The emails started coming in from out-ofstate friends yesterday: “Rabbis and mayors in a corruption probe? Some of which included the sale of body parts? Sounds like you newspaper guys are going to have fun with this.”
“Have you gotten your bag of cash yet?” another began. “If you haven’t, what’s wrong with you? Do you think there’s something wrong in accepting the stimulus?”
“It looks like everyone in New Jersey got a bag of cash in this thing,” a third said. “You say you haven’t, but I say you’ve been holding out on me.”
I think that one was from my wife, but I’m not sure.
And then there on the evening news was some law enforcement guy in a suit declaring that New Jersey was now officially the most corrupt state in the nation.
That finally puts us ahead of our long-time rival, Illinois, where Gov. Rod “Blago” Blagojevich got booted early this year for trying to sell Barack Obama’s seat in the United States Senate to the highest bidder.
Gosh, it makes a fella proud, doesn’t it?
We’re Number One! We’re Number One!
I’ve got to say I saw this coming, but I couldn’t have predicted the scope. And when I heard the first reports of the massive bust this week and heard it involved rabbis and Syrian Jewish money launderers, two words came to mind: Solomon Dwek.
And sure enough, Solomon — who was named in a New York Times article July 24 as the government’s informant — turns out to have been at the heart of the stings after cutting a deal to save his own hide on charges he tried to pass bad checks for $25 million.
You’ve got to give the Dwekster credit for one thing. He’s a big thinker. Always has been.
And those of us who’ve followed his illustrious career for the last several years have known all along that there was something very wrong about him.
For years, the guy was on a property-buying spree in Monmouth and Ocean counties that made Donald Trump look like an untutored wannabee contestant on “The Apprentice.”
Dwek bought everything, often sight unseen, and he often paid well above market value for his purchases. If you had a white elephant property, or even one that was semi-nice, Solomon Dwek was the go-to guy, the first, and often last, stop for real estate brokers trying to unload the properties. For a while there, it looked like he might wind up owning the entire counties outright. He had at least 100 properties, and maybe more.
I remember Lindsey Siegle, one of the managing editors who worked for our papers, telling me that there was something rotten in Dwekville, and trying to put together a list of all the properties the guy owned. That list was massive, but we didn’t have the resources to do a full-blown investigative series on Dwek’s empire. We knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before it crumbled.
That happened in 2006, the year Dwek tried to buy the 117-acre Deal Golf and Country Club for 10 times its assessed value. The members turned the offer down, and were ultimately glad they did, because Dwek didn’t have the money.
Then, in April, he tried to deposit phony $25 million checks in a couple of Monmouth County banks and got busted by the feds. They and eventually had to put up a website so investors who thought they’d gotten burned could figure it out for themselves.
At one point in that process, there were more than 50 lawyers in one room at the state Superior Court in Freehold representing, as we reported, “an assortment of nervous bankers, brokers, investors, business partners and other players” in Dwek’s dealings, trying to sort through all the claims against him and his “troubled portfolio.”
Fifty lawyers in one room. The horror! The horror! That’s the very definition of a black hole, and it’s just a wonder the universe didn’t get sucked into it and disappear.
Facing a possible 30-year hitch in the slammer for his crimes, the Dwekster became an informant and set about trying to bribe other businessmen and officials to get a better deal from the government.
He apparently did a bang-up job.
Last week, the feds arrested 44 people for bribery and money laundering, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis — all of them allegedly bribed by, or involved in, illegal schemes with Solomon Dwek.
All I can say is that anyone getting involved with the Dwekster, after Googling his history, deserves whatever they get. They ought to go to jail for sheer stupidity.
Still, the guy did have bags of cash. And in New Jersey that, as Yogi Berra might say, is as good as money.
I’m not sure you remember the details that came out of the big corruption busts in Monmouth County in 2005. A lot of those bribes took place at diners and restaurant parking lots, and there were so many shady characters passing bags full of money around that grandma and grandpa couldn’t find a place to park when they showed up for the early-bird special.
But those bags were full of modest bribes, usually in the $1,000 to $5,000 range.
Dwek put them all to shame, although many of his bribes also took place in diner parking lots. According to the July 24 story in The New York Times, one of his bribes came in an Apple Jacks box stuffed with $97,000 in cash. Forget Wheaties. That, dear readers, is the real Breakfast of Champions.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
That Apple Jacks story is one of my all-time favorites, right up there with the story about Anthony Spalliero — who was accused of slipping former Marlboro Mayor Matthew Scannapieco about $135,000 in bribes — offering the mayor some advice on which chemicals to sprinkle on the bribe money he buried in his backyard so it wouldn’t rot.
You’ve got to wonder what advice Dwek, or his cohort, gave the guy who was just handed $97,000 in an Apple Jacks box. There’s no mention of it in anything I’ve read so far, but I’m pretty sure it had to be: “NO MILK!”
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].