New Jersey NAACP president, legislators demand monitor for attorney general’s state corruption unit

The longtime leader of the New Jersey NAACP called Thursday for an independent monitor to preside over a key unit of the state Attorney General’s Office that prosecutes public corruption and police misconduct.

Richard T. Smith claimed the “scandal-plagued” Office of Public Integrity and Accountability has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars while using illegal and unconstitutional tactics to pursue innocent defendants.

“The OPIA has been shown to be a haven of investigatory and prosecutorial abuses,” according to an Aug. 6 letter released Thursday that was written on Smith’s behalf by attorney Gregg Zeff. “These abuses must stop, the credibility of our State’s criminal justice system is on the line, and demands no less.”

The letter, jointly signed by a bipartisan group of six New Jersey lawmakers as well as two North Jersey black ministers and a state union leader, was addressed to Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who brought sweeping racketeering charges last year against South Jersey power broker George Norcross and several of his allies.

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Platkin’s prosecution of Norcross, which focused on a real estate scheme allegedly engineered by Norcross on the Camden waterfront, was thrown out by a Superior Court judge in February. Platkin has filed an appeal in the case. His office declined to comment for this story Thursday evening.

Smith raised eyebrows last December when the state NAACP signed on to an amicus brief seeking the dismissal of the charges against Norcross and his co-defendants.

The brief, which was also signed by labor groups that support the party leader, said “economic threats” and other strong tactics allegedly used by the defendants were nothing more than old-fashioned politics. The filing even drew comparisons between hardball tactics allegedly used by the Norcross defendants and measures taken by civil rights leaders during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s.

Grassroots groups in Camden County that have worked against mainline party Democrats allied with Norcross were taken aback by Smith’s public support for the defendants. Many in the groups have fought to reform the state’s party line system, which has historically tilted primary elections in favor of party bosses like Norcross and their hand-picked candidates.

Antoinette Miles, state director of the New Jersey Working Family Alliance, said Smith’s call Thursday to clamp down on Platkin was a “stunning but predictable” disappointment that reflected his own narrow political needs over the considered principles of the NAACP.

Many Blacks in Camden County and elsewhere, she said, know Smith primarily as “political insider” with long ties to Norcross, rather than a civil rights champion dedicated to the workaday needs of African-Americans in the neighborhood.

“The state NAACP has some very good people doing some very good things every day,” Miles said in an interview Thursday evening with The Jersey Vindicator. “But Richard Smith, I’m afraid, has shown he cares less about the little guy than the wealthy elites like Norcross.”

Calls and messages to Smith and the NAACP State Conference in Brigantine were not returned Thursday evening.

In a brief interview with The Jersey Vindicator at Cooper Hospital in Camden last January, Smith declined to speak extensively about his support for Norcross and his rationale for signing the amicus filing opposing Platkin. But he acknowledged that he was personally responsible for the brief, and said he did not seek prior approval from the NAACP’s executive committee.

“It was something that had to get done right away, so there was really to take it before the next scheduled committee hearing,” Smith said at the time.

Smith, who has been the state NAACP president since 2013, is a Trenton native who spent 25 years with the state Department of Corrections before retiring in 2015. He later served as a warden in the Cumberland County prison system.

Along with Norcross, Smith is currently listed as a board member of Cooper University Health Care, the Camden-based hospital system championed by the party leader for decades.

In 2020, Smith was also named to the board of New Jersey American Water, the Camden firm that is closely associated with Norcross and built its new headquarters on the city’s waterfront adjacent to Norcross’s insurance brokerage.

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Daniel Fee, a spokesman for Norcross, did not return a phone call Thursday evening seeking comment on Smith’s call for greater scrutiny of the Attorney General. In the past, attorneys for the party leader said Platkin’s pursuit of Norcross was politically motivated.

“I think when history looks back at Mr. Platkin’s tenure as the attorney general of the State of New Jersey, it will have proven to be an epic failure,” Michael Critchley, a Norcross attorney, said earlier this year in a meeting with reporters. Platkin, he said, was “a politician masquerading as a law enforcement officer.”

In indicting Norcross and his co-defendants, Platkin focused on a stream of business deals over the past decade that gave Norcross and his allies control of waterfront real estate that was set to boom thanks to the passage of the most generous package of tax breaks in the state’s history.

Norcross and his allies in the alleged scheme to control the waterfront, including his own brother and a former Camden mayor, worked against competitors in acquiring approvals and engineering the state law that created the lucrative tax awards, according to Platkin.

State records show that businesses owned by or associated with Norcross and his brother eventually were awarded $1.1 billion of about $1.6 billion in tax breaks that went to Camden under the 2013 tax break law.

“The Norcross enterprise manipulated government programs and processes designed to attract development and investment to instead suit their own financial desires,” Platkin said in a June 2024 press conference, announcing the Norcross indictment. “Instead of contributing to the successes of the city of Camden … the Norcross enterprise took the Camden waterfront all for themselves.”

In throwing out the case, Judge Peter Warshaw sided with the defendants, saying in effect that the charges were attempting to criminalize hardball politics.
Norcross’s alleged threats “may be boorish and indecorous,” the judge said, but they weren’t a crime.

The Office of Public Integrity and Accountability has obtained over 100 favorable dispositions, with more than 40 in the past three years alone, according to the Attorney General’s website.

Just last year, the website says, the office concluded successful prosecutions against a former mayor who defrauding the state, a police chief who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, a campaign manager who committed election fraud, a corporate official who pleaded guilty to defrauding the state, a bus company owner who defrauded the state, and a woman who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in state pension benefits.

Following a criminal probe, the office also won a $5 million agreement from Holtec International, a nuclear energy firm based in Camden that was accused of attempting to defraud New Jersey of $1 million in tax breaks.

The office also served as the independent investigator for 24 fatal police encounter investigations and led investigations that reformed practices in the New Jersey State Police.

Last month, three unions representing the New Jersey State Police sued Platkin in an attempt to stanch his investigation into allegations that the police force deliberately slowed down traffic enforcement in response to racial profiling claims.

Allies of the State Police in the Legislature have proposed a measure that would remove the agency from the Attorney General’s oversight, make it a standalone department and elevate the superintendent of the State Police to cabinet-level status.

Several lawmakers from both parties signed Smith’s letter to Platkin this week, including Senators Michael Testa, Robert Singer, Gordon Johnson, John Burzichelli, and Nilsa Cruz-Perez. A spokesman for some of the lawmakers said they were not immediately available for comment Thursday.

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