Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The sopranos they ain't; they're crooks

Only in south New Jersey. The headline is "Political boss enters prison" and it starts out like this.
Five minutes before noon Tuesday, former Democrat Party power broker John A. Lynch Jr. said goodbye to a friend who drove him to the Federal Correction Institute in Loretto, Pa., and became federal inmate 28068-050.

"You're a nobody. You're just a number. You just went from the limelight to the shadows," said Gerald J. Luongo, a former mayor and South Jersey assemblyman who recalled making that walk himself when he entered a federal prison camp in Florida in 2002.
Lynch was is the former mayor of New Brunswick, president of the New Jersey State Senate and Middlesex County party boss.

Just google -- New Jersey mayor sentenced -- for a few of the Garden State's finest. An overview of 2004 written at the end of the year by the Star-Ledger had this startling fact, "2004 was remarkable for how much time and how many resources were spent chasing dishonest officials.
Assembling this list of corruption-related events - raids, indictments, sentencings, resignations, etc. - reveals an average of one corrupt act playing out on the public stage every three days. "

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