In January 2013 one of Christie’s staffers—he wouldn’t tell me who—bet him dinner that he’d reach the 60 percent mark for his reelection that November.
“You don’t understand New Jersey, you’re crazy, that will never happen,” Christie responded. He didn’t even crack the 50 percent mark in the three-way 2009 race.
Christie took the bet anyway. Eleven months later, on election night, campaign manager Bill Stepien walked into the room. “You’ll be over 60 percent,” he told the governor.
First Lady Mary Pat was smiling. But her husband wasn’t. And it wasn’t just because he’d have to pay up on that debt. “Sixty percent in a blue state? Someone they think is going to run for president?” Christie asked. “They’re coming. I don’t know when, or how. But they’re coming.”
Two months later, his premonition proved accurate, as far as he could tell. His enemies were coming for him. And now he had to brace for war.
ALL EYES TURNED to 970 Broad Street, Newark, the same building where Christie made his name as U.S. Attorney of New Jersey. Immediately after his epic Bridgegate press conference, federal prosecutors sent a message to the governor’s office that a criminal investigation into the lane closures had begun.
Investigators contacted Bridget Anne Kelly’s relatives, and FBI agents showed up at Stepien’s apartment, where they questioned his landlord about his marital status and whether he paid his rent on time.
New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, Christie’s successor and a President Obama appointee, was running the probe. Christie and Fishman ran in the same prosecutorial circles, and Fishman had represented one of the hip-and-knee-device companies that Christie had prosecuted. Their relationship was described to me as either friendly-competitive or openly disdainful. Regardless, Fishman was now the biggest potential obstacle between Governor Christie and President Christie.
There were few similarities, stylistically or substantially, between these men. Fishman was small and short, reportedly nicknamed “Napoleon” by Christie. As U.S. Attorney, Fishman focused less on corruption and clamped down on U.S. Attorney Christie’s use of high-cost Deferred Prosecution Agreements, which Fishman believed gave too much power to prosecutors to cut deals with companies. The powers, he thought, were especially risky in the hands of a U.S. Attorney looking to use such agreements to give government contracts to friends and allies.
Two months before the investigation began, Fishman and Christie teased each other from the stage in front of a room of lawyers during a ceremony honoring a judge. Christie tweaked Fishman for his verbosity: “If each and every one of you . . . were given the time to come up here and speak, you all would have spoken less than Paul Fishman.”
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S investigation was one of several. The Manhattan district attorney and a U.S. Senate committee had related probes. And Senator Weinberg and Assemblyman Wisniewski were starting up a new Bridgegate committee, appointing members and dropping subpoenas. Democratic groups were spending serious money on oppo research, flooding government agencies with requests for scandal-related documents. More than a dozen reporters were covering Bridgegate full-time, from MSNBC to the Los Angeles Times. With little else going on politically at the time, the governor was the top political story in the country for weeks.
Christie could do nothing more than hunker down and wait for the bombardment to ease. The inner circle called it “The Crisis.”
Christie had survived crises before. And he had done so by doing what he did on January 9—long press conferences in which he answered every question in the room. When his brother’s legal problems started to dog his campaign in 2009, he held a press conference in which he exhausted all reporters’ questions and then went looking for more (“C’mon, I drove all the way to Trenton!”).
But Christie’s offering to the media of 108 minutes of his political heart and mortal soul did little to quell the interest. Reporters were calling Democratic elected officials throughout the state who had once allied with Christie to suss out if they, too, were victims of his administration’s bullying tactics. We peppered his press office with so many questions that veteran political hands on his team said it reminded them of the height of a presidential campaign.
Christie’s problems were a publicity boon to local reporters like myself, much to his frustration. Covering the guy in the midst of the top political scandal in the country means your parents suddenly have a reason to learn how to use their DVR. At one point I was on the phone with an MSNBC producer who was trying to book me on a show when I got a call from another MSNBC producer trying to book me on another show.
We had plenty of time to pontificate on the air about Christie’s political problems because the governor himself wasn’t saying anything. He canceled all press conferences for the near future. When he traveled to Camden for a school visit, he made perfunctory remarks about education before fleeing to shouted questions from TV reporters.
My sources in Christie World were still talking, but more carefully. No more texts and emails, given that subpoenas were flying. Phone calls only.
FOUR YEARS EARLIER, in Christie’s first year in office, the NFL announced that New Jersey would host the Super Bowl. That’s how long the governor, a sports freak, had been looking forward to hosting the big game.
Then David Wildstein stole his moment.
The Super Bowl was played three weeks after Bridgegate broke, right in the middle of The Crisis. On the Friday afternoon before the game, the New York Times sent out a breaking news alert to phones and inboxes across the land:
Christie Knew About Lane Closings.
The story said that Wildstein now alleged “that the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening, and that he had evidence to prove it.” Wildstein’s revelation was a new bombshell. Christie could no longer enjoy his moment in the spotlight as the unofficial face of the New Jersey Super Bowl. He was toxic.
The Drudge Report ran with a big headline—“He Knew?”—and the news spread rapidly . . . for about ninety minutes. Turned out the story wasn’t true, in that no such allegation was actually being made. Wildstein had not said that Christie knew about the lane closings. Rather, in a letter that Zegas had sent to the Port Authority seeking payment of Wildstein’s legal fees, the lawyer wrote: “Evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed.”
Evidence exists. But Wildstein wasn’t saying he had that evidence.
Less than two hours after the story posted online, the Times changed its lede, but the damage was already done. Reporters eagerly reported the Times’s scoop. Whatever media magic dust Christie had used during his first four years in office seemed to have been wiped away.
The next day Christie’s people tried to push back, sending an email to allies entitled, “5 Things You Should Know About the Bombshell That’s Not a Bombshell.” The memo delved unusually far into Wildstein’s past—into his childhood—to cast doubt on his credibility: “He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior.”
That was true. At Livingston High, Wildstein tried to run for the school board even though he wasn’t yet eighteen; then his social studies teacher accused him of unethically securing his endorsement. (Later, Wildstein would be elected to the Livingston Township Council and serve two tumultuous years as mayor; another former mayor said he “frightened people.”)
Christie’s anti-Wildstein memo only invited scorn from the political press on Twitter.
Later that day, at a Super Bowl ceremony in the middle of Times Square in Manhattan, Christie was lustily booed by the crowd. “We hate traffic!” someone yelled. Booo was a sound the governor rarely heard. Making matters even more awkward was the fact that Christie sat on a stage alongside New York governor Andrew Cuomo and right across from a huge ABC News ticker with the message: Christie aide says Christie knew about bridge closures.
“I said to Cuomo, ‘Can’t you get that turned off? Kill the power or something?’ ” Christie remembered.
“It was a bad day, bad day, at a very inopportune time. We had worked hard to get the Super Bowl on my watch,” Christie told me. “And for this stuff to happen right on the eve of the Super Bowl? Bad timing. But, ya know, it’s just a game.”
The Patriots beat the Seahawks, 28–24. Afterward, while fans were waiting in long lines trying to get onto New Jersey Transit, a chant emanated from the human traffic: “Blame Christie! Blame Christie!”
IN THE FIRST week after Bridgegate broke, Christie’s idol, Bruce Springsteen, whom he had won over after Superstorm Sandy, teamed up with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon, whom Christie had cultivated as a celebrity friend, to sing the most hilarious Bridgegate takedown imaginable: a duet, “Governor Chris Christie’s Fort Lee, New Jersey Traffic Jam,” to the tune of “Born to Run.” Dressed like 1980s-era Springsteen—with a red bandana and sleeveless jean jacket—Fallon began:
In the day we sweat it out on the streets, stuck in traffic on the GWB.
They shut down the tollbooths of glory, ’cause we didn’t endorse Christie.
Sprung from cages on Highway 9 we got three lanes closed, so Jersey get your ass in line.
Whoah, maybe this Bridgegate was just payback, it’s a bitchslap to the state Democrats.
We gotta get out but we can’t!
We’re stuck in Governor Chris Christie’s Fort Lee, New Jersey, traffic jaaaaam.
Then Springsteen himself walked onto the stage:
Someday, Governor, I don’t know when, this will all end.
But till then you’re killing the working man,
who’s stuck in the Governor Chris Christie Fort Lee, New Jersey, traffic jaaaaam.
The traffic jam had now been labeled “Governor Chris Christie’s.” He had been described by the king of the working man as “killing the working man.” Six million sets of YouTube eyeballs watched that video—several million more views than anything on the governor’s own YouTube channel.
Christie’s son told him about the video, but Dad couldn’t handle watching it. Months later, Springsteen and Christie ran into each other at the United Airlines VIP lounge at Newark Liberty International Airport. Springsteen and his wife “were great with the kids,” Christie remembered, and no one talked about the Fallon video.
“I let him know we were fine,” Christie told me. “We never talked about it directly, but we left the meeting with the understanding that he and I are just fine.”
BRIDGEGATE HAD ENTERED the national consciousness. Announcers at an NCAA basketball game showed an image of the George Washington Bridge and made fun of Christie. Family Guy sent a flier seeking votes for an Emmy nomination that read: “Vote for us, or it’s time for some traffic problems in Brentwood.” Traffic engineers complained to the New York Times that Christie had maligned their craft.
Christie and his scandal became a late-night TV one-liner—“traffic study” became a shorthand, like “Monica’s dress.”
“The Seahawks beat the Broncos, 43–8,” David Letterman deadpanned. “The Broncos are blaming it on a traffic study.”
In a rare public appearance during The Crisis, Christie went to a roast for former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne and had to listen to this from comedian Joy Behar: “When I first heard that he was accused of blocking off three lanes on the bridge, I said, ‘What the hell is he doing, standing in the middle of the bridge?’ ”
“This is a Byrne roast!” Christie said, interrupting her, standing up.
“Stop bullying me!” she responded.
Behar said she wasn’t sure he should seek the presidency. “Let me put it to you this way, in a way you’d appreciate: ‘You’re toast,’ ” she said.
THIS WAS NOT how Christie had envisioned it. His fame was supposed to improve New Jersey’s image, not destroy it. He often spoke of how New Jersey was “a punch line rather than a place of pride” until he came into office and turned the state into a national model for well-run government. “The New Jersey comeback has begun, and you are a part of it,” he said to a crowd in Atlantic City. New Jersey was no longer “just the butt of late-night talk show hosts, we are the focus of the evening news and Sunday morning talk shows, because we work together.”
Christie’s pep talk was more aspirational than reality at first, but sure enough, polls in his first term indicated a spike in New Jerseyans’ approval of their state.
Bridgegate killed that progress. New Jerseyans’ satisfaction with their state dropped, and a poll taken in the scandal’s wake showed New Jersey as the only state in the country that Americans as a whole have a negative opinion about. In other words, New Jersey under Christie was the most disliked place in America.
Quinnipiac University pollsters once asked New Jerseyans to choose a word to describe their governor, and “bully” won in a landslide. “Asshole” was further down the list. But in between were words like “tough” and “strong” and “determined” and “bold”—voters liked that he was shaking things up. And they appreciated that he said difficult things. Like when he appointed a Muslim to be a county court judge, and conservatives accused the judge of practicing Islamic Shariah law, Christie called the accusation “BS” and said he was “tired of dealing with the crazies.”
But Bridgegate turned “tough” into “tough guy” for too many New Jerseyans. His approval ratings would halve in eighteen months.
Bridgegate began to define Christie because it fit the shtick; the guy who goes after a heckler on the Jersey Shore with an ice cream cone in his hand could certainly have closed lanes to go after a mayor, the thinking went. Certain threads from the Bridgegate story seemed so Christie: the vindictiveness, the gruff language, the guts to do the unprecedented. Just as he was decrying the stereotypical Jersey thing, he was somehow embodying it. The Courier-Post newspaper concluded: He “represents our state just as poorly as the buffoons on the trashy reality TV shows filmed in the Garden State.”
This may have been his greatest personal failure as a political figure.
“I will not let this scandal define the state of New Jersey,” said a Christie impersonator, Bobby Moynihan, in a Saturday Night Live skit right after The Crisis hit. “Instead New Jersey will continue to be defined by organized crime, pizza, no-show jobs, a vague chemical smell, and fuggedaboutit.”
Christie attended the first White House Correspondents Dinner after Bridgegate. President Obama joked: “Gridlock has gotten so bad in this town, we have to wonder: ‘What did we do to piss off Chris Christie so bad?’ ”
The dinner’s host, actor Joel McHale, just used the bridge to tell fat jokes. Christie, the guy lampooned as a bully, had to sit there on national TV and pretend to be perfectly okay with this. On the way out Christie told a reporter: “Listen, baby, it’s better to be relevant than ignored.” He hung out at the after-party till 3:00 a.m., and took a bunch of pictures play-fighting with McHale.
ONE DAY IN the midst of The Crisis I was hustling through the Statehouse to do a live MSNBC interview on the building’s front lawn, where the satellite trucks were camped out. On my way I passed by the governor’s office, and as I always did, I peeked through the glass doors. For the first time since I had been covering him, Christie was standing right there in the hallway. With a hand motion, I asked him if I could come in. He waved me through.
He didn’t want to talk about the scandal. He wanted to talk about Bob Czech, a cabinet member who chaired his Civil Service Commission, which oversees the state workforce.
Czech was a healthy man when Christie appointed him to his cabinet at the beginning of his term. But he developed ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and his bodily functions severely deteriorated. Then, on the day the “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email was revealed, Czech’s wife—a registered nurse, and Czech’s caregiver—got into a fatal car accident in Central Jersey. When we spoke Christie had just returned from the funeral, and Christie was shaken by how Czech’s wheelchair was too wide to get into a pew, so Czech couldn’t sit with his own children at their mother’s funeral. Czech also couldn’t lift his own hands, so his children kept getting up from their seats to walk over to him and wipe the tears off his face as he cried. Christie was contemplative and emotional as he recounted this to me. He seemed depressed, but at peace with life’s unexpected travails.
Nearly a year later, I asked Christie to explain what was going through his mind that afternoon. He said he was thinking about how even as Czech’s health worsened he continued to come to work every day, running Civil Service meetings by writing his agendas using eye movements and an iPad, letter by letter. “You realize things could be worse,” Christie told me. “And that you have to remember things you’re blessed with—your own health, your family’s health. You don’t feel bad for yourself at that moment.”
Despite this “perspective,” Christie said, The Crisis was “the most awful professional experience” of his life.
“You hug your children. You love your wife. You just live. You appreciate your friends,” he said. “And you realize that the only thing that moves stuff along is time. And so you just keep going, ya know? Some people quit, some people keep going. I keep going.”
BEFORE JOINT SESSIONS of the legislature, the scene is festive. The New Jersey nexus of politicians, businesspeople and journalists, friends and enemies and colleagues, all here reuniting, gossiping, and dealing. But today’s gubernatorial State of the State Address was coming just five days after Bridgegate broke, so everyone was talking about just one thing.
Christie walked out of his office and made a right and a left toward the grand, impressive Assembly chambers. Inside, the clerk called us to order, and Senate president Stephen Sweeney announced the arrival of “the honorable Chris Christie.”
They rose to their feet and turned toward the door, dramatically opened by guards. In he walked, led by six handpicked legislators, two huge uniformed state troopers, and a guy in a suit from his security detail. The governor needed a haircut.
Christie began his traditional zigzag down the aisle toward the lectern, shaking hands and kissing cheeks and whispering with legislators on both sides. The ceremony has a nice cadence to it, a reminder that partisanship and corruption do not have to undermine democratic respect for the office.
In fact the first hand that Christie shook when he entered the chambers was that of Assemblyman Wisniewski, the Democrat leading the committee that had uncovered the smoking-gun Bridgegate email. Christie had never before shaken the assemblyman’s hand during these things, just pirouetted right past him. But now, amid the cacophony of the standing ovation, they leaned in close.
“Happy new year, John,” Christie said.
“Governor,” Wisniewski said, “this is not about you, this is not about me, this is about getting at the truth.”
“Happy new year, John.”
Debbie Wisniewski, the assemblyman’s wife, was standing next to them during this exchange. She looked right at Christie’s intense, angry eyes. And she was scared. “That’s a reason to lose sleep at night,” she thought.
She turned to her husband. “What are you in the middle of? Are you serious? Are you kidding me? We are in the middle of this with this guy, did you see the look he just gave you?
“If looks could kill,” she said, “you’d be on the ground.”
AFTER THE SPEECH Christie gathered staff, guests, and family in the outer office of the governor’s suite. He leaned on the podium he uses for press conferences. “There’s been no day when you all have given me more strength than today,” he began.
“We’re used to over the last four years having the whole country watching us. We’re not used to it in the current context. That sucks. But on the other hand, it’s temporary. I guarantee you it’s temporary.” He paused.
“I can’t tell you how temporary it’s going to be.” They laughed. He joked that no one should read newspapers, watch TV, or look at the Internet “until further notice.”
And then he told these soldiers of the Christie Army that what he had done earlier, when he shook Wisniewski’s hand, was deliberate. “That is the example I expect you to follow. This is not a funeral procession into that chamber today. By any means. What this is is the next step on the journey we’re going to have together.”
He told them of going to Czech’s wife’s funeral the day before, and watching Czech’s children wipe tears from their father’s face because he couldn’t wipe his own. “We don’t have problems,” he said. “We have challenges that we will overcome. Yesterday? That was a problem.”
Challenges—“some self-created, some foisted upon us by others”—are what we have, he said. “No great accomplishment has ever come without great challenges.”
He thanked them for their calls and emails and texts. It meant so much, he said, “just the fact that you showed me you still had confidence in me.”
“This was not one of our choosing,” he said. “But we will choose how it ends . . . I don’t want to see any hanging heads. I don’t want to see closed doors and muttered conversations and peering over our shoulders, all the rest of that. That’s not what you’re here for. . . . We got a government to run. We got work to do.”
He got emotional. “There’s not a person in this room I don’t have love and respect for, and that—that—is what really matters in life,” he said. “The rest of this shit we’ll shoulder through.”
BUT IT GOT worse for Christie before it got better. Next came the spate of news stories that, for a time, made this Fort Lee situation look less like an aberration and more like Christie administration policy.
It started with Steve Fulop, who had been elected mayor of Jersey City, the second-biggest city in the state, the previous June. He was a fresh face on the political scene—a former Wall Street investment banker who joined the Marines after September 11, fought in Iraq, and returned to win a seat on the city council. Fulop seemed like an independent-minded Democrat, and Christie had designs on his endorsement. So Christie’s political and governmental apparatus went to work—Christie spoke at his inauguration, and Fulop was given extraordinary access to Christie cabinet members. Fulop’s point person at the governor’s office was Bridget Anne Kelly, who talked to him at his inauguration about endorsing the governor and then scheduled what she called a “Mayor’s Day” so five cabinet members—plus Bill Baroni, deputy executive director of the Port Authority—could trek to Jersey City for hour-long meetings with the new mayor in a single day.
Word was Fulop was on board with an endorsement, although nothing was official. Mayor’s Day was set for July 23.
Then Fulop decided not to endorse. Suddenly, all the meetings with top Christie officials were canceled. As if to make sure the message was clear, four meetings were canceled within a single hour. All cited “scheduling conflicts.” No alternative dates were offered.
Fulop repeatedly tried to reschedule his meeting with Baroni. “I am not sure if it is a coincidence that your office canceled a meeting . . . that seemed to be simultaneous to other political conversations elsewhere that were happening,” Fulop wrote to Baroni.
Buried in the newly released Bridgegate emails was evidence that the meeting cancellations were retaliatory. While the lanes in Fort Lee were closed Wildstein had written an email to Kelly about Mayor Sokolich: “His name comes right after Mayor Fulop.”
This added a Jersey City storyline to The Crisis, and another question for reporters to pursue: How deep did this pattern of retaliation in the Christie administration go?
Christie later acknowledged to federal investigators that he was aware that the meetings were being canceled. But he said it was done not to punish Sokolich but to preserve his relationship with Senate president Steve Sweeney, a Fulop rival.
“It’s a dick move,” Fulop said, “but it is what it is.”
THEN BRIDGEGATE TEMPORARILY ensnared Christie’s official number two, the lieutenant governor.
Kim Guadagno was a town commissioner in little Monmouth Beach (population thirty-two hundred) for just two years before being elected sheriff of Monmouth County—a position she also held for about two years before Christie tapped her as his running mate and lieutenant governor. Sheriffs have an array of responsibilities—serving warrants, enforcing foreclosures, and running jails—not necessarily the experience one would expect for a lieutenant governor. But Guadagno had something else: a pedigree as a prosecutor, both state and federal, which was a world that Christie knew and loved.
After Christie won the nomination he invited the Guadagnos, virtual strangers, to hang out in his backyard one Saturday, with Mary Pat cooking and the three Guadagno kids and the four Christie kids, all seven of them, in the pool till past ten-thirty at night.
Back home the next morning, Guadagno was out picking up Sunday morning coffee when her cell rang. It was Chris. “How would you like to be New Jersey’s first lieutenant governor?”
“Honey,” she said to her husband when she got home. “The good news is here’s your coffee. The bad news is that I’m not going to be able to get you coffee anymore.”
Guadagno headed straight to North Jersey, where she was informed she needed to immediately shoot an introductory YouTube video for the campaign. Guadagno went back to Christie’s house, where she borrowed the future First Lady’s blouse and jewelry. In their master bathroom, Kim put on the gubernatorial spouse’s makeup while Christie shaved. There was little pretense to this guy; he got comfortable quick.
Statewide candidacy was not something Guadagno had sought for herself, but with a quick smile and charm, she was pretty good at it. Not so good at it as to overshadow her boss, of course, but good enough not to cause him much trouble. She was there only because of him—that was something he could remind her of as the years went on.
Guadagno was deployed to tasks and events and people that the governor didn’t have either the time or desire for. She also became his official liaison to corporations, small and large, known for giving out her cell phone number from podiums at business luncheons. She did events that the governor may have considered below his station, such as a ribbon cutting for a new IHOP on Route 36 in Keyport, and so she had far more public events than Christie—about one thousand in the first term.
But Guadagno was not inner circle. She was not involved in sensitive decision-making; she’d be informed when she needed to know. She met with local politicians only if okayed by the front office, and she was never allowed to sit down for a full-bore newspaper profile. She stood behind Christie at press conferences on an X marked with masking tape on the floor, and rarely was she allowed to have a press conference of her own.
I was fascinated by the muzzle Christie kept on her, and I reported about it regularly. As a panelist on a televised gubernatorial debate in 2013, I used one of my questions to ask Christie about this. If you run for president and leave office, Guadagno would be in charge. Shouldn’t we have a chance to get to know who she is?
“Matt, let me tell ya, I’m really proud of the lieutenant governor,” Christie said. “She appears publicly all the time, and if you in the press would show up, she answers questions from you all the time. My understanding is you guys just never show up to see her.”
But I asked for interviews with her all the time; the governor’s office strung me along and then stopped responding. During the Legislative Correspondents Club dinner one year, Guadagno and Christie did a spoof video in which Christie pretended to be Guadagno’s assistant, carrying her hand sanitizer and briefcase.
GUADAGNO: What do we have on the schedule today, Chris?
CHRISTIE: Matt Katz wants five minutes.
They both laugh.
GUADAGNO: Okay, what else?
Once, I ambushed her at a dairy farm that she was visiting as part of the governor’s outreach to farmers.
“Matt has a crush on me,” she said to an aide as soon as she saw me standing there, microphone in hand.
I asked if she’d sit down with me for a few minutes.
“You don’t want to sit down with the secretary of agriculture?”
Nope.
Guadagno clearly wanted to talk. She could handle herself. But this was the Christie administration. And that meant, singularly, Christie.
That’s why it was so odd when Guadagno, a second-tier figure in the administration, suddenly became the center of the Bridgegate storm. On a Saturday morning nine days after Christie’s Bridgegate press conference, still in the thick of The Crisis, the mayor of Hoboken went on MSNBC to level a startling allegation: Guadagno, acting as an emissary of the governor’s, tried to shake her down. The scene Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer described confirmed what many were now beginning to believe about Christie: He was not a straight-talker; he was a thug. The narrative was changing suddenly, almost overnight.
Zimmer alleged that the previous year, in a private conversation during the grand opening of a ShopRite in Hoboken, Guadagno had threatened to take Sandy aid away from Hoboken unless Zimmer did the big guy a favor. Christie wanted to fast-track a development project from a politically juiced company, the Rockefeller Group, which had just bought about $100 million worth of property in an industrial area on the north side of town. The company needed Zimmer to take care of some zoning and tax issues to pave the way for what it planned to put there: a $1 billion office complex with sweeping views of Manhattan.
What could Christie send Zimmer in return for this favor? Millions of dollars in Superstorm Sandy relief funds to help protect Hoboken from the kind of cataclysmic floods it had just been subjected to during the 2012 storm. About 80 percent of the city was flooded, up to three feet of sewage-tainted water, inundating homes, fire stations, and hospitals. Sandy was Christie’s lever—if Zimmer didn’t comply with Christie’s demands for Rockefeller, he could withhold federal antiflood funds until she did.
This, at least, was how Zimmer alleged on national television that it went down. “The fact is,” Zimmer alleged, “that the lieutenant governor came to Hoboken, she pulled me aside in the parking lot, and she said, ‘I know it’s not right. I know these things should not be connected, but they are, and if you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.’ ”
Zimmer told a compelling story—with lots of intriguing similarities to the lane closures. As with Bridgegate, the Port Authority was deeply involved in these allegations. Rockefeller’s lobbyist was Port Authority chairman David Samson, a close friend of the governor’s, and the Port Authority inexplicably paid for a feasibility study that Rockefeller used to justify the project.
As with Bridgegate, there were whiffs of retaliation. An aide to Guadagno remembered that after the lieutenant governor got back into her SUV following the ShopRite meeting she said something about Zimmer not “playing ball.”
In the end, Zimmer failed to push the Rockefeller project. And sure enough, when she requested $100 million in Sandy flood aid, she got only $142,000. Zimmer claimed that she was so upset by this shakedown attempt that she wrote about the incident in her journal. Pictures of the passage in her journal were put up on TV. The handwriting looked as if Zimmer could have written this in the back of the SUV on the way to the MSNBC studios, but a public official couldn’t possibly make something like this up, could she?
Zimmer also alleged that yet another Christie cabinet member, Community Affairs Commissioner Richard Constable, threatened her on the same issue. She put that incident in her diary, too, quoting Constable as saying: “If you move that [development] forward, the [Sandy] money would start flowing to you.”
Zimmer wrote about how upset she was: “My beloved governor who wants to run for president, I cannot understand it . . . I cannot figure it out, but I have no option but to stand up to him.”
Zimmer went on a media assault, and soon her story got grander. The day after the MSNBC interview she said that a third top Christie official had pressured her—Marc Ferzan, Christie’s czar for Sandy recovery. Zimmer said when she asked him about Sandy funding, he replied: “Well, Mayor, you need to let me know how much development you’re willing to do.”
The feds took the case.
Guadagno, Ferzan, Constable, and Christie vehemently denied that Sandy aid was used as a cudgel. Christie’s media team cited positive tweets that Zimmer had written just months earlier, such as: “I am very glad Governor Christie has been our governor.” Privately, Christie allies whispered that Zimmer was simply out of her mind—that she either made this up or misinterpreted an innocuous conversation about the limited amount of Sandy aid available.
But then my WNYC colleague Scott Gurian found out that Hoboken did get ripped off when it came to Sandy aid. Just as Zimmer had suspected. Gurian looked at the Christie administration’s formula for doling out money from the Sandy fund that Zimmer had complained about—a $25 million program intended to help towns keep the power on during floods. After Sandy, 85 percent of Hoboken lost electricity—from firehouses to senior citizen apartment buildings. The city had to post handwritten disaster recovery messages on bulletin boards throughout town. So Hoboken seemed like an ideal candidate for this program, and based on the state’s own rules the Christie administration should have provided $700,000 to Hoboken for back-up generators instead of the $142,080 it actually received.
This wasn’t an isolated error. Some towns received hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the state criteria called for them to receive while others got hundreds of thousands less. Officials were forced to finally acknowledge, and correct, hundreds of problems in the distribution of aid. They attributed the mistakes, simply, to data entry error.
These were not criminal errors, it turned out. More than fifteen months after the investigation into Zimmer’s Sandy shakedown began, the U.S. Attorney’s Office sent out this statement: “The investigation of those allegations has been closed.”
I tweeted the news. Zimmer immediately responded, both to me and to Guadagno: “Not criminally charged does not mean acted properly. New Jersey deserves better.”
IN THE EARLY twentieth century, New Jersey’s Wally Edge championed the creation of a bi-state agency to manage the joint economic and political interests of two states on one river. Nothing like it had ever existed in the United States. The Port Authority became a model for the Progressive Era’s efforts to professionalize government and get rid of graft. Over the next several decades the agency aggressively reshaped the region through transportation and real estate projects; by the time Christie got into office it had an operating budget larger than that of nine states. The Port Authority ran four bridges, two tunnels, four airports, a commuter rail, and a smattering of industrial parks, overseeing the transport of millions of people and endless goods across twelve thousand acres.
The Port Authority’s twelve-member politically connected board of commissioners was led by a chairperson, an appointee of the New Jersey governor. In exchange, New York got the top staff position—the executive director. Later, New Jersey was given the deputy executive director position. This situation was awkward and dysfunctional, but it was an imperfect way of easing rivalries that existed as far back as 1927, when New Jersey governor A. Harry Moore demanded that steel from the Roebling Co. in Trenton be used to build the George Washington Bridge.
Likewise, Christie sought to leave a New Jersey imprint on the agency, installing at least fifty of his own people in Port Authority jobs, such as an $85,000 gourmet food broker hired as a financial analyst and a state senator, Bill Baroni, brought on for $290,000 a year. Baroni in turn hired a friend, a part-time soap opera actor who cowrote his book, Fat Kid Got Fit, to edit Port Authority publications.
The Port Authority had traditionally spent money without anyone knowing, because it adhered to neither New York nor New Jersey transparency laws. But now, thanks to Bridgegate, legislative subpoenas were like explosives destroying the locked vault of the Port Authority. All kinds of secrets were being revealed.
IN 2010, CHRISTIE’S recently ousted education commissioner was testifying before a legislative panel about the loss of federal education dollars when reporters were suddenly called into the governor’s office for an unrelated surprise announcement.
Christie announced that he was killing, unilaterally, the largest public works project in the nation.
The Access to the Region’s Core, known as the ARC Tunnel, was a decades-old plan to add a tunnel under the Hudson River to double the number of rush-hour train passengers between New Jersey and New York. More than a half billion dollars had already been put toward the project. The existing century-old tunnels were in a constant state of disrepair, causing delays for Manhattan commuters and rail passengers through the Northeast corridor. With demand for mass transit expected to increase 38 percent over the next twenty years, the need for a new tunnel was immediate.
ARC would not only address this need but also create 6,000 short-term construction jobs and 40,000 long-term jobs. Home values within two miles of train stations were estimated to increase $18 billion, and tax revenue was expected to go up $1.5 billion. Proponents said the tunnel would mean 22,000 cars off the road every day, forty-five-minute reductions in daily train commutes, and 70,000 fewer tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere every year.
Ground had already been broken on the project, and $3 billion in federal funds had already been committed. Reaching such a deal—between two states and multiple transit bureaucracies—was like seeing a comet. It might be decades before such an opportunity came along again.
And yet, ARC was dead, with no chance of resurrection. “This decision is final,” Christie said. “There is no opportunity for reconsideration of this decision on my part. I am done. We are moving on.”
Christie called ARC a “worthwhile project” that “we simply cannot afford.”
“I do this with no sense of happiness at all,” he said.
Christie had once supported the tunnel, but he said he had learned new, more detailed information about how New Jersey taxpayers would end up shouldering the bulk of cost overruns. He said the $8.7 billion cost could reach $14 billion. He backed up his position with a press release headlined: “Christie Administration Enforces Budget Discipline and Protects New Jersey Taxpayer Dollars.”
Some liberals would forever believe this was the worst decision of his governorship. The New York Times editorial board, no doubt made up of some New Jersey–dwelling commuters, was particularly indignant: “If you find yourself in a stopped train in a Hudson River tunnel, or in a vehicle on a choked highway, in coming years, at least you will know why. In his drive to become the darling of the cut-costs-at-all-costs Republican crowd, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey ignored real economic analysis and relied on exaggerated worst-case scenarios to kill the largest public transit project in the nation.”
As always Christie had an effective rhetorical way of dismissing the project—“the train to Macy’s basement.” He said the tunnel would have terminated not at Penn Station, the critical transportation hub with lots of subway access, but underneath Macy’s department store about a block away. And ARC also wouldn’t go to the east side of Manhattan, to Grand Central Station, as had been originally conceived. It was, even backers admitted, an imperfect project.
But they were blindsided by Christie’s decision to kill it rather than alter it. New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg, Christie’s Democratic nemesis, called it “the biggest public policy blunder in New Jersey’s history.”
Meanwhile, President Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, rushed to Trenton to try to get Christie to change his mind. On the way there LaHood and his team scribbled on the back of an envelope some ideas to sway the governor, such as a plan for private entities to finance the cost overruns and $358 million in new federal funds. “We’re going to find a way to fix this,” LaHood said.
Christie told LaHood he’d think about it—and then he said no. He had yet to be governor for a full year, and he was already pulling a power move against the feds.
Conservatives were thrilled. The decision helped to turn Christie into a Republican rookie of the year. Shortly thereafter he was campaigning for Republicans around the country and he found himself at a roundtable for GOP contributors in Portland, Oregon, when one donor turned to Christie and said: “Your rejection of the ARC tunnel tells me all I need to know about you. Because I’m a westerner, and for somebody to tell Washington to take their money and stick it because of the strings attached is what real leadership is all about.”
Over on 60 Minutes, Christie gave the national Sunday night audience his brand of straight talk: “Gotta cancel it. I mean, listen, the bottom line is, I don’t have the money. And ya know what? I can’t pay people for those jobs if I don’t have the money to pay them. Where am I getting the money? . . . The day of reckoning has arrived.”
More than a year later the federal Government Accountability Office determined that the cost overruns actually would have been lower than Christie’s estimates and New Jersey would really only be responsible for 14 percent of it, anyway. Meanwhile the need for new tunnels was later made clear by Superstorm Sandy, which filled the existing tunnels halfway with seawater, causing corrosion. The head of Amtrak warned that the current tunnels would fail and be forced out of service in as little as seven years.
Whatever. Christie boasted to Republican audiences of having the guts to kill the big tunnel. “When they want to build a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s, and stick the New Jersey taxpayers with a bill of $3 to $5 billion over, no matter how much the administration yells and screams you have to say no!” he said. “You have to look them right in the eye, no matter how much they try to vilify you for it, and you have to say no.”
Beyond the adoration from the growing Tea Party movement within the Republican Party, Christie got something else out of the ARC’s cancellation: a whole lot of money. Several billion dollars allocated for the tunnel was now available for New Jersey’s taking. Sure enough, sources told my WNYC colleague Andrea Bernstein that as soon as Wildstein got to the Port Authority, he began asking about using the ARC money for road projects in New Jersey.
The state’s infrastructure was in disrepair, with one out of every three bridges considered decrepit and residents paying, on average, more for roadway-related automobile repairs than drivers in any other state. Improvements to these bridges and roads were supposed to be paid for through the state Transportation Trust Fund, which is bankrolled by a tax on gasoline. But the Trust Fund was nearly empty. Christie had been moving money out of there to backfill the general fund in the state budget. And he balked at increasing the gas tax to replenish the fund, even though the tax was the third lowest in the country and hadn’t gone up in two decades. A penny increase would cost just $60 a year for most drivers—cheaper than the $600 a year spent, on average, to fix pothole-damaged cars. But future presidential candidate Christie couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit such a political sin as to raise a tax. He needed another way.
Enter ARC. Wildstein, the link to Christie operatives in the IGA and governor’s office, helped to move $1.8 billion from the Port Authority’s share of the tunnel to New Jersey roadway repairs so taxes wouldn’t have to be raised. Contrary to Christie’s characterization that he barely knew Wildstein, Andrea and I found that in fact over the course of the first term Wildstein met at least twice with Christie in the governor’s office, joined the governor at seven public events, and had regular contact with his closest confidants.
During one of those meetings Christie brought Wildstein up to the third floor of the rotunda of the Statehouse to show the fake Wally Edge a painting of the real Governor Wally Edge. Christie tried to take the portrait down off the wall right then and there—he wanted it for his office. But a security system held it firm. Later, Christie had it removed and hung in his office hallway, replacing a portrait of the man Christie defeated for the job, Jon Corzine.
While Edge looked over the governor’s office, Wildstein looked over the Port Authority. Wildstein’s job was simple: Squeeze as much out of the Port Authority for New Jersey as possible.
THE ONLY REASON we know about the lane closures at all is the Port Authority’s most controversial move: its 2011 toll increase on the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River tunnels. This was what prompted New Jersey Democrats to seek subpoena power in the first place.
The Port Authority needed money for critical projects that were actually related to the mission of the agency—such as rehabilitation of the decrepit Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan—since billions were now tied up in New Jersey road projects and New York’s World Trade Center construction. Fortunately, unlike a gas tax, tolls could be raised to secure funds without violating Republican orthodoxy. So on the fifteenth floor of the Port Authority headquarters in Manhattan, a door with a sign that read “Do Not Enter” led to a conference room dubbed “The War Room.” Here, officials and outside political consultants went to work on selling this toll hike.
A list was kept of who knew about the plan. A subordinate was told he couldn’t tell his boss what he was working on, and a janitor feared being fired after he was caught trying to get into the War Room to fix a broken pipe.
The increase would be quick and dirty—a midsummer cash grab before commuters could realize what had happened. Because they weren’t looking for just a couple of bucks. The Port Authority would propose a nine-dollar phased-in increase, which would make it seventeen dollars to cross the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York. Seventeen dollars.
On a Friday evening in August the toll hikes were announced. The governors released a joint statement shortly thereafter saying they were dismayed by the decision.
“I said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ” Christie later said, recounting when he was told about the increase. “And they said ‘no.’ ”
Did the governor really not know about such a significant policy decision? Was he really not in a position to dial it back before it was publicly announced? Had Christie’s top political guys at his most important government agency suddenly gone rogue?
The top three New Jersey Port Authority officials—Samson, Baroni, and Wildstein—had all recently met with Christie, according to the governor’s calendar. Christie spoke to Samson more than almost anyone, and the New York Times reported that Christie personally instructed Samson, Wildstein, and Baroni to raise tolls $6.00 for cars by 2014—not $4.00 as planned—during a Statehouse meeting. This would protect him politically, because he would criticize the plan and force, so to speak, the agency to lower the tolls.
That’s basically what happened. Christie and New York governor Cuomo came out against these new tolls. So a new proposal was issued: Tolls would go up $4.50 for cars by 2015.
When that plan was announced, the War Room generated thirty-six supportive press releases, comments were posted on online news stories, and eight public hearings were scheduled. All of those hearings were held in a single day, with a political operative from the local laborers’ union helping to pack the room with union workers wearing bright prison-orange T-shirts that read: “Port Authority = Jobs.” The laborers wanted the toll hikes because it meant construction work for their members; they took up half the seats at one toll-hike public hearing on Staten Island. Held in what was described as a “tricky-to-find” building, the meeting featured testimony from union guys who appeared to be speaking from scripts.
The commissioners of the Port Authority didn’t attend a single hearing. Later, anonymous officials at the Port Authority told the newspapers that the meetings were “all bullshit” and a “farce” intended to “set the governors up to look like heroes.”
The Star-Ledger called it “Hollywood on the Hudson.”
Christie dismissed this allegation as a “conspiracy theory.” But the toll hikes not only helped his state finances but also had a big political payoff—the following year, the laborers’ union gave Christie the first endorsement of his reelection. That’s twenty thousand members, thrilled by the jobs created through the toll-funded construction projects. The union leader was a Port Authority commissioner who had endorsed Corzine in 2009.
“This campaign has just started,” Christie told the raucous crowd of laborers at the endorsement event, “but I doubt that I’ll have many better days than the day I was endorsed by the Laborers International Union of North America.”
ALL OF THE Port Authority mini-controversies from the first term got new scrutiny in the wake of Bridgegate. But it wasn’t until reporters started digging into David Samson, the top guy at the agency and one of Christie’s closest friends, that The Crisis reached new heights.
The greater New York region first learned about this dapper young lawyer from Newark in the early 1990s, when he became the other man in one of the most notorious political sex scandals in New York history. The chief judge of New York, an expected future gubernatorial candidate named Sol Wachtler, stalked and harassed Samson when Samson began dating the judge’s ex-girlfriend, Joy Silverman. Wachtler demanded $20,000 to turn over tapes he supposedly had of Silverman and Samson having sex.
Wachtler’s political career imploded in full view of the New York tabloid-reading public. For decades, Wachtler would represent one of the most epic political flameouts in history.
Years later, Samson was named New Jersey attorney general under Governor Jim McGreevey, who would be forced to resign amid his own sex-fueled epic political flameout.
Samson was not unfamiliar with scandal.
In December 2001, when McGreevey introduced Samson as his nominee for attorney general, Christie put on a suit and drove fifteen minutes to McGreevey’s announcement. He hadn’t been invited, but he had just been nominated U.S. Attorney, so he wanted to introduce himself to Samson. The new attorney general was immediately impressed that the new U.S. Attorney went out of his way to pay his respects.
As New Jersey’s top two law enforcement officials, Christie and Samson worked together on investigations and ended up getting joint death threats from the Latin Kings street gang—“which brought us closer together,” Christie said. They were both provided security, 24/7.
Samson left the Attorney General’s Office after about a year and turned into a power Republican lawyer-lobbyist and perennial top ten on the annual list of the most influential unelected people on Wildstein’s PoliticsNJ.com (later renamed PolitickerNJ.com). Samson and Christie kept in touch, having lunch every month or two and making annual dinner bets about the Mets and Yankees. Christie’s U.S. Attorney’s Office gave Samson a $10 million contract to be a compliance monitor for a company facing criminal charges, and Samson began helping Christie with his fledgling return to politics.
When Christie ran for governor, Samson was the campaign lawyer, with the conference room at Samson’s law office used for debate prep and for big meetings. On the day after he won election, Christie’s first meeting was with Samson. Later that morning the first personnel announcement Christie made as governor-elect was to name Samson as chairman of the transition team that would determine the focus of the future governor’s office. At the inaugural, Samson served as the master of ceremonies.
“David’s a really wise guy and a really good person,” Christie told me. “I sought advice from him on everything from legal decisions I had to make, to situations with my children, to situations with friends. Really smart, wise person. And always was incredibly generous with his time and advice.” Samson was twenty-three years older—“it’s a father-son age difference type, so it’s that kind of interesting relationship.”
Samson was known as fun to be around, entertaining with a good story, and he accompanied Christie on political trips around the country. Christie called him “General” because of his stint as attorney general, but Samson was really the general of Christie’s Army, in charge of shaping the policies and personnel of the new administration. “We serve one client,” Samson was known to say. “Chris Christie.”
Among Samson’s chief recommendations was that the Port Authority’s billions be used to backfill New Jersey state budgets. “The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is an underutilized asset,” read Samson’s transition report to the newly elected governor. Money from the Port Authority, including the ARC tunnel, should be used for New Jersey projects to save the state money.
Before Christie was inaugurated Samson was also negotiating with Governor Jon Corzine to make sure the outgoing governor didn’t make last-minute reappointments to the Port Authority board of commissioners and instead let Christie put his own people at the agency.
Once in office, Christie of course appointed Samson board chairman. But his role was covert. After the Democratic Senate approved Samson’s nomination, a reporter asked Christie if he had given Samson a list of priorities for what he wanted him to do at the Port Authority.
“That’s between me and Mr. Samson,” Christie said.
ON JANUARY 8, when The Crisis broke, there was disagreement at Drumthwacket about whether Samson should keep his job.
Unlike Stepien, whom Christie fired for poor judgment, Samson seemed to actually know something about the lane closures from at least right after they happened. He was portrayed in the emails by Baroni as plotting revenge against New York Port Authority executive director Foye for reopening the lanes. If guilt could be assessed by just that first batch of emails, Samson seemed more at risk than Stepien.
Sources familiar with what went on in the room say a few of Christie’s advisers looked the governor in the eye and told him Samson was a problem that needed to be eliminated. He should be forced to resign, they said.
The governor talked to Samson for two full hours on that day. Just the General and the Governor. The gov’s verdict? Not guilty. He trusted Samson more than almost anyone else in the world. “I’m confident that he had no knowledge of this,” Christie said.
Yet keeping Samson around after Bridgegate proved to be a problematic move, politically, because it made Christie more vulnerable to continued scrutiny. He was still working for the governor, in charge of the region’s infrastructure, showing up to public meetings. So reporters continued to examine his role at the Port Authority, and what they uncovered was shocking.
Because of Bridgegate, reporters now had access to thousands of Port Authority documents that the Democrats had subpoenaed. Suddenly, inside sources—bitter about how their bosses had led the agency—were talking. And it turned out that Samson didn’t just help New Jersey seize money from the ARC tunnel and toll hikes, he also appeared to have been helping himself, too. Much of the negative coverage that Christie sustained in the months ahead was about Samson and his own pocketbook. Or as one of Samson’s former political allies described his actions to me: a “piggish” approach to public service.
WE BEGIN IN Harrison, where the Port Authority announced a new $256 million train station nine months before the mayor there became the first Democratic mayor to endorse Christie’s reelection. This seemed like the normal course of local politics until it was revealed that a builder represented by Samson’s law firm proposed building luxury apartments near the train station. Samson, as Port Authority chairman, voted in favor of the project, which would undoubtedly benefit the builder.
In Atlantic City, the Port Authority proposed taking over the airport even though it was two hours outside the Port Authority’s official district. Samson’s firm was bond counsel for the financially struggling entity that ran the airport, the South Jersey Transportation Authority. The deal had political benefits for Christie, because South Jersey Democrats supported the takeover, but it also had potential benefits for Samson, given that it could aid his client and, therefore, himself. Samson didn’t vote on the deal. Instead, he spoke up in favor of it at a Port Authority meeting.
And then there was North Bergen. Samson came up with an idea to privatize train station parking lots owned by NJ Transit, the commuter railroad. Shortly thereafter Samson’s law firm was hand-picked by NJ Transit for what would become a $1.5 million contract to do the legal work for privatization. Then, it turned out, one of those NJ Transit parking lots, in North Bergen, was actually owned by the Port Authority. So as chairman of the Port Authority, Samson voted to transfer the North Bergen parking lot to NJ Transit for just one dollar annually for forty-nine years—far less than the $900,000 annual rent it had been paying. To recap: NJ Transit paid Samson’s private firm, and he then voted in his public position to reduce the amount of money NJ Transit had to pay every year.
This could seem like a conflict of interest. But lawyers figured it all out. The Port Authority determined that Samson actually “intended to recuse himself” on that vote and the fact that he cast a vote was nothing more than a “clerical inadvertence.” The “yes” vote was officially changed to a recusal. An unprecedented do-over vote was scheduled.
Wherever reporters looked, they found potential conflicts of interest with Samson. My WNYC reporting partner Andrea Bernstein began digging into Samson just as Bridgegate broke, finding that once his friend became governor his firm’s New Jersey lobbying business ballooned—going from $42,000 to more than $1 million a year. Everyone with deep pockets knew: He had a direct connection to the governor’s office.
And that was just the lobbying wing. The firm’s lawyers now represented a half dozen agencies in Christie’s government, earning more than $12 million.
Samson, through lawyers and spokespeople, maintained all along that none of this was done for personal gain and all was pursued for the betterment of New Jersey. If that was the case, this veteran government lawyer wasn’t very careful about making that clear to the public. At one point Samson didn’t recuse himself even as the board voted to award $2.8 billion in contracts to three companies with financial ties to his firm. He called the votes “joyous and happy.” The story about that vote ran on the front page of the New York Times. Samson and Christie, the story said, “operate in a state with a long history of cozy, back-scratching relationships among politicians, lawyers and businesses tied to real estate and construction.”
What was now being documented as fact by reporters was sharply disconnected from the shtick that Christie had pushed for his entire career. He was supposed to clean it all up, not appear complicit in it. This scandal now seemed to call into question everything Christie had told us about his leadership. As Christie impotently watched, the hard-fought narrative he had written for himself collapsed under the weight of that damn bridge.
PATRICK FOYE, the executive director of the Port Authority, publicly declared that Samson lacked the moral authority to continue as chairman. Samson finally resigned, seventy-nine bloody days after “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
Samson hired a lawyer, Michael Chertoff, the former U.S. director of Homeland Security whom two decades earlier prosecuted Wachtler, Samson’s former stalker, when he was U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. Chertoff’s father was the rabbi who Bar Mitzvahed—and later presided over the wedding of—David Samson, a source close to the family told me.
More recently, Chertoff’s security-consulting group had entered into a $300,000 no-bid contract with Samson’s Port Authority that ballooned to $1.5 million.
I thought Nick Acocella explained all of this well. He is something of the political poet laureate of the state of New Jersey—a chronicler of the smoky back rooms who writes Politifax, a weekly newsletter about state politics. “All we’ve seen is confirmation, as if that was necessary, that everyone in New Jersey knows everyone else, everyone has multiple roles, and everyone scratches everyone else’s back,” he wrote. “It may not be right. It may not be pretty. But it pretty much defines this thing of ours.”
AND THEN SOMETHING happened that even New Jersey had never seen before. This was perhaps the most outrageous alleged act of corruption since the bridge lanes were closed—an act brazen and infuriating to every American flying coach.
The Record revealed a federal investigation into whether United Airlines created a flight to Columbia Metropolitan Airport in South Carolina from the Port Authority–owned Newark Liberty International Airport to accommodate Samson, who had a weekend home less than an hour’s drive away in the horse country of Aiken, South Carolina.
The century-old $1.7 million Samson home nestled behind a brick wall was known as “Rest Period,” which is what they call halftime in the game of polo. It was described as “captivatingly elegant” in a long feature about the property in Augusta magazine. There are statues in the house dating back two thousand years to the Han Dynasty. But getting to this gem of a weekend pad was a bit difficult for Samson. He had no problem at Newark Airport—Port Authority executives had special escorts to cut through security lines. But the closest airport to the house itself was in Charlotte, North Carolina, a nearly three-hour drive away.
Samson himself brought up his predicament about the weekend home while dining with United Airlines’ chief executive at a pricey Italian restaurant in New York. He noted that United used to fly to Columbia; maybe that route could be reopened?
United had a lot of business before Samson at the Port Authority, and therefore reason to stay on his good side. The airline was negotiating a $150 million airport lease, deciding whether to start flying out of the newly acquired Atlantic City Airport and hoping to get a $600 million train extension to Newark Airport. Meanwhile, thirteen United executives from around the country were donating to Christie’s reelection campaign. This was the largest pool of donations Christie received from a publicly traded company.
Perhaps United didn’t react quickly enough to Samson’s hint about the flight. Because Bloomberg News revealed that Samson then threatened to block United’s agenda at the Port Authority. Samson’s lawyer denied the claims, but what happened next is indisputable: United added a flight to South Carolina. It left Thursday nights and returned Monday mornings—a perfect schedule for someone looking to have long three-day weekends. It had fewer passengers than almost any other flight out of Newark.
Chairman Samson called the flight the Chairman’s Flight, reports said.
Four days after Chairman Samson resigned, the flight route was canceled.
The following year, amidst a federal investigation into the flight, the United Airlines CEO resigned.
TYPICALLY A “NEWS dump” hits on a Friday afternoon—a press release announcing something unpopular that a politician wants to hide in the mix of weekend plans. Christie’s most notorious dumps were when he vetoed gun control bills, released Bridgegate legal bills, and announced Wildstein’s resignation.
This, though, was other level. At 6:15 p.m. on the Saturday before Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2014, the governors of New York and New Jersey dropped an epic news dump. Christie and Cuomo announced they were vetoing legislation that had unanimously passed both houses in the New York legislature and both houses in the New Jersey legislature. All four chambers had recently agreed to Bridgegate-inspired reforms of the Port Authority—a range of comprehensive steps to return the agency to its core mission of transportation, making it less political and more professional. Only a freak incident, the closing of lanes to the world’s busiest bridge, could inspire such a freak moment of bipartisan, bi-state consensus.
Now, those reforms were dead, killed in secret less than a year after Bridgegate broke.
Christie and Cuomo met a few days before the decision, at an Italian restaurant in Carlstadt, New Jersey, not far from the New York border. They were friends, veterans of the art of transactional politics who never aired their dirty laundry in public. Cuomo hadn’t criticized Christie about Bridgegate, and Christie, as head of the Republican Governors Association, hadn’t financed Cuomo’s Republican gubernatorial opponent. When Cuomo faced an ethics scandal, Christie was mum.
The bills they vetoed would have created a Port Authority inspector general’s office, a whistleblower protection program, and annual independent audits. Commissioners would have been required to take an oath of fiduciary responsibility and testify before the legislatures.
No, thanks, Christie and Cuomo said. After jointly vetoing the bills, they released a ninety-nine-page report with their own ideas for fixing the Port Authority—ideas that preserved and perhaps increased gubernatorial power over the agency.
The New York Democrat who sponsored the original reform bill, Assemblyman Jim Brennan, said that the New York governor’s office told him that killing the proposal was Cuomo’s favor to Christie.
“I’m sure it has to do with a desire to keep a lot of the operations there secret,” Brennan said, “because they benefit from that.”