Illegal business may slow slightly in New Jersey, where the selling of body parts and false Gucci handbags and money laundering has ruled the roost. In an FBI sting, 44 people were arrested, mainly city officials. This was the result of a 10-year long investigation.
The anti-corruption sweep included the three-weeks-in-office, 32 year old Peter Cammarano, mayor of Hoboken. Two other mayors were also arrested, plus five rabbis, two state assemblymen, several city councilmen, local commissioners, regulatory inspectors and other government officials.
“The list of people we arrested sounds like it should be the roster from a meeting of community leaders,” said head of the FBI’s Newark office, Weysan Dun. “But sadly they weren’t meeting in a boardroom this morning. They were in the FBI booking room.”
It was a money-for-access scheme that involved mayors receiving cash in diners, to rabbis depositing untraceable money into charities, to Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, ‘the kidney salesman,’ brokering body parts.
Rosenbaum has been charged with buying kidneys from donors in Israel for $10,000 and selling them to American transplant recipients for $160,000. He has been marketing illegal kidneys for 10 years. “I am what you call a matchmaker,” Rosenbaum told undercover agents.
The sting began when a northern New Jersey real estate developer and son of a prominent rabbi in the Syrian community in Deal, N.J., turned government witness, after being accused of defrauding a bank of $25 million. He is out on a $10 million bond and will receive credits for assisting the FBI investigation.
Over a three year period the witness, turned undercover agent, met with government officials, who took a total of $650,000 in bribes. Rabbis and their associates washed millions of dollars for the witness, through charities and connections reaching from Deal to Brooklyn, Israel and Switzerland.
Patrick Murray, a New Jersey voter for more than three decades, said citizens of the country’s most densely populated state were inured to corruption problems. “They don’t see any way out of it.”
Even though people were aware that an FBI investigation had been ongoing since 1999 and there had been 130 arrests and convictions, the corruption simply continued.
Perhaps the arrested government officials will meet up with Bernard Madoff and exchange notes.
