Three New Jersey mayors, a state lawmaker who sponsored an anti-corruption bill, five rabbis and a Brooklyn, N.Y., man dubbed the “kidney salesman” were among more than 40 people arrested Thursday in a public corruption probe that one FBI official called “unprecedented.”
The politicians met in diners, parking lots, boiler rooms and bathrooms to take payoffs, while the rabbis acted as “crime bosses” by laundering millions of dollars through an international network of charities, officials said in announcing the arrests Thursday.
“Corruption was a way of life,” Ralph J. Marra Jr., acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said at a briefing in Newark. “They existed in an ethics-free zone.”
The primary link in the two-pronged investigation targeting both politicians and rabbis was a lone cooperating witness, according to court records. The undercover informant, at first, infiltrated a money-laundering network involving Brooklyn, New Jersey and Israel and controlled by the rabbis, authorities said.
But the investigation soon delved into public corruption after one of the money-laundering targets, a Hudson County real estate developer, introduced the undercover federal witness to a Jersey City building inspector.
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