Jeff Smith (@JeffSmithMO) is assistant professor of urban policy at The New School in New York City, and a former Missouri state senator. He is the author of Ferguson in Black and White and the forthcoming Mr. Smith Goes to Prison (St. Martin’s, 2015). Brian Murphy (@burrite) is a history professor at Baruch College who writes about the intersection of money and politics. He is the author of Building the Empire State: Political Economy in Early America, to be published in June by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez’s indictment on Wednesday means he could be the first U.S. senator convicted of corruption charges since, well, another New Jersey senator a generation ago.

When Garden State Senator Harrison “Pete” Williams, Jr. was convicted in 1981 on nine counts of bribery for his role in the ABSCAM scandal—a gonzo sting operation that had phony sheiks passing cash to members of Congress while the FBI listened in—he had been serving in the U.S. Senate since 1959 and was a lock to be a senator for life. It was no minor scandal, nor was it a minor scheme. “I’ve got larceny in my blood,” said one of Williams’ conspirators.


Well before Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, we’ve conceptualized politics as an intense competition for power. In spite of rigorous analysis, we often reach to the common language of sports to describe the game’s winners and losers. Undoubtedly, Robert Menendez is a winner when it comes to New Jersey politics—a former member of the state legislature who went on to become a member of the Democratic leadership as a congressman before becoming a U.S. senator. Menendez seemed like he could be, and might end up being, the senator for life that Pete Williams had hoped to be.

But as we contemplate Wednesday’s indictment of Menendez on fourteen counts of bribery and other charges, it’s worth remembering what motives are beneath the surface of our politics. In New Jersey, public “service” is one of the state’s clearest road to riches. For U.S. senators and their friends, along with a cast of hundreds of county party chairmen, state lawmakers, local officials and the heads of agencies most of us have never heard of, elections aren’t simply about grabbing ahold of an office: They’re contests to decide who dispenses favors and contracts from a purse of winnings. Profiteering from public service is so endemic to New Jersey politics that some politicos will read today’s indictment not to lament an ally’s demise or revel at an enemy’s demise, but as a way to bone up on the latest innovations in prosecutorial technology to see how Menendez got caught—and how to avoid a similar fate. “How could he not realize that you gotta get Jersey residency for Melgen (the doctor for whom Menendez allegedly did favors), so he coulda just said he was helping a constituent?” some will wonder, in the New Jersey political world’s unique version of Monday morning quarterbacking.

***

Days ago, the Washington Post ran a story about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s apparent about-face on wind energy. As a newly-elected governor, Christie had pledged to make New Jersey a national leader in the wind-power movement by bringing wind towers to waters just off the Jersey Shore. Yet a Christie-appointed regulatory panel has stalled development of a major new wind farm off the New Jersey coastline for years. Environmental advocates now suggest that the governor’s reversal arose from an attempt to curry favor with the Koch brothers, the generous Republican funders and energy industry moguls.

But in New Jersey, political insiders scoffed at those conclusions. “The Kochs?” sneered one. “That may have been an ancillary benefit. But if Christie went south, it wasn’t for them. It was because Samson got the PSE&G contract.”

The governor's office strongly denies both of these theories, pointing out that the Board of Public Utilities stopped the Fisherman's energy project because the project failed to pass economic and environmental tests established by the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act, as well as failed to demonstrate financial integrity.

Samson? PSE&G?

Samson refers to David Samson, the former state attorney general who is one of Chris Christie’s political mentors and whom the governor appointed as chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. From there, Samson held sway over critical infrastructure and real estate development decisions with massive financial implications for interested parties. And all the while, he kept his day job as the founding partner of blue-chip law firm Wolff & Samson, where he brokered deals that benefitted his law and lobbying clients—firms like PSE&G—New Jersey’s largest gas and electric utility. In the eyes of state lawmakers, Christie’s moves have less to do with presidential courting rituals than they do with repaying favors to onetime allies who leverage their friendships with the governor to bolster their work as lobbyists and lawyers.

Even by New Jersey standards, Samson’s well-chronicled exploits in this realm seem aggressive. As Port Authority chairman, Samson voted for a contract that gave New Jersey Transit—a Wolff & Samson client—a $1-per-year, 49-year-long lease for a Port Authority-owned parking lot in North Bergen, New Jersey. Before hiring Wolff & Samson, New Jersey Transit had paid the Port Authority $900,000 a year for use of the lot. But then they hired Samson, and paid his firm $1.5 million to provide “advice” on how to maximize profits from their commuter parking lots. Samson, meanwhile, helped their bottom line by supporting the $1 lease, leaving the Port Authority as the last agency left standing without a chair when the music stopped. As Port Authority chairman Samson also voted for a $256 million renovation to a train station in Harrison, New Jersey just weeks after one of his law firm’s clients proposed rehabbing an adjacent warehouse into luxury apartments.

Today, Samson is being investigated by federal prosecutors, perhaps in part for failing to recuse himself on these votes—a rookie mistake, scoff other Jersey pols. “He just got sloppy,” said one veteran, shaking his head. And lest you think that he was an exception, consider that another Port Authority commissioner, David Steiner, who also voted for the rail project, had purchased rights to build a 20-story apartment complex on another nearby riverfront tract just four months earlier.

This isn’t really a story just about Robert Menendez, then. This is about how political business is done in New Jersey.

And it’s a story that brings Menendez and Christie into the same frame. Each man’s political autobiography involves him donning a white hat to help bring notoriously corrupt New Jersey politicos to justice.

But those stories are mythologized—each man’s hat was off-white at best. And their careers—even the moments that occurred long before they attracted the current scrutiny of federal investigators—say much about the nature of corruption in New Jersey politics.

As the previous U.S. attorney for New Jersey from 2001 to 2009, Chris Christie made public corruption his focus, nabbing 130 public officials during his tenure, including ex-Newark Mayor Sharpe James and top executives in two of the state’s largest (and widely believed to be most corrupt) counties. He helped launch an elaborate 2009 sting operation in which he spearheaded the arrest of 25 county political leaders and 19 others on a single morning, a feat that helped propel him to the governorship later that year.

But even as Christie was bringing the full weight of the United States government to bear on men who had accepted $3,000 in envelopes, he became known as a national leader in negotiating deferred prosecution agreements under which large companies could avoid prosecution in exchange for promising to obey the law, pay restitution or change personnel.

In one case, Christie gave a firm owned by his former boss, ex-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, a $52 million contract to monitor a hip implant manufacturer that had run afoul of the law. Ashcroft’s firm received monthly fees ranging from $1.5 million to $2.9 million, $750,000 to the firm’s “senior leadership group,” consulting services billed at up to $895 an hour and $250,000 a month for expenses that included private planes. The companies involved also paid multimillion-dollar fines.

Menendez, too, cut his political teeth as a self-styled reformer. As a college student, Menendez staffed Union City Mayor and political boss William Musto. The two were like father and son until federal prosecutors approached Menendez and persuaded him to testify against his mentor, which he did, wearing a bulletproof vest. An anonymous note he received promised simply: “Traitors die in their sleep.”

During the legal proceedings, Menendez would announce a mayoral bid against his mentor Musto, who along with co-defendants was convicted for skimming $600,000 in kickbacks on school construction projects and helping crooked contractors pocket millions more. The day after he was sentenced to seven years in prison, Musto easily defeated Menendez; his adoring supporters asserted that he was framed. The lesson Menendez might have taken from that was that the good guys don’t always win.

***

Christie and Menendez aren’t the political equivalent of professional wrestling good guys gone bad. Rather, they are threads in a larger New Jersey political story whose names and faces change (remember Bob Torricelli and Jim McGreevey?) while the stories remain eerily similar.

Looking back, this prosecutorial attention resembles the scrutiny Wall Street faced after the 2008 crisis. Regulators, bankruptcies and buyouts weeded out a few “bad apples,” but key stakeholders ensured that the system continued to operate essentially as before. As the FDIC’s vice chairman recently warned, the nation’s largest banks are now “larger and more complex than they were pre-crisis,” the value of their derivatives is up 30 percent since 2008; they continue to maintain leverage ratios of 22 to 1, and they are even more interconnected than they were before. None of which should surprise anyone: all of the underlying (and skewed) incentives remain intact.

Similarly, Christie and Menendez helped put some crooked politicians away and profited politically from doing so, but both seem to have succumbed to the same temptation to use their office to extract favors or exact revenge for all the wrong reasons. The New Jersey political class will spend the coming days dissecting the Menendez indictment to see where he slipped up, and people will say to themselves in disbelief, “I can’t believe he was so stupid,” just as Missouri politicos said when one of the authors of this piece himself slipped up. But to imagine that this culture can be cured with more stringent ethics laws, or more transparency, or any disclosure on a monthly or quarterly or annual form filed with a state ethics commission is to live in a fantasy world.

For although these problems are surely exacerbated by inadequate and poorly drafted ethics laws, they’re rooted in culture. When Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer accused the Christie administration of tying Hurricane Sandy relief money to Hoboken’s approval of a project wanted by a Wolff & Samson client, a local official noted that this type of public land use decision was at the root of New Jersey’s rancid political culture. “You get what politics is really about in this state,” he told one of us, who had covered the story. “Wringing as much fucking money out of the system as you possibly can before you get caught.”

Lucrative links between patronage, development and infrastructure make that possible. And as long as New Jersey politicians come up through the ranks to higher office by ingratiating themselves with county party officials and donors looking for payouts once the elections are over, the political culture of the state simply won’t be capable of offering substantive reforms. Some politicians dream of becoming president, but in New Jersey there are officials who spend a lifetime angling to become a deputy commissioner of a water utility.

Why? Because that’s where the money is.

This post has been updated and corrected to make clear that the implant manufacturers paid substantial fines to the government. The original version said they did not pay government fines. It has also been updated to add comment from Governor Christie's office.