George Norcross III, right, and lawyer Michael Critchley speak to reporters in Trenton on June 17, 2024, after hearing Norcross has been indicted by the state Attorney General’s Office. (Photo by Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
State prosecutors have urged a judge to deny Democratic power broker George Norcross III’s motion to dismiss his racketeering indictment, accusing defense attorneys of trashing their investigation to “indoctrinate the press, the public, and, worst of all, the prospective jury pool.”
In a new filing, state prosecutors implored Judge Peter E. Warshaw Jr. to reject Norcross’ argument that he and five co-defendants were engaged in “hard-bargaining,” not extortion, conspiracy, and other crimes, in deals since 2012 to secure land, easements, and tax incentives along the Camden waterfront.
“Defendants resist any further scrutiny of their actions, claiming that this is all just ‘garden-variety politics,’ ‘how deals get done,’ and even ‘a feature of democratic self-government.’ But the grand jury did not think so, and nothing about its view is manifestly or palpably wrong,” prosecutors wrote.
In a letter Friday, Attorney General Matt Platkin also asked Warshaw to reject a separate motion defense attorneys filed last Wednesday to compel prosecutors to produce the applications and other documents authorizing the federal wiretaps. The defense plans to press Warshaw to suppress the wiretapping evidence but needs the underlying documents to do so, they wrote.
The wiretaps initially were approved for a federal investigation into John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, the disgraced labor leader in Philadelphia who went to prison this year for embezzling from the labor union he had headed.
Investigators listening to conversations in that probe shifted their focus in 2016 to Norcross — but they did so without a fresh wiretap order, defense attorneys said.
“These circumstances raise obvious red flags as to whether prosecutors and agents followed Department of Justice policies, the letter of the federal wiretap laws, and truly established probable cause as to Mr. Norcross,” defense attorneys wrote in their motion.
The documents prosecutors did provide were so heavily redacted that defense attorneys accused them of “playing a cynical game of hide-the-ball.”
The defense also accused Platkin of overreach by taking on a case that investigators had first “shopped” around unsuccessfully to U.S. attorney offices in New Jersey and the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Federal prosecutors in those offices closed the case because they “saw no crime,” the defense alleges.
“There is just one conclusion to be drawn — that the Attorney General prizes headlines over prosecution standards,” defense attorneys Jeffrey S. Chiesa and Lee Vartan said in a statement. The two represent William M. Tambussi, Norcross’ personal attorney and co-defendant.
Platkin bristled at defense attorneys’ claims that his office shirked their legal duty to turn over such documents during discovery.
“So far, the State has turned over to the defense more than 4.3 million files ranging in length from one-page documents to documents that are thousands of pages long,” Platkin wrote. “The State has also given the defense more than 6,000 wiretap recordings and at least 700 hours of audio recordings, which include the interviews of about 100 people.”
Defense attorneys sought additional documents his office doesn’t have, and the office requested them accordingly from federal prosecutors, Platkin added.
He dismissed defense attorneys’ claims that his office improperly picked up an investigation the feds abandoned.
“That the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River used wiretap materials that federal officials alone generated to prosecute a Norcross associate while declining to pursue Norcross and his codefendants for different criminal schemes in New Jersey is no barrier to this prosecution,” he wrote.
New Jersey will “safeguard its residents from corruption — even if it invites the wrath of powerful people like George Norcross or less powerful people like Tambussi,” Platkin added.
Federal prosecutors did not pass on prosecuting Norcross and his associates because they saw no crime, Platkin said. Instead, prosecutors close cases without taking them to court for all sorts of discretionary reasons that have nothing to do with guilt or innocence, such as whether their office has the bandwidth to handle such a prosecution, he said.
Defense attorneys in the Norcross case say federal prosecutors in New Jersey who closed the probe without charges in 2018 cited “a review of the applicable law and evidence obtained during the investigation,” while federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania gave up last year “based upon review of the available admissible evidence, the applicable law, the probability of a successful trial and the prosecution standards of the office.”
Platkin attributed defense attorneys’ “distorted” claims to “their months-long effort to barrage the media with inflammatory rhetoric designed to sway the jury pool.”
Norcross was charged in June in a 13-count indictment along with Tambussi and four others — Norcross’ brother Philip A. Norcross, an attorney with Parker McKay; former Camden mayor Dana Redd; Sidney Brown, the head of trucking company NFI and a Norcross business partner; and John J. O’Donnell, a real estate developer and president of The Michaels Organization.
Norcross is accused of overseeing a criminal enterprise, using direct threats and intimidation to win development rights along the waterfront and then benefiting from millions of dollars in state-issued tax credits.
Norcross and his co-defendants have denied the charges against them.
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