The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  Two months later, I bumped into D’Amiano again at the East Brunswick Hilton, after a meeting of the Democratic state committee. “That farmer is here somewhere,” D’Amiano said. “You should hear what’s going on with his case, it’s like something out of Machiavelli. Nobody will talk to him, they just want to take his land in this Machiavellian move. He’s trying to do a Machiavellian move in return.”

  He introduced me to Halper, a stocky man dressed all in black. He was angry. “The council passed a condemnation resolution,” he said. “I tried to speak to Crabiel, but he won’t come to the table.”

  Halper had then appealed to the Middlesex County attorney, without satisfaction. The only way he had figured to thwart the seizure of his land was to sell it to the state under the farmland preservation program, but he was displeased with the offer they made, too. “The Middlesex leadership is totally corrupt,” he said. “They refuse to give me fair market value.”

  True or not, he didn’t seem to be advocating well on his own behalf. “You’ve got to read Machiavelli on how to negotiate on this,” I told him. Then I called over Amy Mansue, my deputy chief of staff, and presented Halper’s grievance to her. “There seems to be culpability on all sides, people are thinking with egos rather than about the bottom-line purpose of preservation,” I said—not the most elegant sentence, but according to the transcript that’s exactly what I said.

  Then I told a bad joke in mangled Yiddish and added it would be a “mitzvah” if we could look into the price offered by the state.

  Michael DeCotiis, who replaced Paul Levinsohn as my general counsel, later determined that there was nothing we could do to increase the offer. Halper’s farm was, as he said, “a shitty piece of land” littered with refuse, a place where nothing had grown for generations. It earned the lowest ranking on the state’s list of desirable lands; we had no interest in offering more money.

  But for me the issue didn’t die there, as it should have. It turned out that Halper had asked D’Amiano for a sign that I was working on his behalf, something to justify all the money Halper had given him. D’Amiano promised that I would use the word “Machiavelli” as a code that the fix was in.

  I learned about all of this when lawyers working for Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney in the state, sent in a subpoena for information relating to our farm ranking. Under Christie, the Newark U.S. attorney’s office was developing a strong reputation for prosecuting official corruption. But in this case the paperwork makes it clear they were investigating me. Jamie Fox found me a Washington lawyer, Bill Lawler of Vinson & Elkins, to see how serious the trouble was. I showed him the state records in which we had ranked Halper’s farm 151 out of a possible 151, as low as any farm could be ranked.

  “I don’t get it,” I told him. “This must be some sort of misunderstanding. Let me talk to them.”

  “It’s too big a risk, Governor,” Bill Lawler said. “The problem with these guys is, even if you tell them the truth, if they decide not to believe you they can stick you with a 1001 false statements charge.”

  He was referring to 18 US Code Section 1001, the law that makes it a crime to lie to federal law enforcement officers. It’s the section under which Martha Stewart was convicted—they couldn’t find that she committed insider trading, the crime they were investigating, but they proved she misled them in an interview. According to Bill, such cases are a common outcome of freely cooperating with federal prosecutors.

  I didn’t care. I knew I had nothing to hide, well, not exactly nothing. “There is one problem,” I admitted to Bill. “D’Amiano used to set me up with women. Do I have to talk about that?”

  Bill felt we could contain that fact, so I had him call and make an appointment.

  We all gathered around the library in Drumthwacket one morning and listened to the tapes. I remember the surprised look on Bill’s face when all was said and done.

  “These are unremarkable,” he said. “There’s nothing bad there.”

  One of the assistant U.S. attorneys asked me point blank. “Were you prompted to say anything to Halper? Did you use a code word?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. In no uncertain terms I said no. The whole thing seemed absurd. I didn’t know until a few weeks later that they were focusing in on the word “Machiavelli.” I honestly thought I’d said it of my own volition. It’s a word I’ve used before and since, many, many times—after all, this is New Jersey, as close to Machiavelli’s cutthroat Venetian principality as any place on earth. But it turns out that Halper had been promised I would say it. I can only assume that D’Amiano’s repeated use of the word while introducing the farmer (which I’ve struggled to re-create here as accurately as I can) planted it on my tongue.

  Thankfully, the assistant U.S. attorneys accepted my explanation—but not before going public with a damning series of allegations, in which I was referred to coyly as “state official number one.” Debates about why I’d said “Machiavelli” jammed the radio waves. For his part, D’Amiano—who repeatedly declared I had nothing to do with his illicit schemes—was indicted and ultimately surrendered to serve a jail term. In a way, that made him the lucky one. Having been publicly branded a corrupt politician, I never had the chance to defend myself, to dismantle the state’s shoddy allegations. As long as I stayed in government, they would stick to me like glue.

  “It’s one thing to have everybody know you had an affair with a man,” my father recently told me. “Worse than that is this allegation that McGreevey defrauded people, that McGreevey was corrupt. That really hurts.”

  To imply that money or greed would ever motivate me to break the law is an insulting misunderstanding of who I am. Money was never important to me; it still isn’t. Senator Gormley once said that I could “live on grass alone,” and that isn’t far from the truth. Other than the old Woodbridge condo, I’ve never owned a home, and after leaving office I bought my first car in decades—a Buick Century. My meager savings came from my governor’s salary, $157,000 a year. Every previous governor in the fifteen years before me had brought personal wealth to the office, allowing them to give back all or most of their salaries; with child support payments and the vast wardrobes required for a chief executive and his family, I could afford to give back only 10 percent without having to borrow money. A simple perusal of my bank accounts would have borne this out. At the time, I had $7,000 to my name.

  WHY WOULD THE U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE GO PUBLIC WITH ALLEGATIONS when conclusive evidence already existed that I was innocent? Pure politics, though I hate to say it. Before George Bush appointed Chris Christie, a civil litigator with no experience as a criminal prosecutor, he had personally raised over $100,000 for Bush’s campaign. Just days before the appointment, Christie’s brother began ladling out donations to Bush and Republican causes that eventually topped $400,000 before his own indictment for illegal trading practices—earning him one of those George Bush nicknames: “Big Boy.”

  What’s more, Chris Christie was openly contemplating a run against me. In fact, he’d been meeting with Torricelli and David Norcross, the high-ranking former chairman of the Republican Party. He was visiting senior citizens clubs, Chambers of Commerce—the fairways of electoral politics. I didn’t need proof of Christie’s ambitions, but I wasn’t surprised when he seized the opportunity of a funeral for Glenn Cunningham, the mayor of Jersey City, to make a campaignlike speech.

  I once talked to BJ Thornberry, former head of the Democratic Governors Association, about Christie’s campaign against me. She believed his conduct fit a pattern of Bush-appointed prosecutors who seemed especially eager to pursue investigations of Democratic governors. At least in my own case, I felt I was innocent until investigated.

  A subsequent study by the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, looking at Christie’s professionalism and that of his counterparts in Maryland and elsewhere, found exactly what I’d suspected. “His investigations into those surrounding McGreevey have raised questions about Christie
’s intentions and his integrity,” the study concluded. “The role of the prosecutor…is to seek justice, not merely raise inferences about an individual’s guilt. Christie’s decision, thus far, not to prosecute McGreevey simply furthers suspicions that Christie lacks a case against him and that his motives are political.”

  AS IF IN TOTAL PARALLEL TO MY OWN LIFE, MY OLD PAL JOE Suliga’s political career took its own worst blow in late September 2003. Late one night he was arrested at the Trump Marina Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, touching off an awful spectacle that played out in headlines and television news stories for days. It seemed that Joe had never tired of the hard partying he and I used to get away with a decade earlier. That night, at the slots, it all caught up to him.

  Apparently, he took an interest in an attractive young patron. But he’d had way too much to drink, and didn’t notice when she rebuffed him. He made her a lurid proposal, which she swore to in a police statement; his vulgar words were duplicated on websites across New Jersey within a few hours.

  Understandably, the woman called casino security, who attempted to escort Joe outside; he responded by starting a fight that was unfortunately captured on the hidden video cameras. Joe threw the first punches. The guards were forced to knock him to the ground and drag him off the casino floor by his feet. Joe was charged with assaulting the officers and with public intoxication, in addition to the sexual harassment allegation.

  In his defense, friends of Joe’s told the papers there was a swingers’ convention at the casino that night and he’d mistaken the patron for a swinger. But that didn’t matter. Now it was open season on Joe, and stories began surfacing about his longtime drinking and womanizing problems. A fellow senator told reporters that the state’s budget would have been passed sooner if the lawmakers hadn’t been distracted trying to sober Joe up. Then an old harassment allegation and police report surfaced, eerily like the current one. It was clear that Joe’s life had spun out of control.

  To his credit, he held a press conference to admit to his drinking troubles and announce he would not seek reelection. My heart broke for Joe. I know being a senator meant the world to him. Leaving politics behind—and doing so in scandal—must have broken his spirit altogether.

  I also suppose it destroyed Ray Lesniak’s spirits. Ray was as much a mentor and rabbi to Joe as he was to me. But Ray wasn’t the type to let a friend sink into despair. I heard through the grapevine that he took Joe under his wing, even helped find a rehabilitation facility to dry him out.

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, GOLAN KEPT CALLING AND CALLING. He’d grown increasingly frantic over time, always obsessed with the same themes: he should have spoken to reporters, I should have denied he was responsible for homeland security, he never should have been forced out of his job. We had this conversation literally a hundred times or more. Every time his name appeared in the papers or on radio, where the Golan Cipel caper was an unending source of fascination, it drove him to despair.

  I came to the conclusion that he loved his infamy as much as he hated it. He admitted clipping the articles, creating a voluminous record of the scorn that was being heaped on him.

  It made me sad to see what had become of him. But he wasn’t doing anything to help himself, either. The job at MWW Group of East Rutherford hadn’t panned out for him; he rarely showed up for work and lasted only a few weeks before Sommer encouraged him to look elsewhere.

  Fearing he would be deported, Golan was apoplectic. Eventually State Street Partners, the lobbying firm where Jimmy Kennedy was a partner, extended him an offer. They gave him a hefty salary, $150,000 plus commissions. But Golan was still pulling his old tricks, handpicking the office he wanted—turned out it belonged to Jimmy, who gracefully moved his things to another space. He filled it with his Trenton memorabilia and two small Israeli flags. This time, though, he went into the office every day, entertaining a stream of rabbis and other power brokers. But he never signed a client—at least not for State Street Partners. Jimmy wondered if he was doing a side business from his office.

  Eventually, Jimmy’s partners terminated Golan for nonperformance. Part of me hoped that would be the end of it. Without a sponsor, he would lose his work permit and be forced to return to Israel. Jimmy even gave Golan airfare out of his own pocket.

  During his last visit to Drumthwacket, I encouraged him to consider going back home for good. I felt I’d done right by Golan at every stage in our relationship, but now I was exhausted. But he said he wasn’t finished in Jersey yet. He had lined up a job working on business deals with Israel and Russia for Shelley Zeiger, a Trenton-based developer and Jewish philanthropist. What he really wanted, though, was to return to government, something anybody with sense would have considered impossible.

  “Golan, do you forget?” I asked.

  “You destroyed my life,” he shot back, his eyes filling with tears. “I made this enormous sacrifice, coming all the way here. You should never have listened to the people who said ‘Get rid of Golan.’ I never wanted to quit, Jimmy.”

  “It was the only option,” I reminded him.

  “For what? What good did it do? I read these clips every day. I read everything that’s written about me. It’s absurd what they say.” When he left State Street Partners, the papers ran front-page stories. Golan obsessed over the coverage; he knew how many inches each paper had given the story. It was true, they made him seem silly, frivolous, and mysteriously ill-suited for any position. His reputation was in tatters. But he was doing nothing to rebuild it.

  “Golan,” I said, “I think you have a perverse attraction to being beat up by the press. They’re saying the same things about me, but I’m not focusing on it. I’m looking forward. I’m moving a thousand miles in the opposite direction.”

  Ironically, my years in the closet had insulated me from any emotional damage the papers could cause. I was able to look at my presentation in the press as though it had nothing to do with me, as though it were pure fiction—because I alone knew for sure who I was. I’d made my divided self into protective armor. I never stumbled; my imposter sometimes did. I wouldn’t wish this sort of immunity on anyone. It muted all sensation of one’s self in the world. If the press was good, I could take little pleasure in it, either.

  But Golan had been less scarred by the closet, and he felt his grief viscerally. “Bring me back to the state house, Jimmy. Please.”

  “Frankly, I pushed the system as far as I could, Golan, to make it accommodate you. If you’re not going to work with it, the game’s up. That doesn’t affect my personal relationship with you. I still care about you, I still have warm feelings. I still look at you, sometimes, Golan….That’s what you don’t understand.”

  He was disgusted. “You destroyed my life,” he reiterated.

  I was terribly weary of the fight. It had been two years since our last kiss, and more than a year since he left the public sector, yet he seemed incapable of handling either loss.

  HAVING DRIVEN THE WARLORDS AROUND THE BEND, I FELT CURIOUSLY free to come up with creative solutions to the state’s troubles. Local property taxes, for instance, were an unending vexation. Since I’d taken office two years earlier, they’d risen by 13 percent. An average tax bill in New Jersey was $5,259—a crippling figure for people living on normal incomes. This was caused mostly by our system of “home rule,” in which every tiny township is responsible for everything from schools to police to sanitation—a system that produces grotesque duplications and inefficiencies, as well as a steady stream of business for companies controlled by the bosses.

  At a rare joint session of the legislature in April, I presented an innovative three-part plan to fix it. I’d push for a constitutional convention in which voters could rethink “home rule,” impose spending caps at the state and local level, and—at least temporarily—increase income taxes on the wealthiest residents in order to allow property tax relief for the poor and working class.

  The millionaire’s tax, as we came to call it, was the
cornerstone of my $26.3 billion budget, targeting not millionaires, exactly, but residents who earned more than $500,000 a year. They made up exactly 1 percent of the population, and the change would raise their rate from 6.37 percent to 8.97 percent, pulling in about $800 million toward the state budget. Bush’s federal tax cuts had just delivered a windfall to these same people. On average, they had received $19,000 in federal cuts. My tax would force them to pay an extra $850 in income taxes to the state. They could afford it.

  As a direct consequence, about a million and a half homeowners would see increases in their property tax rebate checks. Taxpayers who earned less than $125,000 would get checks for $800, more than triple what they’d gotten the year before. Households with incomes between $125,000 and $200,000 would receive checks for $500. And—most important—about 450,000 senior citizens would see a 55 percent increases in their rebates, from $775 to $1,200.

  No one in the party wanted the millionaire’s tax. Dick Codey, by now the Senate president, didn’t want it. He knew, as everyone else in the party did, that Florio’s tax plan had set the Democrats back for a decade. Most of my top advisers were lukewarm about the idea. I remember the look on my staffers’ faces when I pulled them aside one day in Drumthwacket and said: “You know, we’re doing this.”

  “Okay,” said Eric Shuffler, an energetic young lawyer I’d hired away from Torricelli to be my new counselor. He laughed nervously. “But how?”

  We decided to sell the plan directly to voters. We went county to county, visiting two or three senior centers every day, sitting in people’s living rooms, church basements, and VFW halls. Being from a working-class background myself, I knew they dreaded opening their property tax bills each quarter. I talked to them as someone who understood.