In a court filing late Friday evening, the state Office of Public Integrity and Accountability opposed a bid by Democratic powerhouse George E. Norcross III and others to dismiss a state racketeering and conspiracy indictment, arguing that they were properly charged and challenging that the allegations were simply “garden-variety politics” and an example of “how deals get done.”
“Rather than claiming that there is anything palpably untenable — or unclear — about what the grand jury charged, they treat the Indictment as if it comprises the totality of the state’s evidence,’ prosecutors said. “And rather than actually accepting each of the grand jury’s allegations as true, they overlook inconvenient allegations, urge fact-specific inferences, and sometimes inject new facts—all of which may be appropriate for trying to persuade a trial jury, but are wholly out of place in asking this court to nullify a grand jury.”
Attorneys for Norcross and others filed a motion to dismiss a 13-count indictment in September, maintaining there was no crime.
Prosecutors say Norcross and others agreed to “participate in an enterprise that would achieve its goals through a pattern of racketeering activity—a charge that does not require proving that each one of them personally completed racketeering acts.”
They said that by “exploiting Norcross’s reputation for untrammeled control over local government and overpowering political influence across New Jersey, the Norcross Enterprise essentially took the Camden waterfront for itself.”
“It properly charged them with conspiracies to commit extortion and criminal coercion, validly alleging that they had strayed beyond the bounds of ‘hard bargaining’ by threatening both reputational and economic harm, using the instruments of government to intimidate, and widening their extortionate and coercive tactics well past any commercial transactions to which they had a legitimate nexus,” the OPIA argued in their filing.
The state pushed back on a motion to dismiss, arguing the “conspiracies continued into the limitations period, and, regardless, their objectives—including receiving and selling the tax credits, punishing adversaries, and concealing illegality—had been neither accomplished nor abandoned before the cut-off date.”
“There is nothing legally impossible—or even implausible, if that were the standard — which it is not — about the grand jury’s allegations,” the prosecutors said in their filing. “Defendants are free to challenge, by separate motion, whether the grand jury saw ‘some evidence’ sufficient to make out a prima facie case, and in addition to argue to the petit jury, at trial, that the State has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. At this stage, all this Court needs to be confirmed is that their facial motions fail.”