Chris Christie remembered it as the hottest press conference he had ever attended. He stood behind the gubernatorial podium in June 2011 on a sad-looking street in Camden—the most physically and financially distressed city in New Jersey, and one of the most dangerous and impoverished in the country. A plan to hold the press conference inside the auditorium of the 136-year-old Lanning Square elementary school behind him was nixed because it was actually cooler outside, at well over ninety degrees.
Across the street, a woman living in one of two or three houses still inhabited on the block looked on from a front stoop protected by iron bars. They called these “bird cages.” All around us were sagging two- and three-story row houses interspersed with trash-strewn vacant lots where tiny heroin baggies blew like tumbleweeds.
Fifty-seven percent of children in this city were living in poverty; Camden had an unemployment rate more than twice the national average. One-hundred-seventy-five open-air drug markets were counted through a city that’s just nine square miles, tucked around two bridges that lead over the Delaware River to Philadelphia.
Christie arrived in Camden in this, his second year on the job, in order to save it.
AS U.S. ATTORNEY, Christie pushed through a plan to allow fugitives to turn themselves in at Camden churches in exchange for possible leniency, drug counseling, and employment services. He publicly feuded with a recalcitrant Supreme Court chief justice who blocked his plan, but he won in the end and the program was the second most successful of its kind in the country.
As a gubernatorial candidate he campaigned in Camden and other cities, which was unusual for a Republican, and even filmed a campaign ad at Camden’s sprawling, self-governing Tent City of homeless veterans and addicts.
But over the first twenty months of his term he pursued just one of eleven campaign promises for helping cities. To balance the state budget Christie nipped and tucked from discretionary items such as after-school programs and legal aid for poor people. His budget meant fewer police officers in Camden, Newark, and Trenton—among the most dangerous medium-sized cities in the country. Statewide urban poverty continued unabated, with some of the worst unemployment and home foreclosure rates in the country. Christie’s Department of Transportation cleared that Tent City in Camden and put a $45,000 fence around it, but many of those displaced moved across the street, creating an even larger Tent City.
New Jersey was one of the most unaffordable states to live in, with a quarter of renters paying half of their income toward housing. Yet Christie took aggressive steps to dismantle the state’s housing safety net, which through the years had created sixty thousand new homes for those with low and moderate incomes, senior citizens, and the disabled. Christie saw the system as fundamentally unfair because it was created by unelected Supreme Court justices who preempted local zoning laws to require affordable housing. Christie thought the law increased property taxes, as towns were forced to accept more residents and associated costs for education and municipal services.
In Christie’s second month in office he issued an executive order suspending affordable housing regulations in the state for ninety days. Later he tried to seize $160 million from towns’ affordable housing trust funds, which funded homes for the poor and elderly. He even dissolved the state agency in charge of issuing housing regulations.
At every step, he was sued by the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group. The state Supreme Court regularly ruled against him, and in the end he did little more than delay construction of affordable housing for several years.
Christie vetoed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $8.50 an hour because of a provision to tie the increases to the rate of inflation. (The increase was later approved by a ballot referendum.) And he blocked a bill to increase home heating-and-cooling subsidies in order to qualify the poor for more federal food stamp dollars. Meanwhile, the federal government ranked New Jersey second worst in the country for processing applications for food stamps in a timely manner and threatened to take away millions of dollars in funding if the state didn’t improve its system.
In 2012, I crunched the data to reveal that the number of general assistance welfare recipients had quietly plummeted under Christie, with thousands denied monthly cash benefits of about two hundred dollars because of a tweak in requirements. Applicants had to, as always, attend job training or show proof that they were looking for work, but now they also had to attend four weekly appointments at the welfare office before they could receive their first checks. Advocates said this put undue strain on those desperate enough to seek aid—they were already dealing with extreme poverty, homelessness, mental illness, or addiction.
Sure enough, I interviewed a nineteen-year-old homeless woman suffering from multiple mental illnesses who managed to take two buses to the welfare office in downtown Camden for three weeks in a row to hand in paperwork showing she was looking for a job. But when she missed the fourth week, she had to start the process all over again. In eight months, five thousand applicants failed to meet the new requirement, helping to save $9 million. The change was a fiscal success.
Christie was more pragmatic than ideological on these issues. Even as he lampooned Obamacare, the federal health care law loathed by Republicans, and rejected its provision to create a state health exchange, he accepted one key element of the law: federal funds to make 175,000 more New Jerseyans eligible for Medicaid. Christie’s state treasurer later revealed to us that under this Obamacare provision New Jersey saved $150 million in health care costs in a single year. Christie didn’t talk about that.
WHEN CHRISTIE FINALLY started speaking up about urban issues, well into his first term, it was generally in the context of education reform. Inner-city children, he said, were “enslaved” by a public school system run by corrupt teachers’ unions that prioritized rich contractual benefits over children’s education.
Which was why the governor was here under the Camden sun to announce a major education initiative. There would be a new kind of school rising in urban areas, he said, run by private entities but paid for by taxpayers in some sort of public-private partnership—like a charter school, but not. The plan was sketchy, really, but Christie revealed that a bill would be introduced in the legislature the following week to create these schools. He did not say who would sponsor the bill, but he vowed to sign it.
I asked him: Would one of these new schools come to Camden?
He said that would be up to local school board members.
Then why are you here, in Camden?
This place, he said, symbolized the failure of government to deliver quality schools for its poorest children.
Christie failed to mention that earlier in the year, he canceled construction of a new public school in Camden at the very spot where he was speaking.
FOR NINE YEARS, this Camden neighborhood called Lanning Square had been promised a new school. A few years earlier former governor Jon Corzine promised a modern $42.4 million Lanning Square School. Construction would begin in 2010, Corzine said, because it was “inconceivable” that children were still learning in a school from the 1800s, a place where pieces of the stone veneer at the entrance fell to the sidewalk below, regularly and without warning.
To make way for the new Lanning Square School, the Corzine administration purchased under the threat of eminent domain thirty-four properties, some occupied and some vacant, and knocked them down. Furniture and a color scheme for the new school were chosen.
The new elementary school meant that Hilda Vera-Luciano would finally have to move. She had lived on her little block for thirty-seven years, and raised her family here. But the block was designated as “blighted” by the city, which meant that her home could be seized for redevelopment. She got so many letters through the years threatening eminent domain that she left packed boxes in her living room, stacked up, ready to go. Vera-Luciano, now a great-grandmother, wasn’t reluctant to leave, but she was insulted by the cold indifference from the powerful. “I’m just getting tired of going up and down like a yo-yo,” she told me.
In 2009, someone from the city finally came and gave her a $64,000 check. In came the bulldozers, turning the family home into rubble. She moved elsewhere in Camden, got a small three-bedroom for $52,000.
The politicians defended what they had done. Progress, imperfect as it was, was happening. The kids would get the school. Vera-Luciano would get a new place and some extra dough. The ground of the city would be rejuvenated. Camden was on its way back.
Not so fast, Carlton Soudan, a third-generation Camden resident, warned me. He had seen it all before. Politicians “do the bait-and-switch on you,” he said. “Same old song.”
And sure enough, a new school wouldn’t replace Vera-Luciano’s house any time soon.
Because when Christie came into office in 2010, the hard-charging governor, frustrated with years of Democratic waste at the state’s school construction authority, froze almost all construction funding for the state’s poorest school districts. The agency had been deeply mismanaged and was now broke; by the time Christie got into office it was not building promised schools for New Jersey’s poor children. The new governor needed time to look at the books and figure out how to proceed, he said, prudently and cost-effectively. The perfect problem for a corruption buster with fiscal sense.
In his second year Christie announced that he had determined that the state simply couldn’t build all the schools it had promised. So he restructured the school construction program to ensure that schools weren’t green-lit based on “political whim.” Just ten schools throughout New Jersey would get built now, instead of fifty-two. The lucky ten would be selected through a new, complicated formula.
When the results came back, it was bad news for Camden: Construction on the Lanning Square School was canceled, indefinitely. Lanning Square finished eleventh on the list of ten schools. Officials said that although it qualified under the criteria of the school construction agency, it failed under a separate rubric created by the state Department of Education. Camden lost bureaucracy’s game.
Years later, Christie officials refused to provide me details about how they came up with the final score, saying it was “deliberative and therefore will not be provided.” In other words: protected under the state’s strong secrecy laws. Two more school construction lists came out in the coming months and years, but Lanning Square still somehow failed to make the cut.
“Shocked,” the Camden school district’s construction official said when the project was canceled. This was a huge priority for the city, the centerpiece of a redevelopment plan to revitalize the whole neighborhood. The state had already spent at least $5.8 million clearing the land and buying property, such as Vera-Luciano’s home, to make way for the school. Now what?
The conventional wisdom in the city was that the white Republican governor had abandoned his black and Latino constituents. Of course he had, they said. The betrayal was felt more severely when it was revealed that the land where the school was supposed to go would become a construction staging area for a new medical school being built nearby by Cooper University Hospital, whose chairman was none other than South Jersey political boss George E. Norcross III.
OUT OF THE corner of my eye, I saw him, Norcross himself. A smallish and elegantly appointed man in his fifties, Norcross was standing at the back of that 2011 press conference as Christie, under the Camden heat, said this: “I believe that Camden is a place that has bipartisan leadership, folks who care little about party, and much more about getting the results.”
Now things were coming together. Christie made that comment in reference to Norcross, the legendary unelected leader of the Democrats in these parts of Jersey. Norcross was said to control everything from the Statehouse in Trenton to the hospital in Camden, like a political Wizard of Garden State Oz.
“Folks” who care about “getting the results”? Norcross has a sign reading “CAN DO CLUB” on his office desk.
“Second place is first loser,” Norcross once said. “I love that.”
I could not believe Norcross himself was standing on the curb in Camden, watching a Christie news conference. I had only once or twice seen the man at a public event. For a decade, he had been a Democrat in the shadows.
Now, after Christie stepped down from the podium and returned to his gubernatorial SUV, Norcross held an unprecedented, impromptu press conference of his own. Here he was, sweatless in a perfectly cropped suit as if he were in an air-conditioned space all his own. His driver idled nearby.
Norcross told us Camden public schools were “juvenile prisons” and said that tax dollars to Camden were going down the “sewer.” Then he pointed to the sewer, for emphasis. “See that sewer drain?” he said. “That’s what it would be like to give the school board ten cents.” We were standing down the block from a growing piece of his empire, Cooper University Hospital. And we were next door to a brand-new building now rising—Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, essentially gifted to Norcross in 2009 by former governor Corzine in a surprise, late-night executive order.
Norcross didn’t need another crumbling public school next to his expanding medical empire; he wanted one of these new schools, the ones that Christie had just promised. Norcross then talked about creating schools throughout the city—effectively replacing a chunk of the school system in the state’s lowest-performing district. He said this would be “the most important thing to happen in Camden in twenty years.”
Norcross later told me he didn’t know anything about Christie’s plans for new schools until the Camden press conference. But Norcross and Christie had quietly developed an unusual and fruitful political friendship. The unelected Democratic power broker and the future Republican presidential candidate had just gone to a Phillies–Mets game together, in fact. Norcross said he didn’t recall if they even talked about Camden and education.
And yet after the press conference, Norcross’s younger brother—Donald Norcross, a state senator and soon-to-be congressman—sponsored a bill in the legislature to create “renaissance schools,” which would use private dollars to construct and manage public schools. These new types of schools would be run by for-profit entities not subject to public bidding and disclosure laws. Norcross’s renaissance schools bill moved through the system faster than almost any Democratic legislation during the Christie era. Months later Christie held the bill signing in Camden, back at the old Lanning Square School.
“It is unconscionable to me to see what is going on in this city,” Christie said, flanked by Senator Norcross. “I can no longer sit by as governor and allow these children’s voices to be silenced.”
Soon, not one but five new Camden renaissance schools would be planned. All would have the Norcross family name on them—The KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy. The Norcrosses didn’t fund the schools, but they provided something more important in New Jersey: political muscle. The KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy would rise right where the Lanning Square School was supposed to go, and it would benefit from millions in tax dollars already spent on the scuttled public school project.
The day of the bill signing I called up a former school board member, Jose Delgado, who was worried about this newfangled renaissance school—worried about public money headed to the private sector, about the loss of local control, about who would be making money off these public dollars. There shouldn’t be a bill signing today, Delgado said. “The affair that should be occurring on this day is the opening of a school,” he said.
But to others, this seemed like a good deal. The schools would be 5 percent cheaper per student for the taxpayers, and unlike charter schools they were required to educate all students in the neighborhoods where they sat. They would be incentivized to cater to special education students and non–English speakers, the kinds of students who critics said were sometimes left behind by charters because they cost too much to educate and brought down test scores.
Technically, the plan had to be approved by the Camden School Board, which deadlocked 4–4, rendering it dead. But the Norcrosses had serious sway over the board, and two months later the school board came back, met behind closed doors, made a minor adjustment to the plan, and voted yes.
For Christie, the arrangement meant he saved tens of millions of dollars in further school construction costs, because renaissance schools had to use private financing to build their facilities. Plus, by injecting the philosophies of the private sector into urban education, Christie got a chance to do something he actually believed in. Years earlier Christie had worked as a lobbyist for Edison, a large for-profit manager of schools, and he even appointed the company’s CEO as his education commissioner. Signing a bill like this was in keeping with his ideological pedigree.
For Norcross, the school was a chance to build a positive legacy for his family name with an institution that would also buffer his medical school in downtown Camden.
There was nothing, Christie later told me, that was unholy about how this went down. The governor said he had never discussed the idea of ending construction of the Lanning Square public school in order to turn the project over to KIPP.
Regardless, what effectively happened was clear: A future Republican presidential candidate handed the state’s top Democratic political boss a major educational operation on six acres of a revitalizing downtown in the heart of South Jersey.
This deal was just one piece of the larger puzzle. Norcross controlled more votes in the legislature than anyone else. Not only was his childhood friend, Stephen Sweeney, the senate president, and not only was his brother, Donald, an important senator, but several other senators and assembly members throughout South Jersey and beyond owed their political lives to Norcross.
By working with Norcross—by dealing with him—Christie could infuse his term as governor with near limitless potential.
AS A KID, George E. Norcross III donned a bow tie and tagged along to meetings with his father, who as president of the four-county Regional Council of the AFL-CIO Central Labor Union was a major South Jersey political power player. The boy was instructed: “Don’t say anything. You can learn just by observing.” After the meetings, father explained to son how to read those rooms.
Norcross went to Rutgers University in Camden but dropped out after listening to a political science professor drone on. “He knew less about how politics is actually practiced than I did,” Norcross later told Philadelphia magazine. So he started an insurance business in downtown Camden and built a practice boosted by political connections and government contracts. In 1978, at the age of twenty-two, he got a patronage job as the head of the Camden Parking Authority and ran in political circles with Angelo Errichetti, the Camden mayor, state senator, and South Jersey political boss of his time.
Errichetti would soon get caught up in the corruption scandal known as Abscam, and the twenty-five-year-old Norcross became the campaign finance chairman for his successor in the mayor’s office, Randy Primas. By the end of the eighties Norcross was Primas’s primary financial backer.
Norcross ascended to the chairmanship of the Camden County Democratic Party in 1989, the only official job he would ever have in politics. He raised campaign cash through engineers, lawyers, and accountants who did business with the local government; in 1990, a political action committee associated with him funded $145,000 of the winning mayoral candidate’s $170,000 war chest. He shocked local politicos by taking out TV ads in a low-profile campaign against a Republican state senator who had once denied a political appointment to his father.
Norcross didn’t invent the game, but he played it better than damn near everyone, and his influence spread from Camden City to Camden County and then to all of South Jersey. As Christie was getting off to a stumbling start in politics in North Jersey, Norcross was cementing political control in the South. He was professionalizing local politics with pollsters, strategists, and a moderate message. He successfully ran women, minorities, and a high school football coach for office, developing one of the most diverse political coalitions around.
Government contractors funded the operation. Companies were instructed on how much money to contribute to which campaigns and political action committees by the number of invitations they received for fund-raisers; you need not attend, just send checks. Political fund-raisers were staged in Atlantic City casinos and exclusive golf clubs. They were called birthday parties or barbecues, lobster fests or clambakes, but they all fueled the Democratic machine.
When Norcross’s insurance company was absorbed by Commerce Bank, his fortune grew financially and politically. With Norcross as one of the executives at Commerce, the bank started doing business with hundreds of local governments and funding local candidates for office. Norcross’s power extended statewide, and he was said to regularly call Governor Jim McGreevey’s office with “instructions on hiring, contracts, and policy decisions.”
“The McGreeveys, the Corzines, they’re all going to be with me,” Norcross once said. “Because not that they like me, but because they have no choice.”
Buoyed by the influence that their flush campaign coffers bought, Norcross’s South Jersey Democrats ascended to leadership positions throughout the legislature. This is what drove Norcross—the belief that the southern part of the state had been shafted by the wealthier, more populous north when it came to governmental largesse. South Jersey would finally get its fair share, and Norcross would be the broker to make it happen. “For years, there has been a political order in this state, and we’re now rearranging the seats at the table,” Norcross said in 2002. “South Jersey Democrats are coming to have a presence, and many in the north don’t like it.”
Case in point: When Norcross made a rare trip to the Statehouse to personally seal a deal giving South Jersey a minor league hockey arena and civic center, he ended up in a legendary shoving match with Republican Senate copresident John Bennett, who was stalling the plan. Norcross uttered this, allegedly: “I will fucking destroy you.”
Bennett lost his reelection bid.
“He has those who stand in his way defeated or removed,” Bennett said. “I will never seek public office again.”
Norcross explained: “There have been times when my passion and intensity have gotten the better of me, and I’ve acted in ways that would not have made my mother proud.” But he said his motives were pure—he was fighting for South Jersey.
“No one will ever, ever again, not include or look down or double-cross South Jersey,” Norcross once said. “Never again will that happen. Because they know we put up the gun and we pulled the trigger and we blew their brains out.”
Norcross’s juice came in part from his association with the trade unions, which provided a wealth of political contributions and a farm team for future politicians. George’s brother, Donald, succeeded their father as the leader of the eighty-five-thousand-strong South Jersey AFL-CIO and the union’s legendary get-out-the-vote operation. Donald would soon be appointed to a seat in the Assembly (the assemblywoman who stepped aside got a library named after her) before heading over to the state Senate and shortly thereafter to Congress.
A third brother, Philip, formed the last piece of a three-headed political machine—he was a highly paid lobbyist whose law firm earned millions in government contracts. He was known as the policy wonk in the family, helping with writing legislation.
All of this has long been viewed warily by the government do-gooders who work in newsrooms and ivory towers. Norcross “combines the smoothness and outward style of a business leader with the wiles and savvy of an old-time political boss,” political scientist Ross K. Baker told the New York Times. “Then he has a volcanic temper, which is the sheathed sword that makes many people afraid to cross him. It’s a very formidable combination.”
In the legislature, rather than uttering his name, Democratic staffers used a euphemism that referred to Norcross’s impressive silver mane. “The gray-haired uncle,” they would say, “wants this done.”
The hair is thicker than thick, combed and classy—and it is the first thing you notice about him. When he smiles, it’s a toothy smile, a little strained. He sometimes juts out his bottom jaw, as if he’s about to crack his knuckles and punch you in the gut.
The perception of power is Norcross’s greatest weapon, backed by a personality that can be charming and threatening in the span of a single conversation.
IT HAS BEEN written that Christie met Norcross in early 2003, when they dined together at Panico’s in New Brunswick. Christie was U.S. Attorney at the time, and Norcross was coming into his own as the South Jersey Democratic leader. The intermediary was Michael Critchley, a prominent defense attorney who would one day represent Bridget Kelly, the woman at the center of the Bridgegate scandal.
Norcross sought the meeting, Christie told me. Christie obliged because he was “trying to get to know prominent people.” “He’s a significant businessman and operator, political operator, in the state. He wants to meet me? Sure, why not,” Christie thought. All it was, he said, was a “get-to-know-you dinner,” two hours about their respective backgrounds and families. It was, Christie said, “small talk.”
Norcross had a different recollection. He told me the men actually first met in the nineties, and their 2003 dinner was about something substantial—new federal regulations on health care compliance that he was dealing with at Cooper University Hospital, where he was the vice chairman at the time.
Soon enough, Norcross found himself dealing with a lot more than just compliance issues. The Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into a business partnership involving Norcross and the top assemblyman in New Jersey. At about the same time Christie himself as U.S. Attorney announced that his feds were probing a billboard company that had done business with Norcross and aides to Governor McGreevey.
As these investigations swirled, U.S. Attorney Christie was asked by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Monica Yant Kinney if he would dine again with Norcross considering his most recent legal issues. He said: “Anything I do or say, is only good for the moment.”
At the end of their conversation Christie randomly quoted his favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, from the song “Badlands”: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, / And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.” Christie’s criminal investigators were now looking into the Norcross empire. All direct communication, according to both men, ceased. Norcross lowered his profile and tried to keep his name out of the papers. He wasn’t successful.
“I WANT YOU to fire that fuck. You need to get this fuck Rosenberg for me and teach this jerk-off a lesson. He has to be punished . . . Rosenberg is history and he is done and anything I can do to crush his ass, I wanna do because I just think he’s just done, an evil fuck.”
Norcross’s most infamous moment—and closest brush with the law—came when a part-time councilman in tiny Palmyra Township started recording their conversations. John Gural’s tapes, which were later publicly released by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, included Norcross’s brutal takedown of Ted Rosenberg, a Democratic lawyer who opposed him. The tapes also depicted Norcross explaining how he kept a political serf in line: “I sat him down and said . . . ‘Don’t fuck with me on this one . . . if you ever do that and I catch you one more time doing it, you’re gonna get your fucking balls cut off.’ He got the message.”
After going through hundreds of hours of these tapes the New Jersey attorney general, a Democratic appointee, decided not to indict, instead kicking the case to U.S. Attorney Christie. In July 2005, Christie said he was investigating the matter. Gural and Rosenberg were hopeful that this political-corruption-busting prosecutor would rid South Jersey of Norcross. But Christie never called them to testify before a grand jury, and they soon told the press that they were worried that Christie was protecting Norcross.
The following month, January 2006, Christie dropped the case.
And he didn’t do it quietly. In an extraordinarily public move Christie wrote a six-page, seven-point letter explaining that he couldn’t pursue the investigation because the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office had, in so many words, screwed it up—perhaps intentionally, for “the protection of political figures.”
This was unusual, for a federal prosecutor to publicly lambaste state investigators. The attorney general at the time called Christie’s allegations “utter nonsense.”
By accusing others of politicizing the Norcross investigation, Christie was “freed of any responsibility for letting George Norcross get off of the hook,” Rosenberg said. “Chris Christie is first and foremost a political animal.”
A decade later, I asked Christie why he gave up on the Norcross case. “I’m not going to talk a lot about it, because I still feel under some ethical restrictions to discuss publicly a lot of the stuff that happened when I was U.S. Attorney that isn’t completely public,” he said. He also wouldn’t get into what he found out about why some of the Norcross tapes were deleted by the Attorney General’s Office. “There was no evidence to conclude what definitely happened. All I know is the investigation got messed up at the state AG’s office.”
The authorities did nail three people on tax fraud and campaign finance violations as part of the investigation, but illegalities were not pinned on Norcross himself. In the end, much of the recordings was determined to be little more than juicy gossip and political bravado.
“Christie, as I’ve come to know him now, is somebody who if he has a head shot he will take it,” Norcross later said. “If I had done something illegal, he would’ve indicted me. No doubt about it in my mind.” The fact that the Christie letter did not explicitly pronounce his innocence “disappointed” him.
The dropping of the Norcross case became a much-discussed riddle in the Trenton political world. Did Christie agree not to indict Norcross in order to establish a partnership with a man he could later make deals with as governor? Those who worked with Christie at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, even his detractors, doubt this—they say he wanted as many political indictments as possible. They do note, however, that if he didn’t think he could convict Norcross, if he thought this über-smart and carefully coiffed millionaire would woo a jury enough to avoid prison, Christie wouldn’t have gone after him. Taking a swing at Norcross and missing was ill-advised.
Asked about the Norcross investigation that he dropped, the governor seemed to get about as honest as he could get in explaining it to Philadelphia magazine. “You change roles. Um, I’m now—here I was the United States Attorney, a prosecutor, and I was doing my job as I saw it. And now I’m the governor. And now I’m a political leader, on top of being a governmental leader. And so certain things that I couldn’t do as a prosecutor, I can do now, and I’m really obligated to do, and certain things that I could do as a prosecutor I can’t do anymore. So, you know, your power is in some ways expanded and your power in some ways is limited, as the governor, as compared to being U.S. Attorney.”
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, a seventh grader at Sacred Heart School in Camden was asked if he was afraid.
“I’m not afraid,” the boy said, “because if the terrorists fly over Camden, they’ll think they have done it already.”
I heard that anecdote, told by Monsignor Michael Doyle, a longtime Camden civil rights crusader, when I first began covering Camden for the Courier-Post in South Jersey. It is still the saddest thing about Camden that I’ve ever heard. The feeling of abandonment—by people, by business, and mostly by government—was tangible. Camden had lost 70 percent of its population since 1950, and more than a third of its parcels of land were vacant.
Like Newark, Camden experienced a multidecade, across-the-board collapse in the manufacturing job base. Schools, government, and the police department were woefully underfunded and rife with corruption. Camden became a place to dump what wealthier suburban subdivisions didn’t want: waste water treatment plants, trash dumps, and halfway houses. The city became known less as a place to buy a home to raise a family and more as a place to idle your mom’s Nissan while you bought strong heroin.
One freezing winter night I visited a shelter in Camden to interview the homeless, and I asked a heroin addict from western Pennsylvania how he ended up here, in South Jersey. “If you liked cheeseburgers, if you really really liked cheeseburgers, and you heard that the best cheeseburgers in the world were in Camden,” he told me, “wouldn’t you be here, too?”
I also wrote about the Gonzalez family, who made enough money cleaning offices in the suburbs to buy a little row house, only to find out that Camden’s broken sewerage system was leaking feces into their basement. The city government was too broke to fix it. They put the house up for sale, but there were no takers.
Things weren’t supposed to be this way. Several years earlier, South Jersey Democrats had a grand idea to save Camden. Thanks in part to Norcross’s muscle in 2002 the state handed Camden $175 million in bonds and loans. There was one catch: The governor would appoint a chief operating officer to run the city and oversee the elected mayor and city council. Longtime Norcross ally Primas, the former mayor Norcross had backed thirty years earlier, was the first COO; the second was another Norcross ally who earned $175,000 a year, the same salary as the governor.
At the time this was the biggest state takeover of a municipality in American history. Camden residents lost democratic rights. In return they were promised more jobs, lower crime, the demolition of vacant properties—and yes, fixed sewers.
But even though the Gonzalezes’ sewer was listed as an emergency project, it was never fixed. In fact few of the stated promises were fulfilled. Down the block from the Gonzalezes’ house, across the street from a prostitution den, I met George Arroyo, who was cleaning a vacant lot so the local kids wouldn’t have to walk through urban detritus to get to school. Arroyo told me a rumor he had heard on the streets: that the $175 million bailout package was sent in an armored truck from the state capital, but the truck got carjacked on the way to Camden.
He was serious. And he didn’t realize how right he was.
As I found in a thirteen-month investigation for the Philadelphia Inquirer, less than 5 percent of the money to save Camden went to address crime, education, job training, and municipal services. The vast majority of the $175 million was for institutions, like Norcross’s Cooper University Hospital, which received more than $25 million to expand, and the local aquarium, which used its $25 million for a new hippo exhibit.
In 2009 Governor Corzine, who had presided over much of this disaster in public policy, was leaving office—and leaving Camden to the next guy.
“GOVERNOR-ELECT CHRISTIE FOR sure.”
On election night 2009, Norcross emailed Bill Palatucci, Christie’s political aide-de-camp, to tell him the breaking news that Christie had just beaten Corzine. Norcross had seen the early returns. It was three minutes after the polls had closed.
Palatucci burst into the hotel suite where Team Christie was holed up, carrying his BlackBerry with the email aloft. He had a huge smile. Later, as a gift, Norcross gave Christie a framed copy of the “Governor-elect Christie for sure” email.
With a new Republican governor on his way to Trenton, South Jersey legislators sprang to action, working to end the Camden takeover and return control to the city. The so-called “Camden Freedom Act” was rushed through in the last week of Corzine’s term, without input from the residents who were supposedly being freed, ending America’s biggest state takeover after more than six years.
Meanwhile, Christie called Norcross for a meeting. Just as he had met with Big Steve and Joe D. and Cory in Newark, now here he was meeting with Norcross in Philadelphia, across the river from Camden.
“Listen, I want to find a way for us to work together,” Christie told Norcross. “The election’s over. I’m the governor. I want to work with you. And it’s going to be important for me to have a relationship with you.”
Norcross agreed. He found Christie to be a dynamic communicator and terrific political artist.
One Christie adviser told me the takeaway from the meeting was this: “Let’s do it—how do we do it? Let’s break some heads.”
That’s how the most consequential relationship in modern New Jersey politics began. The de facto leaders of opposing political parties would never utter an ill word about the other in public. Christie once said that he “can’t think of anything off the top of my head that hasn’t been laudable” that Norcross has done.
“He has never in his dealings with me ever broken his word to me, ever,” Christie told me. “If he tells me he’s going to do something, he does it. And if he tells me he can’t, he doesn’t. And I have had nothing but a fair, even, and honest relationship with him.”
IN THE BEGINNING, the new Norcross-Christie relationship had no evident benefits for Camden. Blaming a state deficit, Christie cut $466 million in aid to municipalities when he became governor. That disproportionately affected cities, like Camden, where the state funded more than 80 percent of the city budget.
Camden mayor Dana Redd, a Norcross acolyte, was faced with a slimmed-down budget, but she never spoke out against the governor (as much as I tried to get her to). Turned out, that was the smart play. Some months later Christie came through with another allocation of funds, which meant that Camden faced only an 8 percent cut from the previous year in Trenton money, far better than expected.
Christie promised that the cuts would deepen every year until he could wean Camden off its state subsidies. But Camden was filled with nontaxpaying entities like schools and hospitals—it lacked tax ratables. With Christie’s frugality and the economic recession, Redd couldn’t make payroll. The cost of the police department alone was more than twice as much as the city’s total municipal tax base.
So after failing to negotiate contractual cuts with the unions, and with no state bailout from Christie, she did the unthinkable, laying off 163 of 368 officers—nearly half of the department, rendering the police force in America’s most dangerous city nearly impotent with barely more than 200 officers, the lowest level in more than half a century. Sixty firefighters, and 100-plus employees of every department in City Hall, were likewise laid off.
But the cop cuts were the harshest. The entire narcotics unit was eliminated, prompting gangbangers to print T-shirts marking the date when the layoffs would take effect—“JANUARY 18, 2011: It’s our time.” There were no more property crimes detectives. Car gets stolen? Head to the police headquarters, somehow, and file a futile police report. Car accident? No major injuries, then no police response.
The rate of aggravated assaults and burglaries went up by double-digit percentages. The arrest rate went down 43 percent. Homicides reached forty-seven that year and sixty-seven the next, a city record. The unsolved crime rate skyrocketed.
On the day the layoffs were executed, officers lined the side of Federal Street in Camden with boots they would no longer need. Soon Camden residents started coming by. They wanted to know if the shoes were being given away, because they sure could use a pair.
CHRISTIE DIDN’T SAY much about the public safety crisis. He didn’t come to Camden to decry the violence or walk through the white crosses planted in the front of City Hall to memorialize the victims.
For a period, he sent in state police. Invoking his mother’s old phrase, he said he didn’t have a “money tree” to do more.
But behind the scenes, the powers that be were cooking up a solution. They were going union busting.
Norcross and Christie reasoned that tens of millions of dollars could be saved by severely cutting back on police officers’ benefits. The police contract was laden with goodies like “shift differentials” (originally intended for officers who worked overnight shifts, this perk was now used for day shifts, too) and “longevity pay” (which kicked in after just five years).
The proceeds from eliminating the labor agreements, they reasoned, could then be used to hire more officers. But the only way to rip up the contract was to bust the union. The only way to bust the union? Eliminate the police department altogether. So the Republican governor, partnering with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic political boss, agreed to do just that.
The state takeover of Camden had ended, but now the city’s primary duty—public safety—would be taken over by the county government. The plan was to replace the city police department with a Camden County Police Department overseen by the Camden County Freeholders, all Democrats who served at Norcross’s will.
Around this time I sat down with the governor in his office in Trenton. Bruce Springsteen sang “Wrecking Ball” quite loudly from his office stereo. “We’re not trying to break the unions, the unions are trying to break the middle class in New Jersey through the expenses, and they’re close to doing it,” he said. “And this government, our government, is the only thing that can stand up and fight that.”
Protests ensued. Community activists in Camden believed that the original police layoffs, spurred on by Christie’s cuts, created a crisis in the murder rate that provided a convenient excuse for yet another takeover by out-of-town politicians. They said Democrats were intentionally sabotaging the city police, breaking the department’s budget on things like overtime for officers who did security at the tax-exempt concert arena.
In the end, though, Democrat-backed judges signed off on the dissolution of the city force and the creation of the Camden County Police Department. Christie sent $10 million in state start-up funds. New patrol cars were purchased. Civil service protections were temporarily suspended, allowing the police chief to promote and demote at will. The force had new foot patrols, cameras on street corners, and a gunshot-detecting network of microphones, but it also sought to win hearts by distributing free hot dogs, ice cream, and Christmas presents to kids. The “culture,” as Chief Scott Thomson was fond of saying, was reborn.
And in fact, most of the anti-Christie and anti-Norcross community activists I knew said their neighborhoods felt measurably safer. In 2014, the force’s first year under the county, homicides were down 51 percent and total violent crime dropped 22 percent.
Christie trumpeted stats like these whenever he could—on national TV, in his State of the State speech, and while traveling the country. Yet the context was cherry-picked. He always compared the progress to 2012, the most violent year in Camden history, when the governor himself allowed the police department to be cut to nearly half of its legally mandated size.
The numbers didn’t look as impressive when compared to the pre-layoff years. Under the new force, in 2014, there were thirty-three homicides in Camden. In 2009, before Christie got into office, there were thirty-four.
Camden’s public safety success was moving more slowly than Christie’s political aspirations. Christie sold the department’s techniques as the way to reduce crime, save money, and quell the recent violence between blacks and police around the country. Here was a fiscal conservative, compassionate about an urban area and willing to work across the aisle, all the while cutting onerous union-inflicted work rules and hiring more cops. The Camden story was tailor-made for a nascent presidential campaign.
Privately, Camden County Democratic functionaries griped that Christie’s rhetoric about his Camden success overstated his involvement. He did not order the firing of the department, as he claimed on the stump, and instead had signed on to a plan already in progress. As the deal was being finalized, one source said, stretches of time went by when Christie wasn’t responsive to local leaders.
But no one dared publicly complain, and a narrative was built of a Camden reborn through bipartisanship. President Obama even came to the city, highlighting it as a model for twenty-first-century policing. In his remarks he thanked Mayor Redd. The president did not mention Christie nor Norcross, who was more responsible for this than anyone.
I HAD REPORTED about each man at different times—Norcross, when I was covering Camden, and Christie, when I was based out of the Statehouse. Now that their political partnership was starting to go public, I was eager to untangle the story, because I knew Christie’s partnership with Norcross would be central to understanding him both personally and as a governor.
Then Norcross bought my newspaper.
Norcross and a group of investors announced they were purchasing the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the joint website, Philly.com, for $55 million.
Someone asked Christie what he thought about that. The governor smiled mischievously and looked at me. “I’d love to have Norcross be Katz’s new boss,” he said.
As a newly minted newspaper owner, Norcross attended the next Trenton Legislative Correspondents Club dinner. When he showed up he found his table somewhere near the back of the room, but he pulled the power move of all power moves: He proceeded to the head table, greeted the governor, and then sat at the table next to his—in the temporarily vacated seat of Christie’s spokesman. Norcross stayed there for the rest of the event. (The following year Norcross skipped all pretense and simply sat with Christie’s senior staff.)
I was president of the correspondents’ club that year, which meant I sat next to the governor at the dinner—and I roasted the governor. When I was called up to the mic for my speech I left my iPhone at the table with the audio recorder going so my wife could listen to it later if she was interested (she wasn’t). Former law enforcement guy that he is, Christie noticed my phone on the table and picked it up. What transpired next I gleaned from my recording.
“He’s recording us!” Christie said, feigning outrage as he showed the phone to the lieutenant governor, the Senate president, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, all of whom were sitting at our table.
Christie left the recorder going. When I opened my roast with an off-color joke about Governor McGreevey’s ex-boyfriend, Christie approved. “Wow! Really! That’s starting off strong,” he said.
Then I moved to zing Christie about Norcross. “Governor, you and I do have something in common,” I said. “As many of you know, my newspaper, the Inquirer, was bought by George Norcross one year ago. . . . That’s right, Governor. You and I have the same boss . . . I don’t know what everybody is laughing at. He’s your boss, too!”
CHRISTIE’S URBAN NEW Jersey—from Camden to Newark to Paterson and back again—needed a new stimulus. Manufacturing had sustained it over the centuries, now those jobs were long gone, overseas, or obsolete. For a time, information processing—back-end office work for corporations—replaced manufacturing as a good source of middle-class jobs, but now many of those cubicle farms sat empty in sprawling office parks. The national recession in 2008, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and the collapse of the Atlantic City casino industry in 2014 only compounded the economic problems.
Christie enacted gradual business tax cuts, eventually totaling more than $2 billion. But his only other major effort to create jobs was through generous and highly controversial tax incentives, used to lure businesses to New Jersey or keep them in-state.
He began by trying to restart two stalled mega-projects with jaw-droppingly large tax breaks. First, he earmarked a $261 million tax credit to finish construction of the half-built Revel hotel and casino in Atlantic City, but it went bankrupt on the way to its indefinite closure, leaving a brand-new glistening skyscraper as a vacant symbol of the gambling town that Christie was supposed to save.
Likewise, Christie sought to complete the stalled construction of a massive shopping and entertainment complex at the Meadowlands known as “American Dream”—he pledged $390 million in tax credits—but litigation and other issues delayed its opening until years after the target date of the 2014 Super Bowl, which was played next door.
Some companies were given tax breaks for simply moving from one place in New Jersey to another place in New Jersey—and sometimes, to another place in the same neighborhood. Prudential Financial moved a few blocks away in downtown Newark and won a $211 million tax break. Panasonic was awarded $102 million to move one train stop.
Christie’s most significant change to the state’s tax incentive program began with the signing of a bill sponsored by Norcross’s legislator brother, state senator Norcross, that gave businesses moving to Camden richer incentives than those offered to the rest of the state. So Subaru snagged $118 million in tax incentives to move its headquarters four miles down the highway from suburban Cherry Hill to a Camden office park, promising to create one hundred jobs as part of the move. That’s more than $1 million per new job. The multibillion-dollar defense contractor Lockheed Martin got $107 million in tax breaks to relocate from nearby suburban Moorestown to the Camden waterfront; after thirty-five years, if Lockheed is still around, the company will have provided just $249,000 in total net economic benefits to the state. That’s according to Christie’s own figures.
Critics of incentive programs say the short-term political gains of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new buildings are not worth the long-term shortfalls in the state budget. But boy did the deals look good in the newspapers the next day! A politician’s name in a headline that tells of “jobs created” becomes fodder for future campaign ads. Officials made grand pronouncements about Camden’s renewal after each tax break. Just as with the state takeover, officials promised a brand-new day for Camden just around the corner.
The Camden tax incentives may have come from Christie but they bore the Norcross name. George served on the board of directors of Holtec International, a nuclear parts manufacturer that landed $260 million in tax breaks to move its plant to Camden’s waterfront (net economic benefits over thirty-five years: $155,520). Cooper University Hospital, where George served as chairman, was awarded $40 million in incentives to move two offices from the suburbs to the city (nineteen jobs created). And lawyer-lobbyist brother Philip represented the Philadelphia 76ers in its deal for a new practice facility in Camden with $82 million in incentives. That deal failed to even allow Camden kids to sometimes watch practices or use the gym, and jobs were not guaranteed for Camden residents.
The millions in tax breaks for the 76ers—owned by a billionaire who donated $50,000 to the Republican Governors Association when Christie ran the group—troubled one conservative New Jersey state senator enough that he actually criticized the Christie administration over it. This was a rare betrayal amid the typical obsequiousness of the Republicans in Trenton. And Americans For Prosperity, founded by the conservative financier Koch brothers, slammed the tax breaks as “corporate welfare handouts” that neither bring jobs nor stimulate economic growth. Conservatives said empowering government to pick corporate winners defied the laws of capitalism.
Meanwhile liberals argued that corporations moved to New Jersey for its location, educated workforce, and quality schools—not tax incentives. They spoke of the unfairness of giving breaks to the wealthy corporations while tax relief programs for the working poor were slashed.
The tax deals were hammered out in secret and then approved by the state’s Economic Development Authority, which was led by longtime Christie confidant Michele Brown. The details of the 76ers agreement were released on a Monday and then voted on on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. by a group of gubernatorial appointees in a cramped conference room in Trenton, forty-five minutes from Camden. I stood in the doorway, struggling to listen in on the hearing, as Camden activist Kelly Francis took the mic. He had taken a bus and train to Trenton to ask the 76ers CEO if there’d be entry-level jobs for local residents at the team’s new practice facility.
Well, the CEO said, “we need a shooting guard.”
The suits laughed and laughed.
Norcross and Christie believed that targeting one small area with nearly unlimited tax incentives would bring in a critical mass of employers for an immediate economic impact. Construction jobs would be created, and the new companies would attract other companies. Lunch places would open and retail stores would follow. Having corporate executives in a downtrodden place would lead to philanthropic efforts. The Christie Republicans and the Norcross Democrats argued that the cynics just couldn’t recognize the momentum.
Officials also noted that companies had to make money before they could collect tax breaks. So when Revel closed, for example, the state didn’t lose a dime.
In the long term, though, there’d be untold billions of dollars in lost tax revenue, and in the short term there was little improvement in the state economy. While hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs were added under Christie’s watch, New Jersey lagged in job growth compared to the rest of the nation. After his first term New Jersey had recovered just 47 percent of jobs lost during the Great Recession, far fewer than its neighbors and the country as a whole.
NONETHELESS CAMDEN WAS fast becoming Christie’s symbol of not just urban renewal but also presidential-caliber bipartisanship—a demonstration of how when Americans lay down their ideological swords and sit down at the same conference table, they can do the impossible.
“For those who examine what’s happening in Camden and constantly have critiques of it,” Christie said in a speech in the city, “I would say to you this is a place I look forward to doing the business of government.” For a time, Christie was visiting Camden more than any other municipality besides Trenton.
Regardless of the policies, when Christie compared New Jersey to Washington, where Congress dissolved into discord each week, he had a strong argument to make. He was most assuredly working with the other side.
But there was more work to be done. Many of these white-collar professionals now coming to Camden for work drove here every day from their homes in the surrounding suburbs. Until Camden had schools that functioned properly, it would never turn those professionals into residents.
Of course, Christie and Norcross had a plan to fix all that, too.
CAMDEN SCHOOLS WERE performing horribly: Twenty-three of the district’s twenty-six were considered the worst in the state, and fewer than 20 percent of fourth graders were proficient in language arts. Each student cost an average of $23,709 to educate, $5,000 more than the state per-student average.
The problem wasn’t money, Christie said again and again. The problem was leadership.
Even though Christie’s state coffers funded 86 percent of the district’s $327 million budget, he wasn’t allowed to choose the Camden schools superintendent. “I don’t want to look back on my time as governor and say, ‘I should have done something different, I should have acted more aggressively,’ ” he later remembered thinking.
So in 2013 Christie took over the school district. Norcross Democrats welcomed Christie’s intervention and even thanked him for it. The school board would be reduced to an advisory role, stripped of its powers, and the governor unilaterally appointed the new superintendent—a thirty-two-year-old Iranian American from the Bronx with a background both as a teacher and as an analyst for Goldman Sachs.
In a testament to the near-control Norcross had over the city, this was all met with acquiescence. Just one board member complained about “disenfranchisement” and resigned.
CHRISTIE’S TAKEOVER OF the school district gave him a stage to return to Camden, over and again, to make announcements and declare progress. Each time his PR team shot videos of him adorably mixing with black and brown kids. One afternoon Christie walked through an old community center in North Camden, past a boxing ring and onto a basketball court, where he asked for the ball and went to the foul line. Reporters shadowed him, aware of the potential for an authentic moment.
Clang. The gov missed his first free throw shot. Boom, clang. Missed again. Whiff. Air ball! After one particularly errant throw the ball bounced toward me, almost hitting the microphone I was holding. “If I hit Katz, I would have stopped!” he said.
Because hitting me would’ve been better than actually landing the shot.
But he didn’t stop shooting. And he didn’t stop missing. He continued to ask for the ball back again and again. There was a hard-headedness here that seemed unusual—wouldn’t most politicians make a self-deprecating joke and move on to the next photo-staged activity? Not this governor.
On the twelfth shot, as the cameras clicked, the ball hit the backboard, then the rim, and fell in. He smiled, high-fived Mayor Redd, and proceeded outside to a Little League field to have a catch with a little girl.
“In all the years of previous governors, we were always the forgotten city, they never came to Camden and showed the love that Christie does,” an optimistic Emiliano Reyes, Jr., a Camden truck driver, told me that day. “Flowers growing out of concrete, it’s awesome.”
IN HIS FIRST term the Norcross family quietly brought the Christies to Philadelphia about a half dozen times to watch sports. They sat together in luxury suites at Eagles football and Phillies baseball games. These trips were never on the governor’s public schedule.
But by 2013, the Norcross-Christie relationship was very public, affirmed at the grand opening of Norcross’s new Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in downtown Camden. The medical school had been the dream of George’s father, a onetime Cooper board member.
Had Norcross’s political muscle helped him to finally land the $140 million facility? “I sure as hell hope so,” Norcross once told a reporter.
Christie took the lectern as keynote speaker. “The son executed the plan of the father,” Christie said. “And any of us, any of us who have children, who we have dreams for, and then those children begin to execute on those dreams, not only of their own but some of ours . . . we feel a great sense of pride.”
He said, “There is fascination in the media about my relationship with George Norcross,” but it is nothing more than admiration and friendship. “So now some will run away and write stories, and say, ‘Jeez, why was he saying this stuff today about Norcross?’ Let ’em write about it. Because from my perspective, whenever my name is in the newspaper it ain’t all that bad. And—and—I know whenever I mention George’s name I’m going to be in the newspaper.”
Nearly blinded by the flashes of cameras, the men stood and shook hands as those in the room rose to their feet in applause.
SOME MONTHS LATER, Christie returned for the groundbreaking of yet another Camden milestone: the KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy.
Yes, Lanning Square was finally, now, getting its school.
From the podium, Norcross mentioned that he had recently sponsored an annual charitable run—the Cooper Norcross Run the Bridge Event, which temporarily closed the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia.
“There’s one thing the governor with all his power has not been able to achieve,” Norcross said. “I’m the one who’s able to shut down the bridge.”
There it was, the first Bridgegate joke ever publicly told to Christie’s face after the scandal erupted. Uncomfortable and then hearty laughter filled the room. The governor smiled broadly. Norcross was the only guy in the world who could get away with saying such a thing, which was exactly the point.