11 Arrested in New Jersey Corruption Inquiry

TRENTON, Sept. 6 â?? Eleven current or former public officials, including two members of the State Assembly, were charged Thursday with taking thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for promising municipal business to undercover officers posing as insurance brokers in the latest federal probe into New Jerseyâ??s rampant political corruption.

The officials, and a man affiliated with one of them, were rounded up by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation early Thursday morning and appeared before a judge in Federal District Court here by afternoon. The arrests culminated an 18-month investigation in which an undercover agent and cooperating witnesses posed as insurance brokers and traded wads of cash ranging from $1,500 to $17,500 for assurances of votes on school boards and city councils.

The investigation initially focused on the Pleasantville Board of Education, which runs a tiny, impoverished school district near Atlantic City. With 13 superintendents in the last 10 years, the district has been plagued by turmoil and is now working with a state-appointed monitor.

But then, unexpectedly, Pleasantville officials led federal investigators on what Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney for New Jersey, described at a news conference here as a â??corruption tourâ?� of New Jersey by referring the fake insurers to other parts of the state.

That tour, prosecutors said, ranged 125 miles north to Passaic and Paterson, two gritty towns just outside New York City known for rough politics, as well as to Newark and Orange. And the way it transpired resembled the New Jersey of Hollywood as meetings unfolded in parked cars, rest stops on the Garden State Parkway, restaurants and hotels.

The arrests are the latest example of how the stateâ??s roster of elected and appointed officials has come, at times, to resemble a police blotter. Two powerful Democratic veterans â?? Sharpe James, the former mayor of Newark, and Wayne R. Bryant, a state senator from Camden â?? were indicted earlier this year, and State Senator Joseph Coniglio, a Democrat of Bergen County, has been notified by prosecutors that he is the target of a corruption investigation.
11 Arrested in New Jersey Corruption Inquiry - New York Times

The Dems take yet another hit........tsk, tsk........

Have a good one!:s4:

I knew it, when i heard they were dems, i knew p4b be all over this.....