THE NORCROSS FIASCO

A courageous A.G. fights back, but Democratic pols are (mostly) silent.

When Superior Court Judge Peter Warshaw summarily dismissed the racketeering charges brought by Attorney General Matt Platkin against South Jersey political boss George Norcross, his brother, and associates on February 26, without even allowing a jury a chance to examine the extensive evidence, there should have been howls of outrage from the Democrats seeking to be the next governor.

Hardly a peep – with one prominent exception (see below).

Platkin, who says that he’ll appeal Warshaw’s decision, had charged Norcross with running a “criminal enterprise,” extorting and threatening other developers and a nonprofit that owned land along the Camden waterfront to compel them to sell to Norcross. Along the waterfront, Norcross and his allies erected large corporate buildings in order take advantage of a state tax credit scheme – one that they themselves drafted! Norcross’s own company, and those of his cronies, ultimately qualified for more than $1 billion in tax credits.

In charging the boss, Platkin said that Norcross “decides which candidates the South Jersey Democratic Party will support and who will be prominently featured on voting ballots. And he intimidates and retaliates against those who cross him, using his control over government agencies to cause those opponents to lose government contracts or jobs.”

Of course, it’s well known that Norcross Inc. controls or influences pretty much every Democratic party committee in the southern half of the state. Over years, starting in the 1990s, Norcross essentially bought and paid for Democratic county committees and politicians, building a political empire that gave him enormous power in Trenton and beyond. Steve Sweeney, the former state senate president who’s currently running for governor, owes his political career to The Boss (and we don’t mean Bruce Springsteen).

Example: back in 2018, Norcross put his thumb on the scale to ensure that then-State Senator Jeff Van Drew of Cape May got the Democratic party nod to run for Congress in New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district. The authors of The New Jersey Democrat covered this for the now defunct Cape May Sentinel back then, when a would-be challenger to Van Drew told us that Norcross elbowed him out of the running. (Van Drew promptly switched parties to Republican and joined the Donald Trump movement. At the time, Norcross was a member in good standing at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.)

In order to take over the Camden waterfront, Platkin’s brief detailed how Norcross exploited his victims fear of his “ruthless tactics” to destroy their reputations and cripple them financially to get their property rights.

But the judge said these tactics were “permissible hard bargaining not uncommon in high-level negotiations between businesses.”

So, what future governor of New Jersey wants a powerful political boss controlling local elected officials, leaders, government contracts, threatening competitors and drafting state programs that primarily benefit him? Most of them, it seems, if their muted response to the judge’s action is any indication.

Not surprisingly Steve Sweeney, Norcross’s childhood friend and longtime political ally, declared him innocent and called the lawsuit political prosecution. (Meanwhile, in county after county in south Jersey, Sweeney is winning the backing for local Democratic organizations.)

Representative Josh Gottheimer said the judge’s decision showed how the court system is supposed to work.

Sean Spiller managed to bemoan the longtime control of New Jersey politics by party bosses, but on Norcross he merely said that the “dismissal of the charges leaves many unanswered questions that will only build distrust.”

Representative Mikie Sherrill said she has been “monitoring” the case.

Steve Fulop, mayor of Jersey City, noted that technicalities often decide cases, not right and wrong.

And Ras Baraka has said nothing yet.

There’s a long track record of investigations, probes, and legal challenges to the Norcross machine.

The tax incentive program controversy dates back to the earliest days of the Murphy administration. Within days of taking office he directed the State Comptroller’s Office to complete a performance audit of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s (EDA) tax incentive program, which was created in 2013. That’s when Governor Chris Christie and state senate president Steve Sweeney were decrying the money spent on public employee pensions and demanding dramatic cuts to teacher benefits. But the EDA was doling out billions of dollars in tax breaks, with little oversight, to companies that promised to provide jobs in Camden and elsewhere in South Jersey.

The State Comptroller’s report blasted the agency that was in charge of the tax credit program for approving $11 billion – $11 billion! – in tax credits without procedures in place to make sure companies actually created or retained the jobs they said they would.

Governor Murphy lambasted the program as a “black hole” and formed a task force to investigate oversight of the firms that claimed they would leave the state without the tax incentives. The investigators found that Norcross-connected firms falsely claimed they would move out of state without the credits – a Sopranos-like version of: “Hey! Pay us or, um, we’re outta here.” Of course, they never intended to relocate. Cooper Health, where Norcross was board chairman, boosted its tax award by $32 million by falsely making this claim.

The task force and investigations by ProPublica and WNYC further detailed how the tax credit legislation was drafted specifically to help Norcross-allied companies. Amazingly, the law itself was written by an attorney from the high-powered Parker McCay law firm, Kevin Sheehan, where none other than Norcross’s brother Philip is managing partner. Among the beneficiaries of the law were bigger tax breaks for the 76ers, Cooper Health System, and the nuclear services giant Holtec International. Norcross is an unpaid member of Holtec’s board.

The investigations unearthed the ways Norcross-allied companies lied about how they would leave the state without the tax credits when they had no intention of doing so and they made claims they could not support about the jobs they created. They omitted key facts on applications about being barred by other states from doing work there.

The EDA tried to hold up some of the tax credits that were slated to be awarded in future years. In particular, it paused the remaining years of Holtec’s tax incentives, alleging the firm had failed to disclose in applications a 10-day debarment it received in Tennessee in 2010 and had misrepresented an offer of free land from South Carolina.

Holtec in turn sued the authority in March 2020, alleging breach of contract and related offenses over the stalled incentives. Holtec won its case in the lower courts. The legal fight ended in October, 2024 when the New Jersey Supreme Court refused to re-examine these lower court rulings.

Despite all the evidence detailed in press exposes, task force investigations, the Attorney General’s lawsuit against the Norcross family and their hardball tactics to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers, Governor Phil Murphy showed up – with four other ex-governors – on January 28 to praise George Norcross at the ground-breaking for a $3 billion expansion of Cooper Health, financed largely with state money. And up the road his attorney general was still in court against the Norcross “criminal enterprise.”

Par for the course, New Jersey’s Republicans are calling for the impeachment of Platkin, perhaps the state’s most courageous public official. Democrats in Trenton speaking out in defense of the Democratic attorney general are hard to find.

So who’s the one Jersey pol saying what has to be said about Norcross? “An attorney general that is trying to change our broken politics in New Jersey and stand up to lawlessness from the White House will of course ruffle feathers and invite retaliation,” said Senator Andy Kim, who’s built a political career despite roadblocks thrown up by Norcross in south Jersey. “I respect AG Platkin for being in the arena of public service and taking on the hard fights that many shy away from. Not everyone will agree with all of his actions as he has raised concerns about both Democrats and Republicans, but we need that political and partisan independence now more than ever, especially in our law enforcement.”

We’ll give the last word to Charlie Stile, the longtime columnist and reporter. Now the unsettling question for the progressive activists who challenged the Democratic machine in Camden, Norcross’s base of political and community operations, and for the neighborhood residents who fought for redress and recognition in the shadow of office buildings rising along the Delaware River, is this: Will New Jersey’s corroded system ever change?