WHERE DOES FULOP’S MONEY COME FROM?
Lots of wealthy backers, including developers, but Fulop says, ‘So what?’ — no evidence of corruption
Here at TNJD, we’ve already written about the sources of funds for one of Fulop’s rivals, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who’s cashed in on money from Wall Street, investment companies, drug companies, AIPAC, and other wealthy donors for years. Coming: we’ll take a look at where the money comes from for Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor; Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association; Steve Sweeney, the former senate president; and Rep. Mikie Sherrill.
Steve Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City and one of six Democratic gubernatorial candidates competing in the June 10 primary, gets a lot of money from developers, real estate companies, real estate lawyers and their ilk. But is he “just that corrupt,” as Rep. Mikie Sherrill claimed last week, in a high-profile attack on Fulop?
The New Jersey Democrat took a long look at where Fulop’s money has come from, going back to 2005, when he first ran for city council in Jersey City, through his 2025 gubernatorial campaign – and including his super PAC, the Coalition for Progress. We examined records at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the New Jersey Election Enforcement Commission (ELEC), a wide range of media accounts, and conducted interviews with people familiar with Fulop’s role in Jersey City politics. And we conducted a lengthy interview with Fulop himself.
Our conclusion? Like virtually every politician in America, Fulop has solicited funds – often in big chunks, in his case, mostly at $4,900 or more a clip – from a wide range of wealthy people. But we couldn’t find any evidence that Fulop is “corrupt” or that he’s traded favors for his donors in exchange for contributions.
Not surprisingly, Fulop agrees. “The fact of the matter is, I did away with tax abatements in Jersey City. So, when you’re talking about, people got a benefit from supporting me, it’s a tax abatement you’re talking about, and I didn’t do one for eight years,” he told The New Jersey Democrat, in an interview. “You show me a mayor in the country who doesn’t have a relationship with real estate, because real estate is part of growth. And if somebody wants to support me, and they got nothing in exchange for it, then so what? So what?”
An investigative article in NJ.com, owner of the Newark Star-Ledger concluded years ago that there was no evidence of corruption involving Fulop in Jersey City. “NJ Advance Media found no evidence that any particular Jersey City contract was awarded for the purpose of currying political favor on behalf of the mayor, or that any contract recipient was unqualified for the work for which they're being paid,” it said.
Fulop pointed out that in his early days in Jersey City politics as a member of the city council, in 2008 and 2012 he succeeded over opposition in passing pay-to-play laws for the city. (Pay-to-play are designed to restrict the ability of contractors doing business with the city from influencing people who make decisions.) The laws been in effect ever since, and Fulop says that he’s adhered to them. “The pay-to-play law that I passed actually became the pay-to-play law for the state of New Jersey, he said. “And we complied with it. And how do you know that we complied with it? Because there’s never been a shred of an investigation.”
During his first term as mayor (2013-2017), Fulop says that he did make use of tax abatements, which are essentially giveaways to wealthy developers to invest in projects that, well, they might invest in anyway. In his second and third terms (2017-2025), he says, he stopped using them – with a couple of exceptions, mostly to do with affordable housing, he said. In those two cycles, he won reelection by overwhelming margins: 77 percent in 2017 and 67 percent in 2021.
Fulop’s outsider campaign for governor, in which he’s explicitly challenging the traditional machine politics that’s been controlled by county bosses for decades, is fueled by several pots of cash – all of which are continuing to accumulate funds even as this article is written. His official campaign war chest, Fulop for Governor, has raised a total of $2,891,706, according a 2025 summary posted at ELEC, going back to his 2023 announcement that he planned to run for governor. On top of that, Fulop has qualified for an additional $5,500,000 in public matching funds from the state of New Jersey, which is the maximum allowed under state law. (Both Sherrill and Gottheimer have also reached the $5.5 million limit.) Adding those two sums together, it means that Fulop’s campaign war chest has reached at least $8,391,706.
Should Fulop spend all that, plus whatever’s still coming in, he’ll bump up against the limit set by the state for allowable campaign spending in a 2025 primary, for candidates who accept public money: $8.7 million.
We’ll get to where all that money is coming from in a minute. First, however, there’s the super PAC. Ever since the regrettable Citizens United ruling in 2010 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which effectively eliminated ceilings on money spent for elections, nearly all candidates today rely on super PACs to support campaigns. Super PACs can accept virtually unlimited contributions, and Fulop’s super PAC, called Coalition for Progress (CFP), is no exception. CFP’s stockpile of cash is enormous, and none of its spending on behalf of Fulop counts as part of the $8.7 million spending cap under ELEC’s rules.
According to the FEC, for the past five election cycles, CFP has amassed quite a stack of dollar bills. Its take, cycle by cycle:
2015-2016 $4,275,456
2017-2018 $ 189,248
2019-2020 $ 269,341
2021-2022 $3,130,981
2023-2024 $3,661,929
2025- $1,565,012
TOTAL $13,091,967
Although a minor portion of that money was spent in various ways over the years, Fulop’s combined war chest for 2025, including for his campaign and by the super PAC, has amassed more than $21 million.
By the way, under the law, a super PAC is supposed to be completely independent of whatever candidate it chooses to support. That includes a prohibition on coordination between the candidate and the super PAC. In practice, no one really believes that there isn’t some sort of sub rosa contact between campaigns and super PACs, such as quiet signaling from the candidate about where the super PAC should spend its millions and what its message, in ads, ought to be. In Fulop’s case, the treasurer of the Coalition for Progress is Drew Nussbaum. And Nussbaum is the business partner of Jaclyn Fulop, Steve Fulop’s wife, in a lucrative physiotherapy company with six locations. (Here we hasten to add that nearly every super PAC ever created has close ties to the candidate it spends its millions on.) Feel free to imagine that Fulop quietly explains his campaign strategy to his wife, Jaclyn, who then shares it with Nussbaum – but if so, that would be illegal, and we’re certain that both the Fulops and Nussbaum have lawyers who’ve told them so.
Between Open Secrets (for 2015 to 2024) and the FEC (for 2025), there’s a lot information about contributors to CFP. (Go ahead, take a look.) Start with 2025: so far this year, according to the latest filings at the FEC, at least 99 individual donations have been made to CFP. The seven biggest are:
Amalgamated Transit Union Trade union $200,000
Yan Moshe Hudson Regional $150,000
Jonathan Schwartz BNE Real Estate $100,000
William Melms William Guarini, Inc. $100,000
John Scerbo Daybreak Express $100,000
Lionel Jorge Insurance $ 50,000
William Guarini, Inc. (See above.) $ 50.000
Eight others, including developers and real estate businesspeople, gave $25,000 each. Together, just those 15 contributors pitched in $950,000, or 61 percent of CFP’s total take in 2025, as of March 31.
Between 2015 and 2024, as Coalition for Progress geared up and got going, it pulled substantial cash from key industries and firms. More than $2.7 million came from real estate firms, construction firms, contractors, and homebuilders. Another $613,000 came from lawyers, often those that deal in real estate.
During his career as a member of the city council and then during three terms as mayor, Fulop’s own campaign war chest – plus the funds raised directly for his gubernatorial campaign – followed a similar pattern. Most of his campaign funds, as distinct from the super PAC, came from businesses in and outside Jersey City, and the vast majority of his cash came from big donors. An analysis of data from New Jersey ELEC shows that between 2023, when he began his gubernatorial campaign, and the first quarter of 2025, just 437 donors – each contributing $4,900 each – made up three-quarters of the contributions to his gubernatorial war chest. The biggest chunk, more than $500,000 of the total raised (out of just under $3 million), came from the real estate industry, according to a chart published in the Jersey City Times.
According to Fulop, there’s nothing nefarious in any of this, and he insists that not a single one of his contributors got anything from him in exchange. “You have real estate people that see the city booming, and growing, and they love that, because I’m unapologetically pro-growth as a mayor, along with housing, especially affordable housing. And people support me because the city’s done well. So, what’s the point? What’s the point?” he told TNJD, referring to the criticism that he’s beholden to developers. “There’s no quid pro quo.”
Some national candidates – such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic senator from Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the House member from New York – have raised the vast majority of their funds from small donors. Sanders has often said that his average donation is just $27, and in just the first quarter of 2025, AOC pulled in $9.5 million from a staggering 266,000 donors, whose contributions averaged $21 each. But Fulop points out that for a statewide candidate in New Jersey without a national donor base, that’s impossible.
“The campaign, when we launched it, I tried to leverage a network of people that I knew, or relationships that I have, of people who could get me to a substantial place. And the reason I did that was because people didn’t think I was viable at the time, and I was trying to hit the maximum amount, threshold, to show viability,” he said. “And there really isn't anybody in the state that could do that with $27 donations.”
In the history of Fulop’s fundraising, one contribution stands out above all the others. In 2015, Vivek Garipalli – we know, you’ve never heard of him – gave a cool $1 million all at once to Coalition for Progress. At the time, Garipalli was the owner and founder of CarePoint, a hospital company that owned several hospitals in Hudson County, including Christ Hospital in Jersey City. What made the cash gift even more controversial, in addition to its sheer size, was the fact that it was made semi-anonymously under the name of something called DE First Holdings, which drew complaints from ethics and campaign finance watchdogs.
What followed, between 2015 and 2025, is an exceedingly complex set of events involving Garipalli’s CarePoint, Christ Hospital in Jersey City, the Hoboken University Medical Center, the Bayonne Medical Center, and Hudson Regional Hospital, a corporation owned by the above-named Yan Moshe, who this year alone has contributed $150,000 to the Fulop-linked super PAC. After a series of business maneuvers involving these entities, and as Christ Hospital was nearing bankruptcy and threatening to close, in April 2025 a federal judge resolved the whole thing by allowing Hudson Regional to take over the struggling CarePoint system and all three hospitals in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Bayonne. Moshe, the chairman of Hudson Regional, had made a series of “multi-million-dollar investments … to stabilize the financially distressed hospitals.”
In all of this, despite major campaign contributions to Fulop from Garipalli, Moshe, and others involved in these healthcare systems, it’s hard to find any wrongdoing or improper favors by Fulop to any of them. But on May 5, Mikie Sherrill’s campaign seemed to charge Fulop with doing exactly that:
In several well-publicized cases, Fulop has used his position as mayor to advance the financial interests of some of his largest real estate-connected donors. Among the most significant examples: Fulop backed the takeover of Christ Hospital by donors who have given over $1.5 million to his super PAC Coalition for Progress – including $1 million from former owner Vivek Garipalli [and] $400,000 from real estate developer Yan Moshe.
Asked about this by TNJD, Fulop rejected the implication that there is anything amiss. “It’s crazy,” he said:
The city has absolutely no ability to approve these things. It was approved by Phil Murphy. And the fact is that Yan [Moshe] is a friend of mine, and he’s been supportive, which I’m thankful for, and the fact is that he saved the hospital system in Hudson County. But the approval of the hospital system is via the state of New Jersey, not the city of Jersey City. So, the guy is a supporter because he’s a friend. What’s the big deal? What did we give him? And the benefit is that the hospital was about to go out of business. We had no buyers. CarePoint was on the brink of bankruptcy within three weeks. That’s common knowledge. And the fact is, they ended up going through bankruptcy, and if HRH [Hudson Regional Hospital] didn’t step in, it would have closed permanently, because there was no other buyer, and because the building was antiquated.
Fulop did express regret about the way the $1 million donation occurred in 2015:
Vivek [Garipalli] has been a friend for a long time. And he is a huge political supporter all over the country. Do I wish that he didn’t make that donation in the way that he did? Absolutely. But it was to the super PAC that I didn’t control. The problem, which I pushed [back on], was that they didn’t do the disclosure. But I didn’t control that. Do I wish that he didn’t do it like that? Of course. Do I have regret over the fact that I’m friends with him? No. … And what did he get for it? The guy ended up losing his shirt in the bankruptcy situation. He ended up losing like $30 million.
If Fulop didn’t precisely “back the takeover” of Christ Hospital, he certainly urged Governor Murphy to get involved and he welcomed the resolution of it all. We hasten to add that if anyone involved in any of this can let TNJD know what, if anything, Fulop did – improperly or unethically – during the high-stakes takeover of several Hudson County hospitals by HRH, we’ll investigate it and write about whatever we find. So far, however, Fulop’s questions (“What did we give him?” and “What did he get for it?”) stand.