Dana Difilippo, New Jersey Monitor

The owner of a Monmouth County airport is accusing state and local officials of trying to seize his 746-acre property to cash in on a massive film production studio Netflix aims to develop a few miles away.

Alan Antaki said he has fended off a series of would-be buyers since he bought the Monmouth Executive Airport in 2013, and he balked again when county officials first signaled their intention to pursue the Wall Township property through eminent domain in 2023.

“There’s never been a shortage of people interested in buying the airport, because we brought it out of the doldrums. We saved it,” Antaki said. “But I’m not selling.” ...

Federal prosecutors want former Sen. Bob Menendez sentenced to at least 15 years behind bars, saying he deserves substantial prison time for a “historically unique” and long-running bribery and foreign influence scheme that implicated national security.

Prosecutors also urged Judge Sidney H. Stein to sentence businessmen Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, who were convicted in July alongside the ex-senator, to 10 years and 9 years, respectively, and order the three men to pay fines of over $5.8 million, combined.

Such penalties will “provide just punishment for this extraordinary abuse of power and betrayal of the public trust, and to deter others from ever engaging in similar conduct,” prosecutors wrote in a 108-page brief filed Friday. ...

Two Camden men spent 25 years in prison for a double murder they didn’t commit.

A young Plainfield mother who went to a New Brunswick hospital to give birth was left partially paralyzed after doctors botched the epidural.

Police wrongly dispatched to a Bridgeton home startled the elderly couple sleeping inside — and then shot the man, arrested the woman, and failed to realize their errors for hours. ...

The owner and operators of a South Jersey nursing home pocketed millions of dollars in Medicaid money while its 110 residents lived in a dirty, understaffed facility, a scheme that went unnoticed for years by the state agencies tasked with oversight, the state Comptroller’s Office has found.

Acting state Comptroller Kevin D. Walsh said Thursday that his Medicaid fraud team first began looking into South Jersey Extended Care, a for-profit nursing home in Bridgeton, because it was the state’s worst, having received more one-star ratings than any of New Jersey’s roughly 350 nursing homes.

They soon uncovered evidence of “a massive scam, perpetrated for years,” Walsh said. ...

A former aide to Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop sued him and other city officials Wednesday, accusing them of discrimination, defamation, and civil rights violations for trash-talking and ultimately firing him because he donated to his conservative sister’s political campaign.

Jonathan Gomez Noriega, who worked off and on for the city since 2018, served on Jersey City’s LGBTQ+ task force, a job that normally wouldn’t attract much notice — but did after reporters discovered he was a regular donor to sister Valentina Gomez’s campaign to become Missouri’s secretary of state. Valentina Gomez, a Republican who lost her primary bid, is known for her viral videos in which she bashes the LGBTQ+ community, among others.

But in a complaint filed in federal court, Gomez Noriega accuses Fulop, a Democrat running for governor next year, of “an abuse of public office.” Fulop knew for eight months that he supported his sister’s campaign and even advised him to “focus on family,” but dismissed him in August “to bolster his progressive credentials” after his donations made headlines, he contends in the complaint. ...