The previously unreported allegations, included in a 2015 FBI memo, come as New Jersey’s largest city grapples with a massive lead contamination crisis that has forced tens of thousands of residents to rely on bottled water for drinking and cooking. | AP Photo/Cliff Owen Former Booker aide allegedly directed campaign fundraising through city’s watershed

NEWARK, N.J. — A longtime friend and adviser to former Mayor Cory Booker allegedly directed the head of Newark’s troubled watershed to solicit political contributions from agency contractors in the late 2000s, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

The previously unreported allegations of unethical behavior, included in a 2015 FBI memo, represent the newest twist in a decade of political turmoil surrounding the city’s water system, and come as New Jersey’s largest city grapples with a massive lead contamination crisis that has forced tens of thousands of residents to rely on bottled water for drinking and cooking. The allegations were presented in April as evidence in a separate criminal case.


While Newark’s lead contamination crisis began in earnest under the city’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, Booker — New Jersey’s junior senator who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president — presided over major administrative problems within the city’s water system that were further exacerbated by his appointees, according to interviews and the documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Lax oversight of the watershed fueled calamity in the ranks of the water system — which fell under the city’s direct purview — as well as the nonprofit Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation, which held contracts to operate the water treatment plant and distribution network in the years leading up to the current lead crisis.

“When you turn your water company and your water corporation into a dumping ground for political hacks, this is what happens,” said Jeff Tittel, senior chapter director of New Jersey’s Sierra Club. “This is the kind of stuff that’s gone on there for far too long. And the outcome is we’re poisoning our children.”

Under Booker, the watershed corporation’s executive director was Linda Watkins-Brashear, a one-time campaign volunteer who pleaded guilty in late 2015 to accepting nearly $1 million in bribes and kickbacks from contractors as well as an employee of the corporation. She was sentenced in 2017 to eight years in federal prison. Eight other officials were charged in the scandal.

The watershed’s corporate counsel at the time was Elnardo Webster, a friend and former law firm colleague of Booker’s as well as the treasurer and finance chairman to his mayoral campaigns.

Neither Booker nor Webster was charged with wrongdoing, but the unseemly tangle of patronage hires and kickbacks at an agency responsible for maintaining safe drinking water for Newark was a stain on Booker's tenure as mayor, which ran from 2006 to 2013.

(In 2016, a federal judge excluded Booker from a lawsuit that sought to win financial damages from him relating to the corporation’s misdeeds while he was mayor. Booker was immune from liability as his chairmanship was a function of his elected position, the judge ruled.)

In 2015, after securing an agreement with federal prosecutors, Watkins-Brashear told the FBI that Webster directed her to hire several vendors for the watershed corporation, including multiple contractors who would eventually assume direct control of the city’s water system in the early part of the decade.

Watkins-Brashear also said Webster “presented a list of consultants he expected to donate when there was a Democratic candidate in need of their support … along with a donation goal he expected from the NWCDC— on average, approximately $35,000,” according to the FBI’s report. Watkins-Brashear said she maintained her own list, as well, to achieve the fundraising goal.

Those efforts accelerated around Booker’s 2010 reelection as mayor, according to the FBI report, which notes that Watkins-Brashear characterized the watershed as a “political entity“ and said she believed she would lose her job if she stopped fundraising.

In 2012, The Star-Ledger reported that corporation contractors contributed $54,200 to Empower Newark, a Booker-aligned political action committee, between 2008 and 2010. Watkins-Brashear was a regular volunteer for the committee during that period, particularly in 2008, when she collected roughly $4,000 from the PAC for committee-related activity.

At no point in her interview with the FBI did Watkins-Brashear implicate Booker in any wrongdoing.

In an email Thursday morning, Booker spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said that "without any supporting evidence or corroboration whatsoever, this baseless story rests entirely on the disputed words of a person who, to feed an out-of-control gambling addiction, schemed to defraud the people of Newark and lied to the FBI about it.”

Webster, as corporate counsel, played a key role in the selection of several of the contractors who went on to make large donations to Empower Newark. Those groups, including law firms, financial advisers and consultants, largely worked on a failed effort to move the city’s water assets — and the watershed corporation — to a new Municipal Utilities Authority.

The MUA proposal, which Booker touted as a solution for bonding much-needed capital infrastructure improvement, was rejected by the Newark City Council in 2010.

In an interview, Webster denied Watkins-Brashear’s allegation that the watershed corporation’s contracts were linked to Booker or Democratic fundraising, adding that Watkins-Brashear’s conviction and self-admitted gambling addiction make her an unreliable narrator.

“At the end of the day, Linda Brashear was a troubled person with a substantial gambling addiction that she funded by stealing and receiving kickbacks from illegal vendors,” Webster told POLITICO. “It’s unfortunate that one person, or a small group of people, have impugned the integrity of people like myself and the other corporations and companies and entities that have provided quality services to the people of New Jersey, collectively, for hundreds of years without blemish.”

Watkins-Brashear’s kickback schemes were largely centered around smaller contractors, including entities set up by friends, acquaintances and coworkers, which Booker’s allies and Webster say were ultimately undetectable by the watershed corporation’s power structure.

Both Booker and Webster were heavily criticized for their oversight of the watershed corporation in a 2014 state comptroller’s report.

While the city’s drinking water contained only limited amounts of lead throughout Booker’s time as mayor, his oversight of the water system and the watershed was lacking, according to the report, leaving the door open to rampant corruption and mismanagement. Booker, who as mayor was also an ex officio chairman of the watershed’s board, never attended meetings and failed to designate an alternate to attend in his place after the city’s business administrator left in 2010, the report stated.

Problems at the Pequannock water treatment plant — which provides much of the city’s water and is now at the the epicenter of current lead crisis — were a consistent refrain at those meetings.

Under Watkins-Brashear’s watch — and Booker’s oversight — the nonprofit watershed corporation was repeatedly warned that the Pequannock plant was relying on antiquated technology, an unproductive workforce and in desperate need of upgrades to its disinfection processes, former plant manager Andrew Pappachen told the agency’s board in May 2010, according meeting minutes.

At another board meeting, in April 2010, Joseph Beckmeyer, an outside consultant who was granted a $175,000 annual contract to manage the water system in 2010, said the Pequannock plant “has been neglected through the years and therefore is not running at its capacity.”

Those problems are not necessarily uncommon, Pappachen, who now works for Trenton’s water utility, told POLITICO.

“There’s a lot of improvements needed for all treatment plants,” he said in an interview, quickly adding that “there’s no connection with the lead issue.”

Over time, the water being pumped out of the Pequannock plant became increasingly acidic, according to a report published by the city’s current water consultant, CDM Smith. The change in the water’s acidity — purportedly done to bring the water system into compliance with federal regulations for carcinogenic byproducts of disinfectants — weakened the system’s corrosion control program, which relied on silicates that coat the interior of lead pipes to prevent flaking.

By 2015, more than a year after Booker left office, neighborhoods served by the Peqannock treatment plant began exhibiting signs of elevated lead levels, a problem the city claimed was limited to only a handful of homes.

Earlier this month, federal regulators all but forced city and state officials to make bottled water available to tens of thousands of residents living in the Pequannock’s service area because filters distributed by the city may not have adequately screened for lead. It’s unclear how long those residents will have to rely on bottled water for drinking and cooking.

“For years as mayor, Cory waged a public battle to reform Newark’s water system, but those efforts were repeatedly blocked by opponents. Despite portrayals by critics to the contrary, Cory Booker faithfully executed his duties as they related to the Watershed, where a small group of employees and contractors conspired to conceal their criminal enterprise so effectively that accountants and even independent auditors didn’t discover the fraud,” Singh, Booker’s spokeswoman, wrote in an earlier email. “When serious evidence of wrongdoing at the Watershed emerged, then-Mayor Booker took immediate action to dissolve it and bring its operations under direct control of the city.”

The reform efforts refer to Booker's push to create an authority to run the city's water infrastructure. Watkins-Brashear accompanied Booker throughout the city in 2010 when he tried to sell the MUA proposal to city residents. She, along with Webster, directed much of the research and spending at the watershed in planning for an MUA.

Watkins-Brashear’s FBI interview is being used as evidence in the criminal trial of Janell Robinson, a former Newark police officer who is accused of defrauding the watershed corporation by offering bribes to Watkins-Brashear in exchange for a contract for security services.

At one point in the interview with the FBI, Watkins-Brashear “admitted she had not been truthful” in describing her arrangement with Robinson, who allegedly kicked $3,000 of each watershed corporation payment back to the then executive director.

That trial in federal court is ongoing.