This is bi-partisan corruption.
"The culture of corruption in New Jersey is unique nationwide." So begins The
Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption Part I, a documentary
written by reporters Bob Ingle and Sandy McClure. New Jersey won, they say, by a
large margin over runners-up Louisiana, Illinois, and Rhode Island. The culture
rules regardless of who is in power. This is bi-partisan corruption.
The film
itself is poorly organized and marred by a hokey narration, but it is still a
wakeup call to incompetence and stupidity in government and blind acceptance of
a broken system by a sleeping citizenry. We are talking here about tax evasion,
fraud, bribery, money laundering, kickbacks, theft, and a host of other, less
obvious, vices; the filmmakers make the amusing point that it started when New
Jersey charged tolls to New Yorkers traveling across the state to attend the
Continental Congress in Philadelphia. How's that for consistency?
The running
theme here is "everybody's paying somebody." We meet some genuinely nasty
people: David Friedland of Hudson County who faked his own death in a Scuba
accident to avoid prosecution and then founded five dive shops in the Maldives;
Leona Beldini, deputy mayor of Jersey City, right there on video tape taking
bribes in a diner; Wayne Bryant, king of Camden County who funneled millions in
funding to the state dental school in return for a "no show" job. Newark Mayor
Sharpe James, former civil rights hero and star cheerleader for Newark who was
still personally greedy enough to end up with a celebrity lifestyle - a huge
boat, a Bentley, multiple homes, and two city credit cards for trips. And there
is his mistress Tamica Reilly who bought real estate low from the state and
flipped high.
And lest we
forget: Governor John Corzine who paid his former girlfriend and union head
Carla Katz 6 million to renovate her house and buy a Hoboken condominium. And
James McGreevy who took benign neglect to a new level. He didn't steal money,
the filmmakers say, but he didn't care whether anyone else did. What he did do
was hire his lover Golan Cipel, an Israeli who needed back door help just to
stay in New Jersey, to be head of the state's Homeland Security department,
passing over the available former FBI chief Louis Freeh to do so. John Lynch who
made huge profits on shady deals and was taken down by then U.S. Attorney
Christie. Charles Kushner, McGreevy's fundraiser, was nominated by his boss to
be chairman of the NY/NJ Port Authority and fell under charges of graft and
fraud. The Meadowlands are awash in scandal: the polluted dump where $50,000,000
vanished into a swamp after houses were built on trucked in landfill only to be
torn down when the fill proved toxic.
This is
government by corruption and unbridled arrogance. The cost to each of us is a
10% corruption tax on top of the already highest state taxes in the Union. Wake
up, New Jersey.
Copyright (c) Illusion