Once again, the Garden State makes the news, and not in a good way:
The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, two state assemblymen, five rabbis and dozens of others were rounded up early Thursday as the F.B.I. swept across New Jersey and Brooklyn as part of a two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation, the authorities said.
The case ranges from the Jersey Shore to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and even reaches into the State House in Trenton. It apparently began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in the seaside town of Deal, N.J. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, the case mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey’s recent past.
“For these defendants, corruption was a way of life,” Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said at a 12:30 p.m. news conference. “They existed in an ethics-free zone.”
Some would say that the entire New Jersey political system is an ethics-free zone.
Oh well, at least my hometown wasn’t implicated.
