Local news

Guido Fawkes and the Gunpowder plotters, by Crispijn van de Passe, 17th century. Wikipedia.

In local news, as you've probably heard, New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R) and his son Adam have been arrested for corruption—specifically, with doing favors in Albany for an environmental contracting firm and a real estate developer in return for their paying Adam a hefty, work-free salary (eventually, $10,000 a month).

In a statement, Senator Skelos said: “I am innocent of the charges leveled against me. I am not saying I am just not guilty, I am saying that I am innocent. I fully expect to be exonerated by a public jury trial.”

Uh-huh:

In March, in another phone call recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call.”

It seems clear from another secretly recorded conversation cited in the 43-page complaint that Adam Skelos’s work with AbTech had little to do with his environmental expertise. In the conversation, recorded in February 2015 by a senior AbTech official after he began cooperating with investigators, Mr. Skelos acknowledged that he became a consultant for the company even though he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff.”

I'd like to think Bharara got an enjoyable chuckle out of that bit of audio.

Across the notorious bridge (the other day in Riverside, looking northward toward the GWB past a gaggle of tourist teenagers, I heard one of them say, "Hey, that's the bridge to Englewood!"—perfectly true, but I've never heard it expressed quite that way, Englewood being from most points of view a fairly insignificant aspect of what it's a bridge to, from immediately Fort Lee to broadly North America, and it was a humbling reminder of how parochial our perspectives basically all are), there were more indictments courtesy of a different US attorney, Paul Fishman, with one guilty plea, and a pretty coherent story, though without so much [expletive] detail, which apparently isn't Fishman's style.

The story is, of course, the story of how the accused plotted to punish Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich (D) (or as Governor Christie's then Senior Representative at the Port of New York and New Jersey, David Wildstein, called him, "this little Serbian") for his failure to cross party lines to support Christie's bid for a second term, when it was "time for some traffic problems" in Fort Lee in the first week of school, September 2013. (Only one life is known to have been lost due to the playing of this amusing game, that of Florence Genova, 91, who suffered a heart attack at home and whose ambulance got stuck in the traffic, but there were also a number of car crashes and other inconveniences.)

It's really fascinating because it's one of those rare cases where an actual political conspiracy comes to light, not a paranoid fantasy but a genuine fairly elaborate plot, with the guys "working the cones" under the pretext that the Port Authority was conducting some vague kind of research that necessitated the lane closures, and the storm of emails keeping everybody on script.

Wildstein is the one who pleaded guilty, while Christie's deputy executive director at the Port Authority Bill Baroni (author of the inspirational Fat Kid Got Fit and So Can You, 2012, not about Governor Christie) and his deputy chief of staff in the governor's office, Bridget Kelly, both deny the charges. There is, naturally, no evidence that Governor Christie knew anything about this complex plan on the part of three of his closest associates. I mean stands to reason, why would they have told Christie about this? Why would he even want to know that his employees were trying to avenge him for Sokolich's blow to his vanity and to his project of getting a really huge majority in the 2012 election to show the national Republican Party what a terrific vote-getter he was, so that he could dump New Jersey two years into the term for which he had fought so hard to become a full-time presidential candidate?

Most interesting to me was what Kelly said, in a Friday news conference:

"I am not stupid, weepy, insecure, unqualified, or overwhelmed."

Those are the words used to describe her in the report prepared by another Christie crony (an ancient pal of Rodolfo Giuliani as well), Randy Mastro, in which Christie redefined chutzpa last year by having his own attorney "investigate" the allegations that the governor had somehow been involved in the conspiracy to do carry out his desire for vengeance. The purpose was to claim that the whole thing was Kelly's work, carried out because you know how those crazy womenz are, with the indefatigable energy and capacity for detail work that you naturally get when you're a hysteric, and somehow connected to a reputed affair with Christie's mysteriously unindicted campaign chief and confidant, Bill Stepien.

I sort of doubt she was a hysteric in the fall of 2013, but I can't imagine how she wouldn't be in a murderous rage by now with Christie and Stepien, given the treachery with which these vile people have repaid her loyalty as they themselves apparently skate. And she does sound pretty angry. Is she not implicating the governor because she is, after all, a Republican? I swear I want to sit down with her and say, "Look, Bridget, this guy is a shit, however you may feel about teachers' unions and property taxes, he should not be holding public office. Take him down!"

Correction: The post, written during a remarkably noisy family conversation, originally listed Stepien as one of the indicted parties and didn't mention Baroni at all. Sorry, as David Brooks wouldn't say.