Here’s a hint. If you’re trying to hire a hit man to kill your husband and ask a “friend” to help you find one, there’s a big potential pitfall.
When you hear from the prospective hit man and he wants to meet you at Denny’s to talk about the details, remember this: he’s likely an undercover police officer wearing a wire.
Only stupid people plot murders in public places with people they don’t know, and there are lots of wives and husbands in jail right now who didn’t think of that beforehand. You read about it all the time.
Here’s another hint. If you’re an elected official in New Jersey and you think you’re worth more than they’re paying you, or maybe you just give in to greed and let it be known you can be bought, there’s a big potential pitfall.
When you hear from someone who sounds willing to trade cash for favors and wants to meet you at Denny’s with a brown paper bag filled with Benjamins, remember this: he’s likely an undercover police officer or FBI snitch wearing a wire.
At this point, there are more than 100 (108) public officials in New Jersey who didn’t think of that beforehand and have been convicted on federal corruption charges in the past five years. Unfortunately, we read about it all the time.
In Monmouth and Middlesex counties, it seemed for a while like we had a monopoly on corrupt officials, with sweeps like Operation Bid Rig snagging public officials like a fisherman catching minnows in a fine-mesh net. (A lot of those guys are coming up for sentencing next month and I, for one, can’t wait).
But U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie and the FBI weren’t finished. They busted Sharpe James, the powerful ex-mayor of Newark who apparently believed he could not be touched. They busted John A. Lynch, the former Senate president from Middlesex County who was arguably one of the three or four most powerful political operatives in the state. That guy is currently serving a 39-month sentence in a federal prison. They busted Wayne Bryant, a once-powerful Democratic senator from Camden who used his position to funnel millions of state dollars into a state medical school in return for a no-show job.
They busted a whole raft of other political reprobates, and last week they busted 11 more.
The latest crop of alleged miscreants includes Democratic state Assemblymen Mims Hackett Jr. (who is also the mayor of Orange) and Alfred Steele, Passaic Mayor Samuel Rivera, a couple of Passaic councilmen and a bunch of current and former Pleasantville school board members.
The latest arrests led most of the national news reviews for a couple of days and put our proud New Jersey into the spotlight as perhaps the most corrupt state in the entire union. You know things are pretty bad when most of the expert observers agree we’ve got more corrupt officials here than they do in Illinois or Florida, where the concept of cash for favors was practically invented.
And the scary thing is that Christie says these arrests have barely scratched the surface in terms of catching all the corrupt politicians and hangers-on.
I don’t know how they measure things like this, but say that maybe one person in 10 who breaks the law gets caught and arrested. Using that modest ratio, we’ve got over 1,000 corrupt officials in the state, with almost 900 still on the loose.
If you say the ratio is one to 20, we’ve got 2,000. And if we’re only catching the really, really dumb ones – the slow-swimming fish – and there is only one public official getting arrested for every 100 with their hands in the public kitty, it means we’ve got 10,000 of the dirty rotten b@#$%&*s sucking us dry.
And what if it’s one in 1,000? If it’s that high, heaven help us all, for we are well and truly doomed.
It might actually be that high. Several of this latest crop were school board members, for God’s sake. Let me say that again, SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS taking kickbacks on insurance deals. And if school board members are crooked, you just know that every elected position and every municipal department – including health departments, building departments, sanitation departments and code departments – are suspect.
I hear a lot of rumor in this business, and this week, for example, I heard about a local contractor in one of our towns who says that the difference between waiting four weeks for a building permit and three weeks is a $50 bribe. The difference between four weeks and two weeks is $100. And if you think that’s pricey, he says, you just have to look to the next town over, where the going rate for building permit kickbacks is twice as high.
It simply boggles the mind.
If we’re waiting for Christopher Christie and company to get down to the level of building departments in central New Jersey, however, we’re gonna be waiting a long time.
What to do? Well, to start, we could stop paying annual salaries to people elected to local and state office, except for an honorarium and per-diem expenses. That seems to work in some states, and that way we wouldn’t attract as many career politicians.
Instead of enacting term limits that kick elected officials out after two or three terms, we could enact limits of a single term. That way, people wouldn’t be around long enough to develop a criminal career over time as their power grows.
Or, we could just elect and hire women.
I know certain of my male readers will say that sounds a bit sexist, but if you look at the list of people busted for corruption in New Jersey in the past few years, there were very few women.
If all we elected were women, we might learn in the fullness of time that they’re every bit as corrupt as men. It’s true that lots of women are busted for embezzlement and similar white-collar crimes in this country every year, and some are busted for violent crime and drug-related crime, so you can’t make blanket statements about their gender-specific honesty. But at least in the New Jersey political arena, their track record is stellar in comparison with their testosterone-enhanced colleagues.
I don’t know exactly what it all means, but you sure can’t argue with the numbers.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of
Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach
him at [email protected].