The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  Over the phone from Boston one day, I happened to share my frustration with my parents. That weekend my father spotted a local politician, a family friend, at Sunday Mass with his wife. Dad asked him to “help Jimmy out.” Within thirty-six hours I had an appointment to see the county prosecutor, Richard Rebeck. It was my first taste of politics New Jersey style, my first glimpse of just how well-oiled, tribal, and dependent on patronage the machine was. That local politician is a scrupulously honest fellow, and his gesture was nothing more than a simple favor for a friend. Still, in retrospect, my introduction to the slippery slope of New Jersey politics—a culture where the system of favors and friendship had a life of its own—had begun.

  I flew back home with a surprising case of nervous anxiety to meet with Rebeck. He was a quiet and decent man with a reputation for directness, and he ran a competent operation—a lot to say for an underfunded, meagerly staffed office that prosecuted thousands of cases a year, a large number of them violent. I don’t remember what Rebeck wanted to know about me, other than the fact that I was game. He hired me on the spot, for $21,000, half what the private law firms had offered.

  I flew back to Boston to gather my diploma and finally leave academe behind me.

  I WAS RAISED IN A FAMILY THAT EMBRACED HARD WORK AS THE staff of life. Every morning of my childhood I watched my father’s daily rituals—rising before dawn, shaving and performing his ablutions, pulling on a starched white shirt, tie, and suit, and heading off to conquer the world. My mom was equally formal about her commitments to work and school, and after my sisters and I were older, she rejoined both. In some ways, her drive was even greater than my dad’s.

  Too much has been made of the so-called Protestant work ethic. I never saw men and women more tireless, more dedicated to their labors, than my parents and their Irish Catholic friends. In just one generation, they took their community from poverty to the middle class while educating their children for higher rungs, in Carteret and in countless similar parishes across the country. And they did this without greed, always giving back when they could. In service to their family and their community, my dad and mom worked dawn till dusk—still do—without complaint. Catholics of their time haven’t yet been given their due.

  I loved emulating them. And I loved my new work in the county prosecutor’s office. I loved the feeling that I was doing good for my community, solving problems and making the world a better place. I may have been a bit idealistic, but nothing I saw at the prosecutor’s office undermined my faith in American justice.

  Probably because of my work in early childhood education, Rebeck sent me to work in the Juvenile Division. “Kiddie Court,” as we called it, takes the juice out of a lot of young lawyers. The division was run by one of the most intuitive people I’ve ever met, a barely reconstructed child of the sixties named Caroline Meuly. I liked her immediately; she, on the other hand, wasn’t as quick to take me in. For one thing, Caroline spotted my insecurity at once, though I thought I’d hidden it pretty well. She also saw something much more private—not my sexual identity, but my ambition, especially my naked intention to use this job as a stepping stone to political office. To her, I seemed to be “slumming” in the job. She took me down a notch or two right away. “I’m gonna call you MOPFE,” she announced with the disarming smile that was her trademark. “Stands for Man of the People—Former Elitist.”

  I came to love her for saying that. In a line, she unmasked my many poses. I was the geeky kid from Carteret pretending to be a Harvard Ole Boy pretending to be a streetwise lawman. She caught me every time I tried to shoehorn some Harvardism into my speech, and she mocked me for it mercilessly. Along the way she used a surgeon’s skill to remove any last bit of Republican shrapnel in my system, for which I am eternally grateful. Every day, she challenged me to not run away from who I was, to drop the conservative pose I’d hidden behind in my youth and follow my truer political instincts.

  Caroline was a huge influence on my sense of myself. What she couldn’t touch, of course, couldn’t even have known about, was how far away from integration I already was. Part of me thought, If I can convince people I’m straight, why not affluent? She beat back the second impulse. The first went unchallenged.

  Caroline was a great teacher. When I arrived in her employ, I knew I was a good speaker, a fast study, well organized, a hard worker. But that didn’t make me a prosecutor—those skills I had to learn. In one of the first cases I took to trial, I presented what I thought was a water-tight argument for conviction. Just before I was about to rest, Judge Joseph Sadofski called from his bench. “Mr. McGreevey, may I remind you that now would be a good time to introduce any evidence you might have?”

  With coaching, over time, I started winning my cases.

  But winning isn’t always the goal. Kiddie Court demanded a copious supply of compassion. Most of the cases that came across my desk involved kids charged with selling drugs. It only took me a few weeks to realize these were among the smartest kids in their neighborhoods. Without any formal education, and with precious few role models, they had figured out capitalism and the market economy, often building vast enterprises—an amazing feat given their ages. These were kids who took risks, who not only accumulated capital but reinvested it in distribution, even manufacturing. Don’t misunderstand: I loathe drugs. But it seemed to me that there was a spark of real potential mixed in with the delinquency, something to encourage alongside something to punish.

  Unfortunately, the system wasn’t good at doing both things at once. So time after time I’d process these boys and girls, negotiating short juvenile sentences or restrictive probation for them, only to see them back in the holding cell a few months later. Bright as they were, they hadn’t learned the simplest lesson: to paraphrase Einstein, you can’t do today what you did yesterday and expect different results. I hated pressing for long sentences on these cases, because everybody knew this would expose them to the worst elements of their generation. But too many kids went down that road.

  I can’t be sure my time at Kiddie Court changed anyone’s life. I’ve come to recognize that we can’t break that cycle without doing something about the homes and communities these kids are being returned to—hopeless landscapes that prevent even the smartest young kids from seeing promise on the horizon.

  After a few months, my supervisors granted my request for transfer to the criminal prosecution division on the ninth floor. Now things were getting fascinating. These were the dark days before specialized sex crimes divisions, so I got a number of rape cases to try. Having had a friend who had suffered the emotional trauma of sexual abuse, I did everything I could to alleviate any increased burden on the victims, meeting with them and trying to offer not just legal representation but emotional support as well. It was rewarding work. But one case challenged the way I thought about sexual assault cases.

  The complainant in the case was white, the defendant black. They had been close friends through high school. After a graduation party, they had had a sexual encounter of a disputed nature in a car parked outside a local nightclub. At the time the woman had not called the encounter an assault. Only later, after her father discovered the encounter, had she filed charges.

  It was a difficult proceeding. The woman was noticeably conflicted about the charge, but she appeared to be motivated by her family’s anger toward the young man. Ethically, I was concerned about the State’s case, and I went back to the woman to try to ascertain her true feelings. But she assured me that she wanted to prosecute.

  I was duty bound to accept her at her word. The jury, however, wasn’t, and they returned a verdict of not guilty. In all my time in the prosecutor’s office, I saw, almost categorically, the effectiveness of the justice system. This is one of the rare cases—certainly the only one I prosecuted—where I believe that the failure of the State’s case led to a just verdict.

  WHEN I FIRST GOT BACK TO CENTRAL JERSEY—AFTER A FEW WEEKS back in my old bedroom in Carteret—I rented an apart
ment fifteen minutes away in Woodbridge, the state’s fifth-largest city, and joined the Catholic Lawyers Guild, eager to get acquainted with the area’s legal community. Only a few years old, the Guild was the brainchild of Bishop Theodore McCarrick, who had been brought in from New York to found the new Metuchen Diocese after it split off from the burgeoning Diocese of Trenton in 1981.

  An intelligent and well-read gentleman who understood the importance of the Church’s role in the modern world, McCarrick took our young diocese by storm. I loved hearing his homilies at the new cathedral, and his speeches before our Guild, pushing us to address socially progressive issues like poverty and war. No one who knew him then was surprised that he later became the cardinal leading the powerful Washington, DC, archdiocese—or that he eventually became one of the voices of reform and compassion who helped the Church through the sexual abuse scandals of 2002.

  Before long, the Guild’s presidency fell vacant—and I saw my first opportunity to run for office. As a Catholic group, however, the Guild was hardly a democracy. The choice of a new president would be heavily influenced by McCarrick himself. I had no idea how to lobby him—and even though he was relatively young, and Metuchen was not especially important in the national Church, it was still difficult to get him on the phone or pin him down for a meeting. So I began to make it my business to know the priests who worked for him in the chancery. It took a while, but I figured out which priest was advising the bishop on this matter; graciously, he allowed me to make a case for my leadership directly to him. My plank, if you could call it that, was my interest in the financial plight of seniors in our community, who were pinched between skyrocketing nursing costs and a Medicaid system that subsidized the most expensive care in nursing homes but refused to bankroll home health care, a cheaper alternative preferred by many. The system kept people sicker and poorer—which were hardly Catholic principles.

  Ultimately, though, I developed a good relationship with McCarrick, and he looked kindly upon my bid for the leadership role. Some called this “the work of the Holy Spirit”—a little too cynically, I thought. Sure, I campaigned. But I was excited about the job, and I went on to serve aggressively for a number of years.

  A very attractive, witty, and talented lawyer named Deborah Venezia was named secretary-treasurer, thanks to her own efforts at the chancery, and together we organized professional gatherings, social mixers, discussion breakfasts, and the like. We also organized a legal clinic for senior citizens, helping them with health directives, wills and estates, reverse mortgages, and any other services they needed pro bono.

  And for a brief time Deborah and I dated, if halfheartedly. Our relationship came to an ignoble end one day when a mutual friend told me that Deborah had taken up with a vet. “Of what war?” I asked. Turns out he was a veterinarian. She made a wise choice: Deborah and Barry Adler, a well-loved Woodbridge vet, are married to this day.

  Besides, Laura and I were still “steadies.” She was living in New York City at this time, working as a page for NBC and Saturday Night Live, a perfect place for a woman of her urbanity and wit. From time to time, she’d sneak me into the cast parties after the broadcasts. Way in the back of the crowded snapshots from that historic time in the show’s long run, I’m sure we can be seen dancing together. Those were crazy affairs, with earsplitting music and all the excesses of the early 1980s. When someone offered us a snort of cocaine, piled on the tip of a tiny spoon, we declined.

  “I put people in jail for that during the week,” I said, none too politely.

  Laura was mortified.

  7.

  WITH PERMISSION FROM MY SUPERIORS IN THE PROSECUTOR’S office, I started to attend overtly political local events. These were lavish affairs, and to me they were thrilling. In those days, the most powerful gatherings were held twice yearly for local Middlesex County officials and businessmen. I decided to go to the supper after work one night that fall, figuring I could buy a ticket at the door. But when I arrived at the fancy Pines Manor catering hall in Edison, it seemed I was wrong. Everybody there had come with their tickets in hand—no doubt doled out by county chairmen as demonstrations of their affection, or else by large contractors and vendors with proposals they hoped to advance.

  I wasn’t about to slink back into my car, revealing that I’d misunderstood the rules. So when I saw a large unruly party push through the door with a blizzard of tickets, I crowded in behind them.

  Looking around inside was eye-opening. The ballroom was packed with hundreds of people, almost all of them Democrats—in my county the Republican Party was considered an extremist group. The attendees were buzzing around like yellow jackets at a county fair, clustering at one table, then racing off to another corner of the room in a swarm of new allegiances.

  At the front of the hall was a large, three-tiered dais. On the lowest level sat the party apparatchiks; on the second level the municipal party chairmen; above them, closest to heaven, sat our elected officials. Even among them a surprising hierarchy was apparent: the most powerful and sought-after officials weren’t state senators or even congressmen, but local mayors.

  For one thing, the mayors outnumbered everybody else—our mid-sized county was home to twenty-five mayors ruling over villages ranging in size from tiny Helmetta (population 1,961) to bustling Woodbridge (100,421). This proliferation of sovereignties made for a large-scale redundancy of services in the area. Every mayor has his or her own road crews, code inspectors, trash haulers, and the like. And their local power came from their total control over municipal contracts—from the age-old practice of patronage.

  New Jersey has taken many hits as the patronage capital of the country. Patronage is the coin of the realm. I can’t defend it, as I’ve said. But at the time I was convinced it wasn’t all bad. It certainly breaks no laws, and it can have some social benefits. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has extolled patronage as a tool for promoting political stability and easing the integration of marginalized groups. I believed it could do that, and more. The great old mayors of New Jersey still run their domains like magnanimous despots, taking care of the citizens, keeping the trains running on time, and maintaining cool heads through careful appointments.

  But when the system goes bad, it can be disastrous. Courts in the state are crowded with politicians charged with bid rigging, bribe taking, and sundry crimes against the public trust. In fact, New Jersey leads the nation for mayors in prison.

  Even more powerful than mayors are the party chairmen, or “bosses,” as the media has dubbed the top officials from either party in each of New Jersey’s twenty-one counties. Our boss system is a throwback to an earlier time in America, when the parties doled out jobs, housing, and food to immigrants in exchange for votes. New York City’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall in the nineteenth century and Chicago’s Daley machine in the mid-twentieth were perhaps the best-known examples of this. No one in New Jersey is handing out food in exchange for votes anymore, but the bosses still hold tremendous sway over an election’s outcome.

  Perhaps their most obvious source of influence comes from the bosses’ control of what’s known as the “party line”—that is, the line of candidates appearing in the first column on the ballot during a party primary. Nominally, of course, New Jersey holds open primaries, in which each candidate appears on the ballot and has an equal chance of being selected by the voters. But the party bosses have long realized that they could heavily weight the outcome of a primary by giving their favored candidates pride of place in a column at the far left of the ballot, bestowing on them the party’s imprimatur while maintaining the illusion of an “open” race. The party line almost always wins.

  Another source of power stems from the state campaign finance laws. These laws allow bosses to raise and spend fourteen times the amount of money the candidates can, cementing their Svengali-like powers. For many candidates, financial support from the bosses is essential, and most of them are all too willing to cut backroom deals in exchange f
or it.

  This practice makes bosses the most powerful players in statewide politics. They pull strings inside town halls, the State House, the governor’s mansion, and Congress. The personal payoffs can be extreme. Many bosses become multimillionaires, thanks to lucrative contracts they negotiate with officials they’ve helped elect. Best of all, they never have to face voters themselves. Some of them choose to hold elected office, but most of the time they’re ordinary citizens tapped by their countywide party machine as chairmen—typically after they’ve already wrestled total control over the party. Sometimes that control lasts for many generations, and being boss becomes the family business.

  This was the circus of New Jersey politics, and I’d just stumbled into the center ring.

  “YOU NO GOOD SON-OF-A-BITCH!”

  Looking across the banquet hall, my eye fell on a red-haired woman of forty or so, poured into a dress that put her feminine assets on display. Her makeup was running, and every time she gesticulated she threatened to dislodge the rhinestone tiara that teetered atop her elaborate coiffure.

  “Who’s that?” I asked a man standing next to me. He told me her name, and I recognized it from the local papers. She was a powerhouse in local Democratic politics. On the receiving end of her outburst was Bernie Dwyer, who had won his congressional campaign and was heading to Washington. Tonight he was the man of the hour.

  From across the room we heard Dwyer’s voice: “This is not going to happen!”

  “What’s she upset about, do you know?” I asked my interpreter.

  “She thought Dwyer made a promise to her and she came to collect. Obviously he sees it differently.”

  Now the woman was growling at Dwyer. Before long she was gasping for air and sobbing. With a final shriek, she ran behind the dais to hide while she gained composure. Unfortunately, the dais’s wooden structure worked like a drum, amplifying her sobs even louder. “I’m going to get him,” she blubbered. “He’ll never be reelected!”