeniably allied with the charter chains. He was instrumental in recruiting Mastery and Uncommon to apply for renaissance charter status and he preliminarily approved those chains to open schools in Camden in September.
Camden parents understand that the superintendent works for the governor rather than for them. They also know that they cannot expect their political representatives to protect their public schools. The District has no elected Board of Education and even the appointed Board that served prior to the 2013 state takeover of the District has been replaced by individuals willing to rubber stamp the Christie Administration’s actions. Camden’s political establishment, at both the local and state levels, is closely aligned with the South Jersey political machine of George Norcross, who was the primary force behind the creation of the Urban Hope program and whose name graces one of the renaissance charter schools. And Norcross is a close ally of the Governor.
In contrast to the corporate education reformers’ mantra of greater parental choice, many Camden parents feel that they have no real choices. Not only are they barraged by the aggressive and relentless recruitment efforts of the charter chains, they also are concerned about the impact on their children of having to be transferred multiple times as their local public schools are sequentially closed due to the expansion of renaissance charters.
Many parents – and Camden public school administrators – also believe that a complete charter takeover of the district is inevitable and beyond their control. There is even a publicly-availableblueprint that details the Christie Administration’s intentions to convert Camden into a New Orleans style all-charter district that includes a few remaining public schools to educate the children too challenging for the charter chains to take on – children with significant special needs; children who are not English proficient; and children whose families are too economically or emotionally distressed to meet the charter networks’ parental-involvement requirements. To minimize the uncertainty that they see ahead for the district and for their families, some parents have decided to move their children to a charter school now to avoid subjecting them to multiple possible future transfers.
But there are Camden parents who are mobilizing against the destruction of their public schools. They reject the Christie Administration’s mantra that their public schools are all failures because their personal experiences show that to be a lie. And they do not want to give up on public schools that accept every child rather than weeding out those who do not score well on standardized tests or who are more challenging to educate.
These parents express shock at the Mastery charter chain’s reported practice of having children carry a “demerit card” on a lanyard around their necks, with demerits issued for such minoroffenses as students having their shirts untucked or chewing gum, and with eight demerits leading to a detention.
They do not want their children to attend a charter school that touts its 100 percent graduation rate while only half of the children who start in 5th grade manage to make it to 12th grade (and only 40 percent of the students who are Black and male), as is the case for the UncommonSchools charter chain.
Parents also are increasingly aware of what has happened in Detroit and New Orleans and even parts of Washington D.C.: Once the local public schools are gone, there is no way to get them back. Consequently, the children who do not conform to the “no excuses” charter models end up with no place to turn.
Two and a half years ago, when the Urban Hope legislation that created the renaissance charter program was first introduced and rushed through the New Jersey Legislature, in the waning hours of a legislative session, it was not sold as a way of privatizing Camden’s public schools. Instead, Senator Donald Norcross, the bill’s primary Senate sponsor and George Norcross’s brother, argued that the legislation was urgently needed because Governor Christie had frozen the work of the State’s Schools Development Authority, which had been tasked with building and renovating schools in 31 of New Jersey’s highest-poverty school districts. That is the reason that the legislation authorized renaissance charter schools to be funded at 95 percent of their home school district’s average per pupil expenditure levels vs. 90 percent for regular charters – to give the renaissance charters the financial resources to build those critically needed new schools.
However, revisions to the law that were snuck through the New Jersey legislature last week gave the renaissance charters the option of renovating existing facilities rather than having to build new schools, upending the entire premise for the renaissance charter program. Now, the renaissance charters will receive more of the taxpayers’ dollars for doing exactly what most existing charter schools already do – renovating an existing facility.
For all the efforts by the Mastery and Uncommon charter chains to characterize their work as being driven by what is best for the children, the Camden story suggests that their true motivation is a relentless push for greater market share and a willingness to abuse power, and even to break the law, in order to accomplish that objective.
Clarification: This post characterizes some of the Renaissance schools’ activities as “illegal” with respect to the original 2012 Urban Hope law. However, neither the charter-management organizations in question nor the Camden school district has in any way been found to be out of compliance with the law or its supporting regulations.The groups’ applications were approved by the state on Monday, July 7.
Julia Sass Rubin is an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University and a visiting associate professor of public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is researching the community response to public education privatization efforts in Camden and Newark. Dr. Rubin also is one of the founding members of the grassroots, pro-public education group Save Our Schools NJ.
TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie on Monday signed a bill that wrests control of emergency ambulance services in Camden from one south Jersey hospital chain and gives it its competitor, Cooper Health, overseen by south Jersey power broker George Norcross.
Virtua Health, with hospitals in Voorhees, Marlton and Berlin in suburban Camden County, has provided advanced life support and paramedic services in the city of Camden since 1977. Cooper University Hospital, the level one trauma center located in Camden and serving south Jersey, trains Virtua’s paramedics.
But under legislation that raced through the Assembly and Senate last month in the final days before the summer break, Cooper would take over emergency medical services for the city. State Assemblyman Gilbert “Whip” Wilson (D-Camden), one of the bill’s sponsors, argued Cooper was best suited to provide these services because their paramedics intend to provide follow-up care after patients — many of whom live in Camden — are discharged.
The budget Christie signed last month for the fiscal year that began July 1 also dedicates $2.5 million to Cooper to buy new ambulances and other equipment.
Norcross is the chairman of the board at Cooper, and is the widely considered the most influential Democrat in the state, with ties to Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican. There was no statement from Christie along with the announcement that he’d signed the bill on Monday.
The legislation sparked a public feud between the two hospital systems. Virtua argued the bill was a blatant power grab because it circumvents the state Health Department’s authority to decide who should provide EMS services. Virtua executives also argued they do a commendable job providing the service without needing to take money from the state budget.
Cooper supporters argued that when Virtua closed down its acute-care hospital in the city 15 years ago, it had abandoned the Camden, despite providing outpatient services there. Paramedic response time data released by Camden County the night before the legislature approved the bill on June 22 called into question Virtua’s service record.
According to the bill, (S2980), “A hospital which is designated a Level 1 trauma center shall be exclusively authorized to develop and maintain advanced life support services in the municipality in which the trauma center is located, and shall have the right of first refusal to provide both advanced life support and basic life support in the municipality.” Cooper is not named in the bill, but it is the only level one trauma center in the state does not provide EMS services to its host city’s hospital.
Cooper officials intend to bid on the basic life support ambulance service contract provided by University Hospital, based in Newark with a substation in Camden.
“The governor’s action today, in addition to the overwhelming, bipartisan support of the legislature, will allow advanced life support services in Camden to finally be fully integrated within the region’s only level 1 Trauma Center,” according to a statement released by Cooper spokeswoman Wendy Marano. “Camden residents will now receive the same level of care as others in the state.”
Richard P. Miller, Virtua President & CEO, said he was “extremely disappointed” the governor signed the bill, and hinted he may sue.
“The best practice model for EMS across the nation supports regionalization of EMS services, not creating a new program for one municipality,” Miller said in a statement released late Monday night.
“When every minute counts, Virtua paramedics are the best in the state, having served all municipalities in Camden and Burlington counties with distinction for more than 38 years,” Miller said. “For the City of Camden, Virtua exceeds the State Department of Health’s guidelines for response time, delivering even faster response times than guidelines established by the Department’s Emergency Medical Services Blue Ribbon Panel.”
“We will explore all options, including the possibility of litigation, and will provide additional information as appropriate,” according to Miller’s statement.
By Maddie Hanna and Andrew Seidman, Inquirer Trenton Bureau
Gov. Christie’s chief of staff, Kevin O’Dowd, will step down this month to work for Cooper University Hospital in Camden, nearly a year after the governor named O’Dowd his pick for attorney general.
O’Dowd, whose selection as attorney general never moved forward after controversy arose over lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, will serve as senior executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Cooper, where he will focus on business development, Christie officials said. He will start at Cooper in January.
In a telephone interview, Christie said O’Dowd told him two or three weeks ago he had received the job offer from Cooper and was thinking about it.
“Kevin and I both decided this was the next best step for his future,” Christie said. “He served me extraordinarily well for 11 years. I don’t think I can ask a whole lot more out of somebody.”
O’Dowd, a former federal prosecutor, also worked for Christie while the future governor was U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
“It was an honor and a privilege to serve the people of the State of New Jersey for the last five years,” O’Dowd said in a statement. “While I will miss interacting with my colleagues in the executive and legislative branches, I am very much looking forward to joining the Cooper team and beginning the next phase of my career.”
O’Dowd’s wife, Mary, serves as commissioner of the state Department of Health.
Christie said the prospect that his chief of staff would face questions about the bridge scandal during a confirmation process before a Democratic-controlled Senate “didn’t play a role in this at all.” He noted that O’Dowd had already faced hours of questions about the matter from a legislative committee.
Christie, a Republican, has sought to move past the bridge scandal as he considers running for president in 2016.
O’Dowd testified before the committee in June that he had played no role in the September 2013 lane closures, which jammed traffic in Fort Lee. Lawmakers questioned why O’Dowd hadn’t asked more questions about the controversy, which erupted in January after documents revealed that a now-fired Christie aide, Bridget Kelly, had sent an e-mail calling for “traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
O’Dowd, who supervised Kelly, was never directly implicated in the controversy.
State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) said he approached O’Dowd around the time of his testimony to ask whether he wanted to be attorney general.
“I said, ‘Kevin, what are you going to do?’ ” Sweeney said. “He said, ‘Steve, I just want to move on.’ ”
Sweeney added, “If Kevin wanted to be attorney general, he would be the attorney general right now. He had the votes to get passed. I was extremely supportive and would have testified in favor of him.”
A confirmation hearing “wouldn’t have been horribly contentious,” Sweeney said, noting that O’Dowd was well-respected in the Legislature and had already testified before the investigative committee.
Sweeney described O’Dowd’s departure as an end of an era and added, “I trust him with my life.”
Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto (D., Hudson) praised O’Dowd as “a person of compromise” who would be “sorely missed.”
Over the summer, Christie publicly supported O’Dowd for attorney general but said O’Dowd needed to determine what he wanted to do.
At Cooper, O’Dowd’s focus will include the MD Anderson Cooper cancer partnership and the AmeriHealth New Jersey relationship, Christie officials said. He will also oversee marketing, human resources, compliance oversight, and corporate real estate development.
Adrienne Kirby, Cooper’s chief executive officer and president, praised O’Dowd’s “proven track record of strong management, development and implementation of strategic plans, as well as improving organization performance and productivity.”
O’Dowd’s arrival will be the latest management shake-up at Cooper.
Kirby took over as CEO after her predecessor, John Sheridan, and his wife, Joyce, died Sept. 28 in a mysterious house fire. The case remains under investigation.
Cooper spokeswoman Lori Shaffer said O’Dowd’s hiring was unrelated to Sheridan’s death.
Cooper does not disclose employee salaries, she said. O’Dowd made $141,000 as Christie’s chief of staff.
In the interview, Christie said he never spoke with George E. Norcross III, chairman of Cooper’s board of trustees and South Jersey Democratic leader, about O’Dowd’s move.
“Obviously, Kevin has had a relationship with a number of folks in South Jersey,” including Norcross, Sweeney, and Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald (D., Camden), Christie said.
Revenue at Cooper University Health Care will surpass $1 billion this year, and O’Dowd is the “perfect choice” to manage its growth, Norcross said in a statement.
Christie said he would consider making another nomination for attorney general, “now that Kevin has taken himself out of the running.” John Hoffman has served as acting attorney general since June 2013, when then-Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa was appointed to the U.S. Senate.
Regina Egea, director of the authorities unit, will replace O’Dowd as chief of staff at the end of the month.
O’Dowd, 42, who lives in Princeton, has been Christie’s chief of staff since January 2012. He previously served as deputy chief counsel to Christie, starting in 2010.
O’Dowd worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey from 2003 to 2010, including as chief of the office’s Securities and Healthcare Fraud Unit. He also served as chair of the office’s Healthcare Fraud Task Force. He twice received the integrity award from the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
He was educated at Catholic University of America and St. John’s University School of Law.
Camden residents gather on May 12, 2014 ahead of a special meeting of the school board in which Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard announced plans to lay off educators and other staff within the school district. (Staff Photo by Jason Laday.)
CAMDEN — City education officials on Monday announced 241 layoffs across the district’s 26 schools, including 206 teachers.
Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard approved the layoffs during a special meeting of the school board Monday evening, which was marked by continuous, angry outbursts and comments made by members of the public. They included members of the Camden Education Association (CEA), parents and other residents.
The crowd reserved particular vitriol for the state-appointed superintendent, with shouts of “Go back to New York” and “You sold us out to the governor” heard throughout the beginning of the meetings.
“You work for us, not the other way around – we tell you what to do,” shouted Eulisis Delgado from his seat in the auditorium at H.B. Wilson Family School. Later, he produced a bullhorn and addressed that board and superintendent.
Following an hour-long executive session of the school board, Rouhanifard attempted to address the crowd in advance of a presentation detailing the layoff plan.
However, regular outbursts from many residents, as well as a brief chant of “Whose school? Our school,” caused the superintendent to abandon the attempt in favor of moving directly to the public comment part of the agenda.
“Tonight is hard,” said Rouhanifard, prompting the audience to respond in shouts and sighs of faux sympathy. “I have been responding to a number of teachers about this, and you can shout back at me – nothing is stopping you, and I won’t stop you – but I want to say we went about this process in a way that reflects the importance of this decision.
“I want to make it immensely clear that there are many people who will lose their job (in this plan) who care deeply about their students – this is not an indictment of them,” he added. “And while I know that this may seem to contradict with what we’re doing here today, we care deeply about these teachers.”
Teachers who spoke out Monday against the layoffs, criticized the district for issuing “pink slips” during the week of the NJASK standardized tests. They also questioned the criteria used by the district in selecting which teachers are to be laid off.
According to Rouhanifard, the layoff plan follows state law and seniority requirements in the collective bargaining agreement with the CEA.
Robert Farmer, a leader in the CEA, called the layoffs the “first step” in converting more students over to charter schools at the expense of public schools.
“We will sit down with the superintendent and board in order to lessen the impact on schools employees,” he said.
The 241 layoffs made official Monday evening follows the termination of 94 central administration employees late last month.
The Camden school district began the most recent budget process with a $75 million deficit, including a $42 million operating budget shortfall. According to Rouhanifard, non-personnel cuts and the use of surplus funds have helped fill all but $28 million of that gap. However, the superintendent that remaining gap will have to be reconciled with the elimination of 575 positions.
In addition to teachers, the layoffs will hit guidance counselors, nurses and other staff.
However, there are 10 positions that managed to escape the school-based layoffs. According to Lowe, those positions did not suffer any personnel cuts.
They include the district’s athletic directors, attendance and dropout prevention officers, crisis counselors and social workers, custodians, JROTC and JAG team members, psychologists, school-based youth service team members, school safety officers, special education teachers and speech therapists.
The plan also calls for one or more art teacher, guidance counselor, librarian, music teacher and nurse per school.
“So, people are going to say we cut guidance counselors, and we did, but those services will still be provided at every school,” said Lowe. “We’re reducing the total number, but every school will have at least one – Woodrow Wilson will have six, and Camden High School will have five.”
The superintendent’s plan increases the number of community school coordinators and pre-K teachers.
When cellphones flashed “noon” in Ziaira Williams’ history class, students shifted in their seats, exchanged glances, and then filed out into a hallway of purple and gold, launching a two-hour protest of Camden City School District layoffs.
Williams’ history teacher received a layoff notice Monday and said goodbye to his exiting pupils with silent pats on the back and nods of appreciation, Williams said.
“They’re glad we’re doing this. They said, ‘Go ahead,’ and honestly, I don’t care if I get in trouble – I want my teachers back,” the 17-year-old junior said.
Hundreds more would join the two-mile march from Camden High to the Board of Education building downtown Wednesday afternoon, including students from Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy, Brimm Medical Arts High School, and Woodrow Wilson High School, many carrying signs and chanting, “Save our teachers!”
The walkout came in response to the district’s announcement Monday that it would lay off 272 people, 206 of them teachers, to bridge a $75 million revenue gap. Samir Nichols, a senior at Creative Arts and the school’s valedictorian, said he organized the rally.
The protest grew so large that police blocked off Haddon Avenue and Cooper Street. It apparently prompted NJ Transit to suspend for about an hour service on the RiverLine between the Walter Rand Transportation Center and the waterfront.
Don’t suspend
Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard said he would encourage principals not to suspend students for the day’s protest. “We respect their right to peacefully protest,” he said.
“Students have an important voice, and students care about their teachers – we care about their teachers. What we care about, also, is continuing the dialogue with students.”
On the route downtown, students sat on the roofs and hoods of cars rolling alongside the pack, which filled the two-lane roadways. Students in the marching band brought along their instruments to play Camden High’s fight song.
“We feel like our teachers are being disrespected,” said Dejon Sullivan, 18, student body president of Camden High and the student representative for the school board who attends monthly meetings.
“It’s disgusting to me. I believe the education is not the greatest here, but we’re trying to progress. Our teachers have a lot to do with that progress. Camden High is my home, no matter how many fights we have, no matter what. It’s my home, and these teachers treat me like I get treated at home.”
Former Camden school board member Sara Davis watched from her porch as the students marched by.
Davis disagreed with many of the changes state-appointed superintendent Rouhanifard was bringing to the district, including two “Renaissance” schools, which will open in the fall, pending state approval.
“I’m glad to see the kids are interested in what’s happening. Hopefully it will have an effect, but the bottom line is, more people should be speaking on their behalf,” she said.
She said the last time Camden students staged a walkout was in the late 1960s.
As the crowd walked passed Hatch Middle School, little heads peered out of windows, waving at the older students, below who beckoned them to join them outside.
Security guards smiled. “That’s right, keep our jobs,” one said.
The large revenue gap comes in a district that already has one of the highest per pupil expenditures in the state at $23,500. The student-to-teacher ratio is extremely low at 9-1. It will be 11-1 after the layoffs.
Officials cut $28 million in non-personnel costs, but also cut $29 million through the layoffs. Charter school transfer funds increased to $72 million for next year.
Most students said they were upset to find teachers suddenly without jobs. Because layoffs were based on seniority, evaluations, attendance, and other qualitative measures did not come into consideration.
Critics echoed
Some echoed school-choice critics, saying they didn’t want to see public schools get turned over to private operators. The leaders of both magnet high schools in Camden, Brimm, and Creative Arts, have said they are looking into charterizing, a process they would go through with the state, not the city.
Once outside the Board of Education building, students chanted from the steps as employees peeked out from office windows.
Parents and community members from Save Our Schools joined in the protest, at times appearing to run it. Ronsha Dickerson stood at the top of the steps and yelled out to students, “They’re laying off all your teachers, they’re closing your schools.” She called for teachers to strike and make a trip to Trenton to see the governor next week.
Up on the seventh floor of the administration building, Rouhanifard heard the chants and decided to face the large crowd.
“We’re not closing any schools, no schools are closing, we’ve been saying that for the past three months,” he yelled over the crowd. “We have a budget problem; we’re trying to manage it as best we can. We’ve cut other areas, too. This is a really hard time for everybody – for you, for your teachers.”
Meet representatives
Rouhanifard said he would meet with representatives from each school in the next two weeks. Some teachers could be reappointed in the fall, but fewer positions will be available than in previous years, he said. Before heading back into the building he told students:
“This dialogue is important and we’re going to continue to have the conversation, OK? That’s my commitment to you all.”
Latin Kings graffiti adorns the wall of a building near the new KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy now under construction in Camden.
Plans for sweeping restructuring of state-run Camden school district, including turning over four schools to charter operators, faced its first open challenge yesterday when lawyers contended that the moves violated state law and regulations on several fronts.
The Education Law Center, the Newark-based advocacy group, released a statement that said the plans failed to meet both the letter and spirit of the Urban Hope Act, the 2012 law that cleared the way for the charter-operated “renaissance schools.”
It is these “renaissance school” projects that would expand under the reorganization plan announced by Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard last month.
Four schools would be turned over to Mastery Charter Schools and Uncommon Schools, and a fifth school would be closed outright, with most of its students attending the new KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy now under construction.
The ELC contended that the Urban Hope Act was never intended to have existing schools handed over to the charter operators.
The group said the plans also violate the state’s own procedures, under which the targeted school are already operating under improvement plans that preclude such charter conversions.
“Once again, there has been really no public process here,” said David Sciarra, the ELC’s executive director. “The superintendent doesn’t put anything out, doesn’t even post the applications, and he provides no opportunity to have any public input in this.”
Sciarra wouldn’t yet commit to a formal legal challenge, noting that the plans still require final approval from the Christie administration.“I don’t want to get into that at this point,” he said last night.
Rouhanifard’s office rejected the claim that public input had not been sought or even that the changes could even be defined as conversions. It said that the schools are actually being closed and reopened under the new management, including “substantial reconstruction” of the buildings, as allowed under the law.
That might have been semantics but it was, perhaps, a critical legal distinction as Rouhanifard had initially characterized the moves as “transformations.”
District officials said that selling or leasing of the properties to the charter operators is also still being considered.
In addition, Rouhanifard said public hearings were held last year when the first charter projects were approved and again this winter as the new plan was being considered.
“The misrepresentations and factual errors of interest groups will not distract us from the urgent cause of improving our schools,” he said in a statement. “With two out of five students not graduating from high school, it’s critical that we stay focused on improving the education of our children. We have remarkable students, but for far too long the system has come up short in providing them with the educational opportunities they deserve.”
“Over the past 18 months, I have listened to the concerns of parents from every school in Camden, at dozens of community meetings, and most recently, at four town halls,” Rouhanifard added. “I heard loudly and clearly that where our schools are struggling the most, we need to take action. These new renaissance school partnerships represent a real opportunity for us to dramatically invest in our facilities and provide new, high quality educational options for our students and families.”
The challenges to the restructuring were hardly unexpected in light of such sweeping changes and considering that two lawsuits have already been filed since the first of the renaissance-school plans were unveiled.
The first case ended when the state Legislature amended the law to address the complaint. The second lawsuit, lodged by a group of parent advocates, is pending in appellate court.
Rouhanifard is moving ahead with plans for the next school year – including door-to-door canvassing — as the proposals go through the formal review process with state Department of Education.
In each case, the state needs to sign off on the specific applications for each school, and there is also a review process for when a school is closed.
But it would be surprising if the state rejected the plans, given that Rouhanifard is a state appointee whose every move has been backed by the Christie administration
Addressing threats to health care’s core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.
The Troubles at Cooper Continue, Lately Gruesomely, But Will Its Leadership and Governance Change This Time? – Part II: the History since 2005
In our most recent post, we noted the latest tragic, and gruesome development at Cooper Health System, the largest hospital system in southern New Jersey. Months after the system CEO, John F Sheridan, and his wife Joyce were found dead after a fire in their home, local law enforcement concluded that Mr Sheridan murdered his wife, set fire to the house, then committed suicide. It turns out this is just the latest, albeit possibly most tragic and grisly, troubling news from that health care system.
Our last post summarized the history from 1978, including:
– Seven people, including the hospital system chief financial officer, confessed to and/or found guilty of participating in an embezzlement scheme that cost the hospital more than $21 million
– An internal investigation was suppressed for years, but later revealed several severe management problems
– The media revealed multiple conflicts of interest affecting the system’s board of trustees, including members of the committee that performed the investigation
– One member of the board of trustees who participated in the internal investigation was later convicted of arranging his wife’s murder
– Resulting financial losses caused layoffs and service reductions, some of which affected the hospital system’s charitable mission
– The stories received little attention outside the region, and apparently did not result in any fundamental changes in governance or the structure of leadership.
Since 2005, there have been other troubles at Cooper.
Conflicts of Interest Involving Local and State Politics
Board Chairman George E Norcross III
In 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer found close ties between NJ politicians and hospital leaders (see this post). In particular, the story noted “the board of South Jersey’s major hospital, Cooper University Hospital in Camden, is chaired by the region’s most powerful political figure, Democratic power broker George E. Norcross III.”
In 2012, as we posted here, Mr Norcross’ relationships became more evident. The New York Times reported that a story about his conflicts of interest had been held from publication by the Inquirer because Mr Norcross was part of a business group seeking to purchase that newspaper. When the Inquirer story finally came out, it stated firms with financial relationships to the hospital under Norcross had donated generously to Norcross’ political allies, and that Norcross had influenced the creation of relationships with these firms. It suggested that Norcross’ political influence had resulted in an unusual level of state financial support for the hospital system. It noted that the law firm for which Cooper CEO John F Sheridan had previously worked did lobbying for the hospital. It noted that the hospital did millions of dollars of business with firms tied to hospital trustees, including Mr Norcross.
Trustee Emeritus Peter Driscoll
Recent reporting after Mr Sheridan’s death suggested the rehabilitation of former board chairman Peter Driscoll under Chairman Norcross. Mr Driscoll was the former board chair who resigned in 1999 after the embezzlement scandal report and revelations about conflicts of interest affecting the board were finally made public, and the hospital system was in financial difficulty. However, by 2014, he was identified by the board as a “trustee emeritus.” Per the Philadelphia Inquirer, after the fire at the Sheridan house was attributed to arson,
‘If they had died because the house was on fire, that would be a terrible, terrible tragedy,’ said Cooper Health System trustee Peter E. Driscoll, a senior member of the Haddonfield law firm of Archer & Greiner. ‘. . .I don’t know what to make of it. I can’t imagine anybody that would want to do something like this.’
New Vice President Kevin O’Dowd and his Family
Also after Mr Sheridan’s death, the hospital system hired a new top manager with his own extensive political connections and conflicts of interest. Per the Inquirer,
Gov. Christie’s chief of staff, Kevin O’Dowd, will step down this month to work for Cooper University Hospital in Camden, nearly a year after the governor named O’Dowd his pick for attorney general.
O’Dowd, whose selection as attorney general never moved forward after controversy arose over lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, will serve as senior executive vice president and chief administrative officer at Cooper, where he will focus on business development, Christie officials said. He will start at Cooper in January.
The conflict was
O’Dowd’s wife, Mary, serves as commissioner of the state Department of Health.
State Health Commissioner Mary O’Dowd will refrain from making decisions that would directly affect Cooper University Hospital in Camden after her husband accepted a senior management job there, officials said Friday night.
The move was made to avoid any conflicts of interest as the state Department of Health licenses and inspects hospitals, and doles out money to compensate them for treating uninsured charity care patients. Cooper will receive $37.3 million in charity care payments from the state this year, the fifth highest amount in the state.
A story in the NJ Spotlight suggested that would not solve the problem,
The question that the O’Dowds will have to face is whether they can overcome even the perception of a conflict of interest when their jobs so pervasively present opportunities for such a situation.
‘It’s a very, very tenuous situation,’ said William Schluter, a former longtime member of the State Ethics Commission and state senator.
He noted that nearly everything that senior hospital executives do in their jobs is influenced by state regulations.
‘It’s a situation that I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be in,’ said Schluter, adding that he expects second-guessing in the media and by elected officials as the state handles issues affecting Cooper.
Just to ice the cake for Mr O’Dowd, the Courier-Post noted that Mr O’Dowd’s job at Cooper could be considered an example of the revolving door, albeit delayed,
O’Dowd, previously the governor’s deputy chief counsel, also worked under Christie at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Jersey.
During seven years as an assistant United States attorney, O’Dowdoversaw a securities and healthcare fraud unit. He also prosecuted cases ranging from child pornography distribution, cybercrime and drug trafficking.
O’Dowd served earlier as a state Deputy Attorney General, where his responsibilities included providing legal counsel to the state Department of Health.
As US Attorney, Christie, possibly with the aid of Mr O’Dowd, pursued a deferred prosecution agreement for UMDNJ, then Cooper’s primary academic affiliation, for a complicated set of allegations that we discussed extensively in the past (look at this post and follow links backward).
Late CEO John F Sheridan and Family
Apparently only after Mr Sheridan’s death did the media report extensively on his political connections. The earliest report I found was in the Philadelphia Inquirer from September 28, 2014. He served
on Gov. Christie’s health-care transition subcommittee in 2010.
The statement said he was New Jersey commissioner of transportation under Gov. Thomas H. Kean and served as New Jersey deputy attorney general and assistant counsel for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, and was counsel for the New Jersey Senate majority.
Also,
his son Mark – a prominent lawyer … has represented Christie in the Bridgegate scandal
John Sheridan Jr., the CEO of Cooper University Health System … previously spent 40 years in New Jersey government
Also,
He has held positions on Gov. Thomas Kean’s cabinet as transportation commissioner and chairman of the New Jersey Transit board, as well as held roles on transition teams for Gov. Chris Christie and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.
Furthermore,
Earlier in his career, he served as Deputy Attorney General of the State of New Jersey, Assistant Counsel to Gov. William T. Cahill, General Counsel to the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and Counsel to the New Jersey Senate Majority.
Finally, his son
Mark Sheridan, a partner at Squire Patton Boggs, acts as general counsel for the New Jersey Republican State Committee.
So, in the years since conflicts of interest at the board of trustees level were noted as part of the investigation after the management embezzlement scandal at Cooper, many more apparent conflicts affecting top managers and board members have appeared, most recently in late 2014.
Settlement of Allegations of Kickbacks
In 2013, the media reported that Cooper settled federal allegations that it gave kickbacks to doctors to induce referrals. As reported by the Inquirer,
The Cooper Health System in Camden has agreed to pay $12.6 million to settle a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that it made improper payments to doctors in an effort to build its cardiology business, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey said Thursday.
From October 2004 through 2010, local doctors were paid $18,000 to attend four meetings of the Cooper Heart Institute Advisory Board in any given year under ‘consulting’ and ‘compensation’ agreements, in possible violation of antikickback laws, state and federal law enforcement officials contended.
The whistle-blower was South Jersey cardiologist Nicholas L. DePace. He attended an advisory board meeting in 2007 and was convinced that the board’s purpose was not to provide advice to Cooper, but to be a source of patient referrals to the Heart Institute, according to a lawsuit he filed in 2008.
‘He was invited to be a member of the advisory board. He attended a meeting and it quickly became apparent to him what the advisory board really was. It was sitting and listening to lectures and not providing advisory services,’ said Michael A. Morse, a partner in Pietragallo, Gordon, Alfano, Bosick & Raspanti L.L.P. in Philadelphia, one of DePace’s lawyers.
As is typical of legal settlements involving prominent health care organizations,
Cooper admitted no liability.
‘After more than three years of extended discussions with government lawyers, we decided, in the best interests of Cooper, to settle our dispute without the admission of wrongdoing to avoid the burdens and uncertainties of a protracted litigation,’ Cooper president and chief executive officer John P. Sheridan Jr. said. ‘This allows us to focus our full energies on serving our community.’
In a note to Cooper employees, Sheridan said the board was established to ‘improve the quality and responsiveness of our cardiac programs’ and ‘was reviewed by outside legal counsel before it began operations.
However, given that the Inquirer reported that “the $12.6 million penalty is financially significant for Cooper,” one wonders why it was made if hospital leadership felt that the case against it was poor.
So years after the embezzlement scandal, another scandal involving allegations of illegal behavior was settled. This time, there was no trial, but since the settlement was financially burdensome for the hospital, it is plausible that it resulted from managers’ realization that they would not have a good defense against the charges at trial.
The Death of the Sheridans
Mr Sheridan became CEO of Cooper in 2008. As noted in the Gloucester County Times,
On Feb. 7 John P. Sheridan Jr., was appointed president and chief executive officer of The Cooper Health System by the Cooper Board of Trustees. Sheridan joined Cooper as senior executive vice president in July 2005 and has served as president of Cooper University Hospital since September of 2007.
‘Cooper has grown dramatically in recent years and is positioned as the academic medical leader of South Jersey,’ said George E. Norcross III, chairman of the Board of Trustees at Cooper. ‘John Sheridan is a proven leader. He has the skills required to build-out our $500 million health care campus in Camden, implement our suburban strategy and achieve our vision of creating the premier academic health care system in South Jersey and the Delaware Valley.’
As of early 2014, he was getting substantial compensation typical for a hospital system CEO, per NJBiz, “John T. Sheridan Jr. (of the $913 million Cooper Health System) received $963,433.”
In late September, 2014, Mr Sheridan and his wife were found dead in a house fire. Initial reports suggested the fire was accidental. Then it was declared to be arson. Then Joyce Sheridan’s death was found to be the result of a homicide. Finally, as we posted here, law enforcement declared that Mr Sheridan killed his wife, set the fire, and then committed suicide.
That news was so horrendous that it dumbfounded Cooper insiders. As reported by the Inquirer,
‘It’s not something I can imagine,’ said Peter Driscoll, a Cooper Health System trustee emeritus and a senior member of the Haddonfield law firm Archer & Greiner.
Also,
In a brief statement, Cooper University Health Care called the prosecutor’s findings ‘unfathomable to us.’
I can only hope that they will get over their shock and realize that the institution really has some big problems.
Summary
Since 1978, there have been multiple stories about mismanagement, conflicts of interest affecting managers and board members, and crimes committed or alleged to have been committed by management and at least one trustee at Cooper Hospital/UMC which then became Cooper Health System. Despite these often lurid stories, there is no indication that there has been a fundamental change in the governance of the institution. While managers have come and gone, sometimes under difficult circumstances, there is no indication that how managers were hired has changed. Since the early 1990s, there has been no obvious effort made by management or board members to change, at least not one announced publicly. There has been no outside investigation.
Given that the hospital system has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with state government, including both the legislative and executive branch, maybe it has been easy to go along to get along. More cozy relationships, including some with ownership of the news media, may have helped to keep this story anechoic outside of the region.
Yet the cumulative story is so striking that it should prompt national attention, and inspire some real hard thought about how health care leadership and governance has gotten so bad.
To repeat what I have said all too often, and I admit with little impact so far….
True health care reform requires governance that is accountable, transparent, true to the organization’s mission, and honest, ethical, and without conflicts of interest; and leadership that understands health care, upholds its values, is honest, ethical, and without conflicts of interest, is transparent and open, and is willing to be accountable and subject to appropriate incentives.
Addressing threats to health care’s core values, especially those stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in leadership and governance of health care.
The Troubles at Cooper Continue, Lately Gruesomely, But Will Its Leadership and Governance Change This Time? – Part I: Historical Background
Allegations of Murder-Suicide by a Hospital System CEO
This will be a hard series of posts to write. It was triggered by the latest, and perhaps most gruesome chapter in the troubled history of the leadership of Cooper Health, the largest hospital system in southern New Jersey (known locally as South Jersey). As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 28, 2015,
Cooper University Health System CEO John P. Sheridan Jr. stabbed his wife to death, set their bedroom on fire, and then took his own life, authorities have concluded, closing a six-month investigation into the deaths that shocked New Jersey’s political and civic communities.
The Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office announced its results in a news release Friday, citing forensic evidence and a lengthy probe that included more than 180 interviews.
But it offered no conclusive motive to explain why Sheridan, described by family and friends as mild-mannered, would brutally stab his wife and kill himself.
‘Many possible scenarios and theories were considered,’ the prosecutor’s office said in a statement after months of virtual silence. The evidence ‘supports the conclusion that John Sheridan fatally stabbed Joyce Sheridan, set the fire, and committed suicide.’
The Story in Context: a Long History of Leadership and Governance Problems
We have often discussed bad leadership of health care organizations, and written a lot about the contrast between the munificent compensation paid to non-profit hospital CEOs and the lack of evidence justifying such pay. However, a murder-suicide allegedly perpetrated by the CEO of a large non-profit hospital system is way at the tail of the curve of questionable managerial behavior.
But it turns out that Cooper Health System has a very long record of leadership and governance troubles. The current chapter is the latest, and possibly most gruesome, in this sorry series. However, the context of this history has been lacking in the recent coverage, which has been so far limited to local media. The history deserves a more complete discussion, and maybe then it could lead to some reconsideration at least of this one institution’s leadership and governance, and perhaps the larger troubles in leadership and governance in health care.
Thus this post will summarize the history that I could find up to 2005. A second post will summarize more recent history up to and through the terrible deaths of John and Joyce Sheridan.
In the interests of full disclosure, I started my faculty career at what was then Cooper Hospital – University Medical Center, the main teaching hospital for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) branch at Camden, NJ. During my four years there, 1983-87, I was impressed with the dedication of the physicians, nurses and other health care professionals there. However, even given my naivete at a young faculty member, the leadership of the institution, which was one of the early adapters of the generic management model, seemed strange. Little did I know how strange it was.
In the late 1990s, when I became seriously concerned about what I know call leadership and governance problems in health care, I ran into some folks from South Jersey who told me that Cooper had a tumultuous history since I left. I got around to researching it, leading to an article in our local American College of Physicians newsletter. The article, to which I had linked here, is no longer available on the internet. So I have reposted it below, with some minor modifications, put in square brackets . Again, the history is of major problems with leadership and governance at Cooper that had inspired no reconsideration by 2005.
The Curiously Quiet Case of Cooper’s Corrupt CFO
Embezzlement by Top Management
In 1994, two powerful executives at Cooper admitted their guilt in an elaborate embezzlement scheme. In 1978, John H. Crispo, the owner of Financial Management Corporation Inc., to keep his contract with the hospital, began paying monthly kickbacks of $2500-$10,000 to John M. Sullivan, the Cooper Executive Vice President for Finance. Sullivan then referred delinquent hospital accounts for collection to a new company Crispo set up. In turn, Crispo repaid him $340,000 in more kickbacks. Sullivan recruited Cooper’s Controller, P. John Lashkevich, and the three devised a scheme to defraud the hospital using fabricated bills, established a fictitious company to launder money, and falsified tax returns. A prosecutor claimed “Mr Sullivan blew this money on wine, women, parties, and a lavish lifestyle,”which included trips with girlfriends to the Plaza Hotel, and jewelry shopping at Tiffany’s. Sullivan had driven a Porsche, and lived in a $700,000 house. The conspirators also bought cars, boats, and racehorses.
Other conspirators were also found and prosecuted. Helene Weinstein admitted to helping establish a shadow company as a conduit for Sullivan to send money from the hospital to his estranged wife, Elarba Pagan. Pagan was accused of receiving money sent by Sullivan from Cooper to another firm. Weinstein testified that Pagan carried “briefcases of cash from the hospital to shop in New York for $1500 shoes.” Also, Cooper’s Vice President for Finance, Robert Schmid Jr, admitted embezzling money from Cooper to pay for home improvements. Finally, Thomas J. Damadio admitted helping launder up to $600,000 stolen from Cooper, and evading income taxes.
Sullivan was sentenced to 55 months in federal prison, Lashkevich, 25, Pagan, eight, Weinstein, three years of probation, Damadio, six months of house arrest. Crispo died before serving prison time.
The Internal Report, and the Murder Conviction of One of Its Authors
After these stories became public in 1994, Cooper’s Board of Trustees established a special committee to investigate its financial operations, which included Peter E. Driscoll, Chairman of the Board, Kevin G. Halpern, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and a local Rabbi, Fred Neulander. The hospital pledged to make its investigation public, but then fought to keep it secret. Its report was finally released in 1998, after a discovery motion in a civil lawsuit. Prior to then, the Philadelphia Inquirer had revealed numerous financial conflicts of interest affecting Board members, including those on the special committee. For example, Cooper paid the law firm of Archer & Greiner, of which Driscoll was a senior partner, $2.1 million over three years from 1993-96.
The report revealed that the conspiracy had bilked the hospital of at least $21.8 million from 1987 to 1994, while “Cooper has been the victim of a massive crime wave.” It stated Sullivan, Lashkevich, and Crispo “had unrestrained and absolute control of virtually all the important financial functions at Cooper and they took full criminal advantage….” It also noted that “employees who became suspicious and questioned the accounting practices or tried to alert management were intimidated, transferred, or dismissed by the high-ranking executives.” Furthermore, it suggested “the ability to bypass or defeat controls grew from an institutional culture that delegated and outsourced too much responsibility, without developing effective controls….” The report also raised questions about how the internal investigation was conducted. It noted that Driscoll and Halpern “often locked horns with [the other] committee members….” Driscoll had objected when other board members called for an independent investigation. Halpern and Driscoll resigned their positions within days of the forced release of the report.
One member of the special committee became particularly notorious. Soon after the internal investigation was set in motion in 1994 Rabbi Neulander’s wife had been murdered. Soon after, Neulander had failed a polygraph test when questioned about it. He then resigned his clerical position after his extramarital affairs with members of his congregation were revealed. In September, 1998, he was charged with hiring the “hit men” who committed the murder. In 2002, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The Aftermath, Financial Woes and Impact on Patient Care
By 1997, Cooper was in financial trouble, although none of its managers ever admitted a connection to the conspiracy and resulting losses. However, during a related civil lawsuit, Cooper officials alleged “the hospital’s general operating fund was depleted” by the conspiracy. Cooper began merger discussions with several partners, including AHERF, although none were ultimately successful. Physicians started leaving in 1997, when all but one full-time cardiologists announced their resignations. Cooper revealed a $16 million loss for 1998, the largest ever incurred by a New Jersey hospital. Its bonds were down-graded to junk. The hospital then announced that it would stop accepting uninsured patients for elective treatments, departing from its historic mission of charitable care. Losses continued in 1999, again totaling $16 million, leading to additional budget cuts. [CEO Halpern and Chairman of the Board Driscoll resigned within days of each other in 1999, both denying their actions were related to the report.] By 2000, the hospital had cut its work-force to 3100, from 4000 in early 1999. and had closed various clinical sites and units. Only thereafter did Cooper began posting budget surpluses. [By 2002, more physicians quit Cooper en bloc, and the hospital was on its second new CEO since Mr Halpern.]
The only published reaction to Cooper’s woes came from the related legal proceedings. The prosecutor in Sullivan’s trial claimed that his thefts were so big that they “threatened the financial stability of the hospital,” and “hurt the image of the city as a whole.” At Pagan’s sentencing hearing, Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez stated “society could not tolerate a system in which hospital executives ‘rake millions off the top’ that were intended for medical care for the poor.”
It does seem likely that Cooper’s scandals had major effects on its patient care and academic missions. Yet, I could find nothing published about such effects. Despite the luridness of this case, I also found no reaction from local or national medical groups, from academic organizations, accrediting groups, or government agencies.
Summary
In 2005, I wrote,… The case of Cooper’s corrupt executives can be viewed as the forerunner to the even more massive bankruptcy of AHERF [Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation, see posts here]. One can only speculate that learning the lessons of the Cooper case could have mitigated the AHERF disaster. However, as noted in my last article, the lessons from AHERF are also not widely known. Yet, as George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
As I will address in another post, events at Cooper after 2005 also generated few echoes, up to the latest tragedy. These events did not suggest much had been learned from the events through 2005.
So the unfortunate, and sometimes terrible case of Cooper Health has become one of the longest running examples – starting in 1978 – of the troubles with leadership and governance of large health care organizations, the bad effects of these problems on health care and the values of health care professionals, the lack of public attention to and discussion of these problems and their effects, and the failure of organizations to address on their own their problems with leadership and governance.
True health care reform, as we have said endlessly, requires governance that is accountable, transparent, true to the organization’s mission, and honest, ethical, and without conflicts of interest; and leadership that understands health care, upholds its values, is honest, ethical, and without conflicts of interest, is transparent and open, and is willing to be accountable and subject to appropriate incentives.
References
Embezzlement….
Lewis L. Former official gets jail term for bilking Cooper: John M. Sullivan was sentenced to 55 months – the scheme netted $4 million. He spent his take lavishly. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 26, 1996.
Graham M. New panel at Cooper plans review: embezzling of $3.8 million by two former top aides and a vendor prompted the study. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 27, 1994.
Lewis L. Ex-hospital executive gets 2 years: he helped steal $4 million from Cooper Hospital – his lawyer said the investigation was going to spread. Philadelphia Inquirer, November 9, 1996.
Graham M, Turcol T. Inquiry widens into finances at Cooper Hospital: a federal grand jury subpoenaed several officials this month – the inquiry was spurred by testimony from two former Cooper executives indicted for fraud. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 1996.
Lewis L. Woman admits role in bilking Cooper Hospital. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 6, 1996.
Lewis L. Ex-hospital executive admits theft: Robert Schmid Jr. pleaded guilty to embezzling about $50,000 from Cooper Hospital. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 24, 1996.
Lewis L. More charged in theft at hospital: six people have now been indicted in the embezzlement at the Camden facility. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 12, 1996.
Lewis L. Ex-wife of jailed Cooper Hospital official sentenced in scam: Elarba Pagan bought $1,500 shoes with medical center money, her business partner said. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 2, 1998. P. B5.
Lewis L. Business owner pleads: Thomas J. Damadio said he helped Cooper Hospital executives launder stolen money. Philadelphia Inquirer, January 18, 1997.
The Internal Report…
Anonymous. Cooper forms committee. PR Newswire, July 26, 1994.
Graham M. FBI is probing Cooper Hospital for violation of securities laws. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1997. P. A1.
Hollreiser E. Cooper urged to release audit results. Philadelphia Business Journal, May 30, 1997.
Graham M. Hospital gives state its audit: Cooper complied after the state threatened to withhold funding – the report will be kept secret. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 1997, P. B1.
Graham M. N.J. finds nothing amiss at Cooper: the Attorney General’s office reviewed an internal hospital audit – no criminal wrongdoing was uncovered. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 11, 1997. P. A1.
Graham M, Cusick F. Listing Cooper’s board deals: companies associated with the hospital’s trustees have gotten some of its largest contracts. Philadelphia Inquirer, June 15, 1997. P. A1.
Anonymous. Report says Rabbi failed polygraph on wife’s death. The (Bergen County) Record, September 5, 1996.
Burney M. Rabbi charged in wife’s killing. Associated Press State & Local Wire, September 10, 1998.
Mulvihill G. Judge declares mistrial in case of Rabbi charged with arranging wife’s murder. Associated Press State & Local Wire, November 13, 2001.
Bell T. Rabbi found guilty of murder in wife’s 1994 death. Associated Press State & Local Wire, November 20, 2002.
Mulvihill G. Jury spares life of rabbi in wife’s murder; faces life in prison. Associated Press State & Local Wire, November 22, 2002.
The Aftermath…
Uhlman M. Cooper talks with Allegheny: the Camden hospital wants a partner, and the Pa. chain plans a further push into South Jersey. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 1997. P. C1.
Gerlin A. Philadelphia hospital raids New Jersey system’s cardiology staff. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 27, 1997.
Kastor JA. Governance of Teaching Hospitals: Turmoil at Penn and Hopkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004. P. 41.
Goodman H. As Cooper suffers loss, it says care won’t suffer. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 11, 1999.
Rizzo N. Cooper Hospital announces cuts in staff. Associated Press State & Local Wire, March 18, 1999.
Goodman H. Cooper Health system cuts 103 employees: financial problems were cited – about 400 jobs could be lost this year, and uninsured care will be curtailed. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1999. P. A1.
Anonymous. As losses mount, Cooper Hospital’s debt rating falls. Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 16, 1999.
Goodman H. Cooper’s debt rating tumbles as losses rise: the 1998 figure is twice as bad as estimated – the poor rating means the hospital must pay more to borrow. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 16, 1999. P. B1.
Kent B. In Camden, a hospital finds itself seriously ill: Cooper, the city’s biggest employer, has ‘heavy losses.’ New York Times, May 9, 1999.
Anonymous. Cooper Hospital announces more cuts in staff. Associated Press State & Local Wire, May 20, 1999.
Anonymous. Camden hospital posts $16 million loss: president sees turnaround. Associated Press State & Local Wire, February 23, 2000.
Kiely E. Cooper Hospital to forgo charity-care payments – the state will not reimburse the Camden facility for uninsured patients for four months – the reason: the beleaguered hospital received the money from the state in advance last year. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 2000. P B1.
Anonymous. Cooper Hospital president quitting. Philadelphia Business Journal, January 15, 2002.
Anonymous. Hospital company sues six departing surgeons. Associated Press State & Local Wire, July 4, 2002.
Camden Civil Rights Project 