Weeding the Garden State

For years municipal corruption in New Jersey has been almost a folkloric way of life. During his heyday in the '30s, Jersey City Political Boss Frank ("I am the law") Hague blithely told a reporter he did not understand the fuss over kickbacks to city officials because "I think 3%--the rate for city employees and contractors--is a bargain for getting good service." The difference today is that service has declined while kickbacks have more than doubled with inflation, and Jerseyites will not tolerate that kind of arithmetic.

Last week, in an ever-tightening net that has already trapped former Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio and a raft of officials of the state's largest city, federal prosecutors caught yet another batch of public officials on the take. This time the site was Jersey City, the state's second-largest community. It took a jury just three hours of deliberation to convict eight Hudson County politicians, including Jersey City Mayor Thomas Whelan,* on charges of conspiracy and extortion.

Men's Room. Held in the dusky, red-draped federal courtroom on the third floor of Newark's Old Federal Post Office Building, the seven-week-long trial was a recital of secret meetings in private planes, passing money in restaurant men's rooms, bargaining kickback percentages with competing contractors. It was also an illuminating example of Jersey City's peculiar political mores. As one of the convicted officials said of the city's way of doing business: "We are a very political place, and we have our special regulations."

Regulation No. 1, it developed, was to arrange a kickback percentage--often as high as 10%--with Purchasing Agent Murphy, who was at one end of the siphon that poured millions of dollars into the coffers of Hudson County Political Boss John V. Kenny and his underlings. "The Little Guy," as Kenny, 79, is known, temporarily escaped prosecution because of serious illness. That left Whelan, 48, embarrassingly alone in the starring role.

Strike Force. Whelan was specifically accused of trying to extort $150,000 from a Jersey City gambler and eventually receiving cash payments of $15,000. The source of the allegation was a former Kenny protege who had turned state's evidence. Even more damaging was the Government's disclosure that Whelan and Council President Flaherty held a numbered joint bank account in Miami Beach that until June 1970 contained $1,200,000.

That U.S. Attorney Herbert Stern and his aides were able to bring the convictions at all, as well as the earlier ones in Newark, attests to the effectiveness of the multiple-agency strike-force concept. Until the first investigators were sent into New Jersey five years ago by the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, no one had been able to crack Kenny's hegemony, or Hague's before him; both had run Jersey City, and in turn the state, virtually by fiat. Now organized crime, on the municipal level at least, is clearly on the run.

* The others were Jersey City Council President Thomas Flaherty, Port of New York Authority Commissioner William Sternkopf, Hudson County Treasurer Joseph Stapleton, Hudson County Freeholder and Democratic County Chairman Walter Wolfe, Jersey City Purchasing Agent Bernard Murphy, Hudson County Police Chief Fred Kropke and Jersey City Business Administrator Philip Kunz.

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