Coughlin names new SCI member

Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin today appointed Kevin R. Reina, an attorney from Summit, to the State Commission of Investigation.

He will succeed John A. Hoffman, who was named to the post in 2018 by Coughlin.  Hoffman has resigned, effective Saturday.

Reina, 61, is an attorney for the Fidelity National Law Group.  He is deacon at the Saint Teresa Avila Church in Summit.

Since Reina is an independent, Coughlin’s appointment opens the door for Gov. Phil Murphy to appoint a Democrat to replace Joseph Scancarella, a retired Superior Court Judge and Republican assemblyman who has been on holdover status since January 1.

Murphy will get a second appointment to the SCI in January when the seat of a second Republican, Rosemary Iannacone, becomes vacant.

Scancarella and Iannacone were both appointed by Gov. Chris Christie.

The fourth seat is held by Robert Burzichelli, a Democrat, who was named to the post by Senate President Steve Sweeney.

Because of the statutory requirement that no one political party have a majority on the SCI, Murphy must name at least one Democrat.

Although their powers have subsided in recent decades, there was a time when the SCI had real teeth, back in the day when a visit from an investigator or a subpoena to appear could reliably cause severe sphincter tightening.

The Legislature created the SCI in 1968 as part of a package of crime fighting bills pushed through by Gov. Richard Hughes after allegations that a North Jersey assemblyman worked to cancel a Senate hearing on organized crime at the request of reputed mob boss Jerry Catena.

Not long after that, an assistant state attorney general, in a speech to a state journalistic society, said that three incumbent legislators were “entirely too comfortable with organized crime.”  He later upped the number to six.

The new SCI was created with enormous investigatory power, largely to keep the Legislature out of the organized crime investigation business.  The commission had the authority to authorize wiretaps, to compel top mob bosses to testify, and even to temporarily jail those who refused to appear before them.   They would refer their findings to law enforcement and acted independently of politics.

While the SCI has broad jurisdiction, these days they deal in issues that are smaller in scope to the ones that dominated their original mission.

Scancarella, who was not one of the legislators under any cloud, voted to create the commission in 1968.