The New Jersey Attorney General’s office declined to disclose the current job of embattled Deputy Attorney General John Nicodemo, saying it could “reveal or lead to information that may reveal such duty assignment.”
The information was sought in a request under the state’s Open Public Records Act.
Nicodemo’s secret assignment appears to be as a diversity officer, two individuals with direct knowledge of his position told the New Jersey Globe. He is no longer acting as a line prosecutor, but there’s no evidence that a series of allegations over Nicodemo’s ethics have caused him to be moved to an administrative desk job.
Still, despite multiple allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, Nicodemo has had twelve raises in the last six years. His salary jumped from $74,508 in 2017 to $145,053, a 94.7% increase. That includes two in 2020, two in 2021, three in 2022, and two in 2023, according to records released by the attorney general’s office.
“It’s the Peter Principle,” said one Department of Law and Public Safety official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “People know he’s a problem, a big problem, so they put him in a room with nothing to do.”
The attorney general’s office said on Thursday that they will review allegations made against Nicodemo.
“Any allegation of misconduct on the part of an employee of the Department of Law and Public Safety is thoroughly reviewed,” a spokesperson said.
This week, Nicodemo was accused of deliberately editing out portions of a statute, offering false testimony and purposely hiding exculpatory evidence during a grand jury presentment.
Following that accusation, Nicodemo changed his state cell phone number and pulled down his LinkedIn page.
According to a resume supplied by the attorney general’s office, the 61-year-old Nicodemo was a professional actor from 1990 to 2009, appearing in regional and off-off-Broadway shows and appearing in an episode of a soap opera, All My Children. He continues to appear in community theater performances in South Jersey; some of his performance dates coincide with times when he allegedly made mistakes as a deputy attorney general.
He graduated law school at age 49, was admitted to the bar in 2012, clerked for Superior Court Judge Samuel Natal, and joined the attorney general’s office as a financial crimes prosecutor in 2013.
A number of accusations of malfeasance have been made against Nicodemo.
Superior Court Judge Joseph Paone determined in 2022 that Nicodemo intentionally withheld crucial evidence and disregarded a court rule requiring prosecutors to disclose important information in the government’s possession to the defendant’s lawyers in his prosecution of a prominent Lakewood Rabbi, Osher Eisemann.
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.
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 later told the New Jersey Globe.
RELATED ARTICLES
-
April 13, 2018 -
February 1, 2018 -
October 16, 2018