Power Outage
James E. McGreevey never identified him personally, but the name Golan Cipel has become synonymous with one of New Jersey’s biggest political scandals. A look inside the administration tracks how an unknown P.R. man helped bring down the governor.
By Jeff Pillets
Photograph: Laura Pedrick
February 21, 2002, was an unusually balmy day for the middle of winter. In Trenton, bureaucrats poured from their offices to eat lunch in the sunshine and feel the warm breezes blowing off the Delaware River, whose banks were lush with budding forsythia.
Many of the workers were brand-new hires of the five-week-old McGreevey administration. It was a time of great promise for the Democrat from Woodbridge, a 44-year-old ex–altar boy and Marine drill sergeant’s son who had become a champion high school debater because he was too puny for contact sports. McGreevey’s 15-point margin of victory was no surprise to those who had watched him race up and down New Jersey in pursuit of the win. At his inauguration, people raved about McGreevey’s rich future on the national political scene.
But on this February day, all the bureaucrats in the streets were asking one question: “Who the hell is Golan Cipel?”
The question had been raised that morning in a newspaper story that landed with a pronounced thud on the new administration’s doorstep. Cipel, it turned out, was many things: a poet, an Israeli navy veteran, a former public relations aide who’d worked for the mayor of his hometown, a congested suburb of Tel Aviv. Now, the newspaper reported, to the surprise of even McGreevey’s top-level officials, young Golan Cipel was the governor’s personal adviser on homeland security.
A spate of friends and advisers keeps the administration in the news—and in court.
The names trip off the tongue, forever linked: Haldeman. Ehrlichman. Dean. Mitchell. Magruder.
Daisies in the chain of deceit known as Watergate. Now, New Jersey can boast of its own matched set of fleurs du mal destined for imprint in the state’s collective memory:
Taffet. Levinsohn. Kushner. Chugh. D’Amiano.
These names were brought to you by James E. McGreevey, three years after vowing to forever “change the way Trenton does business.”
The names here should remind you that before McGreevey’s August 12 resignation/disclosure address, the governor was in the deepest kind of trouble. Even his own party, embarrassed by his string of ill-advised appointments and ethical foibles, was itching for an excuse to drop him.
U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie is all over McGreevey’s friends and fund-raisers. Many wonder whether it‘s just a matter of time before McGreevey himself does a perp walk.
Christie says that Cipel's alleged plot to extort money from his ex-boss is only the starting point in his investigation. He's asking other questions too: Just what steps did McGreevey take to hide the truth about Cipel's credentials? Is it possible that someone else was threatening to expose the governor's sexual preference? Were state money, contracts, appointments, and approvals ever used as currency to buy silence?
After McGreevey finally conceded to push Cipel from his $110,000-a-year state job in August 2002, how did Cipel land lucrative positions with private-sector firms run by the governor’s friends? How did he move so easily from one job to the next if, as his ex-employers acknowledge, Cipel rarely showed up and did practically nothing?
Fair questions, but they’re only the latest.
Remember Machiavelli?
One night not too long ago at the East Brunswick Hilton, McGreevey casually slipped the name of the Florentine philosopher into a conversation with a fundraiser and another man who was considering making a $40,000 contribution to the governor and his party.
The would-be contributor, Piscataway farmer Mark Halper, was wearing a wire in the meeting for the FBI. Halper claims that he told the fund-raiser, Middlesex County mulch merchant David D’Amiano, to have McGreevey utter the name as a signal to show that the fix was in on a lucrative land deal that would bring the farmer millions.
McGreevey says he was making an innocent literary allusion. But how does the author of a sixteenth-century book that espouses gaining and keeping power through any means necessary enter into small talk between a farmer and his governor? In September, D'Amiano pleaded guilty to two criminal counts of mail fraud in the case. He‘ll be sentenced December 28; he could get 24 to 30 months in jail.
Then there's Charles Kushner, the developer who personally engineered the funneling of $1.5 million to McGreevey and the Democrats in his name and those of unsuspecting others. He’s expected to be sentenced to 18 to 24 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign-finance fraud. With the FBI hot on his tail, authorities say Kushner sought to blackmail potential witnesses with the use of hookers and videotapes. Among those he allegedly tried to ensnare was his own brother in-law.
Look at some of McGreevey’s other friends:
Former aides Gary Taffet and Paul Levinsohn are under investigation for allegedly using their clout to rig multimillion-dollar billboard deals. Two McGreevey fund-raisers, Ronald Manzo and Jay Phillips, who pleaded guilty to various stock schemes and business fraud, are reportedly cooperating in the billboard probe.
Rajesh “Roger” Chugh, a former cab driver hired as an outreach coordinator by McGreevey despite the objections of a parade of prominent Indian businessmen. Chugh is under investigation for allegedly shaking down Indian small-business owners for campaign contributions.
Christie won’t say where all the probes are going. But speaking about the costs of corruption to a group of senior citizens in Denville, the Republican said that the Cipel story, while certainly significant, may have been merely the last straw.
“While I’m not saying that the governor himself was corrupt,” he said. “I am saying that the scandals surrounding his administration weakened him to the point where he felt his only option was to resign.”
—Jeff Pillets
The article also said that Cipel had no real credentials in counter-terrorism or state security, although McGreevey chose him for the job over former FBI director Louis Freeh. The article did not report that Cipel and McGreevey had engaged in a homosexual affair.
It is really not possible, then or now, to call it a relationship, because Cipel alleges that McGreevey forced him to have sex. McGreevey denies any coercion.
There have been few weirder interludes in the history of a state long ago weirded out by the exploits of some venal politicians who have run it. The McGreevey-Cipel relationship, which first became the subject of Statehouse gossip that balmy morning in 2002, blossomed into a full-fledged scandal 30 months later, when the governor called a press conference to announce three things: that he was gay, that he’d had an extramarital affair with a man, and that he would leave office on November 15. McGreevey thus entered history not as the man who campaigned to “change the way Trenton does business,” but as the first sitting governor to come out before a national television audience.
In Trenton, people talk about McGreevey’s ”gay American” speech with the same gravity that they recall where they were when JFK was shot or when the towers fell. They also chatter about Cipel, and how everyone knew but no one talked.
The decline and fall of Jim McGreevey is really a story about silence and deceit. “I knew from the beginning that something was seriously, seriously wrong [with Cipel’s hiring],” says David Twersky, director of international affairs at the American Jewish Congress in New York and former editor of the New Jersey Jewish News. “I think a lot of people knew that, but what can you do? How do you tell the governor that everyone thinks he’s gay? How do you tell him that everyone thinks he’s put his gay lover on the state payroll? So there was really this kind of conspiracy of silence.”
Twersky, a friend of Cipel and McGreevey, covered their attempts to get out the Jewish vote during the 2001 campaign. One day in the summer of 2002, Cipel, who was being hammered by the press, asked Twersky to write an editorial in the Jewish News about how bright and capable he was. Twersky says that he agreed, though reluctantly. The editorial appeared under the headline Golan Depths. Twersky wrote that the press should stop pursuing the 32-year-old Cipel unless it found something substantial. Cipel’s critics, he wrote, should either ”spit it out or swallow it.”
By the time Twersky’s editorial appeared in July 2002, innuendo had become a kind of universal currency in Trenton. Reporters had been chasing Cipel for six months, some even traveling to Israel to research his background or hiring Israeli reporters to do the legwork for them.
A month later, the governor had a question for Twersky: “Why is everybody picking on Golan?”
“Come on, Jim,” Twersky replied. “You know why everyone’s interested in Golan. You know it’s because everyone thinks he’s your gay lover.”
McGreevey, Twersky says, dismissed it with a laugh and a denial. “I can’t believe they’re bringing that up again,” the governor said.
Pieces of McGreevey’s relationship with Cipel already had emerged, but no one really could say what it all meant. Cipel had come from solid middle-class roots in Rishon Letzion, a sprawling enclave of apartment blocks built by early Israeli settlers in the sandy orange groves surrounding Tel Aviv. His father, Avraham, is a retired engineer in the Israeli aircraft industry who now drives taxis. His mother, Leah, works as a receptionist at a nearby military base.
Like other young Israelis, Cipel was required to spend five years in the nation’s armed forces. After his tenure in the navy, he spent more time in the Israeli reserves. Cipel was interested in media and public policy and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communications from New York Institute of Technology. He held many jobs in Israel and the U.S. For a while, he was a television reporter covering the Knesset, for which he had also worked as an aide. In New York City in the late 1990s, he served as a spokesman for the Israeli consulate and addressed civic groups on American-Israeli issues. All said he was bright, articulate, and ambitious.
Cipel’s friends say that he aspired to wealth and glamour, that he liked to drive expensive cars and be seen with attractive young women. Guy Horesh, a 34-year-old systems engineer from Rishon Letzion, grew up with Cipel and claims he remains one of his closest friends. He says that Cipel lived with a woman in New York during his years with the consulate. “Golan is a man who likes women,” says Horesh. “I have been with him many times when he was with women. That is why I find it so hard to believe that he was involved in an affair with the governor of New Jersey.” Horesh says that Cipel was getting ready to propose to his female housemate, and that he had taken her home to meet his parents and friends. The couple broke up, Horesh says, only after she refused to move to Israel, where Cipel had landed a new job as spokesman for his hometown mayor.
Rishon Letzion mayor Meir Nitzan calls Cipel “one of the most sharply intelligent and hardworking aides” he’s ever hired. He says that he was delighted when Cipel introduced him to his girlfriend, and disappointed when the relationship failed. “They came to me, I gave them my blessing,” Nitzan says. “Golan was happy. He had found a girl. He was going to get married and start a family. I was sorry things didn’t work out.”
Those who knew Cipel in Israel say that his real love is politics—American-style politics. They say that he wanted nothing more than to move back to the United States to work for a large-scale campaign. His dream came true in March 2000, when McGreevey, then mayor of Woodbridge and an aspiring gubernatorial candidate, visited Rishon Letzion as part of a goodwill mission to Israel co-sponsored by the United Jewish Federation of MetroWest, a Jewish social organization based in Whippany. Cipel was assigned to accompany the New Jersey dignitaries and soon became McGreevey’s personal tour guide in the Holy Land. Israeli newspaper photos show the two men sharing a bottle of wine, deep in conversation. An excited McGreevey phoned home to tell his campaign staff that he had found a great new guy to join the team.
“Jim calls up out of the blue one day to tell us about this smart new Israeli kid who was going to help us out,” recalls a former McGreevey campaign aide. “It was very weird.”
Months later, with help from McGreevey and other prominent Democrats, Cipel got a job writing press releases for wealthy developer Charles Kushner, who sponsored Cipel‘s application for a work visa.
In September 2001, Cipel found an apartment in Woodbridge, just a few blocks from where McGreevey lived with his pregnant wife, Dina Matos, who’d grown up in Newark’s Ironbound section and worked as executive director of the Columbus Hospital Foundation. McGreevey had proposed to Matos on Valentine’s Day 2000, just a few weeks before his trip to Israel.
Cipel’s apartment building was owned by developer David Halpern, a powerful Democratic fund-raiser. Shortly after Cipel moved in, Halpern took him to court to collect his $900 monthly rent. Cipel paid regularly after that, Halpern says.
People who worked on the 2001 campaign describe Cipel, contrary to the testimonials of his Israeli friends, as an arrogant and pretentious bumbler, a political neophyte. High-ranking administration officials and advisers, who asked that their names be withheld from this story, for fear of alienating incoming governor and McGreevey ally Richard Codey, say they are concerned for McGreevey and about any long-term damage his resignation may have on the party. They say they don’t want to publicly challenge their leader when he’s down, but profess anger that their loyalty was pushed to such lengths.
After McGreevey’s election, Cipel moved into the administration’s transition offices with two aides he had picked during the campaign. Members of the transition team say they were shocked when Cipel tried to assert control over the new governor’s inauguration speech. “He actually wrote stuff,” says a former McGreevey adviser. “The speechwriters just threw it away, but people were forced to listen to Golan because it was clear he had the governor’s ear. He was one man I learned very early on that you could not piss off.”
On February 1, 2002, the governor fractured his leg while walking on a Cape May beach. In the official account, he and his wife had been taking a late-night walk. Reporters wondered whether he might have been with Cipel. News organizations requested records of the 911 call made that night.
Just three weeks later, on February 21, 2002, McGreevey staffers—and the rest of New Jersey—learned that Cipel had landed the security adviser job. “I was with the governor almost every day,” says one aide. “Homeland security was one of our main campaign themes....If I knew one thing, it was that Golan knew nothing about security.”
Within days of the revelation, Cipel was relieved of his homeland security duties and given a vague new position as special counsel. With two aides, he occupied a second-floor Statehouse office, where they mostly collected clips from Jewish newspapers. “It was terrible for morale,” says a former staffer, “because we all saw he was being paid a lot of money for doing nothing.”
The press continued pursuing rumors of Cipel’s relationship with McGreevey. The job controversy, erupting so close to the beginning of McGreevey’s tenure, set a troubling pattern in the administration’s relationship with the press. One former administration official says that Cipel’s job change only exacerbated McGreevey’s penchant for secretive micromanagement, including a mandate that he had to personally approve the release of all information. By summer, jokes about McGreevey and Cipel had made their way to talk radio, where disc jockeys joked about “Little Golan.”
One day in June Twersky met Cipel for lunch. “Golan was watching the ground slip from under his feet,” Twersky says. “He kept saying how smart and qualified he was to serve the governor, that the press had it all wrong.” Cipel gave no hint of trouble. “Sexual harassment? Trouble with the governor?” Twersky says. “Not a word.” Two months later, on August 12, Cipel resigned. The administration reported the parting as amicable. Privately, McGreevey’s advisers were jubilant. The news stories, for the most part, stopped. Cipel moved through a succession of public relations and consulting jobs, some of which he’d obtained through the governor's friends.
The Cipel crisis had passed.
As McGreevey prepared for The 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, things weren’t looking so bad. He had weathered a series of scandals and indictments involving former aides and fund-raisers. His poll numbers were sagging, but not plummeting. But on July 23, just three days before the convention, a New York City lawyer named Allen Lowy called McGreevey’s office. Lowy said he represented a client named Golan Cipel, who was considering filing a sexual assault lawsuit—a sexual harassment suit was also mentioned—against the governor. Sources in the administration report that the call began a three-week odyssey of conversations and meetings between Lowy and the governor’s lawyers. Lowy, who is not licensed to practice in New Jersey, was asking for millions of dollars to make the suit go away, the sources say. Lowy and Cipel wouldn’t comment for this story, and both deny any extortion attempt. With his lawyers and aides furiously trying to manage the crisis, McGreevey kept a game face in public. In Boston, he worked a full schedule, even delivering a speech to gay leaders. Back home, a crisis-management group met with the governor every day at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton. They decided to notify the FBI that Lowy and Cipel were attempting to extort money from the governor.
On August 7, state senator Raymond Lesniak, the powerful Union County Democrat and one of McGreevey’s oldest friends, was staying at his summer home in Curtis Point when the governor phoned to say he was on his way. “I knew something was terribly wrong,” Lesniak says. When McGreevey arrived, he told Lesniak of Cipel’s extortion scheme.
Three days later, the governor traveled to Wanaque for what was to be the administration’s crowning act: signing into law the Highlands preservation bill.
The next day, Lesniak says, McGreevey gave him the essential piece of news: “‘Ray, I’m gay,’ he said. I think it was a great relief to him,” Lesniak says. “It was certainly not a huge surprise to me.”
On Thursday, August 12, Lesniak headed to Drumthwacket, where he met in the governor’s library with McGreevey and Steve DeMicco, Joel Benenson, and Jim Margolis, the governor’s longtime political consultants; chief of staff Jamie Fox, Curtis Bashaw, a real estate developer from Cape May whom McGreevey recently had appointed executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority; Doug Hattaway, the campaign spokesman for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign; and Hank Sheinkopf, a former police officer who owns a public relations and political consulting practice.
As late as 11 am, five hours before McGreevey would face the TV cameras and declare himself a gay American, the governor believed he could manage the fallout without resigning.
“In all my years around politics, I had never seen a scene so damned strange,” says one of the people in the meeting that day. “I don’t think he really understood that he was going to lead the news all over the freaking world.”
The princes of spin went back and forth, working the grisly facts:
McGreevey is gay....Not so bad, they said. We can definitely get over that.
McGreevey committed adultery….Okay. Bad, but manageable.
McGreevey hired an unqualified guy to head homeland security….Bad. Very bad. But not unmanageable.
McGreevey put his unqualified gay lover in charge of homeland security a couple of months after 9/11…Outta there!
McGreevey knew his advisers were right; staying on was out of the question. He agreed to give up the job he worked for his entire adult life, but he’d do it on his terms.
McGreevey had decided to leave December 31, but he was warned that it would give critics too much ammunition. It might also appear unseemly for his fractured family to hobble through the holidays at Drumthwacket.
Several in the room agreed that a November 15 resignation would give McGreevey time to take care of business; Codey would also have time to put together a staff and a plan.
McGreevey was concerned enough about the impact on the presidential race to phone Democratic contender John Kerry. “He thought it was best that Kerry hear directly from him what was about to happen,” says a source close to the governor. “They had a sincere talk. Kerry wished him his best.”
“If New Jersey was in play in the presidential election, McGreevey would have been gone the next day,“ says David Rebovich, a political scientist at Rider University.
Details decided, McGreevey advisers say he addressed the issue of publicly declaring his homosexuality with remarkable grace. Without hesitation, they say, McGreevey began dictating the speech that would shock the state. The opening two sentences of what was to be a mere 693 words startled some in the room: “Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused...”
“It was jarring,” says one adviser. ”It was uncomfortable, but he said this was one speech that wasn’t about politics or the polls or people’s perceptions. This was about his life.... I can tell you that he was a tower of integrity. I was humbled.”
The discomfort of those gathered at Drumthwacket grew as McGreevey began talking about what caused him to “force what I thought was an acceptable reality” on himself. McGreevey traversed the painful territory of his first marriage, to Kari Schutz, a librarian from Canada who divorced him in 1995. In the divorce papers, Schutz said that she and their daughter, Morag, had become nothing more than props for his political career.
Schutz says that she and Morag, now twelve, watched the resignation speech from their home in a Vancouver suburb. It was, she says, one McGreevey’s best moments. “Straight from his heart,” Schutz says. “Anybody who knows that man knows he was speaking with sincerity. Those were his words....I feel real sadness for Jim, but I’m also proud of him. Think of the courage he needed to stand up there and admit the truth.”
McGreevey, although relieved that the truth was finally out, also felt betrayed by Democratic party bosses, particularly former state senator John Lynch Jr. and Camden County kingmaker George Norcross III, who couldn’t wait to replace him in a special election with U.S. senator Jon Corzine. The bosses had their own succession plan: McGreevey out. Corzine in. Congressman Robert Menendez appointed to Corzine’s Senate seat. McGreevey was angry. “They can cut my heart out and drag my body through the streets of Trenton,” he told Lesniak, “and I still won’t leave early.”
The effort flopped. At first Menendez issued a statement of support, then called for McGreevey’s immediate resignation. He was silenced, though, when a high-ranking administration official informed reporters that the separated Menendez should worry about his own personal life.
Corzine, though, fed the frenzy. On Meet the Press he told host Tim Russert that New Jersey was undergoing “a crisis of confidence,” and that he could restore honesty and credibility in Trenton. Then he met with McGreevey and pledged his support, though he told a group of labor leaders in Atlantic City that he remains “willing to serve.”
Then things got really strange. The Associated Press was reporting that Michael David Miller, a Livingston physician who claimed to have been a CIA operative and Cipel’s ex-lover, would undergo a court-ordered competency evaluation; Miller’s fantastic story—delivered shirtless in gym shorts and white socks to reporters, complete with a claim that government spies had fed him skin-darkening medicines—had just been headlined in the New York tabloids. Miller was arrested August 19 in his home by Essex County officers for, among other things, impersonating an FBI officer and causing false public alarm.
On Saturday morning, August 21, the Trentonian ran a front-page picture of a tuxedo-clad McGreevey and his accuser in a prom-like pose, under the blaring headline sex, guys...and videotape? The story quoted unnamed sources saying that McGreevey and Cipel had been secretly filmed frolicking in a Florida swimming pool; the governor’s office scoffed at the report, as did Cipel’s lawyer. No tapes surfaced.
The governor and his accuser were becoming punch lines for late-night comedians and Internet jokesmiths. Holed up in Israel, Cipel issued statements about bringing McGreevey to justice but allowed a deadline for filing a lawsuit to pass. He says he‘ll return to the United States soon. The governor heads into his final days wrapping up his legacy with a flurry of executive orders and proposals for everything from pay-to-play restrictions to banning junk food in schools.
U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, who announced that he would investigate the entire Cipel affair, is said to be looking over a new list of subpoenas. Says a spokesman for Christie’s office, “We’ve been asked to find out what happened in this Golan mess, and we intend to
do it.”
Jeff Pillets, a reporter for the Record of Hackensack, has covered James E. McGreevey’s entire tenure as governor.
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