| It's difficult to know exactly where it starts, but we can start with his hitch on the Essex County Utilities Authority. It appears that he got the job based on his ability to raise money for James Treffinger and Christi Whitman. He then set about making the most of the mostly-unknown position.
One thing he did was befriend Eric Wisler, who was serving as chief counsel for the Authority. He then created a partnership with Mauro Tucci, who also served on the Authority. The legal agent for that partnership was, of course, Eric Wisler. The purpose of the partnership (G&I Associates)? To sell landfill to construction sites.
In the meantime, the buddies were making sure they got their piece of the Authority's pie. Tucci and Robinson would lead the votes to give Wisler's lawfirm millions of dollars in contracts. Meanwhile, Tucci used his position as township administrator of Bloomfield to make sure that Robinson got a contract for "affirmative-action consulting" (honestly, how difficult is it to say "Hire more minorities!"?), of which he passed along some $350,000 to Wisler's firm.
In 2003, Robinson resigned from the Authority, just as another business partner, Ted Fiore, was getting a $9 million contract to dispose of ash from the Essex County incinerator. Ted Fiore, as it turns out, had created yet another landfill contract business with Leroy Robinson. If you think it's coincidence that Fiore managed to land a contract with Robinson's governmental board, then I'd like to sell you the deed to the Bayonne Bridge (cheap!). It's almost as much of a coincidence as Robinson creating a second landfill company to compete with his first.
Or as much a coincidence that: Tom Barrett, a spokesman for the utilities authority, said that after winning the contract in February 2004, Fiore directed the authority?s financial officer to send all paperwork, including bimonthly payments and invoices, to LIR-Fiore?s office in Newark.
Meanwhile - remember this stretches over ten years - Robinson somehow gets a job as a maintenance foreman (roadway superintendent) on the Parkway. He was so good at his $92,000 a year job that he was suspended in 1999 for stealing paint. Supposedly, this roadway pain was given to a chicken farmer who was trying to land a contract with the Atlantic City Convention Center Authority - where he had been appointed a Commissioner by Christi Whitman (I guess she liked his name) and reappointed by Jim McGreevey (I guess he liked his game).
Soon after that, a private detective (I wonder who hired him?) filmed Robinson taking time off of his Parkway job to hang out at home or run "errands". For this, Robinson retired with a $3,200 a month pension. It's worth noting that this independent landfill contractor would have also had the responsibility of supervising the placement of landfill along the Parkway.
Inexplicably, Robinson founded a title insurance company somewhere during these years. To run the office, he hired Merry Wisler - Eric Wisler's wife. Meanwhile, Fiero and Robinson landed a very powerful contract with EnCap. And, if you're in North Jersey, the word "EnCap" is a warning.
Among those who would shudder would be Nicholas Mazzochi: One of the spurned companies, owned by prominent New Jersey hauler Nicholas Mazzochi, lost out to Robinson after obtaining a DEP permit to do the EnCap work and building a $5 million facility for the work.
Mazzochi said Wisler engineered his removal from the site so EnCap could gain control of a huge amount of clean material he already had placed there.
"They forced me off the site, ordered me to remove my fill, but then a year later take control of it themselves and plow it under," said Mazzochi. "I was screwed beyond being screwed, and it was all engineered by Eric Wisler to make money in that rats' nest they created in the Meadowlands."
Robinson's contract gave him huge influence over the environmental health of the future EnCap development, a site where 5,000 people were to live eventually. As a "fill broker" for the project, Robinson was charged with finding clean material and policing hundreds of haulers who arrived there every day.
He was, in essence, a watchdog for the largest redevelopment project in New Jersey history.
Now, there is no reason to automatically believe Mazzochi over Robinson, except that the history would seem to indicate some problems for Robinson: In bankruptcy court papers, EnCap officials said cost overruns were due largely to the unexpected high cost of "fill" material needed to cover the landfills. According to The Star-Ledger's review of state records, EnCap used the state loans to pay $13.7 million for fill.
Nearly half that amount -- $6.3 million -- went to LIR Fiore, a company accused of dumping a load of PCB-tainted materials at the site, state records show. The materials have since been removed, at a cost of $150,000, according to the DEP. LIR Fiore had no experience providing the type of fill EnCap required, state Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper wrote in a 277-page report earlier this year.
No, it isn't as if Leroy Robinson drove EnCap into bankruptcy. But it is - or at least looks like - he used his political pull to be positioned to drive his competitors off the site and drive up costs. Or maybe it wasn't exactly "political" (in the Machiavellian sense): The court papers, based in part on undercover tape recordings made in 2005 by a government informant, describe how one self-professed mob associate ? New York resident Gino Cracolici ? sought to control access to the Meadowlands site via his connection to LIR.
?Cracolici has made a deal ? to take payments of $40 per dump truck load to allow the [confidential informant] to have unlimited access to a land fill project in New Jersey known as ?Endcap?,?? according to the documents.
Cracolici, the documents say, did receive an undisclosed amount in such EnCap payoffs.
I'll leave off for now, but would like to thank the reporters at The Record who worked so hard to put this story together over several months. My final thought is this: By pulling the trigger on the money laundering charge, the big threat from EnCap to Robinson - that he'll go to jail - is now moot. Prosecutors can now dangle a reduced sentence to get cooperation in getting Robinson's testimony. If we never learn the full story about EnCap, we might be able to look at this guilty plea as the reason why. |
