Trenton, NJ’s mayor has been arrested today amid allegations that he has been using the city government to lean on contractors.
Mayor Tony Mack was arrested this morning at his home by FBI agents on corruption charges linked to $119,000 in bribes for a parking garage project in the city, authorities said.
Mack campaign supporter Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni, who owns JoJo’s Steak House in Trenton, was also arrested at his home in Ewing, spokeswoman Barbara Woodruff said. Mack’s brother Ralphiel Mack, who is the coach of the Trenton Central High School football team, surrendered to the FBI later this morning.
“The investigation revealed evidence of a conspiracy among the defendants and other to corrupt certain functions of Trenton City government in favor of a purported developer seeking to building a parking garage on City-owned property in exchange for cash payments totaling approximate $119,000, a total of $54,000 that the defendants actually accepted in one way or another and another $65,000 that they anticipated accepting,” according to the criminal complaint filed today.
The FBI caught the whole scheme on secretly recorded conversations, including this bit.
“We want this,” Giorgianni said, according to the complaint. “What do you think we did all this for? I like to make money for my friends. I like to do it like the Boss Tweed way. You know Boss Tweed ran Tamany Hall?”
Read the whole story, and you won’t find a word about which party Mayor Mack belongs to.
It’s New Jersey, and he is of course a Democrat. Here is his official web site. His official one-man platform begins with this now amusing claim.
What he meant to say to the exploiters was, “You remember Boss Tweed, right?”
Mack is, by the way, also a union man. He is past president of the local AFSCME chapter.
A public sector union boss, and a Democrat, engaged in corruption in New Jersey? Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Where is the media to connect the dots and build the “culture of corruption” narrative that leads all the way to President Obama and his pledge to carry Big Labor’s agenda as his own? Hmmm?
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