A prominent Lakewood rabbi convicted of money laundering will get a new trial after a state appellate court panel affirmed that embattled Deputy Attorney General John Nicodemo withheld crucial evidence at his 2019 trial.
Osher Eisemann, the founder of the School for Hidden Intelligence, was accused of misappropriating over $200,00 in school funds as part of a scheme to create the effect that he used personal funds to repay funds he owed the school.
But Superior Court Judge Joseph Paone found last year that Nicodemo had violated the Brady Rule, which requires prosecutors to disclose important information in the government’s possession to the defendant’s lawyers.
Lee Vartan, Eisemann’s attorney, sought a new trial after learning that Nicodemo sat on critical evidence. Paone agreed, ruling that had the jury been aware of evidence the attorney general’s office held back, the verdict would have been different.
The state attorney general’s office appealed Paone’s ruling, suggesting that no Brady violation occurred because evidence of his possible innocence could have been discovered in QuickBooks ledgers in his possession.
“We are unpersuaded,” the three appellate judges, Thomas Sumners, Peter Geiger, and Ronald Susswein, stated in their decision. “We see no basis to disagree with the motion judge that the State committed a Brady violation because it denied (the) defendant his constitutional right to a fair trial in not disclosing (evidence).
Eisemann has been under suspension by the special education school he ran since his 2018 indictment. Nicodemo has no personal liability for his mistake, while Eisemann has now paid legal fees related to his first trial, his request for a new trial, and the appeal of that decision.
In 2022, an indictment of a Bergen County police chief was dismissed after a judge found that another deputy attorney general assigned to Nicodemo’s unit, Eric Cohen, omitted key information from his presentment to the grand jury that indicted him. But the exoneration came nearly one year after the police chief, Robert Kugler, lost his bid for Bergen County sheriff.
Nicodemo has faced challenges to his ethics before, leading two state senators to sharply criticize him last year.
In an April 2021 court hearing where Nicodemo sought to seal a list of potential targets in a state corruption probe involving cooperating witness Matthew O’Donnell, an attorney representing a former assemblyman facing bribery charges requested a certification from the attorney general’s office that all evidence had been turned over.
But the judge, Mitzi Galis-Menendez, decided she would accept Nicodemo’s word and not require any certification.
In that case, the judge acknowledged that the attorney general’s office made a mistake in court filings that disclosed the names of the potential targets. The attorney general’s office filed the motion to seal records two days after the New Jersey Globe sought copies of public court filings.
Last year, an attorney representing Holmdel in a civil lawsuit against O’Donnell accused Nicodemo of communicating about the case directly to a Superior Court judge without notifying him.
Nicodemo made an unusual end-run around court procedure by sending a letter to Judge Linda Grasso Jones by mail rather than electronically filing it. Because Nicodemo didn’t follow the procedure, the court staff uploaded it themselves three weeks later, a spokesman told the New Jersey Globe.
It’s not clear if the attorney general’s office will now launch an internal investigation of Nicodemo or others on his prosecution team. A 2019 directive to county prosecutors mandating policies to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland, applies to deputy attorneys general. A Brady violation is considered a serious issue for prosecutors.
While a “Use of Force” policy implemented by the attorney general’s office in 2020 mandates presentments to grand juries on police officers whose use of force results in a death, there is no similar obligation for prosecutors.
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October 19, 2018 -
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