On election night in 2001, James E. McGreevey ascended the stage in a hotel ballroom, a crowd of 2,000 elated supporters arrayed before him, his dream at hand.
In that giddy, optimistic moment, a close friend of the governor-elect predicted McGreevey’s political star one day would rise beyond New Jersey, perhaps even to the White House. “From here, he becomes a national figure,” state Sen. Ray Lesniak said. “He will get it done in the right way, and that will project him nationally.”
Fast forward to Aug. 12, 2004, when McGreevey stunned the nation by announcing his sexual orientation and stating that he would resign from office. Not only was the 47-year-old married father of two a homosexual who later put his lover on the state payroll, but the man, former aide Golan Cipel, accused McGreevey of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Several revelations have since emerged, among them that McGreevey’s private behavior had threatened to destroy his political career long before he met the man who led to his downfall.
Specifically:
Despite his clean-living image – and confounding those who believed he was a closeted homosexual – McGreevey visited traditional, female-staffed go-go bars so frequently before he became governor that his advisers admonished him to stop, warning that he risked political immolation. At least twice leading up to the 2001 election, McGreevey also spent time at a gay nightclub in Atlantic City.
McGreevey benefited in his rise to power from a small circle of loyalists who came to be known in political circles as his personal cleanup squad. The political guardians quashed rumors, reassured supporters fearful of lurid revelations and, in their most brazen act, shipped a female prostitute out of state just before the 1997 gubernatorial election after she claimed McGreevey regularly paid her for sex.
Cipel was a far more pervasive presence in McGreevey’s life than previously believed, both in the Statehouse and at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, where the aide was twice seen emerging from the private residence early in the morning.
Cipel’s remarkable access to the governor helped him win at least five high-paying jobs in the 13 months after he left the administration. In one previously undisclosed case, he was hired by a leading construction firm just before the governor approved a lucrative state contract for the company.
In the final, desperate days before McGreevey made his resignation announcement, his closest advisers devised a plan to secretly pay Cipel to keep silent. The payoff would have been masked from public view through a legal defense fund, ostensibly created to help McGreevey counter the myriad investigations into his administration.
From his earliest days, McGreevey seemed destined to land on a big political stage. He had an Ivy League education and the backing of powerful figures in the state Democratic Party, and he was developing a single-minded ambition to one day control the Statehouse.
But the aspiring politician also had a habit that, if exposed, might have troubled the voters of New Jersey.
He liked to spend time at go-go bars. After work. In the middle of the day. On the campaign trail.
“There were a lot of go-go bars,” one longtime senior adviser to the governor said. “It was very common.”
McGreevey’s taste for go-go bars already was well-established when he made his first run for political office, winning an Assembly seat in 1989 at age 32.
Indeed, aides say he wasn’t especially secretive about the strip club visits, which continued with regularity even after his 1991 marriage to Kari Schutz, a librarian he had met on a singles cruise to Bermuda, and even as he began a run for mayor of Woodbridge.
Three long-standing political allies said McGreevey sometimes broke away from campaigning for hours at a time to visit go-go bars in Sayreville, South Amboy, Old Bridge and Rahway. The trips were common enough to merit their own euphemism around the mayoral campaign: “McGreevey is out knocking on doors in Sayreville.”
Associates familiar with these trips said they were typical macho outings: McGreevey drank beer, flirted with dancers, tipped them sometimes and was just one of the guys. Frequently, McGreevey or members of his entourage recounted the go-go bar outings around the office the next day.
By 1997, McGreevey had won a second term as mayor of Woodbridge. He also was a state senator and well on his way to capturing the Democratic nomination for governor.
His name and face were on television and in newspapers across the state, and he had cultivated an image tailor-made for politics: proud son of a Marine Corps drill sergeant; champion of the middle class; policy wonk, conversant in the most esoteric details of government.
Early in the 1997 campaign, McGreevey still was visiting go-go bars so frequently his advisers believed an intervention was necessary.
The task fell to Doug Heyl, a Georgian brought in to manage McGreevey’s gubernatorial campaign, and to Gary Taffet, who served as McGreevey’s chief of staff in Woodbridge.
Heyl said there was tension between outside recruits, like himself, and McGreevey’s Woodbridge friends over the candidate’s fondness for strip clubs. At one point, Heyl said, he ordered Taffet, the deputy campaign manager, to confront McGreevey about strip clubs.
“Y’all clean up your mess,” Heyl recalled telling Taffet. “I gave a directive for Kennedy and McCabe to not be around him after 8 o’clock at night.”
Taffet, who later served as chief of staff in the governor’s office, has declined comment, as has McCabe.
That fall, in a surprisingly strong showing, McGreevey came within a percentage point of unseating Gov. Christie Whitman, virtually assuring he would run again in 2001.
He did, campaigning with the kind of tireless enthusiasm that became his trademark. But he had not given up his strip club habit, McGreevey’s advisers said, and once again they feared it would undermine his political promise.
During that 2001 race against former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, McGreevey made frequent stops at a Paterson go-go bar, City Lights, owned by the son of a political ally, Alan Levine. A bar employee and a Passaic County official both said they saw him there.
Inside the club, now known as Hi Beams Gentlemen’s Club, hang two 8-by-10 photos of McGreevey posing with Levine and other supporters at a fund-raiser. It wasn’t just strip clubs McGreevey visited.
During the 2001 campaign, he also spent time at Studio Six, known as Atlantic City’s hottest gay nightspot. On a typical Saturday night, hundreds of people, mostly men, dance until dawn beneath flashing, multicolored lights.
Two employees said they saw McGreevey in the club at least twice, both times on Saturday nights, with owner John Schultz, a former Atlantic City councilman who is openly gay.
The employees said the two men went directly to the upstairs VIP room, a quieter setting with mirrored walls, Roman columns and crescent-shaped booths upholstered in plush yellow fabric.
Rumors about McGreevey’s sexuality go as far back as his 1989 Assembly bid and bubbled up with increasing intensity in succeeding campaigns. An official who worked on both of McGreevey’s gubernatorial campaigns called the rumors a “major distraction” that worried staffers and diverted attention from strategy and core issues.
McGreevey’s divorce from Schutz in 1995 fed the speculation. So did the cadre of young male aides with whom McGreevey surrounded himself. Democrats outside his inner circle derisively referred to the young aides as “the Lavender Hill Mob.”
The name didn’t stick, but the pattern of hiring did. During the 1997 run for governor, the dearth of women in campaign positions stoked controversy.
At the urging of Taffet and McGreevey’s top political strategist, Steve DeMicco, the campaign hired Kathy Ellis, an experienced press aide, to travel with the candidate. Inside campaign headquarters, the stated reason for the hiring was diversity. But a campaign official acknowledges now that Ellis served another purpose.
In 1997, Ellis was in the press office of the state Senate’s Democratic caucus before going to work for the Democratic State Committee and then the McGreevey campaign as the No. 2 person in the communications department. Since early last year, she has been communications director in the governor’s office.
“I’ve always assumed then – and, given my credentials, I continue to assume – that the jobs I was given on the campaign were based on professional competence,” Ellis said.
No matter what moves the governor’s handlers made, the rumors about his sexual orientation continued. One was especially sordid: It suggested McGreevey had been caught having sex with a man in a town-owned car parked in a Woodbridge cemetery. The rumor had surfaced two years earlier, during McGreevey’s re-election bid for mayor. Now it was back, more dangerous than ever.
In a recent interview, the Woodbridge police officer rumored to have caught McGreevey in the act put the political legend to rest, saying it never happened.
“Something was said at one point and it grew legs,” Sgt. Joseph Nisky said, marveling at the story’s rapid spread and staying power. Nisky said he had no idea how or where the rumor began.
Lesniak and Taffet were accustomed to putting down rumors about McGreevey. They had been doing it for years. Together with then-state Sen. John Lynch, another McGreevey mentor and one of the state’s most formidable Democratic leaders, they formed the core of McGreevey’s cleanup squad.
Augmented at times by consultants and lawyers loyal to the Democratic Party, McGreevey’s protectors engaged in heavy phone work and face-to-face contacts, assuring county chairmen and others crucial to their candidate’s advancement that the gay rumors were false and that his go-go bar outings would not become a major issue.
But individual members of the damage-control team also took more aggressive action as needed. During McGreevey’s first gubernatorial run, a prostitute from Perth Amboy merited their attention.
As a character witness, Myra Rosa would be suspect. The 5-foot-1, 105-pound woman had been arrested more than two dozen times in Perth Amboy and surrounding communities, mostly for offenses related to drugs and prostitution.
But in October 1997, as McGreevey threatened to upset Whitman, Rosa, then 26, began repeating a claim she first made to Sayreville police in 1995 after an arrest. It was a claim some in McGreevey’s camp viewed as a potential candidate-killer.
McGreevey, Rosa told police in a tape-recorded statement, had been a client off and on for two years. She made similar statements to her mother and to employees of Lucky 7 Bail Bonds, the Perth Amboy business that routinely secured her release from jail.
“She used to yell that in the office,” said Robert L. Hand, Lucky 7’s president at the time. “We’d be bailing her out, and she’d blab that McGreevey was her man.”
Today, former campaign officials and others with knowledge of the operation say Rosa’s removal from New Jersey was orchestrated by McGreevey’s political guardians.
McGreevey met the 36-year-old Cipel while on a trade mission to Israel in March 2000, three weeks after proposing marriage to the woman who would become his second wife, Dina Matos. Cipel, then a spokesman for the mayor of Rishon LeZion, began working on behalf of McGreevey’s gubernatorial campaign within months.
In January 2002, a newly elected McGreevey named the public relations man his homeland security adviser, a move that troubled some of the governor’s aides, given Cipel’s lack of experience for such a sensitive post in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
To many observers, even more remarkable than Cipel’s access to the governor in public was his frequent presence at Drumthwacket at unusual hours.
A former administration official recalled twice arriving at the governor’s mansion for a 7:30 a.m. meeting and finding Cipel there, dressed in sweat pants.
“It was very obvious that he spent the night,” the official said. “You don’t go to the governor’s mansion with a sweat suit on. His hair was not combed. His face did not look like he washed it.”
To no avail, McGreevey sought to limit the glimpses into his private life. Shortly after moving into the mansion in 2002, he ordered his State Police security detail out of the main building and into a retrofitted garage out back. He also required estate staff to sign confidentiality agreements, an unprecedented move, and he ended a record-keeping practice in which the names of visitors to the 19-room residence were recorded.
For Cipel, what followed was a succession of private-sector posts, all high-paying and all linked either to McGreevey or to contacts Cipel made while in the administration.
McGreevey personally arranged jobs for Cipel with the MWW Group, a lobbying and public relations firm in East Rutherford, and with State Street Partners, a Trenton lobbying firm where Jim Kennedy is a partner.
The others were with Zeiger Enterprises, a Trenton import-export company run by Shelley Zeiger, a McGreevey supporter whom Cipel met while arranging a trip to Israel for the governor, and with Touro College, which was seeking government approval to open a medical school in New Jersey.
In all four cases, company officials parted ways with Cipel – or fired him outright – because of his performance.
In late July, Cipel contacted the McGreevey administration through New York entertainment lawyer Allen M. Lowy, saying he planned to file suit against the governor for sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Lesniak and McGreevey’s lawyers claim Lowy demanded as much as $50 million in what they characterize as an extortion attempt. Lowy called the contact between the parties legitimate settlement discussions and denies demanding such an exorbitant sum.
In the days that followed, Lesniak says, he and McGreevey’s advisers considered keeping Cipel quiet with a $500,000 settlement payment. The money could be raised through a legal defense fund for McGreevey without drawing public scrutiny of its true purpose, they believed, because the governor faced a series of other investigations into his associates.
But Cipel was asking for too much, far more than Lesniak could raise and conceal. The defense fund plan was abandoned.
For hours leading up to his Aug. 12 news conference, McGreevey resisted advice to quit. According to three advisers huddled with him in the governor’s mansion that day, McGreevey wanted desperately to believe he could withstand the storm that would arise when Cipel’s claims went public.
The political consultants in the room told him otherwise, suggesting “every rumor, every innuendo” that had ever come up in his political career would be grist for the media. There was no need to elaborate – many in the room knew of the Myra Rosa matter and McGreevey’s past fondness for strip clubs. Any indiscretion, past or present, would be fair game.
It wasn’t until 1:30 p.m., 2 1/2 hours before his scheduled news conference, that McGreevey set about writing his resignation speech, his resolve gone.
Negotiations with Cipel’s lawyer would continue until nearly 4 p.m., yielding a last-ditch settlement offer of $2 million. McGreevey summarily rejected it.
“I’m done,” he said, according to those present. “I’m not going to hide anymore.”
Today McGreevey plans to make his farewell to his friends and supporters with a brief speech at the State Museum in Trenton. He moved out of the governor’s mansion last week and is settling into a two-bedroom apartment in Rahway, where his best friend, Kennedy, is mayor. He will work as an attorney in the law firm of Ray Lesniak, his mentor and a longtime member of the cleanup squad. It will be his first job out of government in 15 years.