Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver hired a man who was convicted in 2014 for bribery, extortion, and mail and wire fraud in a scheme to influence the development of city-owned land while his brother was Mayor of Trenton.
Ralphiel Mack was hired as a constituent services representative at the Department of Community Affairs, the state agency that Oliver runs, despite his 2014 federal bribery conviction.
State law says that public officials convicted of a federal or state crime related to their work ‘shall be forever disqualified from holding any office or position of honor, trust or profit under this state or any of its administrative or political subdivisions.’
Tony Mack, the former Mayor of Trenton, and his brother, Ralphiel Mack, stood trial on charges of conspiracy to commit extortion, attempted extortion, bribery, mail fraud, and wire fraud.
The jury convicted Tony Mack on all counts; it acquitted Ralphiel Mack of the mail and wire fraud charges but he was sentenced to a 30-month prison term after being found guilty on three other criminal counts in the parking-lot bribery scheme.
The Trentonian reported that Raphiel Mack “landed a new gig with the Department of Community Affairs as a constituent services representative. He works in the commissioner’s office, responding to referrals and complaints. He officially started with the department this week, replacing outgoing Reginald Bledsoe, whose last day is April 1.”
Tony Mack, a former four-term Mercer County Freeholder, was elected to the Trenton mayoralty in June 2010.
Three months later, he was the target of an elaborate FBI sting operation involving a fictitious plan to erect an automated parking garage on city-owned property on East State Street in Trenton.
Federal agents arrested the mayor of New Jersey’s capital city, his brother, and convicted sex offender Joseph Giorgianni as part of an ongoing corruption investigation into bribery allegations related to a parking garage project that was concocted as part of an FBI sting operation.
Posing as agents for a development firm, two FBI cooperating witnesses —disbarred attorney Lemuel H. Blackburn Jr. and Harry Seymour —sought to buy official backing for the project.
Over the course of a 21-month-long undercover investigation, Blackburn and Seymour delivered payments totaling $54,000 to Giorgianni, a restaurateur, reputed loan shark, and convicted drug peddler, who acted on behalf of Tony Mack in the scheme by passing along corrupt payments through Ralphiel Mack.
This is not the first time a criminal who is barred from public employment landed a state government job in the administration of Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy hired former Passaic City Councilman Marcellus Jackson in 2018, to a state job at a salary of $70,000 to work in the Department of Education.
Jackson’s 2009 guilty plea to charges that he took a bribe to help steer an insurance contract made him ineligible for state employment.
Officials who commit a crime against the public are more likely to commit another similar crime. And it’s not as if the government has so much trouble filling jobs with excellent pay and outstanding benefits that it has to rehire those who used such a position to criminally enrich themselves.
A benefit of the law that seems to be slipping is that it limits how much government officials can favor the politically connected and protected. Patronage is bad enough, but tolerating crimes against taxpayers and the public interest in the pursuit of favoritism is doubly offensive. Apparently not to Murphy.
Murphy defended the decision to hire the former Passaic City councilman who served prison time for taking bribes from undercover FBI agents, but Jackson was forced to resign by then-Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.
“Marcellus has done all of the above and I think we should all accept that that should be the new norm going forward,” said Murphy, who claimed Jackson was rehabilitated after he served 25 months in prison because the former councilman worked on his 2017 campaign.