Dana Difilippo, New Jersey Monitor

Three unions that represent New Jersey State Police have sued New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin in a bid to block his investigation into whether troopers deliberately slowed down traffic enforcement in response to claims of racial profiling in stops.

Union officials want a state judge to toss five subpoenas Platkin’s office issued in April demanding documents and ordering them to appear before a state grand jury probing the alleged slowdown. They also want the judge to bar the outside attorneys Platkin appointed from investigating further.

In three lawsuits filed late last month, union leaders refute claims of racial profiling, insist the 3,000-member agency is already subject to robust oversight, and accuse Platkin of unconstitutional, retaliatory interference with their rights to advocate for union members.

“In serving the subject subpoenas upon Plaintiffs, the NCOA and its President and three Vice Presidents, Defendants have, by threats, intimidation, coercion or force, engaged in a bald-faced, outrageous attempt at union busting,” states a complaint filed by the State Troopers Non-Commissioned Officers Association of New Jersey. The group represents 1,000 state police sergeants.

The State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey, a 1,900-member union that represents troopers and detectives, and the State Troopers Superior Officers Association, which represents lieutenants and captains, also filed complaints in state Superior Court in Mercer County, naming the state as well as Platkin as defendants.

The first complaint was filed June 19 — the same day several state legislators introduced a bill that would remove the state police from Platkin’s control. The agency now is part of the state department of law and public safety, which Platkin helms; the seven legislators who sponsored the bill want to make the state police its own department answerable directly to the governor.

Platkin’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuits.

Tensions have grown between the state police and Platkin almost since Gov. Phil Murphy nominated him for the post in February 2022. The state police’s union leaders accused Platkin in their June complaints of “continuous and systematic attacks.”

Those lawsuits stem from a report Platkin released in July 2023, in which an academic researcher reviewed more than 6 million traffic stops from 2009 to 2021 and found state troopers stopped, searched, and used force against Black and Hispanic motorists far more than they did against white motorists. Platkin paired the report’s release with an announcement that he would launch a pilot program aimed at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in traffic enforcement statewide.

Union leaders acted quickly. Within a week, they issued notices to be posted on stations’ union bulletin boards, warning troopers that traffic stops posed perils and “internal and external entities who seemingly wish to see us fail” would be scrutinizing every stop and enforcement action.

“It appears increasingly likely you may be considered guilty until proven innocent by entities with questionable agendas,” one notice read. “Please be safe and protect yourself and your fellow Troopers.”

Last December, the New York Times found that traffic stops plummeted in the eight months after the unions’ warnings. Platkin responded by announcing an investigation into the alleged slowdown and appointing Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to lead the probe.

But union officials disputed criticisms and asked Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general at the time, to step in and review New Jersey state police stop data. They also complained about a backlog of cases affecting about 100 troopers under investigation by Platkin’s public integrity and accountability office, asking Gov. Phil Murphy and state legislators to intervene.

In their June lawsuits, union officials say Platkin’s concerns are about troopers’ work conduct, so his probe should have been administrative and not criminal. They noted that no troopers had been disciplined for any traffic enforcement deficiencies and that Platkin never launched the pilot program he promised. Their notices of the perils of traffic stops constituted protected union advice to members, they added.

They denied any racial profiling and noted they had their own academic researchers review traffic stops. They came to different conclusions, the union leaders said, citing as an example one trooper whose numbers were skewed because he was assigned to patrol a stretch of the turnpike in Hudson County that’s home to a large Hispanic population. That trooper also used a laser speed detector to target motorists for stops, they added.

They also pointed to oversight ordered in recent decades intended to thwart traffic enforcement abuses, including a federal consent decree in place from 1999 to 2009, the state’s subsequent enactment of a law enforcement professional standards office, and annual performance reviews by the state comptroller’s office. Troopers also must report the demographics of every motorist they stop, use body and dashboard cameras, and undergo regular supervisory reviews of searches, requests, pursuits, and more, they said.

“The New Jersey State Police has for decades been the subject of rigorous and comprehensive internal and external oversight regarding motor vehicle enforcement. As a result, the New Jersey State Police is one of the most professional, well-trained, and competent law enforcement agencies in the country,” attorneys wrote.

An Essex County jury has handed down a $11.5 million verdict against a New Jersey State Police trooper who mistook a motorist’s stroke for inebriation and arrested her, delaying medical treatment so long she’s now permanently disabled.

Cheryl Rhines of Jersey City was on her way to work in October 2017 when she began feeling ill and pulled to the shoulder of a highway in Newark, according to the lawsuit her mother later filed.

The responding state trooper, Jennifer Albuja, misinterpreted Rhines’ failure to respond to commands, communicate coherently, or stand upright as intoxication — even though Albuja found no smell or sign of substance use and Rhines had facial drooping and other signs of a stroke, was dressed in business attire at 8 a.m. on a weekday, and had no prior offenses, her lawsuit says.

Albuja failed to get Rhines treatment at a hospital 5 minutes away and instead searched her car and hauled her, handcuffed, to the state police’s Somerville station, delaying treatment by two and half hours, according to the complaint.

A sergeant at the station finally called EMTs, but troopers still left Rhines shackled on the floor even after they determined she was in medical distress, her attorney, Dennis M. Donnelly, told the New Jersey Monitor.

“I don’t think the jury liked that much,” he said.

Donnelly attributed the botched police response to state troopers’ “us-versus-them militaristic mentality,” saying they approach their job as warriors instead of guardians.

“They see everybody in the public as a danger,” Donnelly said. “They treated this woman like she was a criminal when she was helpless.”

Rhines spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and another month in a rehabilitation center, her lawsuit says.

Now 56, she had to leave her job as an event planner and move in with her mother in Nashville because she’s unable to speak or understand what people say to her — a language disorder called global aphasia that’s caused by stroke-related brain damage, Donnelly said.

“Her work life and her abilities to live as a normal human being are over,” he said.

The case went through remediation, but the state’s attorneys refused to resolve the case for more than $1 million — and Rhines’ care expenses had exceeded that, Donnelly said.

Jurors decided the case Jan. 29 after a nearly month-long trial — and made a much higher initial finding of $19.1 million to cover Rhines’ future medical care, emotional distress, pain and suffering, and loss of income.

But they blamed 60% of Rhines’ disabilities on the delayed treatment and 40% on the stroke itself, which the trooper didn’t cause. So they reduced their initial award by 40%, following Superior Court Judge Thomas Vena’s guidance.

State police spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Allison Inserro, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment on the case or whether the agency had tweaked policies or training in response.

Donnelly said Albuja, who had been a trooper for only two years when she arrested Rhines, was counseled by her supervisors about the incident — but only after he sued the state on Rhines’ behalf in 2019.

A $11.5 million payout is unusually high for lawsuits filed against the state. In 2023, when the state paid out $121 million to settle 364 claims, only 23 resulted in payouts of over $1 million, according to a recent New Jersey Monitor analysis.

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.”

County officials, though, have plowed ahead anyway, hiring consultants to assess the property and enlisting a crisis management firm to handle the resulting bad press.

“It certainly is an interesting coincidence that all of a sudden, right after Netflix commits to spend a billion dollars in New Jersey, the commissioners have an interest in taking over this regional airport that they never had an interest in taking over before,” said Matthew Dolan, Antaki’s attorney.

Once completed, Netflix’s studio at Fort Monmouth, an old Army installation that shuttered in 2011 about a dozen miles north of the airport, will be its second largest. State officials last month approved giving Netflix up to $387 million in tax breaks to develop more than a million square feet of studio space on 292 acres, with Gov. Phil Murphy heralding the project as key to making New Jersey “a national leader in film and television production.”

The streaming giant’s only other such film hub — a studio that sprawls across more than 100 acres in New Mexico with expansion plans that will have a 300-acre footprint — has created thousands of jobs and brought almost $900 million in investment to the state since it opened in 2018, Netflix officials have said.

New Jersey officials expect similar results here when Netflix, which first submitted a bid to buy Fort Monmouth in 2021, opens its studio here, which is now on track for 2028.

“This project will prove to have a significant impact on our local economy by helping to create jobs, support small businesses, and revitalize communities,” Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth) said in a statement last month.

A county spokeswoman did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s request for comment. Thomas A. Arnone, the Republican director of the county commissioners who is also a board member at the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority, also declined to talk but sent an emailed statement through the crisis management firm.

In the statement, he denied that county officials want to take the airport and cited unspecified security concerns.

“Since the beginning of this process, my fellow Monmouth County Commissioners and I have made clear that our sole intention is to examine the conditions of Monmouth Executive Airport for all who utilize, live near, and work for it. We were made aware of concerns and it was our responsibility as stewards of this county to pursue this review,” the statement reads. “In November, we commissioned Merchant Aviation’s world-renowned experts to study the existing conditions of Monmouth Executive Airport. Once completed, their findings will be made public.”

Arnone declined to answer further questions, including what their security concerns are and if officials reported them to agencies tasked with ensuring transportation safety.

Antaki doesn’t buy it, anyway.

The airport has no record of safety problems, and the state Department of Transportation consequently relicensed the airport in November, he said. As a privately owned airport that has never received federal funding from the Federal Aviation Administration, it’s not obligated to meet FAA standards, an FAA spokeswoman told the New Jersey Monitor.

Arnone has also previously publicly admitted he wants the county to own the airport. In his 2024 state of the county address last March, he said not having a county-run airport was “a little pet peeve of mine.”

“For years, I’ve had a thought, along with my commissioners, that we have an airport here in Monmouth County, and we decided, as a unified board, to engage in the possibility of Monmouth County owning that airport. This is a viable resource that should never leave the county and be somewhat of a benefit to the county,” he said.

Antaki first learned the county was eyeballing his airport in November 2023. That’s when attorneys hired by the township sent him a letter notifying him of officials’ plans to inspect his property under the authority of the state’s eminent domain law, which allows government officials to survey, appraise, and visit property they intend to condemn.

Antaki said he was “blindsided.”

“Eminent domain is to widen the road or highway or what have you. Here, they just want to run the business that I’m running. This is insane,” Antaki said.

The letter cited a resolution commissioners had approved on Nov. 9, 2023, to “explore possible alternatives to preserve the airport,” which they called “an economic driver within Monmouth County since its creation over 50 years ago.” The resolution said nothing about security concerns but also cited the eminent domain statute.

“Two days after Election Day, the county, out of the blue, decided that the airport needs to be taken because they’re concerned about preserving it. I have no idea what the hell that means,” Antaki said.

The airport does not need preservation, he added, because he has worked to make it a thriving family business and remains committed to running it as an airport.

Since he bought the site, he has paid off $2.8 million in delinquent taxes, invested millions in improvements including new instrument approaches to make landings and takeoffs safer, remediated a decades-old environmental problem, and satisfied related debts to state and federal environmental authorities, he said. He also has tripled the airport’s business, he added.

Political meddling

Such progress has come even as local officials have worked to “undermine” airport operations, Antaki said.

In 2018, state Department of Transportation officials approved his application for a $4.5 million grant to repave his main runway, which is longer than LaGuardia Airport in New York. But the grant expired, unspent, after township officials delayed planning meetings and Assemblyman Sean Kean (R-Monmouth), an attorney who serves as Wall Township counsel, asked transportation officials if the township could “veto” the grant application, according to emails Antaki received through public records requests.

And federal authorities dropped plans in 2019 to designate the airport as an official patient-receiving site during national disasters — a designation that would have made the airport eligible for federal grants — due to “tremendous pushback” a federal disaster aid staffer said he got from the county’s Office of Emergency Management Services, according to a lawsuit Antaki filed against the county. Sheriff Shaun Golden, who chairs the county’s Republican Party, oversees that office.

Joseph Grather, an attorney representing Antaki in the county’s eminent domain claim, called the political meddling “interference.”

“That’s just not ordinary, in my experience with eminent domain,” Grather said.

Kean and Golden did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s requests for comment.

Former Assemblyman Ned Thomson (R-Monmouth) went public with his support for a county takeover of the airport in a letter to the editor of the Coast-Star published in October. Thomson, a pilot and former Wall Township committeeman, and Sen. Robert Singer, a Republican who represents the same district, sponsored legislation to allow counties to manage airports as a public utility and issue bonds for airport acquisition and operation. The bill was first introduced in 2021, and Murphy signed it into law in August 2022.

“Netflix is the biggest redevelopment project in the history of the county, and we know county officials — particularly Commissioner Arnone — are involved in the redevelopment of the Fort Monmouth property, so it seems logical that the attempted seizure of the airport and its surrounding 400 acres may be connected to the Netflix development,” said Thom Ammirato, Antaki’s spokesman. “The county has given us no reason to think their condemnation plans are not tied to the Netflix project.”

Antaki said he’s spent about $300,000 to fight the condemnation.

“They’ve tarnished my image — claimed that I’m a bad owner, that I basically have run an unsafe operation, claimed that the airport has languished, effectively done everything they can to say that the airport is in bad condition, when, in reality, it’s licensed by New Jersey DOT every single year,” Antaki said.

As his battle intensifies, Antaki said he hopes Monmouth County taxpayers will join him in demanding officials be more transparent in why they want to take over the airport.

He also hopes they’ll share his concerns, saying public officials should support businesses instead of commandeering them.

“It’s a slippery slope,” Antaki said. “What’s next? Are they going to take every marina? Are they going to take the limo business down the street, the deli down the street, because they think they could run it better?”

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.

Sentencing is set for Jan. 29 in Manhattan.

Under sentencing guidelines, Menendez, 72, faces 24 to 30 years in prison, but the U.S. Probation Office recommended 12 years, acknowledging his crimes were “among the most heinous” of corruption offenses but saying his age and history of civic service warrant a shorter term, court filings show.

Prosecutors agreed that a sentence shorter than the guidelines direct is “reasonable” because of Menendez’s age. Still, the 15 years they want would be roughly seven times longer than what defense attorneys asked for last week, when they suggested 21 to 27 months of incarceration.

But prosecutors argued that Menendez — a Senate Democrat since 2006 who helmed the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time of his September 2023 indictment — was the first person ever convicted of serving as a foreign agent while in public office.

Only 12 U.S. senators, dating back to 1807, have been charged with crimes, aside from Menendez, they added.

“Even leaving aside their historical rarity, the defendants’ crimes amount to an extraordinary attempt, at the highest levels of the Legislative Branch, to corrupt the nation’s core sovereign powers over foreign relations and law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote.

They summarized crimes that took nine weeks of trial testimony to detail, including that Menendez promised to influence national security including U.S. military aid, divulged sensitive information to Egypt that risked the safety of employees at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, pressured U.S. agriculture officials to ignore the halal meat-exporting monopoly he helped Hana secure in Egypt, and tried to disrupt multiple felony criminal proceedings, including by influencing the selection of U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.

“The gravity of each of these promised abuses of power is only underscored by the naked greed that motivated them,” prosecutors wrote.

Hana and Daibes showered Menendez and his wife Nadine with hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes including cash, gold bars, paychecks for a fake job for Nadine Menendez, a luxury Mercedes-Benz convertible and more, prosecutors said.

“They did so to aid their own businesses and deflect government scrutiny of themselves and their associates. And Menendez, who swore an oath to represent the United States and the state of New Jersey, instead put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes,” prosecutors said.

Beyond imprisonment, prosecutors urged Stein to order the men to forfeit the proceeds of their crimes. For Menendez, that would amount to $922,188 in cash, as well as the riches he reaped from the bribery scheme, which include the Mercedes-Benz, gold bars, an exercise machine and an air purifier, according to the brief.

They also asked the judge to fine Menendez at least $2.8 million, Daibes at least $1.75 million, and Hana at least $1.25 million, arguing that their crimes were financially motivated and they’re likely to retain significant assets even after forfeiture.

Menendez, Hana, and Daibes have repeatedly asked for a new trial, most recently over a series of evidentiary errors prosecutors admitted to in November that exposed jurors during deliberations to insufficiently redacted exhibits. Stein last month rejected the defense team’s August request for a retrial but has yet to rule on their more recent request.

Nadine Menendez and businessman Jose Uribe were also charged in the scheme. But Uribe pleaded guilty in a cooperation deal and Stein ordered a separate trial, now set to start Feb. 5, for Nadine Menendez to accommodate her treatment for breast cancer.

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 three incidents prompted lawsuits that cost New Jersey taxpayers almost $17 million to settle in 2023. But that was just a fraction of the $121.5 million the state paid out last year to resolve 364 complaints against the state, state agencies, and state workers, according to records the New Jersey Monitor got Thursday through a records request filed in early January.

Advocates say the payouts hold lessons for state policymakers who must ensure taxpayer money is spent responsibly.

“Lawsuits are going to happen. There are going to be accidents, there is going to be negligence, these are just part of human behavior,” said Peter Chen, senior policy analyst with New Jersey Policy Perspective. “But there are certainly things that states can do to reduce the extent to which these kinds of errors occur.”

That includes spending enough to properly train state workers and arm them with the resources they need to do their jobs, which can help reduce the risk of law enforcement officers trampling citizens’ constitutional rights or NJ Transit failing to maintain its vehicles and property, he said.

“The very basic kinds of boring maintenance of government that people are grumpy about funding — and often make a lot of hay about having to fund — are actually really important and can help mitigate risk,” Chen said.

Most of last year’s lawsuit judgments and settlements arose out of public transit accidents, workplace safety issues, and police misconduct that left people dead or seriously, permanently hurt, the records show. More than 110 payouts involved NJ Transit, while at least 25 involved police or prisons.

Twenty-three lawsuits resulted in payouts of over $1 million, while the largest — for $19.3 million — went to Medicaid for “disallowance matters,” which means the state paid claims through Medicaid that weren’t allowed.

Altogether, lawsuits cost the state less last year than in 2022 or 2021, when payouts totaled $177 million and $196 million, respectively.

In 2023, the state paid:

$700,000 to Gerald and Margot Sykes of Bridgeton. The elderly couple panicked when they awoke to find men peering in their bedroom windows in 2016, thinking they were burglars, according to a lawsuit they later filed. Gerald Sykes, then 76, got his guns and confronted the men — who turned out to be state troopers, sent to the home in error, the suit says. The troopers shot him three times, handcuffed him as he bled on the ground with broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and arrested and interrogated his 80-year-old wife, before realizing their mistake several hours later, the couple said in their complaint.$1.25 million each to Kevin Baker and Sean Washington of Camden, who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 25 years for a 1995 double murder.$175,000 to a 16-year-old boy who suffered a broken wrist in 2020 when a correctional officer beat him while he was handcuffed at a Bordentown juvenile lockup.A total of $1.5 million to two drivers after state troopers hit their cars in separate crashes.Almost $1.8 million to the family of Siham Hajbi, a pedestrian who died in June 2021 after a NJ Transit bus turned a corner and hit her in a Haledon crosswalk. Several bus passengers injured in NJ Transit crashes and a limo driver hit by a NJ Transit bus in the Lincoln Tunnel also got six-figure payouts, and a Brooklyn woman got about $500,000 after she sued NJ Transit for failing to eject the unruly bus passenger who threw a glass object at her face in 2014.$2.5 million to Kevin Powers, a NJ Transit brakeman who fell on garbage in a Bergen County rail yard in 2015 and needed surgeries for a wrist injury, his lawsuit said. Gabriel Santanna, a NJ Transit trackman, got almost $1.5 million after he sued because he got hurt in 2017 by malfunctioning equipment. Another worker, Omash Raghunandan, took a $660,000 payout after he was hurt in 2018 tripping over a barbell left on the floor of a NJ Transit material shop in Hoboken. Several rail workers also collected six-figure payouts for toxic exposure to carcinogens at their workplaces.

Some of the biggest payouts resulted from deficient medical care at the state’s public and teaching hospitals, University Hospital in Newark, Robert Wood Johnson University Medical Center in New Brunswick, and Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

The state paid $13.5 million to Alexandra Mejia of Plainfield, who went to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital to give birth in 2019 — but was left partially paralyzed after complications arose from an epidural. She was 18 at the time. A Newark mother and her son, whose leg was amputated after a surgery went wrong at Newark Beth Israel in 2019, settled their lawsuit for $4.5 million.

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

Akintola Hanif Martin received $2.5 million after he suffered a stroke in 2017 but went without proper treatment for hours because emergency responders and University Hospital doctors thought he’d overdosed on drugs, according to his lawsuit. That was a wrong assumption Martin, who’s Black, blamed on racism. The delayed diagnosis and treatment left him with brain damage, partial paralysis, and more injuries, according to the suit.

And the family of Ryan Andrews Newton got $2 million after he died at 25 in 2015 because doctors affiliated with Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital failed to diagnose and properly treat his malaria and sepsis, their lawsuit charged.

Tax disputes also led to large payouts, records show.

A woman who had interests in several French vineyards and wineries accepted $1.1 million to end her lawsuit over taxes on foreign income. Jersey Central Power & Light took $7.7 million to resolve its complaint over tax overpayments. And a Delaware-based investment banking firm that claimed it overpaid corporate business tax in New Jersey got $2.9 million.

A whistleblower who won a $7.5 million jury award in 2015 against the state Department of Corrections collected a $1.5 million payout last year, after the state in 2019 successfully appealed the award. Lisa Easley claimed in her lawsuit she was fired from her job at a youth correctional facility in Chesterfield in 2012 after helping to expose a bribery scheme in the department.

Some people involved in wrecks on state highways also successfully sued and pocketed big payouts over faulty road conditions they blamed for their crashes.

And the mother of a Kean University student who died at school in 2019 was paid $250,000 to end her wrongful death lawsuit. Senior Kevin Gomez curled up under his desk during class, but no one checked on him, noticed that he’d vomited and was bleeding from the nose and mouth, or called paramedics for over an hour, and he died at the hospital soon after arrival, according to that lawsuit.

Recoveries

The state recovered money through lawsuits last year, too, adding $596 million back to state coffers, records show.

Lawsuits and investigations brought in almost 37% more money than they did in 2022, with almost $460 million of that coming from pharmacy chains, drug makers, and drug distributors as required under nationwide opioid settlements.

Other big recoveries stemmed from taxation disputes, debt recovery, and consumer protection actions.

The e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs paid $33.6 million over its marketing and sales practices, while Dollar General surrendered $1.2 million to resolve pricing complaints. Morgan Stanley paid the state $1.2 million after a multistate investigation into data security problems, and software company Blackbaud forked over $1 million for its inadequate response to a 2020 ransomware incident.

Newark-based MJ & Sons paid New Jersey $8 million over a statewide illegal dumping scheme.

“I am proud that, thanks to the work of our dedicated attorneys, we have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars back in to our residents’ pockets and made them safer in the process,” New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said in a statement.

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.

Investigators found that Michael Konig — who had been barred from operating nursing homes in Connecticut and Massachusetts because of serious violations — and his brother-in-law Steven Krausman ran the home, while its supposed owner, Konig’s cousin Mordechay “Mark” Weisz, was just a straw owner.

They discovered that the home took in $35.6 million in Medicaid funds from April 2018 to March 2023, but paid $38.9 million over that period to health care management businesses Konig and Krausman owned or controlled. The duo charged the home inflated prices while essentially acting as both customer and vendor — an arrangement that “ensured that the customer never complained,” investigators wrote in their report.

State and federal laws require nursing homes, as a way to avoid self-dealing and fraud, to disclose transactions with vendors that are related parties and cap related-party costs at actual cost or fair market value, whichever is lower. Konig and Krausman did neither, Walsh said.

“These individuals were able to amass a fortune by pretending to be independent parties. In reality, they operated as one unit, providing terrible care to the sick, the elderly, and the poor, so they could make big profits,” Walsh said in a statement.

Konig’s Broadway Health Care Management took in $10 million over two years to provide nursing and other services to the home, according to the report. Yet investigators found the home had perpetual staff shortages and unqualified people in key positions — the director of social work wasn’t a licensed social worker, while the director of nursing was a licensed practical nurse whose license had been suspended after her arrest on charges of forging prescriptions.

The home often failed to meet minimum health and safety standards required by Medicaid, investigators found. Inspection reports documented filthy conditions, late medications, and residents’ medical needs that went unmet.

The three men drove the home to the brink of bankruptcy, draining it of cash, investigators found.

The problems went beyond Bridgeton. Konig and Krausman contracted with nine other New Jersey nursing homes — in Trenton, Union, Manahawkin, Perth Amboy, Teaneck, Cape May Court House, Toms River, and Maple Shade — and charged them inflated prices too, profiting $45.5 million in the process, investigators found.

Geriscript Supplies, which Konig controlled, was contracted to provide medical supplies to all 10 nursing homes. But the company spent just $3.6 million on medical supplies — and meanwhile it paid $6 million on consulting and management fees to another Konig business and $800,000 to a religious charity Konig controlled, the report says.

Krausman and Konig’s businesses received $253 million from the 10 nursing homes over the five years investigators examined — 76% of the total Medicaid funds the homes received, investigators found.

Their scheme went unchecked even though the men racked up penalties in other probes, according to the report:

A federal judge ordered a staffing agency owned by Konig to pay $636,000 in back wages after the U.S. Department of Labor found it failed to pay overtime to at least 150 workers at 10 nursing homes in New Jersey.The Federal Trade Commission determined an internet company owned by Konig, Krausman, and a third person lied to consumers about rebates. The commission barred the trio from similar schemes and they agreed to pay the FTC $600,000.In the mid-1990s, officials in Massachusetts and Connecticut barred Konig from owning nursing homes after learning of alleged sexual and physical abuse of residents and other severe deficiencies at facilities he owned or operated in those states.Konig lost a building he owned after he racked up more than 9,000 housing code violations in Brooklyn and filed for bankruptcy, according to the New York Daily News, which called him the “landlord from hell.”

Walsh said his office, with the approval of the state attorney general’s office, suspended the three men, the nursing home in Bridgeton, Sterling Manor Nursing Center in Maple Shade (which Weisz also owns), and 11 others from New Jersey’s Medicaid program and is coordinating with state agencies to ensure residents get care.

“These notices of suspension to South Jersey Extended Care and Sterling Manor Nursing Center and 11 other related individuals and entities will allow the State to take necessary steps to address the problems, and most importantly, protect the nursing home residents and get them the care they need,” Attorney General Matt Platkin said in a statement.

Walsh said he also might try to recover overpayments and seek civil fines and administrative sanctions.

The New Jersey Monitor couldn’t reach the men for comment. But their attorneys told the Comptroller’s Office that the men were not related parties, the Bridgeton home now has a two-star rating, and their profits “were within acceptable profit margins.” They accused the office of failing to understand licensing requirements, financial documents, and applicable laws.

They also offered hundreds of pages of exhibits, “many of which undercut their own arguments, were internally inconsistent, or differed in significant ways from documents previously provided to OSC and other state and federal oversight bodies,” according to the report.

“OSC stands by its findings,” the report says.

Walsh made several recommendations to legislators, as well as the departments of health and human services, to tighten oversight of nursing homes.

This is the second time Walsh has sounded the alarm on New Jersey’s worst nursing homes. He issued a report in March 2023 that identified Weisz and Krausman as the owners or operators of several of the state’s lowest-rated nursing homes.

Walsh’s investigation remains ongoing, he added.

“Our report lays bare in great detail how unscrupulous nursing home operators are able to exploit weaknesses in the system and fleece the Medicaid program,” Walsh said. “We owe it to nursing home residents, and taxpayers, to take this moment seriously, to learn from this investigation, and to ensure this can’t happen again.”

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.

In a statement provided by his attorney, Giancarlo Ghione, Gomez Noriega said his lawsuit isn’t about his former job or political party. Instead, he said, he sued to show that no public servant is above the law.

“This is about our constitutional right to freedom of speech. Steven Fulop and the mayor’s office tried to use me as a political pawn to further his campaign for governor of New Jersey, but this only backfired tremendously, by bringing a national spotlight to the wrongs he had just committed,” Gomez Noriega said. “Like Elon Musk says, the hammer of justice is coming. So to all Americans. Speak the truth, and put God and family before anything.”

Fulop, though, told the New Jersey Monitor Wednesday that Gomez Noriega was an at-will employee — meaning he could legally be fired mostly for any reason — who worked on diversity and inclusion issues, including as a liaison to the LGBTQ+ community.

“Once he decided to campaign on behalf of his sister, who was outwardly spewing hate targeting the LGBTQ community and others, there was no longer the ability for him to do his job, and if you can’t do your job, there’s no way that we could continue to employ you as an at-will employee,” Fulop said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Jersey City spokeswoman Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione, who’s also named as a defendant, seconded that sentiment Wednesday.

“This lawsuit has no merit,” she said.

Jersey City has a track record “second to none” in advocating for diverse communities, Fulop added, pointing to the city’s top score in a national ranking of municipalities’ LGBTQ+ equality efforts.

Gomez Noriega, who’s a registered Democrat, says in the lawsuit that Fulop didn’t object when he advised the mayor in November 2023 that his younger sister would run in Missouri’s GOP primary. Fulop replied by text: “It does not cause any problems- how is her campaign go[ing],” according to the complaint.

Still, Gomez Noriega said, Fulop and other officials ridiculed his sister’s views and social media posts. After his $50 monthly donations made news, they blitzed him with calls and demands to publicly denounce his sister and her views, amid pressure from groups like Garden State Equality, according to the complaint.

His termination came even though he stepped down from the LGBTQ+ task force and assured his bosses he did not share his sister’s views nor otherwise contribute to her campaign decisions, strategy, or messaging, the lawsuit says.

“Political affiliation is protected under the Constitution, and public employees should not be punished for exercising their rights,” said Ghione, Gomez Noriega’s attorney. “This lawsuit seeks to hold Mayor Fulop and Jersey City officials accountable for retaliating against Mr. Gomez simply because he chose to support a family member with a different political ideology.”

Gomez Noriega’s lawsuit accuses Fulop and other officials of retaliation, violating his constitutional rights to free speech and association, and defamation and slander for various public statements they made he said portrayed him as a racist and a bigot.

He argued that his termination also violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination, which protects him as a Latino immigrant. He’s a Colombia native who immigrated to the U.S. in 2009 and became a U.S. citizen in 2016, according to the lawsuit.

Besides Fulop and Wallace-Scalcione, the lawsuit names as defendants Fulop’s chief of staff, John Minella; city manager John Metro; and Mobin Yousaf, the city’s director of employee relations and workforce management.

Gomez Noriega said he has been unable to land a job since the flap first made headlines, even though he’s a college graduate and retired professional swimmer who competed in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo and won a bronze medal in the 2019 Pan American Games in Peru, where he swam for Colombia’s national team.

After her brother was fired, Valentina Gomez warned Fulop on social media that “a huge lawsuit” was coming. Wednesday, she warned him again: “lawyer up. Feel free to leak more text messages that only incriminate you.”

Rep. Andy Kim (D-03) is poised to become the first Korean American senator in U.S. history after the Associated Press projected he defeated his Republican opponent, hotelier Curtis Bashaw, in Tuesday’s general election.

Kim, the Boston-born and Burlington County-raised son of Korean immigrants, soared to victory after a roller-coaster campaign in which he capitalized on voters’ long-simmering resentments over New Jersey’s notoriously nepotistic politics and powerful party bosses.

He was the first Democrat to announce a bid for the seat in September 2023, just a day after its longtime Democratic incumbent, former Sen. Bob Menendez, got federally indicted in a global bribery scheme. But he soon found himself with a formidable foe — Tammy Murphy, the governor’s wife, who party bosses quickly lined up to back after she announced her bid for the seat.

Public backlash was swift, and Kim took on the party bosses in court, challenging New Jersey’s unique ballot design that gives an advantage to party favorites who snag what’s known as the county line.

His subsequent court victories, along with Murphy’s withdrawal from the race and Menendez’s corruption conviction and resignation last summer, made the past year one of the most tumultuous in New Jersey politics.

Kim, 42, will be the first U.S. senator from South Jersey in over a half-century. His win wasn’t surprising: New Jersey Republicans have not won a contest for U.S. Senate in New Jersey since the state reelected Sen. Clifford Case in 1972. Kim also raised and spent more cash than Bashaw.

When he launched his campaign, Kim vowed to restore trust and integrity in government — a promise that even cynical voters believed, given the AP photo that went viral of Kim cleaning up the Capitol after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Kim, a father of two young boys and a former diplomat, is a three-term Congressman in the 3rd district who was first elected to the House in 2018, when he defeated the Republican incumbent, Rep. Tom MacArthur, by a slim margin in a district Donald Trump won in 2016.

In June’s primary, Kim beat two other Democrats, civil rights leader Larry Hamm and labor activist Patricia Campos-Medina. Thursday, besides Bashaw, Kim also beat four third-party candidates, Kenneth Kaplan, a Libertarian; Christina Khalil of the Green Party; Joanne Kuniansky of the Socialist Party; and Patricia Mooneyham, an independent.

Kim is expected to assume his Senate seat a bit early to replace Sen. George Helmy, a former chief of staff for Gov. Phil Murphy, who was sworn in in September to serve Menendez’s unexpired term until a general election victor is certified.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.

The family of a man who fatally overdosed in East Jersey State Prison has sued the state for wrongful death, saying officials “routinely turn a blind eye” to drug smuggling behind bars and thereby create dangerous living conditions for people who struggle with addiction.

Michael Cassella, 40, of Howell, died of acute fentanyl toxicity on Aug. 18, 2022, at the state prison in Rahway, according to a lawsuit filed last week in state Superior Court in Union County.

Cassella had a history of drug addiction and should have been monitored accordingly, attorney Brooke M. Barnett wrote in the complaint.

Despite the state Department of Corrections’ zero-tolerance policy for the possession, sale, or use of drugs and alcohol, East Jersey State Prison tolerates “a pervasive and systemic pattern and practice” of substance smuggling by correctional officers and incarcerated people, as well as grossly inadequate medical treatment provided by deliberately indifferent staff, Barnett wrote.

Cassella was dead for “awhile” by the time an officer found him unresponsive in his cell, she added. His aunt called the prison several times about him when he failed to contact her, but prison officials didn’t notify her of his death until days afterward, the lawsuit says.

“The serious medical needs of inmates, including Mr. Cassella, are given cursory attention, when not entirely ignored, and when acknowledged at all, treated with slipshod, hasty, inefficacious, rubber-stamp patch-jobs, designed to quiet inmate complaints, rather than treat the medical needs of human beings,” Barnett wrote.

The complaint, filed by Cassella’s aunt, Donna McNichol of Freehold, names Department of Corrections Commissioner Victoria Kuhn as a defendant, along with the department, the prison, and unnamed correctional officers and prison medical staff.

It accuses them of failure to protect, state-created danger, negligence, and wrongful death.

“Heroin and fentanyl are clearly infiltrating the prisons,” Barnett told the New Jersey Monitor. “They have a duty to protect these people. I’m not saying that it’s got to be the Hilton Hotel, but you expect these correctional officers and the medical departments in there to do what they’re supposed to do. If we don’t file these lawsuits, everything stays behind the four walls and nothing will be exposed. I look forward to getting some answers.”

Daniel Sperrazza, a Department of Corrections spokesman, said he could not comment on pending litigation.

But he said correctional agencies nationally, including in New Jersey, have seen “a substantial increase in the prevalence and illicit use of synthetic drugs entering facilities disguised in regular mail.”

“This has contributed to the rising number of assaults on staff and threatening the safety of all persons within the correctional setting,” Sperrazza said.

Officials will implement mail scanning and screening technology by the end of the year with state funding provided in the 2025 budget lawmakers approved in June, Sperrazza said. The heightened postal scrutiny comes after officials launched a pilot program last year intended to strengthen safeguards against drug smuggling by mail.

“This mail scanning technology processes original documents off-site, scans them, and then distributes copies of the mail to the population to stem the flow of contraband,” Sperrazza said.

East Jersey State Prison, which incarcerates about 1,200 men, has a history of both drug-related deaths — a Newark man incarcerated there died in 2020 after reacting badly to synthetic drugs in his cell — and drug smuggling by staff and others, including gang members and mob bosses.

Cassella was serving a 20-year prison sentence for an October 2011 car crash that killed a Mount Arlington police officer. In that incident, Cassella was under the influence of several drugs when he crossed a median on Route 80 in Roxbury Township and hit officer Joseph Wargo’s cruiser head-on. Wargo died soon after at the hospital. Cassella told a trooper at the scene he was in recovery for heroin addiction, court records show. He pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in 2013.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.

Francisco Arteaga was incarcerated, waiting to appear for a court hearing last fall, when he spotted a huge guy eyeballing him from the other side of the courthouse holding cell.

“This guy’s arms are like this, right?” Arteaga said, tracing imaginary Popeye biceps in the air. “He got no neck. He has a bald, shiny head. He’s looking at me with this mean face. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’ He’s walking towards me. He goes, ‘Your name Arteaga?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He opened his big arms, and he hugged me. He goes, ‘Thank you, thank you so much! Because of your case, I’m going home!’”

It’s been 14 months since the court ruling that made Arteaga famous, at least among civil rights advocates, New Jersey defense attorneys, and defendants who have found themselves in legal trouble because of facial recognition technology.

Police relied on the technology to identify Arteaga as their prime suspect in the 2019 armed robbery of a Hudson County cell phone store. He denied any involvement, police had scant other evidence, and Arteaga, a Queens native, said he’d never even been to New Jersey. But authorities charged him anyway because facial recognition software spit out his mugshot as a match with grainy footage of the robber caught by surveillance cameras.

Arteaga challenged his arrest and demanded detailed information about the technology police relied on to identify a suspect, aiming to expose its flaws and exonerate himself. He won, with a state appellate panel ruling last year that he deserved to get those materials through discovery.

The decision might have been a watershed moment for criminal justice reformers, offering hope for defendants like Arteaga and his big, bald cellmate who have been charged in otherwise flimsy cases because of such digital deductions.

But at least in Arteaga’s case, prosecutors said they couldn’t provide details about the facial recognition technology that led to his charges, largely because the match was made in another state — outside their jurisdiction and the New Jersey appellate court’s reach.

By then, Arteaga had been behind bars as a pretrial detainee for nearly four years. Rather than remain in prison to continue his fight, he pleaded guilty, his mind on his young son, his teenage daughter, and his fiancee.

“I’m like, do I want to roll the dice knowing that I have children out there? As a father, I see my children hurting. I’m hurting, but I could hurt, right? I could deal with that. But when I see my hurting is affecting my children, I got to be a father. I got to go home to my kid,” he said.

Arteaga’s experience exposes gaps in regulation and oversight that are growing as law enforcement agencies increasingly turn to new technological tools to crack cases where traditional sleuthing has failed, said Dillon Reisman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. Reisman specializes in surveillance, artificial intelligence, and other new technologies.

Policymakers’ inaction to close those gaps puts everyone at risk of wrongful arrest and prosecution, Reisman added.

“What this case really warned us about is the threat of unchecked surveillance power and the acquisition of all of this surveillance technology with no accompanying accountability framework,” Reisman said. “All of these systems, by their nature, involve interstate cooperation and systems that are bigger than one individual agency, and that makes it extremely difficult to have any sort of transparency, to learn how the system’s used, to learn how the system might be flawed, and to advocate against it.”

Police in West New York charged Francisco Arteaga with an armed robbery at Buenavista Multiservices on Bergenline Avenue. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

‘Window-shopping for a suspect’

The appellate ruling lays out how Arteaga wound up in the crosshairs of law enforcement.

The day after Thanksgiving in 2019, a gunman held up the Buenavista Multiservices store on Bergenline Avenue in West New York, pistol-whipping an employee and escaping with $8,950. The employee described the robber as a “Hispanic male wearing a black skully hat.”

West New York officers submitted images from store and area surveillance cameras for facial recognition analysis to the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center, a division of the state police. An investigator there found no matches but offered to repeat the inquiry if detectives produced a better image.

Instead, detectives sent the raw footage to the New York Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center. A detective there captured several still images, compared them against the center’s databases, and identified Arteaga’s mugshot in December 2019 as a “possible match.” Two store employees — including one who wasn’t at the store at the time of the robbery — confirmed Arteaga from a photo array as the robber. Arteaga’s mugshot was in the NYPD’s system from two convictions years earlier on non-robbery offenses in New York.

Detectives’ decision to farm the case out to the NYPD showed they went “window-shopping for a suspect,” Arteaga said.

“The police were like, ‘Well, you know what, let’s send it to New York with no documented reason to do so. We’re going to abandon our state’s professionals and we’re going to go to another state and start looking in their pool right now,” Arteaga said.

Botched Essex County bust shows need for better police misconduct disclosure, advocates say

Arteaga had an alibi. He told police he was visiting relatives in Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County the day of the robbery, and his aunt’s friend — a Nassau County detective — saw him there. But the detective died of COVID-19 before he could vouch for him, Arteaga said. Police charged him, and a judge ordered him held at the Hudson County jail until his trial.

His defense attorney filed a motion seeking information about the facial recognition software that identified Arteaga, including its name, manufacturer, algorithms, error rates, and source code, as well as the qualifications of the analyst who ran the search, details about the mugshot database where the analyst got Arteaga’s photo, and any alterations the analyst made on surveillance stills to improve the odds of a match.

The trial judge denied the motion in May 2022, and Arteaga appealed. A three-judge appellate panel in June 2023 sided with Arteaga and returned the case to trial court, directing the judge to order prosecutors to provide the information the defense sought.

“Here, the items sought by the defense have a direct link to testing FRT’s reliability and bear on defendant’s guilt or innocence. Given FRT’s novelty, no one, including us, can reasonably conclude without the discovery whether the evidence is exculpatory or ‘merely potentially useful evidence,’” Judge Hany Mawla wrote.

Courts must work to understand new technology and allow the defense a meaningful opportunity to fully examine it, Mawla wrote, citing a 2021 state Supreme Court ruling.

“Defendant must have the tools to impeach the State’s case and sow reasonable doubt,” he wrote.

Prosecutors did not appeal the ruling, which means it now carries the weight of law.

Tamar Lerer heads the forensic science unit at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

Attorneys at the state public defender’s office who represent defendants identified by facial recognition software say they’ve encountered the same problem Arteaga had — prosecutors insisting, despite their constitutional duty to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense, that they have no information on the technology underlying their cases, said Tamar Lerer, who heads the office’s forensic science unit.

“It’s a due process violation not to provide it,” Lerer said. “The state is still using facial recognition and I know that attorneys are not being provided with this discovery, and when they’re asking for it, they’re told that they can subpoena themselves. So we have a systemic problem with the lack of compliance with this decision.”

Adding to the complexity, some facial recognition developers require customers to sign non-disclosure agreements to protect their products from competitors. Such secrecy has sparked several lawsuits against the New York Police Department, which was ordered in 2022 to release records — and they showed the department has used Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition technology former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal banned in 2020.

“The police departments are very well aware that they’re utilizing tools of secrecy,” Arteaga said. “So when they take the software recommendation that is built on secrecy to target somebody, that person that has been targeted is sh*t out of luck.”

Lerer said her office is “waiting to see what’s next.”

“The defense is not supposed to be a regulatory agency,” she said.

The West New York store’s owner didn’t respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s request for comment, and a spokeswoman for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment.

In February 2022, the New Jersey Attorney General’s office began soliciting public input about facial recognition technology to help shape a statewide policy on its use by law enforcement agencies. No action has been taken since the public comment solicitation, said Michael Symons, a spokesman for the Attorney General Matt Platkin’s office.

The office doesn’t track how many agencies in New Jersey use the technology, Symons added.

Reisman said the need for policymakers to act is becoming increasingly urgent as the industry expands.

“Facial recognition has been an area of computer science research for well over 30 years, but in the past decade, what we’ve seen is an explosion in the number of companies offering these services and in federal funding for local and state governments to acquire these systems. There’s a lot of money being thrown at these tools without a lot of accompanying forethought into the sort of controls and safeguards we need,” Reisman said. “It’s a terrifying place for the state to be.”

Francisco Arteaga (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

Arteaga considers himself a “hostage” for the time he spent behind bars, where conditions can be notoriously abysmal. Since he got out in November, he has worked to rebuild his life.

He’s studying holistic medicine online, sells health and nutrition products, and works as a gym teacher at a senior citizens’ center in Queens. He now lives in Union City to better accommodate his monthly meetings with his parole agent and sees his son and fiancee, who still live in Queens, every few weeks.

While he won his appeal, he said, it felt a bit like winning the battle but losing the war.

“People be like, ‘Yo, you had a good thing with your case. Why didn’t you fight all the way?’” Arteaga said. “My question for them was, ‘What would you do if you was me?’”

He hopes someone else will pick up the fight.

“I set up the putt close enough for somebody else to sink it in,” he said.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.

The New Jersey Working Families Party has asked a state watchdog to investigate and terminate any public contracts involving South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross and the five business associates recently indicted with him for racketeering.

In a letter sent Tuesday to acting state Comptroller Kevin D. Walsh, the group’s director, Antoinette Miles, said the corruption indictment should trigger “a strong enforcement response” to protect taxpayer money. She reminded Walsh that state officials, by law, can suspend and disqualify public contractors who have been indicted of any “offense indicating a lack of business integrity or honesty.”

“This indictment represents one of the most significant state public corruption prosecutions in New Jersey history,” Miles wrote. “These defendants hold leadership roles in institutions that continue to receive millions of dollars annually in federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars. This situation is intolerable and, if left unaddressed, will continue to erode public trust and risk taxpayer resources at the hands of an allegedly criminal enterprise.”

Laura Madden, a spokeswoman for Walsh’s office, declined to comment, saying: “Our policy is we can neither confirm nor deny matters like this.”

Attorneys for Norcross and his co-defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

New Jersey Working Families Party has long lobbied state and local officials to investigate Norcross and his allies.

“We have known for years about the Norcross enterprise — how Norcross conducts his business dealings and how he wields influence within city government and with other business partners, as the attorney general so eloquently put it, to extort and extract from the city of Camden,” Miles told the New Jersey Monitor. “There are millions of dollars in public sector contracts at stake, and we need not only the attorney general’s investigation, but we also need to dig deeper into the various entities connected to Norcross, because the level of corruption goes a lot deeper.”

In June, state Attorney General Matt Platkin announced a 13-count indictment against Norcross that accuses him of overseeing a criminal enterprise by using direct threats and intimidation to win development rights along the Camden waterfront and then benefiting from more than $1 billion in state-issued tax credits.

Indicted with him were his brother Philip Norcross, who is CEO of the law firm Parker McCay; George Norcross’ attorney, William M. Tambussi of the law firm Brown & Connery; former Camden mayor Dana Redd; Sidney Brown, the CEO of privately owned trucking company and logistics provider NFI Industries; and John J. O’Donnell, CEO at the Michaels Organization, a residential housing developer.

The charges against them include racketeering, misconduct by a corporate official, official misconduct, financial facilitation of criminal activity, and conspiracy to commit theft by extortion and criminal coercion. Norcross and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty during their arraignments earlier this summer.

George and Phil Norcross, Tambussi, and Redd all hold roles in organizations that receive state and local funds that Miles said deserve the comptroller’s scrutiny:

George Norcross chairs the Cooper health system’s board of trustees, while his brother is board chair of its charitable arm, the Cooper Foundation. The hospital receives tens of millions of dollars a year through Medicaid, and the comptroller’s office serves as the state’s watchdog against Medicaid fraud. Cooper Health acquired Cape Regional Health System this summer, an expansion of Cooper’s footprint that makes watchdog scrutiny more urgent, Miles added.Philip Norcross’ and Tambussi’s law firms have contracts with hundreds of public entities statewide. Tambussi’s firm also represents the South Jersey Transportation Authority, and Platkin’s office charged two commissioners at that authority with misconduct the week before the Norcross indictment.Redd heads the Camden Community Partnership, the taxpayer-funded nonprofit at the center of the indictment. Just this week, Camden City Council passed an ordinance to lift a cap on how much taxpayer money can be used to cover the legal expenses of current and past city officials, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.Conner Strong & Buckelew, the insurance brokerage George Norcross helmed until he took a leave of absence a few weeks after the indictment, provides insurance and risk management services to hundreds of state, county, and local government entities.

Beyond contracts, Miles’ group urged Walsh to investigate all permit applications, approvals, and waivers or determinations that involved Norcross, his co-defendants, and the organizations where they work or hold leadership roles.

“The public deserves to have a full accounting of the amount of taxpayer money going to entities controlled by these individuals,” Miles said.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.

Minutes after a jury declared Sen. Bob Menendez guilty of 16 federal crimes, an indignant Menendez walked into the searing sunshine outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan Tuesday and ignored the question everyone in the media mob most wanted to know.

Would he resign?

The will-he-or-won’t-he game continues. Menendez late Wednesday denied reports that he had told allies he was planning to step down, according to CBS.

Whether he would, though, is secondary to whether he should, said a national security expert who joined the chorus calling on him to resign.

The senator’s continued service in the Senate and the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee presents “enormous concerns,” given that he was convicted of taking bribes to act in the interest of Egyptian and Qatari officials, said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Democracy Center. Menendez had chaired the committee but gave up his leadership position after his indictment.

“At the bare minimum, he should immediately lose access to classified information and be taken off the committee,” Binder said.

Legal observers predict busy months ahead, as the senator defiantly resists calls to resign and mounts his appeal, his Senate colleagues consider expelling him, and the Biden administration assesses the policy and national security implications of a sitting senator acting as a foreign agent.

Menendez’s conviction stunned many in the Garden State, who wondered if the Democrat would again dodge accountability. His 2017 trial on unrelated federal corruption charges ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, and no charges resulted in a corruption probe of Menendez that Chris Christie undertook in 2006 when he was New Jersey’s U.S. attorney.

“Sen. Menendez has been the white whale for federal prosecutors in New Jersey for decades,” said Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey who now works as a white-collar litigator in New York.

When federal prosecutors in New York indicted him in September, Epner said, “there was an element of ‘oh, you’ve got to be kidding — this guy got a free pass once with a hung jury. Why is he doing this again?’”

He added, “You should not be putting yourself in the position where you have to explain why your wife got a Mercedes-Benz out of the middle of no place.”

But the conviction should help restore public confidence — if not in politicians, then at least in the judicial system, said Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

“The unfortunate thing about this case is that it is another black mark on public service and on political and governing institutions at a time when the public’s view of those institutions is fairly low, and that’s unfortunate for all of us,” Thorning said. “Given that the senator was able to avoid a prior conviction, there might have been some public sense that he had this sort of Teflon dynamic about him. But clearly that didn’t hold up here.”

His appeal — and a possible prison sentence?

Attorneys agree Menendez’s defense team has plenty they could argue on appeal.

The U.S. Supreme Court has weakened anti-corruption laws in several recent rulings, including one issued during the seventh week of Menendez’s trial.

In that opinion that split along party lines, the court’s conservative majority decreed that a federal anti-bribery statute does not cover “gratuities” given as rewards for official actions, as long as the payment comes after the action. In Menendez’s case, prosecutors weren’t able to prove exactly when the senator’s codefendants Wael Hana and Fred Daibes gave him and his wife, Nadine, some of the cash, gold bars, and other bribes investigators linked to favors, while some came after the official actions at issue in his trial.

His “official actions” will also likely drive an appeal, said Tama Beth Kudman, who heads the white-collar defense team at Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner, which is based in New York and Florida.

A constitutional protection known as the “speech and debate clause” immunizes members of Congress from liability for their legislative activity, or “official actions.” The clause was a favorite argument of Menendez’s defense attorneys throughout his trial, as they fought to bar prosecutorial evidence about what the senator did in exchange for bribes.

Menendez’s attorneys insisted throughout the case that his actions were the “normal work” of a U.S. senator. After the verdict Tuesday, the senator himself suggested that argument will fuel his appeal.

“I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never ever been a foreign agent. The decision rendered by the jury today would put at risk every member of the United States Senate in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be,” he said Tuesday.

Menendez is set to return to the courthouse in Manhattan Oct. 29 for sentencing.

Under sentencing guidelines, he faces 188 to 235 months (that’s 15 to almost 20 years) behind bars, Epner said. That would be an “extraordinary sentence” for someone who’s 70, like Menendez, he added.

It’s unclear if and how soon New Jersey’s senior senator might go to prison. Judges don’t typically wait for appeals to resolve before ordering defendants to report to prison, Epner said.

Epner and Kudman think prison is likely, and they predict a sentence that will be measured in years, rather than months.

“It is offensive to most people and certainly the judiciary when people utilize their public office for improper purposes,” Kudman said. “But there have been allegations of him engaging in this kind of behavior for decades. And that is going to be very concerning to the judge.”

His Senate fate and national security

Both a committee removal and his Senate expulsion would require a full Senate vote, Thorning said. Expulsions are rare and difficult, requiring two-thirds of the chamber to agree, he added.

The Biden administration can and should take other actions both to protect national security and to warn other nations that the U.S. holds its corrupt officials accountable, Binder said.

“This was a corruption scheme where the Egyptian government was a major player in the scheme. Menendez has now been found guilty of this. And so that would mean that the Egyptian government is also guilty,” Binder said.

The Biden administration should kick the Egyptian officials implicated in the scheme out of the U.S. and press the Egyptian government to hold those officials accountable in their own courts, as unlikely as that might be, he said.

The U.S. could also double down on holding Egypt accountable for its human rights abuses, Binder said. Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military aid and has, historically, received the most such aid of any other country besides Israel, but U.S. senators can withhold a portion of that aid to pressure Egypt to improve its abysmal human rights record.

That policy made an appearance in the Menendez trial, because prosecutors showed the senator ghost-wrote a letter from an Egyptian official to other U.S. senators asking them to release $300 million in withheld U.S. aid.

“Holding up some of these funds is a readily available option to demonstrate there’s a cost to these actions,” Binder said.

Prosecutors told the federal judge overseeing Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial in Manhattan that New Jersey’s senior senator has done so much wrong it would take at least five hours to sum it all up.

Monday, prosecutor Paul Monteleoni got started, telling jurors during closing arguments that Menendez trampled the public’s trust to please his wife and enrich himself, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes over a five-year period in exchange for disrupting both state and federal criminal prosecutions of friends and helping them land lucrative business deals.

Monteleoni argued that Menendez, a Democrat, abused his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and put American security at risk by acting in the interest of Egypt and Qatar so that those countries would invest in the business ventures of Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, his codefendants and friends.

Menendez “put his power up for sale,” Monteleoni said, echoing Prosecutor Lara Pomerantz’s opening arguments.

“It wasn’t enough for him to be one of the most powerful people in Washington,” Monteleoni added. “It wasn’t enough for him to be entrusted by the public with the power to approve billions of dollars of U.S. military aid to foreign countries. It wasn’t enough for him to have the ability to recommend who the president nominates to be the chief federal law enforcement officer for New Jersey. No. Robert Menendez wanted all that power, but he also wanted to use it to pile up riches for himself and his wife. So Menendez sold the power of his office.”

Menendez, 70, has denied the accusations against him, refused to step down, and filed to run for reelection in November for the seat he has held since 2006.

Defense attorneys have offered multiple explanations for the gold bars, $67,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible, $486,000 in cash, and other valuables that FBI agents found in the senator’s Englewood Cliffs home during a June 2022 search, as well as the swanky dinners, Formula 1 race tickets, mortgage payments, a “sham job” for the senator’s wife, Nadine, and more that prosecutors tied to Daibes, Hana, and codefendant Jose Uribe.

Menendez’s attorneys have blamed Nadine Menendez for some of the riches, saying she made deals and took valuables without the senator’s knowledge. They insisted other riches were family heirlooms, gifts from generous friends, and cash stashed by a senator distrustful of banks.

But Monteleoni urged jurors to reject those explanations, saying Nadine Menendez acted as a “go-between” to accept the bribes and broker the deals — but that the senator was well aware of the schemes.

“You don’t get to be the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by being clueless,” Monteleoni said.

Monteleoni made it through two hours of arguments before Judge Sidney H. Stein dismissed jurors for the night. The prosecutor laid out what he called “a clear pattern of corruption” by marching methodically through the 18-count indictment to tell the jury why they should convict the defendants of each.

He used the couple’s own words to prove his points, again showing jurors texts between the senator and his wife communicating about U.S. military aid and arms sales to Egypt and meetings with foreign officials soon after the couple began dating in 2018.

“Why is he texting this to his girlfriend? Why is Nadine getting involved in anything about $99 million of tank ammunition?” Monteleoni said of one text exchange.

“She was keeping him in the loop every step of the way,” he added.

He reminded jurors that investigators had connected much of the gold and cash to Daibes and Hana through fingerprints, DNA, and serial numbers — and that Menendez multiple times searched online for the price of gold within minutes or hours of meeting Daibes.

“All this stuff about Nadine having family gold is a distraction,” Monteleoni said.

Bribery law requires prosecutors to prove a public official took something of value, had a corrupt intent, and promised an official act in exchange, he said.

“You only need one thing of value, but you have one after another after another,” he said.

Menendez didn’t have to follow through on his promises for the valuable to be a bribe, Monteleoni added.

“The promise is enough,” he said.

He also listed example after example of “secrecy and lies” he said proves the couple’s corrupt intent, such as Menendez exhorting his wife not to put things in writing and amending his annual Senate disclosure forms to include the gold bars as the couple shopped for multimillion-dollar mansions last year.

“When Menendez hears Nadine will get paid, he swings into action again and again,” he said.

Monteleoni reminded jurors that even the senator’s own staff thought his actions were “weird.”

But, the prosecutor said, “Menendez wasn’t acting weirdly. He was acting corruptly. He was acting like a bribed man. Because that’s what he was.”

Monteleoni is expected to wrap up his closing argument Tuesday morning, and attorney Adam Fee, who is part of Menendez’s defense team, is set to deliver his summation Tuesday as well. Jurors could begin deliberations as soon as Wednesday afternoon.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.

Sen. Bob Menendez, in his first words in court since his federal bribery trial started eight weeks ago in Manhattan, told the judge Wednesday that he would not speak in his own defense and rested his case after just two days of witnesses testifying on his behalf.

“I’m not seeking to take the stand at this time,” New Jersey’s senior senator told Judge Sidney H. Stein, assuring the jurist he had discussed the matter “at length” with his attorneys.

His codefendant Fred Daibes called no witnesses and rested his case Wednesday — also opting not to testify. Attorneys for Wael Hana, another codefendant, began his defense late Wednesday afternoon and expect to call one more witness and then rest Monday.

Stein told prosecutors to be ready to deliver their closing arguments Monday afternoon, and jurors are expected to begin deliberations as soon as Wednesday. The ongoing corruption trial is the Democratic senator’s second in seven years; his first ended in a hung jury in 2017.

After testimony by the senator’s sister and sister-in-law riveted jurors Monday, Wednesday was an anticlimactic end to the senator’s defense in a trial that was expected to end a week ago. Stein, as well as attorneys for all three defendants, have increasingly expressed concerns about “losing jurors” as the trial has fallen behind because of round-the-clock evidentiary disputes, late-arriving jurors, Daibes’ bout with COVID-19, and other random interruptions, like jurors getting stuck in an elevator and the jury room getting flooded by a sink left running over a weekend.

Stein on Wednesday doubled down on his frequent vows to speed proceedings up, telling Hana’s attorney Lawrence Lustberg that he won’t wait on a witness Lustberg aims to call to the stand Monday — who’s now stuck in Egypt awaiting a visa.

“We’re all going to be as efficient as possible in the use of this jury. I’m not going to significantly delay things for that issue,” Stein said. “The rule in my court is: If you don’t have a witness, you rest.”

Wednesday, several jurors dozed intermittently as Menendez’s lawyers presented their final two witnesses in their case.

Under questioning by Menendez attorney Avi Weitzman, forensic accountant David Gannaway presented texts and other documents intended to add context to rebut or at least cast doubt on prosecutors’ case.

Jurors also heard a prerecorded video deposition of attorney Michael Critchley, who represented a trucking company owner in an insurance fraud case filed by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. Prosecutors have said Hana and codefendant Jose Uribe bribed Menendez to derail the office’s prosecution of E&K Trucking owner Elvis Parra, Uribe’s friend, because Uribe worried the attorney general’s expanding probe would reach the insurance company he was running illegally. Uribe pleaded guilty in March and testified against his codefendants last month in a cooperation deal.

Critchley testified that Menendez called him in March 2019 to complain that Parra’s case was “an abuse of prosecution,” and the men agreed the Attorney General’s Office was being used by insurance companies to collect private debt.

Under Weitzman’s questioning, Critchley said the senator did nothing “inappropriate or improper” and that he occasionally talked with Menendez about criminal cases that made the news. Parra eventually agreed to a plea deal with a sentence of noncustodial probation, but Critchley said the plea offer was made because state prosecutors had “a weak case” and not, as prosecutors allege, because Menendez called and met with Gurbir Grewal, then the attorney general, in a deal with Uribe that required the senator to “kill and stop all investigation.”

Under cross-examination by prosecutor Lara Pomerantz, Critchley conceded the case did not receive much publicity and that Menendez never raised concerns about the office unfairly targeting Hispanic truckers, as the senator’s defense team has claimed.

Hana’s team began their defense late Wednesday by calling Carolina Silvarredonda, who works for Hana at his Uruguay office, to the stand.

Silvarredonda told jurors she was Hana’s assistant in September 2019 when Hana hired the senator’s wife, Nadine, to set up offices for his halal meat exporting company, IS EG Halal, as it expanded to other countries after landing a monopoly in Egypt. Prosecutors have said that it was a sham job to mask $30,000 in bribes that Hana paid the couple for the senator’s influence in helping him secure and keep his monopoly.

Silvarredonda testified that she repeatedly asked Nadine to send her information about setting up an office in New Delhi, India, but the company gave the job to someone else when Nadine didn’t send the needed information for three weeks.

“She didn’t do what she was asked,” she said.

The testimony backs up Hana’s defense that the money was payment for a job — and that he fired her when she didn’t do the job.

Under cross-examination by prosecutor Daniel Richenthal, Silvarredonda agreed that she told Nadine her services were no longer needed on Oct. 17, 2019 — and that Hana wrote Nadine a $10,000 check three weeks later, despite supposedly being fired.

Lustberg wanted to call three IS EG employees to show the company now is a thriving business that exports halal beef to multiple countries.

“The impression that the government has left is that it is a completely bogus enterprise that somehow got this contract based not on merits at all, but on corruption,” Lustberg said.

But Stein barred their testimony, saying: “Whether it’s thriving or not thriving or somewhere in the middle today, is irrelevant.”

The trial now is on break for the holiday weekend and is expected to resume Monday morning.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and X.