OPIA director who supervised Norcross probe is stepping down

After just seven months as head of the embattled Office of Public Integrity and Accountability, Assistant Attorney General Eric Gibson will depart state government today, the New Jersey Globe has learned.

Gibson’s departure comes at a time when the state’s new attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, is reviewing the current OPIA structure and is expected to make some changes to the office.

In the meantime, Deputy First Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Kormann, a former public defender who served as the director of Investigations of Fatal Police Encounters, will lead the OPIA.

A former federal prosecutor from Philadelphia, Gibson joined the attorney general’s office in late October 2024 to supervise the state’s prosecution of Democratic powerbroker George E. Norcross and others in what looked at the time to be the most politically consequential state public corruption case in New Jersey history.

Gibson was brought in to supervise another Assistant Attorney General, Andrew Wellbrock, the lead prosecutor in the Norcross case.

But four months later, Mercer County Superior Court Judge Peter Warshaw dismissed the charges in the 112-page indictment against Norcross and his co-defendants.  Gibson lost a bid to convince state appellate court judges to overturn Warshaw’s ruling and reinstate their indictments.

“The office is grateful for his service to the State of New Jersey and his deep commitment to public corruption cases,” said Sharon Lauchiere, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office.

Thomas Eicher, who formed the office in 2018 and retired in March 2024, was succeeded by Drew Skinner.  Skinner bailed last September after just eleven months to become the deputy commissioner and general counsel of the Office of the New York City Chief Medical Examiner.

At a hearing of the Assembly Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday, Davenport defended the prosecutors in the public corruption unit

“What the public doesn’t see is the work that’s done each and every day by the dedicated prosecutors and the members of the New Jersey State Police, the members of the Department of Law and Public Safety within OPIA who do the work to root out corruption, to make sure,” she said.

But Davenport told lawmakers that she is looking at building a better model.

“I am taking a look at that across the board and making sure that when people hear something about our department, it is assigned and appropriated with the words that are integrity, justice, fairness, which is exactly what our people are doing every day,” she said.

Harsh criticisms of the OPIA – along with Eicher, deputy director Anthony Picione, and the number three lawyer, Peter W. Lee, also departed – Platkin went outside the OPIA structure to recruit Skinner, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Skinner had spent nearly nine years as a federal prosecutor and was co-chief of the Violent and Organized Crime Unit.  He previously served in the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force.

Gibson spent eleven years as an Assistant Philadelphia District Attorney and nearly seventeen years with the Department of Justice, where he spent six years as the deputy chief of the Corruption and Civil Rights section.

He successfully prosecuted former Rep. Ozzie Myers, who had gone to prison in the 1980s after his conviction in the Abscam trial, for election fraud.  Myers admitted his role in a ballot-stuffing scheme and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.   He secured convictions against a Philadelphia congressman, Chaka Fattah, on corruption charges, and against Philadelphia Democratic political consultant Kenneth Smukler on federal campaign finance violations.

In 2022, Gibson prosecuted Philadelphia City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson on bribery charges. Defense attorneys accused the government of prosecutorial overreach and argued that Gibson’s case lacked evidence, was based on inference, and “cherry-picked” facts to fit their narrative.  Jurors deliberated for less than four hours before acquitting Johnson.

He left the U.S. Attorney’s office two months later and began a two-year stint as chair of the Internal Investigations and White Collar Defense practice at Post & Schell, a Philadelphia law firm.

The initial hiring of Gibson sidelined the other OPIA co-director, Jeffrey Manis, from the Norcross case.  Manis tried the state’s case against Osher Eisemann, a popular Lakewood Rabbi.  Superior Court Judge Joseph Paone dismissed the indictment in August after the state rested its case, finding that prosecutors failed to prove allegations of money laundering and official misconduct.

Paterson City Councilmen Alex Mendez and Michael Jackson on voter fraud charges in 2020 have still not gone to trial; both are running for mayor this year and the trial has been pushed off until after the May non-partisan municipal election.

In 2022, a Superior Court Judge dismissed an indictment after finding that Saddle Brook Police Chief Robert Kugler didn’t violate any law by permitting police escorts for funeral processions to cemeteries involving a local funeral home he owns.

The judge, Marilyn Clark, found that Deputy Attorney General Eric Cohen had left out key information that might have benefited the suspended police chief, to the grand jury that indicted him.  Kugler was the Republican nominee for Bergen County Sheriff at the time of his indictment.

In April 2025, Superior Court Judge Reema Sethi Kareer dismissed an indictment against former Phillipsburg Councilman Frank McVey, who was accused of threatening Mayor Todd Tersigni in a blackmail scheme. McVey spent years trying to pry discovery from the state, which was legally obligated to provide it but purposely and strategically withheld it.

Because then-Warren County Prosecutor James Pfeiffer once represented Tersigni in a private legal matter, a judge disqualified the entire prosecutor’s office from participating in the case against McVey.   That included Anthony J. Robinson, the first assistant prosecutor and a former top lawyer at the OPIA.  The allegations forced McVey to drop out of the mayoral race and lose his council seat.

At least five former state and federal prosecutors have accused Deputy Attorney General John Nicodemo of misconduct, alleging that he withheld evidence from defense attorneys and lied to grand juries.  Nicodemo, a cartoonish failed dinner-theater actor, is no longer a line prosecutor and now holds a desk job at the Division of Highway Traffic Safety, albeit at his old salary.