With talk of Bob Menendez, under indictment on federal corruption charges, seeking re-election to his U.S. Senate seat as an independent, he’s a primer on how six scandal-tarred Members of Congress from New Jersey fared:
J. Parnell Thomas (R-Allendale), a seven-term congressman from Bergen County, resigned his seat after being convicted of putting his secretary’s niece and her maid on his staff payroll and had them kick back their entire salaries to him. He served nine months in federal prison.
After President Harry Truman pardoned him, he tried to regain his House seat; he won just 12% of the vote in a Republican primary against his successor, William Widnall (R-Ridgewood).
Henry Helstoski (D-East Rutherford) was elected to Congress six times from a Bergen-Hudson district before his 1976 indictment caused him to lose his seat.
After an extensive investigation spanning multiple grand juries, the Justice Department indicted Helstoski on extortion, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice charges, alleging that he took money from illegal immigrants from South America to back legislation to allow them to remain in the United States.
The indictment came one week before the Democratic primary, which he won on a do-over after allegations of voter fraud. He lost the general election to Republican Harold Hollenbeck (R-East Rutherford), a former state senator, by nine points.
The case against Helstoski never went to trial. After a prolonged legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed most of the charges in 1979 under a similar legal theory that Menendez tried: that he was entitled to immunities for legislative acts. The rest of the counts were later tossed.
Helstoski tried to regain his seat twice. In 1978, while still under indictment, he ran as an independent and received 19,126 votes (13%); Helstoski may have been a spoiler for Democrat Nicholas Mastorelli, who lost to Hollenbeck by 16,590 votes (49%-38%).
After the charges were dropped, Helstoski sought the Democratic nomination to challenge Hollenbeck in 1980. He finished third in the Democratic primary with 23%, behind Gabriel Ambrosio (41%) and Fort Lee Mayor Burt Ross (35%). Ambrosio lost to Hollenbeck but later won a State Senate seat in South Bergen.
Helstoski later spent four years as the North Bergen Superintendent of Schools.
Joseph Maraziti (R-Boonton) had served eight years as an assemblyman and five years in the State Senate when he won a newly-created seat in Congress in 1972 under a map he drew himself as chairman of the redistricting committee. He had combined two Hudson seats into one (see the next item) and ran in a new 13th district that was hugely Republican. It started in East Hanover and went through northern Morris County, picked up all of Hunterdon, Sussex, and Warren counties, and ended in northern Mercer. In the 1968 presidential election, the towns in the new 13th had given Richard Nixon a 55%-36% win over Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
Maraziti defeated former First Lady Helen Stevenson Meyner by 25,154 votes, 56%–43%. Nixon carried the 13th by a 70%-40% margin over Democrat George McGovern.
Local newspapers aimed considerable coverage at Maraziti, whose seat on the House Judiciary Committee put him on national television as Nixon’s defender during the Watergate scandal. He voted against all three articles of impeachment.
On top of that, Maraziti found himself in further trouble when he put his 35-year-old girlfriend, Linda Collinson, on his congressional payroll in a no-show job while she continued to work at Maraziti’s Morris County law firm.
Collinson was outed after applying for a loan with the House Credit Union. A staffer at Maraziti’s Washington office told the credit union she had never heard of Collinson. Reporters later discovered that Maraziti owned the house Collinson lived in.
Maraziti was also damaged by reports that a Warren County newspaper fired its managing editor, Donald Thatcher, after learning he was also on Maraziti’s congressional payroll. Later, news broke that Nicholas DiRienzo, the general manager of two New Jersey radio stations, was also on the congressman’s staff.
Meyner sought a rematch and became one of the Watergate Babies, defeating Maraziti by a 57%-43% margin.
After losing his seat, Maraziti tried to return to public office four times.
When John Dorsey (R-Boonton) ran for the State Senate in 1977, Maraziti became a candidate for Dorsey’s 25th district Assembly seat. He defeated Alfred Villoresi, the attorney for several Morris County municipalities and the loser of a 1975 Assembly primary, by just fourteen votes), by 1094 votes after finishing second in a field of six candidates for two seats. (Future Assemblyman Arthur Albohn came in fifth). But in the general election, Maraziti’s past scandals helped former Assemblywoman Rosemarie Totaro (D-Denville) win and flip the open seat by 2,530 votes even though Dorsey ousted State Sen. Stephen Wiley (D-Morris Township) and Assemblyman James Barry, Jr. (R-Harding) won the other two legislative contests.
With Republicans eyeing Totaro’s Assembly seat in 1979, Maraziti ran again in a six-candidate race. But Albohn, the former Hanover mayor, beat him by 965 votes.
In 1983, Morris County Freeholder Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-Harding) gave up his seat to run for the State Assembly, and Maraziti became a candidate for the open freeholder seat. Former Morris County GOP Chairman Alex DeCroce (R-Parsippany), the future minority leader of the New Jersey State Assembly, edged out former Roxbury Mayor Russell Diana by roughly 550 votes to win the Republican primary, with Maraziti running fifth for three seats about 3,150 votes behind DeCroce.
Maraziti tried one more time to run for the Assembly in 1987. State Sen. Walter “Moose” Foran died in December 1986, and Assemblyman Dick Zimmer (R-Delaware) moved up to the Senate; three Republicans sought the open Assembly seat: former State Sen. Bill Schluter (R-Pennington); future Rep. Leonard Lance (R-Clinton Township), who had been an assistant counsel to Gov. Thomas Kean; Flemington attorney Jeff Moeller; perennial candidate Joseph Shanahan; and Maraziti.
Schluter narrowly edged out Lance by 640 votes, with Maraziti finishing fifth in a field of six candidates for two seats, 1,109 votes behind Lance. (Incumbent Richard Kamin was the top vote-getter.)
Cornelius Gallagher (D-Bayonne) represented Hudson County in Congress for seven terms and found himself with legal difficulties in the 1960s after running afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover while chairing a special House committee investigating privacy issues. Some believe an FBI leak spurred a 1968 Life magazine article that he was under the control of mobster Joe (Bayonne) Zicarelli, a capo in the Genovese crime family and the New York Harbor waterfront boss. Gallagher’s connection to Zicarelli was never proven.
The allegations against Gallagher caused his winning percentage to drop to a 56%-35% win in 1968. By 1970, he won a seventh term with 71% of the vote.
Hudson County lost a congressional seat in 1972 when a new district was created in Morris, Warren, Sussex, and Hunterdon counties. Gallagher had been expected to keep the Hudson seat, but party leaders were going to tell Rep. Dominick Daniels (D-Jersey City), who was 20 years older than Gallagher, to retire. Gallagher was indicted on tax evasion charges, and the accusations against him came at a considerable cost.
The Hudson County Democratic Organization, in deep trouble after reformer Paul Jordan was elected Mayor of Jersey City in 1971, decided to keep Daniels and drop Gallagher. Daniels won the primary by a 51%-32% margin against Jordan’s candidate, West New York Mayor Anthony DeFino. Gallagher came in third with just 15% of the vote, with 2% going to former Congressman Vincent Dellay, who had won the other Hudson House seat in 1956 as a Republican and later switched parties.
Gallagher pled guilty and served a seventeen-month prison sentence. Upon his release in 1974, more than 2,000 Bayonne residents turned out to welcome him home,
Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-Trenton) was a thirteen-term congressman from Mercer County and chairman of the House Administration Committee in 1980 when he was implicated in the FBI sting operation Abscam when an undercover agent pretending to be an Arab sheik offered the congressman a cash bribe to help him circumvent federal immigration laws.
Despite his indictment, Thompson sought re-election. He faced Republican Christopher Smith, the 27-year-old executive director of New Jersey Right to Life. Smith had challenged Thompson in 1978 and lost by 24 points, but the sensational allegations against Thompson helped Smith score a 57%-41% victory; Smith is now in his 44th year as a congressman.
There was a time when Perth Amboy was the epicenter of power in Middlesex County politics and the hometown of Edward Patten, one of the state’s most colorful and influential politicians for nearly fifty years.
The gregarious, boisterous, joke-telling Patten started in politics as a volunteer on Alfred E. Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. He began as a stalwart of David Wilentz, the longtime Middlesex County political boss who gained national prominence when he prosecuted the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Perth Amboy was politically competitive in those days, and Wilentz recruited the 28-year-old Patten to run on a slate of five candidates for city commissioner in May 1934. Patten was a lawyer who found a better-paying job as a teacher at the Boys’ Vocational School in Elizabeth during the early years of the Depression.
Wilentz was serving as New Jersey attorney general at the time – there was no line between politics and law enforcement in the 1930s – so he delegated much of the day-to-day responsibilities to his chief lieutenant, State Sen. John Toolan (D-Perth Amboy). The Republican campaign was essentially run by state Motor Vehicles Commissioner Harold Hoffman, a former congressman and South Amboy mayor who wound up getting elected governor six months later.
Patten turned out to be the top vote-getter with 8,424 votes. The candidate Wilentz and Toolan viewed as the likely mayor, incumbent Albert Walters, won the fifth commissioner seat with 7,712. It was a Democratic sweep, with Republican incumbent William Wilson losing re-election by nearly 1,000 votes.
Wilentz was so pleased with Patten’s performance as mayor that in September 1934, he made Patten the Middlesex County Democratic Chairman. One of the other potential candidates for the post was deputy Middlesex County Surrogate Joseph Karcher, father of the future Assembly Speaker and grandfather of the future state senator.
In 1939, incumbent County Clerk George Cathers wanted to seek re-election to a third term, but he had some health issues, and Wilentz decided he wanted Patten to get the job instead. Cathers appeared angry during the ballot drawing when he gave Patrick Moran Line A in the Democratic primary. Patten won anyway, with 81% of the vote. Patten defeated Madison (now Old Bridge) Mayor Maxwell Mayer in the general election by 59%-41% margin.
It was clear that Patten was not Ann Grossi’s role model: he won praise in 1944 when his office sent out 20,000 military ballots, and only seven were returned undeliverable. He easily won re-election in 1944; in 1949, he beat Charles Klein for a third term with 63%.
In 1953, Patten managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of former Senate Minority Leader Robert Meyner. Meyner won the Democratic primary by just 1,585 votes against former Rep. Elmer Wene, 45.7% to 45.0%. Meyner defeated New Jersey Turnpike Authority Chairman Paul Troast in the general election by a 53%-45% margin.
Before taking office, Gov-elect Meyner nominated Patten as New Jersey Secretary of State. He held that post through the entire eight years that Meyner was governor.
In mid-1961, Meyner sought to settle a fight with Middlesex County Democrats over judgeships by nominating Patten to the bench. This was a job Patten had spent nearly a year pursuing.
New Jersey added a 15th congressional seat after the 1960 census. State Sen. John Lynch, Sr. (D-New Brunswick) had pledged to create a Middlesex County-based House district in the days when the Legislature drew the congressional maps. Lynch initially didn’t think he could get his plan through the Senate – Republicans had an 11-10 majority – but he made a deal that would leave the districts of eight GOP congressmen alone if they gave him the Middlesex seat. The state had a Democratic governor and a Democratic-controlled State Assembly to back that up.
Wilentz wanted to give the seat to his son, Warren, but another Perth Amboy Democrat, Middlesex County Freeholder George Otlowski, stood in his way. Otlowski wanted the congressional seat and wasn’t willing to stand aside and make room for the younger Wilentz. Otlowski had developed a following and had essentially sought to split Middlesex.
Democratic party in John F. Kennedy’s mid-term election. (Otlowski had started in politics as a 22-year-old volunteer on Patten’s 1934 Perth Amboy race.)
The campaign morphed into an all-out bid to stop Otlowski, and David Wilentz decided to pull his son and run the still-popular Patten. Patten appeared more anxious to be a congressman than a judge and was happy to get in the race.
Patten’s ascent to the U.S. House of Representatives was hardly automatic. The bitter race became a referendum on Wilentz’s role as the party boss. Patten won by 6,055 votes, 56%-44%. Otlowski, who would later become mayor of Peth Amboy and a state assemblyman, carried only South River, although the two tied in South Amboy.
With the Wilentz machine back in force, Patten defeated Republican Bernard Rodgers, the mayor of Dunellen, by 20,509 votes in the general election, 57%-43%. He won a 1964 rematch with Rodgers by 54,707 votes, 63%-37%, on the heels of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide.
Patten held his seat but not in any landslides. He won 57% in 1966 and 55% in 1968.
In 1970, Patten faced a strong Democratic primary challenger: Lewis Kaden, a 28-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who had served on Robert Kennedy’s U.S. Senate staff.
Fervently opposed to the war in Vietnam, Kaden came at Patten from the left, pulling in student volunteers from Rutgers and Princeton and capitalizing on opposition to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia a month before the Democratic primary. He filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that organization lines were unconstitutional, but his case was dismissed.
The grass-roots Kaden campaign reportedly knocked on 100,000 doors but couldn’t compete with the strength of the Middlesex County Democratic organization. Patten won by a margin of 12,023 votes, 66%-34%. Kaden didn’t do so badly: he worked for Gov. Brendan Byrne and later became vice chairman of Citigroup.
In the general election, Patten faced Assemblyman Peter Garibaldi, a bricklayer who ran as a pro-labor Republican. Patten won by 34,322 votes, 61%-39%. After the election, Garibaldi said something profound: “Running against Ed Patten is like running against Santa Claus.”
(Garibaldi later found that Jim Bornheimer was no Santa Claus; he ousted him from his Middlesex County State Senate in 1983.)
Republicans thought they would finally have a shot at Patten in 1972, with a newcomer named Fuller Brooks mounting an aggressive campaign to tie Patten, a moderate Democrat, as a big-spending liberal. Richard Nixon beat George McGovern 61%-39% in the 15th district, and Republicans picked up two Middlesex County Freeholder seats – Otlowski was defeated for a sixth term – but Patten held on and eked out an 8,755-vote win, 52%-48%.
Any electoral vulnerability for Patten disappeared amidst the Watergate scandal, and Patten was re-elected in 1974 with the most significant margin of his congressional career: 71%.
Republicans nominated Charles Wiley, a conservative activist and broadcaster from Sayreville who had sought the nomination in 1972. With Jimmy Carter taking 54% in the district, Patten coasted to a 59%-30% win.
Patten’s last campaign came in 1978, and he almost lost.
Now 73 years old, details about Patten’s involvement in the Koreagate scandal began emerging. Lobbyist Tongsun Park was charged with using funds provided by the government of South Korea to bribe six congressmen as part of a bid to ensure that the United States kept its military presence there. The allegation against Patten was that he solicited an illegal campaign contribution from Park, including funds that found their way into the account of the Middlesex County Democrats. Patten allegedly took cash contributions from Park and then wrote personal checks to the county organization.
A 30-year-old Edison attorney, George Spadoro, challenged Patten in the Democratic primary and held him to 59% of the vote, a 6,323-vote plurality. (Spadoro would later become the mayor of Edison and an assemblyman.) Republicans nominated Wiley to run against him.
Summer headlines on Koreagate dominated the summer news, as did Patten’s testimony before the House Ethics Committee. Patten steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. In October, the Ethics panel voted unanimously to clear him of the charges. And the Friday before the election, state Attorney General John Degnan announced that he had cleared Patten of any wrongdoing in Koreagate, which had become a state issue since some of the contributions had come to the county party organization.
Patten also faced allegations that he failed to disclose his assets as required by House rules. Patten had filed a financial disclosure saying he had no personal assets; he eventually announced that all his assets were in his wife’s name.
The scandal took its toll on Patten. He won re-election, but just narrowly 48%-46%, with a plurality of only 2,836 votes.
Despite his near defeat, Patten tried to hang on and run for a tenth term. Democrats were desperate for him to retire, but party leaders were still reluctant to dump him from the organization line as the list of potential successors grew.
Finally, county chairman Nicholas Venezia said Patten would not automatically receive the organization line and must appear before the screening committee. Patten said he would not seek party support and would step aside if they didn’t unanimously endorse him.
One possible candidate, Perth Amboy City Administrator (and future Monroe mayor) Richard Pucci, railed against party bosses and called for an open primary.
In a strange twist, there was a newspaper report that Patten was among the congressmen targeted by the FBI sting operation known as ABSCAM, but that he refused to accept a bribe. Patten vehemently denied that.
Within a few weeks, Patten realized his career was over and announced that he would not seek re-election. Democrats held his seat, electing Senate Majority Leader Bernard Dwyer with 53% of the vote in a district that Republican Ronald Reagan carried by seven points.
Patten returned to Perth Amboy, where he was remembered for his personality and ability to deliver federal funds to his district from his seat on the House Appropriations Committee.
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