In one of Jersey’s many government scandals, Gov. Jim McGreevey put his boyfriend, Golan Cipel, on the state payroll. (Getty Images)
In one of Jersey’s many government scandals, Gov. Jim McGreevey put his boyfriend, Golan Cipel, on the state payroll. (WireImage)
How pervasive is political corruption in New Jersey politics? When I was a reporter there in the late ’70s, I politely declined a couple of cash-stuffed envelopes from municipal candidates seeking better coverage in towns I covered.
Things over there have gotten even worse, according to “The Soprano State,” an entertaining if superficial greatest-hits collection of Garden State scandals from the last decade.
Based on a book of the same name by a couple of New Jersey political reporters, this breezy documentary is hosted by on-screen narrator Tony Darrow, who was in a batch of episodes of “The Sopranos.” Here he appears in a nightclub setting, makes off-color jokes, and even sings humorous ditties about the state, when he isn’t puffing on a big cigar.
He traces New Jersey corruption as far back as the Revolutionary War, when the natives charged George Washington’s troops to use toll roads and the state’s signatory to the Declaration of Independence covered his bets by also signing a loyalty oath to the British monarchy.
New Jersey is currently a state with an astounding 81 government workers per square mile, compared to an average of six for the rest of the country. Some of those workers hold multiple part-time positions that require few, if any, appearances, in order to fatten their pensions. By one estimate, everything in New Jersey costs an extra 10 percent because of payoffs to organized crime.
In recent years, New Jersey has pulled ahead of such rivals as Louisiana, Illinois and Rhode Island as “an international laughingstock” (in the film’s words), because the state has never outlawed some particularly jaw-dropping examples of cronyism and conflicts of interest.
The most famous case was that of former Gov. Jim McGreevey, who after 9/11 passed over former FBI director Louis Freeh as the state’s first director of homeland security. Instead he hired a young Israeli man with dubious credentials — who McGreevey, a closeted married man, later admitted was his gay lover.
There’s also the colorful saga of longtime Newark Mayor Sharpe James, who dodged several federal investigations. He finally went to jail when he blatantly arranged for a girlfriend to cash in on a federal housing rehabilitation program. Even rabbis from the Jersey Shore were nabbed bribing municipal officials.
The film’s murkiest section is at the end. It isn’t clear exactly who footed the bill for Xanadu, a $2 billion eyesore of an abandoned mega-mall in the Meadowlands. Or exactly what happened with an expensive abortive effort to build an upscale golfing community on a landfill there.
“The Soprano State” is something of an infomercial for the New Jersey’s current governor, Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor who frequently appears on-screen as a good guy. Let’s hope he doesn’t join those he put behind bars in the promised second part of this documentary.