Robert Van Etten, the inspector general for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, died Monday at his New Jersey home of an apparent heart attack, law enforcement sources said. He was 70.
He joined the PA in 1996 and earned $208,468 yearly as the agency’s top corruption-fighter, overseeing a staff that probed corruption involving vendor contracts and suspected misconduct by civilian PA workers.
During his tenure with the PA, he created the Fraud Prevention Program for the World Trade Center Reconstruction Projects, which was designed to uncover possible waste or criminal behavior involving an array of large capital construction projects, including the New Goethals Bridge; the Moynihan Station Development Project; the Bayonne Bridge Navigational Clearance Project and the Hurricane Sandy Recovery and Resiliency Program.
More recently, his office assumed the management of three Port Authority Police Department units: internal affairs; civilian complaint investigations and absence control.
Van Etten previously held a number of positions with the Department of the Treasury, including special agent-in-charge, New York Office, for the U.S. Customs Service.
He also helped found the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) in 1977, an organization that now represents more than 25,000 federal law enforcement officers from over 65 different agencies.
“Please keep our fallen hero, Bob, and his family in your thoughts and prayers…God doesn’t make them any better, and Bob was the epitome of honor for our noble profession,” wrote FLEOA President Jon Adler, in an email to his members.
A graduate of Manhattan College, Van Etten also completed the Senior Executive Fellows Program, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
A funeral mass will be held on Thursday, July 3 at 1:00 p.m. at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, 10 County Road, Tenafly, NJ. He is survived by his wife, Theresa, and two adult sons, Robert and David.