In a scathing letter, Attorney General Matt Platkin accused lawyers involved in the defense of Democratic powerhouse George E. Norcross III and others of “staging a spectacle for the media rather than presenting a case grounded in the facts and law.”
“Mischaracterizations made by the lawyers of powerful people will not derail New Jersey’s efforts to seek justice for the victims of the Norcross Enterprise,” Platkin said in a letter to Superior Court Judge Peter E. Warshaw, Jr. “In what can only be reasonably viewed as a transparent attempt to try this case in the press on assertions that have no bearing on the evidence amassed against the defendants, counsel urges this court to draw incomplete and incorrect conclusions about complex investigations into wide-ranging criminality that captured the attention of many federal and state agencies.”
Platkin disputed a suggestion by two defense attorneys, Jeff Chiesa and Lee Vartan, that his office was slow to turn over wiretap recordings that are in the possession of federal law enforcement authorities. He said the state told them about the request hours before they filed a court motion to compel their release and that the attorney general’s office can’t compel the Justice Department to turn over documents they don’t have.
“The bottom line is that the defendants’ sophisticated counsel must know that this motion to compel is improper and beyond the Court’s jurisdiction, just as they must know that their months-long effort to barrage the media with inflammatory rhetoric designed to sway the jury pool is an affront to the integrity of the judicial process,” he said.
According to Platkin, the documents sought come from an unrelated investigation into a Philadelphia labor leader, John Dougherty. He maintains that the intercepts of Norcross and others were “essentially spun off from the legally authorized intercepts of conversations between Dougherty and George Norcross during the investigation into Dougherty.”
He also says a decision by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania not to prosecute Norcross was unrelated to the state indictment.
“Counsel contorts the actual facts and bases his arguments on mischaracterizations of documents that he almost certainly knows are inadmissible at trial and do not support the picture he paints in his filing,” Platkin said. “Unfortunately, this motion is only the latest evidence of the defense’s apparent interest in staging a spectacle for the media rather than presenting a case grounded in the facts and law.”
On Wednesday, Norcross’s attorneys alleged that an FBI agent may have gone prosecutor shopping in a bid to indict the Democratic powerbroker. They also claimed FBI agents who worked on the investigation in Philadelphia were also deputized by the New Jersey attorney general — Michael Breslin quit his job as an FBI agent and now works as a deputy attorney general assigned to the Norcross case – as was an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District.
Platkin says the federal prosecutor, K.T. Newton, “had nothing to do with the grand jury presentation in, or prosecution of, this case and indeed left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in June.”
One of the state’s most influential political figures since the late 1980s, Norcross was indicted in June for allegedly creating a criminal enterprise that used “threats and fear of economic and reputational harm” to obtain lucrative property rights along the Camden waterfront and influencing tailor-made legislation that came with bankable tax breaks for Norcross’ businesses and the non-profit Cooper University Health Care that he runs.
The 111-page indictment lays out 13 specific charges against Norcross and his co-defendants, including racketeering, conspiracy to commit theft by extortion, financial facilitation of criminal activity, and official misconduct. Read the full indictment here.
StatesLetterinResponsetoDefensesMTC112224 (filed copy)