The Confession (14 page)

“He's going on vacation,” Jack said. “We're going to have to go too.”

“Bother him
during his vacation?
”

It seemed like an imposition, but that's exactly what Jack had in mind. “You want to be the next assemblyman? Make your reservations.”

Of all places, Otlowski was vacationing in Key West, a challenging
destination for a closeted would-be politician. We flew down in early February with Otlowski and his longtime aide, Julius Rogovsky, and sped to our cheap motel—past gay nightclubs and restaurants, bookstores and gift shops, and same-sex couples exchanging kisses or strolling arm in arm to the beach. I tried my best not to notice, but I had never before seen such simple freedoms, not in public.

“George,” Jack began our pitch, “we need your support. Jim's young, he's progressive, a reformer. He's the new face of the Democratic Party in the district. People love him, you told me so yourself. He can win this, George, if we put him on the party line. You know he can.”

But Otlowski was noncommittal. So we made an appointment to lobby him again in the afternoon, and every afternoon until we won him over. Of course, it wasn't all work. With another Woodbridge couple, we toured the old Hemingway homestead and the Truman Summer White House. We made regular strolls down the beach.

The constant presence of gay men caused some awkwardness, but not for Jack, I was happy to learn. When we were being introduced to the local mayor, someone mentioned that he was the first openly gay mayor in the country. “Jeez,” Jack said, finding the reference unnecessary, “I want to
meet
him, not
dance
with him.”

Somehow I don't think Julius Rogovsky noticed we were in a gay Mecca. After dinner one evening, he got the perverse idea of trying to drag us all into an adult bookstore. We spent twenty minutes trying to talk him out of it. The windows of the place were brimming with gay S-and-M paraphernalia. But Julius considered himself worldly—evidently he had visited Scranton, Pennsylvania, looking for women during World War II—and he headed inside alone. “I've seen it all, McGreevey,” he said over his shoulder. “Nothing can shock me.” He reemerged a few minutes later, looking stricken. “Never seen nothin' like
that
in Scranton,” he said.

After talking ourselves silly about the 19th Legislative District for nearly a week, playing our ground game carefully, Jack and I finally asked Otlowski for his endorsement. He laughed. “Go with God,” he said. “We'll campaign together as Batman and Robin.”

After that, the race was a breeze. I loved retail politics: meeting people,
talking to them about their concerns, sharing their celebrations. Teddy Roosevelt called this being “in the arena.” There wasn't an ethnic fair or house party or religious service I didn't attend. Every morning and evening, jacket slung over my shoulder, I would knock on doors introducing myself to potential voters. I remember downing shots of vodka at 10:30 in the morning in the basement of the Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in South River, gorging on kielbasa at the Polish parish luncheon in Sayreville, and stuffing myself with cannolis in Perth Amboy's shrinking Italian district at night. For a sheltered Irish Catholic, it wasn't always easy for me to learn new ethnic traditions. I remember one morning when George Otlowski arranged for me to attend a Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church communion breakfast in South Amboy. I had the honor of sitting next to the old Polish pastor, a well-known curmudgeon, and I very politely cut slices of bread from a big loaf in the middle of the table and gave us each a serving. “This is the strangest looking soda bread I've ever seen,” I remarked brightly.

He was aghast. “Soda bread? What soda bread? This is babka. ” I had much to learn.

 

JOE SULIGA WAS ALSO RUNNING FOR ASSEMBLY IN THE ADJOINING
district. Watching him hone his own campaigning techniques was instructive for me. He believed that a successful lawmaker had to establish an intimate relationship with the voting public, and he practiced what he preached. After the July Fourth weekend, for instance, he sent handwritten thank-you notes to everyone in his district who displayed Old Glory. People who received them were totally disarmed, even Republicans. People just loved being noticed, and appreciated him for making them feel good. I was in awe of his ability to connect with his base.

I wasn't quite as solicitous as Joe, but I did develop an ability to recall hundreds of names and faces—and file them away with some memory of their lives, like the names of their children or the health of their parents or grandparents. This came easily for me, the way memorizing the Latin Mass had years ago. At the end of each day I reviewed the “walking notes” I'd jotted down following each encounter, hoping to lay down the
information in my long-term memory. Then I would write quick letters complimenting the residents on their yards or gardens and asking after their pets. Before long, I couldn't set foot in one of these neighborhoods without hearing them call out hellos like we were old family friends. “Hi, Jimmy!” they said. “Say hi to your mom!”

Still, political life seemed to come more naturally to Joe. In the midst of a tight campaign, he still found time to head to the Jersey Shore for those wild weekends of his. One Saturday I passed him near Exit 11 on the Turnpike as he headed south. When I blew the horn, he made a hair-raising illegal turn to say hello.

I looked at him in his floral shirt and sandals, in his red Mustang convertible, with admiration. Clearly, he was on his way to a fun-filled night of partying. I, on the other hand, was returning from talking at a senior center, heading off in my usual suit and tie to a weekend of church basements and diner meetings.

“You know, Joe,” I said, “my dream is to come back in the next life as Joe Suliga.”

He just laughed. “Coming back as Jim McGreevey is my nightmare,” he said, then waved and made another squealing U-turn off to Atlantic City.

 

MY PARENTS SEEMED TO BE HAVING AS MUCH FUN IN THE CAMPAIGN
as I was. My dad's mission in life was advocating for veterans, and he took me to the local VFW halls around the district every chance he got. There were breakfasts and mixers by the dozens, and I loved showing up there with Dad. But the formidable force in the family was Mom, my secret weapon. She'd come into the campaign office at dawn ready to make phone calls—and work the phones till well after dinner. She was so tireless that some suspected me of using an army of stand-ins posing as my mother. I remember Dad telling me he was driving home from work late one day and saw my mother walking from porch to porch in a distant neighborhood knocking on doors with my campaign literature.

I also turned out to be a natural campaigner. My childhood awkwardness had given way to a confident demeanor. It was as if I'd overcome all the demons of my youth.

During this time I never worried what people would make of my status as a single candidate. I'd been known to date from time to time, but I was still very young, just thirty-two years old. Older women seemed to find me handsome, especially the ladies in St. Joseph's Nursing Home on Strawberry Hill in Woodbridge, and constantly offered to set me up with their daughters or granddaughters. I played along happily. By now I'd mostly given up on anonymous sexual encounters; I'd sublimated my sexual appetites and refocused all my energy into campaigning. I consciously made a bargain with myself: if I did this well and won a seat on the assembly, the good work I would be able to accomplish would far outweigh any frustration or loneliness my chastity would cause. Priests make similar deals, mostly more effective than mine turned out to be.

But putting my sex drive behind me didn't erase my history. One day, Otlowski sat me down with a sheath of papers. “Negative research on our Republican legislative opponents,” said one of his aides, pushing toward me various documents—probably details on finances, speeding tickets, and the like. In that moment, I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was. If we could get these things on my opponent, what could he find on me?

That's when the news hit the papers about my stupidity flashing that old Prosecutors' Office badge to state troopers. On April 20, 1989, Michelle Sobolewski, my campaign manager, woke me in the morning to break the news. There were two stories sharing the front page that day. The first was the story of the deadly explosion aboard the USS
Iowa,
which was initially blamed on a gay sailor until an investigation proved it a freak accident. The second story was about me. “Your career and the USS
Iowa
both exploded on the front page today,” Michelle said.

I went numb. But as she read me the story, I realized it wasn't the incident I was thinking of, the time I'd been caught looking for sex in the rest stop. This was a different episode, which happened one Sunday afternoon as I was racing through Highland Park to attend a museum opening. When the police pulled me over for speeding, I showed them my license and, once again, my badge. Again, I had hoped it would get me out of a jam, but the cops gave me a ticket anyway and reported my inappropriate representations back to county prosecutor Alan Rockoff, a former judge and dear friend. He had me summoned and took my badge away. “These things are
given out to former assistants assuming they're going to mount them to a plaque,” he said, “not to fix speeding tickets.” I felt like a stupid child.

Hearing Michelle read the story, I was relieved; at least my big secret hadn't been revealed. Of course, it was my first scandal. But Michelle just laughed it off. “You were speeding,” she said. “Big deal.” Still, it also meant that people were out there digging around in my background. It meant I wasn't safe.

That night, I made a long list of everything I could recall about every sexual encounter I'd had. I didn't know anybody's name, of course, but I tried recalling something to anchor each tryst in history: a snippet of conversation, something about the way he looked, whether he was kind or aloof. It came to more than twenty individuals. Then I made an assessment about each entry. What are the chances that
this one
lives in the 19th Legislative District? Would
that one
be able to find me? If
he
sees my picture in the paper, would he be likely to reveal our secret? Line after line, I imagined the worst. Is this one a threat? Could that one do me in? Blackmail, I realized, begins well before there is a perpetrator; its possibility is invented by the victim.

I had only one consolation—that anyone who'd been in the places I was worried about would be just as ashamed as I was and just as unlikely to go public.

But I had other concerns. I lived in fear that a videotape would surface from some dingy adult bookstore. I knew there were cameras; you could see them posted over the cash register and at the doors—though not in the back by the booths, where the untoward things happened. I had no way of knowing how long they kept those tapes and knew no one to ask. I did ask my friend Jimmy Kennedy, the mayor of Rahway, obliquely about my brush with the state trooper at the Parkway rest stop: if a police stop didn't result in a summons, could it still make it into public records somewhere? Politely, Jimmy didn't ask me why I wanted to know.

Plan your work and work your plan
. As Election Day drew near, I found myself dating young women more frequently, including some who were helping out on the campaign, and this got a buzz going in the office about my virility. One woman in particular captured my interest—a bright and
competent woman who happened to be on my campaign staff. And one lonely night we crossed a line together. It was foolish and wrong of me to do, and I'm afraid she felt hurt by me when I didn't want to continue. It was the first time in my life I realized I had power and stature over another individual, and I didn't handle it very well. I regret causing her any pain. But when word leaked out about my heartlessness, I'll admit that I found a certain power in it.

On November 7, 1989, Jim Florio beat out Republican congressman Jim Courter for governor of New Jersey, becoming the first Democrat in eight years to head to the governor's mansion. My pal Joe Suliga prevailed in his campaign to become assemblyman from Linden. And by a vote of 27,099 to 24,695, James E. McGreevey, the kid from Carteret, became the newest representative of the 19th Legislative District. Joe and I were two of the youngest lawmakers in Trenton.

SINCE THE ASSEMBLY ONLY PAID $35,000 A YEAR, I DECIDED TO
hold onto my day job at Merck. Dick Trabert, my boss, made sure I was carrying my weight at work, and reassigned me away from any potential conflicts. For the most part, my responsibilities there consisted of reading white papers involving federal actions and assessing their potential impact on Merck clients—nothing that conflicted with my work as a legislator. Indeed, some of my own legislative initiatives were sometimes seen as anti-Big Pharma. Trabert, a staunch Republican, tactfully held his tongue, never once interfering with my work in government. (Although when I asked his daughter on a date, I saw his handiwork behind her rejection.)

In Trenton, I focused mainly on three issues, writing or sponsoring laws on the environment, Holocaust education, and women's health care. New Jersey has the third highest rate of breast cancer in the country. Without early detection, one out of every four breast cancer victims will die of the disease. But women were routinely being denied reimbursements for a simple test that could save their lives. I wrote a bill mandating insurance coverage for mammograms, the most powerful tool in early detection.

In addition, I wrote legislation establishing a permanent Holocaust Commission, the first of its kind in the nation, and began the long work that eventually required teachers to discuss the sad lessons of hatred and intolerance from that time to all grade-schoolkids. My assembly aide, Herb Gilsenberg, a former truck dispatcher from Brooklyn, took on this effort as a personal mission. In one of his memorable letters, he wrote to the entire state legislature telling them it would be a “mitzvah,” Yiddish for “good
deed,” if they passed the Holocaust legislation. The then-speaker, Joseph Doria, an Italian Catholic from Bayonne with an education degree from Columbia, asked me in the assembly rotunda, “What's a mitzvah?” I had to tell him I had no idea.

With the leadership of Senator Dan Dalton, we also passed the Pollution Prevention Act, a landmark law that established financial incentives to reduce usage and generation of hazardous materials. As a result, New Jersey was awarded the Best Bet Award for Environmental Achievement from the National Center for Policy Alternatives, a proud accomplishment.

I also supported Governor Florio in his record-breaking $2.8 billion state tax increase. It was a bitter pill, but an essential one if we were to balance the budget, increase aid to public schools, and increase property tax relief for working New Jerseyans, who were suffering under the heaviest tax burden in the nation.

But I also worked on a bill that had indirect impact on Merck & Co. Still advocating for seniors, I championed legislation in the General Assembly that would require doctors to accept Medicare caps as payment in full. This touched off a firestorm of anger from the medical establishment, but to their credit no one at Merck ever complained. I was sure the company's CEO, Dr. Roy Vagelos, disagreed with my position. But he had such unimpeachable integrity that he drew a bright line against indirectly interfering with legislative action.

I wasn't always diplomatic. I got a reputation as a young man in a big hurry, not the most effective image. They called me “Assembly Boy,” sometimes less than lovingly. But I persevered. Just as I had at Scout camp, I identified the people who were most prone to dislike me, and I made it my business to win them over.

 

A FEW MONTHS INTO MY TENURE, I WAS OUT FOR A DRINK ONE
night with my friend Tim Dacey. He told me he was worried about me—that I was working too much and not finding a balance in my life. He was right; I wasn't spending as much time chasing girls in Atlantic City as I used to. In truth, I'd been glad to leave that charade behind—girls were part of
the campaign, not part of the administration. Of course, there were moments when I wished I had a woman on my arm, like when Governor Florio invited me and a number of other lawmakers to his home on the shore for a picnic. Everyone else brought their husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend; I arrived with my sister. I struck a strange Nixonian image, besides—wearing a dark suit and tie when everybody else knew enough to wear polo shirts and chinos. My friend Christine Simon, a fellow former assembly staffer, took me aside. “Jim, you can't be serious. Your sister? A suit? What are you thinking?” I didn't have a clue.

But I didn't feel compelled to date women, as long as I was working hard. Long hours were a good excuse for bachelorhood; besides, they kept my mind off my plight.

I didn't tell Tim any of this, though. I told him I felt obliged to the voters, and to Merck & Co., to work every last minute of the day.

“You're killing yourself,” he said. “You worked yourself to the bone on your campaign; you deserve a break. Let's take a vacation.”

He was a dear friend, and I appreciated his concern, but I turned him down. “Not this year,” I said.

It was no use: Tim had already conspired with my secretary at Merck to book us both on the Royal Viking Star for a week's round-trip cruise to Bermuda. He told me it wasn't refundable. At first I was aggravated, but finally I agreed to go along. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.

We left on a Saturday from the New York City Passenger Ship Terminal in Manhattan. Never having been on a cruise before, I'd always assumed they were strictly for retirees; I couldn't believe how many passengers were our age, and obviously looking for romance. Leave it to Timmy to find the cruisiest cruise ship in history, I thought. I don't think we were more than a few miles outside of New York Harbor when he'd already struck up an acquaintance with a couple of beautiful women from British Columbia. One was a blonde, the other a brunette. They were in deck chairs with their feet up, reading books poolside. My first inclination was toward Heather, the lighthearted blonde. I spent the first evening talking with her while Tim hung close to her friend. But somewhere through the second day Tim and
I—and Heather and the other woman, Kari Schutz—had a slow change of heart, and there was a switch of teams. Tim paired up with the blonde; I got Kari, a librarian about my age.

For the first time in my life, I was swept away by a woman. Bright, engaging, vivacious, Kari challenged me about literature, art, music, and politics. She was elegantly dressed, with beautiful hair and deep, dark eyes. We spent all that day talking, swimming in the pool, and feasting in the many restaurants aboard. Her stories about traveling—to China, Russia, through Europe—were riveting. Oh, she made me laugh! When I told her I was an assemblyman, she thought I meant I worked on an assembly line. “Which plant?” she asked, and I fell off my deck chair laughing.

That night at dinner I took her in my arms on the deck, leaned her against the railing, and kissed her gently—fireworks. By the time we hit our first port, St. George, we were holding hands; at the next stop, Hamilton, we rented mopeds and explored the place from top to bottom, crawling through basement pubs like college kids. This was the romance I craved, with a person who totally captivated me—she just happened to be a woman.

As different as we were, we had a lot in common. Her parents were immigrants to Canada from Scotland and Norway, blue-collar like my folks, and like me she was very connected to her Church—only she was Anglican, not Roman Catholic. She was a hard worker, well educated, not at all a snob—she wouldn't have cared if my job
was
on some assembly line. We just hit it off honestly, two individuals bobbing around on a huge sea.

When I got back to Woodbridge, I called Kari every chance I got. A dozen times in the next year I flew to Vancouver to visit her. She visited me just as often—these were proper and old-fashioned courting visits, but I couldn't wait for us to become more intimate. During one of her visits we drove into New York City for a romantic dinner at the Rainbow Room, a glorious ballroom high above Rockefeller Center. We danced and ate and sipped champagne and our heads were fuzzy with love.

I reached in my pocket for a diamond ring. “Kari,” I said. “I love you. You make me very happy. I am a better person with you, a person I never thought I could be. And I think I make you happy, too. I'd love to live with you for the rest of my life. Will you marry me?” Tears poured down her
cheeks as I slid the ring on her finger. She hadn't expected this at all. She nodded yes, unable to speak.

We took each other in our arms and twirled around on the dance floor for hours. I knew I loved her totally. But the thought that kept running through my head was,
I've beaten it back. Now there's no limit to what I can do.

 

DESPITE ALL THIS HAPPINESS, MY POLITICAL CAREER WAS IN DANGER
of cracking apart. Around Thanksgiving 1990, my ally and friend JoJo DeMarino, the Woodbridge mayor, told me and Jack that he was about to be indicted for bribing a Carteret official for his vote on a city contract. He broke the news at the Woodbridge Diner after our annual Thanksgiving Day Prayer Service in Avenel. I could hardly believe my ears.

A few weeks later came another blow. An effort to redraw legislative district lines in the state—in order to follow population trends—merged portions of two districts into one. That meant that Assemblyman Tom Deverin and I would have to duke it out to see who got to keep the job. This was terribly unfair. I'd known Tom forever—his family and mine were regulars at the same St. Joseph's Masses. The other district being merged was already being represented by me and George Otlowski, to whom I now owed so many favors. I couldn't imagine running against him, either. This was a terrible bind for me.

Unfortunately, the decision was made for me in early 1991. JoJo DeMarino called a meeting of the five chairs from the newly incorporated district, plus Otlowski and Deverin—everyone, that is, but me. DeMarino, as the local party boss, had decided to throw his support to Deverin, not me. He didn't even have the courtesy to tell me in person.

I remember how I found out about the meeting. I was on the platform of the Metropark Station stop waiting for the annual Chamber of Commerce train ride to Washington DC, the other yearly event involving every elected official in the state. I called Jack Fay from the platform pay phone. “Welcome to boss politics,” he said. “You've just been kicked off the line.” I was furious, especially at JoJo, whose career I had helped resuscitate; I considered him a mentor and a friend. Given his indictment, and the almost
impossible reelection campaign that was sure to follow, I was stunned that he would turn on me.

Next I called JoJo himself and demanded an explanation. “It's unfortunate,” he said, “but I couldn't get you on the phone. I tried several times.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I have an answering machine at home and secretaries at Merck and at the assembly office. You screwed me.”

After conferring with my inner circle, I made a decision: I would run for mayor of Woodbridge against JoJo. At least in part, I was motivated by revenge. I even settled on an unofficial theme: “The Unindicted Democratic Ticket.” But I knew I could run the town well, and I knew I could win. I was familiar with his weaknesses, and I was confident I could siphon off his brain trust—especially Jack, who was as mad as I was.

On the day I told JoJo I was taking him on, we were sitting in his white Lincoln Continental. I said, “If you had come to me and said to my face, ‘This is the way it's gotta be—you're the junior man, you're off the line,' I may not have liked it, I may have been angry, but I would have accepted it.”

His large head turned bright red. He ticked off all the church parishes, veterans' organizations, firehouses, and power bases that he could count on to vote for him. He had all the sanitation workers, too, because he'd hired them all. He had the town locked up. All I could expect was the Woodbridge American-Irish Association.

“I'm gonna cut your balls off,” he told me.

The campaign went hand to hand through the backyards of Woodbridge. DeMarino played rough, ordering his garbage collectors to pull my signs off people's lawns. We never played that kind of dirty game—and we couldn't have spared the manpower for pulling up signs if we'd tried. Instead, I worked my ass off and signed up every volunteer I could get. I even started to accumulate party support. The family of Attorney General David Wilentz threw in behind me. The Wilentzes never liked JoJo; David once called him “the only man who could lie to God.”

Ray Lesniak, the county boss, signed up too. I think Ray saw potential in me, not just for the future but, as a chance to establish a Democratic beachhead in this Republican year. Without Ray, my race had no chance.

 

WHEN THE HISTORY OF NEW JERSEY POLITICS IS FINALLY WRITTEN,
Raymond Lesniak will no doubt emerge as one of our most towering figures. Apart from the obvious political cunning that won him the chairmanship in Union County when he was still quite young, Ray is an enormously appealing figure. Women find him attractive, and he's been known to adore them back. In fact, there is something of the screen idol about him: his wide-open face, intense blue eyes, and suave demeanor mix with his high-flying political standing to make him unique in the state political class.

For reading, he wears wireless glasses tinted blue, which give him a flower-power aura. But Ray is more new age than hippie. Raised Roman Catholic in the Polish parishes of Elizabeth, he now considers himself a born-again evangelical Christian of a variety he has improvised along the way. He still attends Mass at a Roman Catholic church, but he reads self-help books voraciously and is a dedicated follower of the twelve-step philosophy on which Alcoholics Anonymous is based. Ray was never a problem drinker. For him, the steps are a way of life, their own spiritual movement. We're all addicted to something that's holding us back, he believes. When people ask Ray what he's recovering from he says, “a compulsiveness to be in control of everything.”