On November 7, 1989, Jim Florio beat out Republican congressman Jim Courter for governor of New Jersey, becoming the first Democrat in eight years to head to the governor’s mansion. My pal Joe Suliga prevailed in his campaign to become assemblyman from Linden. And by a vote of 27,099 to 24,695, James E. McGreevey, the kid from Carteret, became the newest representative of the 19th Legislative District. Joe and I were two of the youngest lawmakers in Trenton.
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SINCE THE ASSEMBLY ONLY PAID $35,000 A YEAR, I DECIDED TO hold onto my day job at Merck. Dick Trabert, my boss, made sure I was carrying my weight at work, and reassigned me away from any potential conflicts. For the most part, my responsibilities there consisted of reading white papers involving federal actions and assessing their potential impact on Merck clients—nothing that conflicted with my work as a legislator. Indeed, some of my own legislative initiatives were sometimes seen as anti-Big Pharma. Trabert, a staunch Republican, tactfully held his tongue, never once interfering with my work in government. (Although when I asked his daughter on a date, I saw his handiwork behind her rejection.)
In Trenton, I focused mainly on three issues, writing or sponsoring laws on the environment, Holocaust education, and women’s health care. New Jersey has the third highest rate of breast cancer in the country. Without early detection, one out of every four breast cancer victims will die of the disease. But women were routinely being denied reimbursements for a simple test that could save their lives. I wrote a bill mandating insurance coverage for mammograms, the most powerful tool in early detection.
In addition, I wrote legislation establishing a permanent Holocaust Commission, the first of its kind in the nation, and began the long work that eventually required teachers to discuss the sad lessons of hatred and intolerance from that time to all grade-schoolkids. My assembly aide, Herb Gilsenberg, a former truck dispatcher from Brooklyn, took on this effort as a personal mission. In one of his memorable letters, he wrote to the entire state legislature telling them it would be a “mitzvah,” Yiddish for “good deed,” if they passed the Holocaust legislation. The then-speaker, Joseph Doria, an Italian Catholic from Bayonne with an education degree from Columbia, asked me in the assembly rotunda, “What’s a mitzvah?” I had to tell him I had no idea.
With the leadership of Senator Dan Dalton, we also passed the Pollution Prevention Act, a landmark law that established financial incentives to reduce usage and generation of hazardous materials. As a result, New Jersey was awarded the Best Bet Award for Environmental Achievement from the National Center for Policy Alternatives, a proud accomplishment.
I also supported Governor Florio in his record-breaking $2.8 billion state tax increase. It was a bitter pill, but an essential one if we were to balance the budget, increase aid to public schools, and increase property tax relief for working New Jerseyans, who were suffering under the heaviest tax burden in the nation.
But I also worked on a bill that had indirect impact on Merck & Co. Still advocating for seniors, I championed legislation in the General Assembly that would require doctors to accept Medicare caps as payment in full. This touched off a firestorm of anger from the medical establishment, but to their credit no one at Merck ever complained. I was sure the company’s CEO, Dr. Roy Vagelos, disagreed with my position. But he had such unimpeachable integrity that he drew a bright line against indirectly interfering with legislative action.
I wasn’t always diplomatic. I got a reputation as a young man in a big hurry, not the most effective image. They called me “Assembly Boy,” sometimes less than lovingly. But I persevered. Just as I had at Scout camp, I identified the people who were most prone to dislike me, and I made it my business to win them over.
A FEW MONTHS INTO MY TENURE, I WAS OUT FOR A DRINK ONE night with my friend Tim Dacey. He told me he was worried about me—that I was working too much and not finding a balance in my life. He was right; I wasn’t spending as much time chasing girls in Atlantic City as I used to. In truth, I’d been glad to leave that charade behind—girls were part of the campaign, not part of the administration. Of course, there were moments when I wished I had a woman on my arm, like when Governor Florio invited me and a number of other lawmakers to his home on the shore for a picnic. Everyone else brought their husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend; I arrived with my sister. I struck a strange Nixonian image, besides—wearing a dark suit and tie when everybody else knew enough to wear polo shirts and chinos. My friend Christine Simon, a fellow former assembly staffer, took me aside. “Jim, you can’t be serious. Your sister? A suit? What are you thinking?” I didn’t have a clue.
But I didn’t feel compelled to date women, as long as I was working hard. Long hours were a good excuse for bachelorhood; besides, they kept my mind off my plight.
I didn’t tell Tim any of this, though. I told him I felt obliged to the voters, and to Merck & Co., to work every last minute of the day.
“You’re killing yourself,” he said. “You worked yourself to the bone on your campaign; you deserve a break. Let’s take a vacation.”
He was a dear friend, and I appreciated his concern, but I turned him down. “Not this year,” I said.
It was no use: Tim had already conspired with my secretary at Merck to book us both on the Royal Viking Star for a week’s round-trip cruise to Bermuda. He told me it wasn’t refundable. At first I was aggravated, but finally I agreed to go along. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
We left on a Saturday from the New York City Passenger Ship Terminal in Manhattan. Never having been on a cruise before, I’d always assumed they were strictly for retirees; I couldn’t believe how many passengers were our age, and obviously looking for romance. Leave it to Timmy to find the cruisiest cruise ship in history, I thought. I don’t think we were more than a few miles outside of New York Harbor when he’d already struck up an acquaintance with a couple of beautiful women from British Columbia. One was a blonde, the other a brunette. They were in deck chairs with their feet up, reading books poolside. My first inclination was toward Heather, the lighthearted blonde. I spent the first evening talking with her while Tim hung close to her friend. But somewhere through the second day Tim and I—and Heather and the other woman, Kari Schutz—had a slow change of heart, and there was a switch of teams. Tim paired up with the blonde; I got Kari, a librarian about my age.
For the first time in my life, I was swept away by a woman. Bright, engaging, vivacious, Kari challenged me about literature, art, music, and politics. She was elegantly dressed, with beautiful hair and deep, dark eyes. We spent all that day talking, swimming in the pool, and feasting in the many restaurants aboard. Her stories about traveling—to China, Russia, through Europe—were riveting. Oh, she made me laugh! When I told her I was an assemblyman, she thought I meant I worked on an assembly line. “Which plant?” she asked, and I fell off my deck chair laughing.
That night at dinner I took her in my arms on the deck, leaned her against the railing, and kissed her gently—fireworks. By the time we hit our first port, St. George, we were holding hands; at the next stop, Hamilton, we rented mopeds and explored the place from top to bottom, crawling through basement pubs like college kids. This was the romance I craved, with a person who totally captivated me—she just happened to be a woman.
As different as we were, we had a lot in common. Her parents were immigrants to Canada from Scotland and Norway, blue-collar like my folks, and like me she was very connected to her Church—only she was Anglican, not Roman Catholic. She was a hard worker, well educated, not at all a snob—she wouldn’t have cared if my job was on some assembly line. We just hit it off honestly, two individuals bobbing around on a huge sea.
When I got back to Woodbridge, I called Kari every chance I got. A dozen times in the next year I flew to Vancouver to visit her. She visited me just as often—these were proper and old-fashioned courting visits, but I couldn’t wait for us to become more intimate. During one of her visits we drove into New York City
for a romantic dinner at the Rainbow Room, a glorious ballroom high above Rockefeller Center. We danced and ate and sipped champagne and our heads were fuzzy with love.
I reached in my pocket for a diamond ring. “Kari,” I said. “I love you. You make me very happy. I am a better person with you, a person I never thought I could be. And I think I make you happy, too. I’d love to live with you for the rest of my life. Will you marry me?” Tears poured down her cheeks as I slid the ring on her finger. She hadn’t expected this at all. She nodded yes, unable to speak.
We took each other in our arms and twirled around on the dance floor for hours. I knew I loved her totally. But the thought that kept running through my head was, I’ve beaten it back. Now there’s no limit to what I can do.
DESPITE ALL THIS HAPPINESS, MY POLITICAL CAREER WAS IN DANGER of cracking apart. Around Thanksgiving 1990, my ally and friend JoJo DeMarino, the Woodbridge mayor, told me and Jack that he was about to be indicted for bribing a Carteret official for his vote on a city contract. He broke the news at the Woodbridge Diner after our annual Thanksgiving Day Prayer Service in Avenel. I could hardly believe my ears.
A few weeks later came another blow. An effort to redraw legislative district lines in the state—in order to follow population trends—merged portions of two districts into one. That meant that Assemblyman Tom Deverin and I would have to duke it out to see who got to keep the job. This was terribly unfair. I’d known Tom forever—his family and mine were regulars at the same St. Joseph’s Masses. The other district being merged was already being represented by me and George Otlowski, to whom I now owed so many favors. I couldn’t imagine running against him, either. This was a terrible bind for me.
Unfortunately, the decision was made for me in early 1991. JoJo DeMarino called a meeting of the five chairs from the newly incorporated district, plus Otlowski and Deverin—everyone, that is, but me. DeMarino, as the local party boss, had decided to throw his support to Deverin, not me. He didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me in person.
I remember how I found out about the meeting. I was on the platform of the Metropark Station stop waiting for the annual Chamber of Commerce train ride to Washington DC, the other yearly event involving every elected official in the state. I called Jack Fay from the platform pay phone. “Welcome to boss politics,” he said. “You’ve just been kicked off the line.” I was furious, especially at JoJo, whose career I had helped resuscitate; I considered him a mentor and a friend. Given his indictment, and the almost impossible reelection campaign that was sure to follow, I was stunned that he would turn on me.
Next I called JoJo himself and demanded an explanation. “It’s unfortunate,” he said, “but I couldn’t get you on the phone. I tried several times.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I have an answering machine at home and secretaries at Merck and at the assembly office. You screwed me.”
After conferring with my inner circle, I made a decision: I would run for mayor of Woodbridge against JoJo. At least in part, I was motivated by revenge. I even settled on an unofficial theme: “The Unindicted Democratic Ticket.” But I knew I could run the town well, and I knew I could win. I was familiar with his weaknesses, and I was confident I could siphon off his brain trust—especially Jack, who was as mad as I was.
On the day I told JoJo I was taking him on, we were sitting in his white Lincoln Continental. I said, “If you had come to me and said to my face, ‘This is the way it’s gotta be—you’re the junior man, you’re off the line,’ I may not have liked it, I may have been angry, but I would have accepted it.”
His large head turned bright red. He ticked off all the church parishes, veterans’ organizations, firehouses, and power bases that he could count on to vote for him. He had all the sanitation workers, too, because he’d hired them all. He had the town locked up. All I could expect was the Woodbridge American-Irish Association.
“I’m gonna cut your balls off,” he told me.
The campaign went hand to hand through the backyards of Woodbridge. DeMarino played rough, ordering his garbage collectors to pull my signs off people’s lawns. We never played that kind of dirty game—and we couldn’t have spared the manpower for pulling up signs if we’d tried. Instead, I worked my ass off and signed up every volunteer I could get. I even started to accumulate party support. The family of Attorney General David Wilentz threw in behind me. The Wilentzes never liked JoJo; David once called him “the only man who could lie to God.”
Ray Lesniak, the county boss, signed up too. I think Ray saw potential in me, not just for the future but, as a chance to establish a Democratic beachhead in this Republican year. Without Ray, my race had no chance.
WHEN THE HISTORY OF NEW JERSEY POLITICS IS FINALLY WRITTEN, Raymond Lesniak will no doubt emerge as one of our most towering figures. Apart from the obvious political cunning that won him the chairmanship in Union County when he was still quite young, Ray is an enormously appealing figure. Women find him attractive, and he’s been known to adore them back. In fact, there is something of the screen idol about him: his wide-open face, intense blue eyes, and suave demeanor mix with his high-flying political standing to make him unique in the state political class.
For reading, he wears wireless glasses tinted blue, which give him a flower-power aura. But Ray is more new age than hippie. Raised Roman Catholic in the Polish parishes of Elizabeth, he now considers himself a born-again evangelical Christian of a variety he has improvised along the way. He still attends Mass at a Roman Catholic church, but he reads self-help books voraciously and is a dedicated follower of the twelve-step philosophy on which Alcoholics Anonymous is based. Ray was never a problem drinker. For him, the steps are a way of life, their own spiritual movement. We’re all addicted to something that’s holding us back, he believes. When people ask Ray what he’s recovering from he says, “a compulsiveness to be in control of everything.”
But pity the person who thinks Ray’s not still a commanding figure. He can be ruthlessly persuasive and single-minded—and always charming—when he sets his sights on a goal. Winning his support and friendship gave me hope that I might actually win my run for mayor.
As we got down to the wire late that summer and early fall, DeMarino’s attentions were distracted by his criminal case. The trial was scheduled for October, and because I was campaigning on “integrity,” he was forced to explain himself.
“I was asked to help some friends out,” he once cryptically told a reporter. “That’s all.”
We were polling neck and neck. In a curious move, DeMarino pushed to have his trial broadcast on local cable. He truly believed that the voters would see how innocent he was and reward him at the polls.
But it backfired. It turned out that the county prosecutor had been secretly tape-recording JoJo for years. It didn’t matter whether the case was strong or weak; his coarse language alone cost him votes. The seniors in Woodbridge tuned in every morning, and the little old Hungarian and Italian ladies were scandalized. Hearing the word damn was enough to send them into a spell. The language on the tapes was much worse. As I went door to door, they would say to me in horror, “Can you believe what DeMarino said today?”
JoJo was found not guilty in October 1991, but by then he’d already lost the race. The following month, in a close four-way election, I became the next mayor of Woodbridge. I packed my things at Merck & Co., married Kari in a beautiful Episcopal ceremony in Vancouver, with Jimmy Kennedy as my best man, and moved to Town Hall.
One of the first things I did as mayor was hire Paul Weiner as my corporation counsel, the town’s top lawyer. Paul was a partner in Ray’s law firm, Weiner Lesniak, and Ray must have known he was just what I needed, a loyal and extremely competent deputy. With just the right temperament, he was able to meet with the squabbling party stalwarts in both parties and divvy up the spoils: appointments to various town departments and offices, jobs on this crew or that agency. Some of it was patronage, always has been, but done as wisely as Paul did it
, doling out the jobs can build a mighty peace. The way we did it in Woodbridge had an almost parliamentary effect; we entered a power-sharing arrangement with our adversaries, reached out to voting blocks that hadn’t supported us, and gave a little back to the people who supported us. And in the bargain, we made sure everybody had a stake in running the town. Good government and good politics aren’t contradictory ideas, not always.
I HAVE TO SAY, JOJO DEMARINO DID ME A HUGE FAVOR. NO JOB WAS better suited to me than being mayor of Woodbridge. In the years since then I have traveled the world and seen cities and villages that took my breath away. But Woodbridge is still my favorite place. Its roots go back to the early days of American history. Settled in the autumn of 1665 and granted a charter five years later by King Charles, the city was named either for the English town where some of the settlers were born or in fond memory of a pastor the Puritans recalled from their first stop in America, in Newbury, Massachusetts—nobody knows for sure. The first permanent printing house in America was opened here in 1751, and the first truly American periodical in the Colony was published there.
The fact that gave me greatest pride, though, was that the sons of Woodbridge hosted the first antislavery conference in American history—on July 4, 1783, six years before George Washington was inaugurated first president of the United States.
In modern America, there is perhaps no place that better embodies middle-class American values. Every ethnic group, every race, every religion and culture is represented there—not in unofficially segregated communities like I remember from my childhood, but intermingled and coexisting, and equally invested in the community. We had many prefixes, but for us what mattered was our suffix: African American, Italian American, Turkish American, Cuban American, all sharing the American dream. The St. James Street fair every October was a celebration of our diversity. So was the yearly Pearl Harbor memorial service, and every baseball game come spring. In fact, baseball season is my favorite time in Woodbridge, those warm, endless nights when floodlights glow over distant diamonds and the sounds of cheers spill out over the town.
The Confession Page 14