by Chris Hedges
Norcross brags on the tapes that his political enemies will always respect him because “they know we put up the gun and we pulled the trigger and we blew their brains out. . . . ” Norcross may be a Democrat, but he has become a political ally of Republican governor and rumored presidential hopeful Chris Christie.
The brief taped conversations are perhaps the only window the public has into the tactics that make Norcross and those with his economic clout a formidable force within the state and the nation. Norcross, like most who wield corporate power, is able to operate from the shadows, entering the State House through a private entrance, or working through lieutenants. His penchant for brutality surfaced publicly only one other time in 2002, when he demanded that State Senate co-president John Bennett hand over $25 million in state funds for a proposed civic arena in the town of Pennsauken.39 Bennett says Norcross began to shove him around, something Norcross denies, but it is not disputed that when Norcross stormed out of the office he shouted to Bennett: “I will fucking destroy you.” Bennett, not surprisingly, was defeated the next year in a vicious and ugly campaign.
“That was the worst time of my life,” Bennett told Richard Rys of Philadelphia Magazine. “He has those who stand in his way defeated or removed. I will never seek public office again.”40
Norcross is the prototype of the new political boss, the one who wears tailored suits, serves on bank boards, and runs insurance companies. Power arises from their vast wealth and the legalized bribery that permits the rich to buy the candidates and judges who serve corporate interests, while using their money to intimidate and destroy those who stand in the way. The old tactics of thugs and physical intimidation are no match for the sums available to oil the political system. Politicians in statehouses or Washington must assiduously placate these corporate interests or endure the wrath of corporate masters.
On the tapes, Norcross says that in the end, “the McGreeveys, the Corzines”—two of the state’s former governors—“they’re all going to be with me. Because not that they like me, but because they have no choice.”41
“This is no petty corruption,” lawyer Carl Mayer says. “It is systemic, its tentacles radiate from top to bottom, it reaches across all three branches of government, and it is bipartisan. Graft is destroying democracy in New Jersey.”42
The result of the political and corporate graft is a state and federal government controlled by the corporate elite. The taping never led to any charges by the Attorney General’s office against Norcross. Gural and Rosenberg filed a federal racketeering suit against him. This, too, went nowhere. It was dismissed. And the remainder of the taped conversations are locked away.
I spent two hours with Norcross on December 15, 2009, in his expansive penthouse office. He refused to let me tape the interview and prohibited me from using much of the conversation, although I took notes, on the record. He studiously shuns publicity. During the conversation he maintained that he was a force for good. It was hard to tell whether he believed all of his own rhetoric, but he clearly believed some of it. He spent most of his time talking about Cooper University Hospital, which exists like a separate city within Camden, with its own 65-member security service. When I talked with him, he was planning to put in a charter school. Norcross, who is the chairman of the board of trustees of Cooper, has ensured that his hospital complex in the heart of the city has been lavished with state funds. He pushed through a law in the State House to hand $ 12.35 million to fund the hospital’s $220 million expansion. He got the state to pay $9 million towards a $140 million medical school and an additional $3 million for a neonatal unit.43 According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, in 2012 Cooper “received $52 million in state funding, more than any hospital in South Jersey—and in the top five for all 72 New Jersey hospitals.”44 With over half a billion dollars in annual revenue, Cooper is a major employer. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that, over the last decade, businesses tied with Cooper have donated more than $1.5 million to oil Norcross’s Camden County Democratic machine.45
Trim—he is an avid golfer—and with a full head of silver hair, Norcross insisted that his state contracts amounted to only five percent of his total business. But there is little dispute about Norcross’s personal wealth. It is great. He admitted that at one point his goal was to be a billionaire. Norcross earned $121 million alone from the sale of his shares of Commerce Bank to Toronto-Dominion Bank.46 He was able to buy back the insurance division. Norcross is part of a small group of investors that in April 2012 bought the Philadelphia Media Network, which owns The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and the Philly.com website.47 Parks, bridges, roads, and municipal construction projects in South Jersey usually go through Norcross’s hands. Hundreds of state and municipal employees owe their jobs to Norcross.
“Chances are the streets in your town have been reviewed or designed by engineers who’ve donated millions to Norcross’s political machine,” the Courier-Post newspaper wrote of Norcross, who would later be invited to sit on the newspaper’s board of directors. “Look at the men unloading the food at the grocery store, the hospital workers caring for your sick mother or father, the government workers spending your tax dollars. With few exceptions, they’re members of unions with direct ties to the Norcrosses.”48
And if you want a job on any of the dozens of state and municipal projects controlled by Norcross, you spend your time on Election Day getting out the vote for Norcross candidates.
The one recurring thread in our conversation was Norcross’s father. At one point he moved from behind his large desk to show me a wall of photos on which there was a black and white picture of him as a small boy with the Three Stooges and his father, George Edwin Norcross, Jr. His father, a New Jersey union boss, made sure his son was integrated into the South Jersey power structure. And Norcross is grateful. He is a frequent visitor to his father’s grave in the Colestown Cemetery in Cherry Hill. A large stone, with the letters NORCROSS, is held fifteen feet up in the air by four heavy Greek columns. It is one of the largest tombs in the cemetery.
Norcross’s father began as a television antenna installer, but he rose through the ranks of the union and became the head of the South Jersey AFL-CIO and one of the most important union bosses in the state. George tagged along to meetings with his father, who schooled him in the art of political patronage. George, not much of a student by his own admission, dropped out of Rutgers-Camden. His father advised him to get insurance and real estate licenses. He rented a tiny office in Camden and began to build his empire of Keystone National Insurance Companies with a chair, a single phone, and the lucrative connections provided by his father. It became a multimillion-dollar corporation. Municipalities that needed to insure everything from buildings to employees were steered to the young Norcross. He keeps a tight rein on the two institutions that made him very, very rich: labor, and his huge investment and insurance company. He was running the Camden County Democratic Party by 1989 and began targeting politicians who he saw as impediments to his own advancement. One of the first politicians he took down was State Senator Lee Laskin, who had the misjudgment to block the appointment of Norcross’s father, who loved the racetrack, to the New Jersey Racing Commission.
“Norcross devised a plan of attack that focused on both the big picture and his backyard: Laskin’s State Senate seat, and the Camden County freeholder board, which today oversees a $289 million operating budget and influences the appointment of countless jobs,” Rys of Philadelphia Magazine wrote. “Control the freeholders, and you control the county. String a few counties together, and you overcome their weakness in the legislature with sheer fund-raising might. Combine that financial strength with influence in the Assembly and the Senate, and you’ve built hotels on every square from Mediterranean Avenue to Boardwalk.”49
When he travels, Norcross, who does business in some twenty-five states, carries an eight-by-ten photo of his dad and his young self, smiling and sitting on his dad’s knee, his dad’s arm around him.
Norcross’s brother, Donald Norcross, once president of the Southern New Jersey AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, representing eighty-five thousand workers, was elected with Norcross’s backing to replace Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr., a former Norcross business partner, in the State Assembly. Don Norcross is also the business manager of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 351, which, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “wrote checks totaling more than $125,000 to Camden County Democratic Party and its candidates between 2001 and 2008.”50
The party, the Inquirer reported, does not send out explicit demands for donations to business owners, construction companies, or law firms. A packet of invitations to fund-raising events arrives in the mail. The number of invitations indicates how much the machine expects businesses to contribute. Ten $1,000 invitations are not uncommon. Donors can mail in money without ever attending the event. Those who receive contracts are also apparently expected to fund political action committees. One committee controlled by Camden County Democratic operatives, the Leaders Fund, began in 2002 with a vague eight-word mission to support Democrats. It had collected six figures by the end of the year, according to the Inquirer.51
“Thousands of dollars in Leaders Fund money have come from companies that received Camden recovery money, and those dollars have in turn gone to politicians around the state, winning South Jersey statewide influence over the selection of politicians, the creation of laws, and the hiring of government workers,” reporter Matt Katz wrote.52
Tens of millions in state funds have been devoted to infrastructure projects to make Norcross and his associates wealthy. Millions have been donated by these hired firms and contractors to the machine’s bank accounts. According to the Inquirer: “Less than five percent of the $175 million recovery package was spent addressing the most pressing concerns in the city—crime, schools, job training, and municipal services.”53
Not that much of this is new. White supremacy, wielded by those of privilege, has remained one of the uninterrupted constants in American life. The poor and the working class were excluded, along with women, slaves, indentured servants, and Native Americans, by the white male elites at the Constitutional Conventions. The white upper class viewed Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses, as commodities, fodder for the armies carrying out the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans in the West or cheap labor in the squalid workhouses and mills. Blacks, first imported as slaves, later became part of a disenfranchised underclass. American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in The People’s History of the United States, has been one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. There have been moments when radical movements, especially on the eve of World War I or during the Great Depression, have pushed back to expand opportunities. But corporate capitalism has over the last few decades reversed most of these gains.
On Election Day, November 3, 2009, Angel Cordero, who is running for mayor against the Norcross-backed candidate Dana Redd, sits in his headquarters. It is a dilapidated house missing whole sections of the floor on the upper level. He has handwritten slogans on yellow poster board, including, “First They Ignore You! Then They Laugh at You! Then They Fight You! Then You Win!” and “Stop Violent Crime and Corruption,” along with “Let’s Rebuild Camden Together.” All are tacked on the walls downstairs.
When I ask him about Norcross and his allies, he calls them “the pimps of poverty.”
“When the state took over Camden, they told the people the money would go to them,” says Cordero, dressed in a dark business suit, a pink shirt, and a pink tie. “Instead it went to Rowan University, Rutgers University, Cooper Hospital. They gave $30 million to the fish of Camden,” he adds, referring to Adventure Aquarium on the waterfront. “All this happens while we drink water contaminated with lead, while our pipes burst and raw sewage leaks into our houses. Kids get locked up for selling drugs even when they don’t have any drugs or sell any drugs. The community has lost the will to fight. People are so repressed and have been abused for so long they think abuse is normal.”
Cordero stops to answer his cell phone.
“Pedro, the only way to help is if you vote for me,” he says to the caller. “If you are homeless, why would you vote for the people in power?
“You never voted?” Cordero says into the phone.
“The only thing I can tell you is that I am for the people,” he continues. “All the homeless that are here and are not from the city will be sent back to where they came from. You live in Camden and you don’t even have a home.”
He hangs up. When we see him next morning, he is just another devastated former candidate who got caught in the ugly maw of the Norcross machine.
When we arrive at her office, Mayor Gwendolyn Faison, eighty-four, is serving out her last days as Camden’s lame-duck mayor. She was a councilwoman when she was voted into office in 2000 to replace Milton Milan, the third Camden mayor in two decades to be convicted and sent to prison for corruption. Her first task, she tells us, was to clean up an office ransacked by the FBI. She sits behind her desk wearing an orange leather jacket and matching skirt. Her walls are decorated with gleaming shovels that represent groundbreaking ceremonies for construction projects. Faison, who is active, lively, and at times coquettish, has no real power. No mayor in Camden does. The city’s budget is controlled by a state-appointed official, and the priorities for the city are set by a shady bureaucracy that even she, as the mayor, is not permitted to penetrate. She is blunt about her distaste for the arrangement, saying the city’s “constitutional rights are being violated.” During her tenure, she says, she was never invited to city planning meetings, and when new development projects were approved, she usually found out about it afterward, often, she says, by “reading about it in the newspaper.”
I ask her why Norcross, a white multimillionaire who does not live in the city or hold elective office, is Camden’s overlord. She answers slowly and carefully, aware she is stepping into a minefield.
“I wish I knew,” she says. “It is something about his cleverness and his money. There are no jobs, and probably it is due in part to the education system. People need help. He has been successful overpowering people who have needs and controlling them.
“There is something about him,” she goes on. “He seems to have that kind of control. He is a humanitarian in one sense and a dictator in another. If you are hungry he will bring you food, but you don’t know what the payback will be. He seems to have a way of raising money. I heard him say, ‘I take politics as a blood sport.’ Politically he is funny. Norcross always has two horses in a race. When he found out I would be the winner in the election, rather than the other girl, he put money in my campaign, although I didn’t know that. He makes offers you can’t refuse.”
She tells us that when she called mayor-elect Redd and offered to meet with her, Redd told her she would have to ask permission from Norcross first.
“People who have stood up to him were destroyed,” she says quietly.
On the corner of Mt. Ephraim Avenue and Jackson Street, Ali Sloan El, a vocal critic of Norcross, is leaning against his blue 1990 Cadillac, which he purchased off a lot for $550. He wears a black hat, jeans, and a black leather jacket. He has a beard and speaks with the studied eloquence of a preacher.
“Camden is the poorest, richest city in America,” he says. “It is like a third world country. You have the rulers and the rich. They control everything while the people die and perish. It’s a slow-moving Katrina. Poverty hits. It gets worse and worse and worse. It deteriorates until it becomes an emergency.”
Sloan El was a community organizer before he was elected to city council, where he swiftly ran afoul of the Norcross machine. He found himself investigated in 2007 and sentenced to twenty months in federal prison for accepting $36,000 in bribes from a contractor working undercover in a sting operation for the FBI. Sloan El had promised to steer Camden redevelopment work to the informant.54
He insists he was set up.
Sloan El is chatting with some men in the street, several of whom, like Sloan El, are Muslim. They all have shaved heads and long black beards. The men had witnessed a botched robbery at a barbershop a few minutes earlier. A young gunman, nervous and unsure of himself, had pulled a pistol and tried to rob the barbers inside. He was chased out of the shop and tackled on the sidewalk. One of the barbers is at the police station giving a deposition.
The mood inside the barbershop is hostile and reflects the insular, distrustful, and closed world of Camden’s streets.
“How did you know about the stick up?” asks a barber who says his name is Sam.
“We were told about it on the street,” I say.
He arches his eyebrows in disbelief.
“No one would talk to you on the street,” he says coldly. “No one would tell you nothin’.”
“A mother with a two-year-old in a stroller told us,” I tell him.
“Yeah,” he admits reluctantly, “maybe that’s right, maybe a mother would talk.”
The rumor on the street, Sloan El tells us, is that the robber, like the stickup men at Oscar Hernandez and Sylvia Ramos’s bakery, was high on a narcotic called “wet.” Wet is the preferred drug of Camden’s criminal class. It is produced by soaking marijuana in phencyclidine or PCP, known on the street as angel dust. Wet is smoked dry, but the leaves, which glisten with the dried chemical, give the drug its liquid name. Wet numbs its users and endows them with what seems to them like superhuman strength. Their body temperatures rise, their blood pressure is lowered, and they frequently hallucinate. The high can last for several hours. Two Camden police officers told us they most feared confronting suspects on wet.
