Bartels of New Jersey

For decades mob corruption pervaded the public and private life of New Jersey. Politicians were manipulated, unions controlled, businessmen forced to pay off, policemen bribed into blindness. That situation has now changed in some startling ways. In the most significant attack on organized crime in the state's history, 40 separate indictments have been brought against 300 people--among them powerful politicians, union officials and mob leaders.

The man behind much of the change is John Bartels, 36, director of the Justice Department Strike Force that has been rooting out New Jersey corruption for a year and a half. Federal Strike Forces were started in 1966 by Attorney General Ramsey Clark as a way of bringing organization to the fight against organized crime. Previously, law-enforcement agencies plying their particular powers and responsibilities--some critics say kingdoms--often worked at cross-purposes, failing to exchange information, coordinate investigations or cooperate on crimes outside their jurisdiction. When Attorney General John Mitchell decided to send a Strike Force into New Jersey, Bartels eagerly accepted the job of heading it.

Really Hell. His credentials for the post were impeccable. Father: a successful attorney who was named to the federal bench by President Eisenhower. Education: Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, a year's study in Germany as a Fulbright scholar, back to Harvard for law school. Wife: Wellesley. Bartels looks like the cliche image of a college professor: prematurely gray, pipe-smoking, given to rumpled suits. Indeed, he teaches a night class at Rutgers Law School.

After graduating from law school, Bartels had joined John Lindsay's old Wall Street law firm, but quit after three years. "I was bored," he says. His flight from boredom took him to the office of U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau in New York. In four years there, he says, "I learned the extent of organized crime, the pervasive influence of mobsters." Prodded by his father, a judge in the U.S. District Court for New York's Eastern District, he left Morgenthau in 1968 and went back to private practice. "My father kept telling me I had to grow up. I used to laugh about that one day each month--the day I went to the bank--but the other 29 days were really hell." When the offer came from the Justice Department, Bartels zealously plunged back into the work he really enjoyed.

His zeal soon rubbed off on the members of the ten agencies involved in the Strike Force. He helped question witnesses, accompanied agents to rendezvous with informers, and personally arranged protection for informers and their families, sometimes moving them across country to new jobs under new names. He brought a representative of each enforcement agency--with the exception of the FBI, which preferred to operate from its own office near by--into a single headquarters, and encouraged them to work across jurisdictional boundaries. The result has been indictments against public officials ranging from cops on the beat to Newark's former mayor, Hugh Addonizio, Jersey City Mayor Thomas Whelan and Hudson County Democratic Leader John V. Kenny, one of New Jersey's most powerful political bosses. In the process, Bartels has presided over the touchy coordination of ten sometimes jealously competing federal law-enforcement agencies.

Imaginary Repairs. It has not always gone smoothly. There have been conflicts and breakdowns in communications. A carefully laid plan to uncover the top operators in a police theft ring, for example, was sabotaged when one of the agencies arrested a minor figure prematurely. Overall, however, the results of the Strike Force's work have been encouraging. Newark, scarred by riots three years ago, has been a center of the investigations, and Bartels hopes that indictments there will restore some of the confidence lost over years of political corruption. "You can't begin to understand the riot until you understand the extent of the corruption there," he says. "Everything was for sale. The entire black community was aware of this and simply lost confidence in the city's institutions. I knew New Jersey was corrupt, but I never knew how corrupt until I got here."

The momentum built by the Strike Force's success has carried into agencies long inured to official corruption. Last month the N.J. State Investigations Committee held public hearings on charges of corruption among officials of the Hudson County mosquito extermination commission. The commission was accused of shaking down the Penn Central Railroad and a New Jersey Turnpike Authority contractor for $114,000 for imaginary repairs on mosquito-control drainage ditches in the Jersey meadowlands.

Bartels has not only streamlined Strike Force procedure but gained the respect of the men within the force. Says a federal agent on his staff: "You want a guy who doesn't just want the glory and then leaves. You've got to have a guy who believes that this is his way of life." That way of life is considered an improvement by his family, despite the long hours (he sometimes works until 1 a.m.). "When John was in private practice, he was just miserable, grumpy all the time," says Mrs. Bartels. "I think he feels more at home with agents than he does with Wall Street types."

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