New Jersey U.S. Attorney Putting 'Crooks' In Jail!
By Gordon Bishop (09/18/07)
Better watch out for any person whose name contains two powerful religious names in it: "Christ" and "Christ."
That person is New Jersey’s United States Attorney: Christopher Christie.
He’s also known as “The Big Guy” because he is physically big and he goes after the “Big Guys” who are also the “Bad Guys” and “Wise Guys.”
Since Chris Christie became U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in 2002, he has done a slam-bang job of putting crooks in jail, many of them politicians or political parasites, which doesn’t help New Jersey’s “image” as the home of the Tony Soprano mob family in Lodi, NJ.
This year, Christie’s 153-lawyer office in Newark filed 838 “informations or indictments,” compared with 181 in 2005 and 687 in 2001.
“You’ll recall when I was nominated (for NJ’s U.S. Attorney), there was not a great outcry of jobs,” Christie, 45, told the New Jersey Law Journal, which crowned him as “Lawyer of the Year.”
Christie was hardly the “Gang Busters” lawyer cleaning up crime in the Garden State. His legal practice at Cranford-Hewitt was in administrative and election law with a smidgen of litigation, hardly criminal law, especially in a politically-corrupt State. “All that skepticism (about me) was justified,” he pointed.
I’m a huge fan of Christie, as I was New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney in the early 1970s, Herb Stern, who started cleaning up City Halls by putting the mayors of Jersey City, Newark and Atlantic City in jail for their blatant misdeeds.
The headlines in the New Jersey-New York mainstream media in September reinforced Christie’s popular role as “Crime Fighter”:
FBI ARRESTS 11 OFFICIALS
ON BRIBE-TAKING CHARGES
Christie’s back on his white stallion, wearing his Hopalong Cassidy white hat, exposing another round of political losers: Democrat State Assemblyman and Orange Mayor Mims Hackett, Passaic Democrat Assemblyman and church pastor Alfred Steele, Passaic Democrat Mayor Samuel Rivera, Democrat Pleasantville School Board President James Pressley, Former Democrat Pleasantville School Board Member James McCormick, and Pleasantville School Board Members Jayson Adams and Rafael Velez.
It piqued my curiosity as an investigative reporter and columnist at the Newark Star-Ledger for 27 years that five of the indicted politicians were black and two were Hispanic. New Jersey’s urban-suburban demography has been dramatically changing over the last 30 years.
I should mention that these public lawmakers are “innocent” until proven “guilty.” They were indicted by a grand jury, the first step toward a public trial and verdict, and, of course, years of appeals.
What surprised most New Jersey residents were the two State legislators who were indicted. That’s the State Capital and where the Democrat Governor presides as the State’s chief executive.
That may not bode well for the Democrat party in next year’s general election.
I’ve lived all my life in New Jersey. Born in Paterson, raised in Hackensack, and a graduate of Rutgers – The State University, founded in 1766 as Queens College. During the past 48 years, I’ve worked on two daily newspapers (The Star-Ledger & The North Jersey Herald-News), covering10 Governors and countless congressional races, not to mention local mayor and council and county freeholder elections. I’ve run the political gamut from bottom to top and know where many of the political skeletons are kept hidden from the voting/taxpaying public.
It’s sad to see my home state became a punch-line for comedians, known as the “Jersey Joke.”
In the real world, we must not be defined as a “Jersey Joke.” We have some 8.8 million residents. Only a 1 percent fraction of that population can be branded as “crooks.” But the “crooks,” convicted or awaiting their trials, hardly represent the real Garden State.
The real deal is New Jersey’s brilliant universities (Princeton is always ranked No. 1 in the nation in present and recent years) – and New Jersey is the home of such global superstars as Frank Sinatra (ironically, his last name starts with “Sin”), Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Bon Jovi, Thomas Edison, the “Wizard” of Menlo Park, Albert Einstein (lived and taught classes in Princeton), and innumerable authors, historians, educators, entrepreneurs, not to mention America’s inspiring symbol of Freedom – the Statue of Liberty on the Jersey waterfront, and the legendary Ellis Island, which made America a “Melting Pot,” and the State’s own prominence in the American Revolution, where New Jersey is known as “The Crossroads of the American Revolution.”
And Princeton, not to forget our heritage, was once the Capital of the United States during that great “Tax Revolt” of 1776, the birth of a new nation with Thomas Jefferson’s
”Declaration of Independence.”
I could go on ad infinitum….but my media space is limited to only the crème de crème.
I’ll leave you with God BlessAmerica!
Gordon Bishop
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