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Photo provided by LOUIS MANZO (above)
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark “used evidence they know is untruthful to corrupt the sacred grand jury process for the purpose of indicting me a third time,” Manzo writes. They also relied on a “prey for pay” informant who was once a major GOP contributor and eventually proved unreliable, he adds.
Manzo compares the use of FBI operative Solomon Dwek to Barry Bonds becoming Major League Baseball’s all-time home run leader:
“[T]he bounty system he employed, and the careless breaking of guidelines and the law by government agents and prosecutors, served as steroids that illegally enhanced Dwek’s corrupt performance.”
Interesting that most of Dwek’s activities on behalf of Christie’s federal staff were in heavily Democratic Hudson County, Manzo notes. Sweeping key politicos out of office could be viewed as cunning, calculated “political profiling” meant to clear a path for Christie to Trenton, he says.
While this was going on, Manzo charges, members of Christie’s federal staff – and some of their relatives – were donating to his gubernatorial campaign. A dozen or so eventually were either hired, appointed to state agencies or nominated for the Superior Court bench by Christie, he says.
“I never took anything from Dwek,” Manzo tells CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “I took actions to make sure he would have nothing to do with my campaign. The federal government knows this, yet they persist against me because of what I have said and documented.
“This sting was a ruse from the get-go to benefit Christie’s campaign and the careers of the prosecutors who managed the investigation.”
Manzo tells CLIFFVIEW PILOT he has additional evidence, in the form of government documents, that he is keeping under wraps until pre-trial motions.
The superseding indictment returned last week in Newark was nothing but revenge, pure and simple, he says in the detailed emails, a rare move for a defendant at any level of justice (Their lawyers ordinarily determine what is or isn’t said, all but gagging their clients so that they can’t utter anything that later can be used against them).
Manzo’s attorney, John Lynch of Union City, said he didn’t know about the emails to CLIFFVIEW PILOT. Reached on his cell phone early Monday afternoon, Lynch declined to characterize his conversation with Manzo after discovering what his client did.
Manzo said he reached out to CLIFFVIEW PILOT because major media has ignored him.
“It is hard for me to ask you to believe in what I say, given the fact that you do not know me and because of the predicament I am in,” he writes, in an email received late Monday morning.
But, he says: “My public life has been a battle against [p]arty[-]organized politics and corrupt developers who are a cause for my former home – Jersey City[‘s] – demise.”
Solomon DwekThe new indictment accuses Manzo of twice crossing the state border into Staten Island to talk with Dwek, a convicted felon turned government informant who was ordered jailed after an arrest in Baltimore violated the terms of his plea bargain.
It also accuses Manzo, 56, of failing to report a crime – namely, directions from two people, including his brother, Ronald Manzo, to take a Dwek payoff.
“Basically, they are prosecuting me for refusing to take a campaign donation that they lab[e]led as a bribe, because the evidence is I did not take it,” Manzo writes to CLIFFVIEW PILOT in the first email, received on Saturday. “If I took it, they would have stated so and prosecuted me for taking it.”
Manzo says the government stretched The Travel Act, under which he was charged in the new indictment, beyond all recognition:
“The governments’ actions were tantamount to enforcing State campaign finance laws for local elections through an unjustified and contrived federal investigation, which is clearly prohibited by the United States Constitution.
“It made me wonder[:] were the world’s sharpest legal minds in the United States Attorney’s Office concentrating on the tenets of the law when drafting my indictment, or were they daydreaming about their future jobs, that at least twelve of them would land, in Governor Christie’s Administration?”
The Manzo brothers were among 46 people swept up in July 2009, after Dwek – looking to shorten a sentence for swindling unwitting victims of $50 million – wore a wire for the FBI while posing as a crooked developer.
Both were originally charged with accepting $27,500 under a federal statute that governs public officials. But a U.S. appeals court ruled that they were improperly charged, given that they weren’t public officials when the FBI arrested them as part of “Operation Bid Rig II.” Lou Manzo was running for mayor of Jersey City and Ron was his campaign manager.
Federal prosecutors then obtained new indictments.
Ronald Manzo, 67, pleaded guilty in May to charges that he conspired with then-Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell and Edward Cheatam – also implicated in his brother’s case — to collect $10,000 from Dwek in exchange for promises from the former mayor to secure project approvals.
A federal jury convicted Elwell early last week of taking the cash bribe, days after a federal judge ordered Dwek jailed for trying to cover up an arrest in Baltimore when he was supposed to be under house arrest in New Jersey while awaiting sentencing. The indictment against Louis Manzo was announced later in the week.
Government prosecutors “allowed their own confidential informant to b[r]eak the law under their own direction, by having him put money into active elections, corrupt those election results and disenfranchise voters — in violation of federal law and the United States Constitution,” Manzo writes. “They then destroyed the evidence of their crimes — thousands of text[-]messaged instructions from the FBI to Dwek — in order to conceal how the government broke the law.”
Federal authorities “are prosecuting me for my failure to have psychic abilities and mental telep[a]thy by not having knowledge of criminal events occur[r]ing throughout the indictment during encounters I had no knowledge of nor [was] present at. They are accusing me of failing to report a crime against my brother that they have dismissed against him, and a crime that Ed Cheatam testified in the Smith trial that he was unaware of committing.”
The indictment actually clears him, Manzo contends. By charging him with failing to report crimes by others, “they are acknowle[d]ging I was not part of it,” he writes.
If he was, Manzo adds, “due process protects me against self[-]incrimination, and therefore any obligation to report a crime that would implicate me.”
On top of that, by removing Dwek from the witness list in Elwell’s trial – denying defense lawyers the opportunity to cross-examine him – federal prosecutors admit they “did not believe” him, completely undermining Dwek’s credibility, Manzo contends.
He adds:
“Despite coasting through his rendezvous with targets in the early phase of the investigation, by the time February 2009 arrived, Dwek, so far, had only been in contact with five of the eventual twenty-two Hudson County defendants in the sting…The government had to step it up. Ably assisted by the pay for prey bounty scheme, Dwek began meeting targets at breakneck speed.”
Dwek “set a blistering pace of 107 taped meetings over the course of 51 days,” Manzo’s email says. That included six meetings one day and five another, it says.
These “required consultation and instruction from Dwek’s FBI handlers,” the first email to CLIFFVIEW PILOT says. “When cross-examined by Defense Attorney Brian Neary in the trial of defendant Leona Beldini, Dwek stated in sworn testimony that the consultation and instruction sessions were held in sync, either before or after, each target meeting and that there were ‘hundreds’ of such sessions.”
The figures exclude “the mounting number of taped meetings with public officials never charged” – among them, other North Hudson mayors and council members. “Neither do these figures account for the thousands of phone conversations recorded between Dwek and the defendants as well as others not charged,” Manzo argues.
Dwek was also helping a bankruptcy trustee “unravel” hundreds of millions of assets in order to repay the victims of his previous scams, a freelance government gig that brought him $12,000 a month – drawn from what was left of the money due creditors, Manzo notes. By doing so, he alleges, Dwek was again scamming the original victims, as well as the government.
In Manzo’s view, the government clearly violated the revised 2006 U.S. Attorney General guidelines, which he says do not allow for using a snitch to target people who aren’t public officials.
Manzo quotes the guidelines: “[T]he Confidential Human Source is authorized only to engage in the specific conduct set forth in the written authorization and not in any other illegal activity. …under no circumstances may the Confidential Human Source initiate or instigate a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state, or local offense.”
However, Manzo says, “the approach to candidates who were not elected or public officials was the entrée of the ongoing election. Dwek was practically demanding that his targets take his campaign donations and not report him, as required, on their election financial disclosure forms. Sometimes he gave his donations to straw donors, who then fraudulently cut checks to candidates’ campaigns.
“Dwek’s language was unmistakably clear and prolific. The crimes he advocated were New Jersey Election and Campaign Finance Laws violations…. The government was part and parcel of every manner and way in which Dwek comported himself, especially in regards to setting up the alleged crimes.”
“Both the authorization forms and the Attorney General’s Guidelines require the FBI to implement ‘precautionary measures’ and that they ‘must take all reasonable steps to monitor closely the activities of the Confidential Human Source.’ They further required that the FBI ‘must take all reasonable steps to minimize the adverse effect of the Otherwise Illegal Activity on innocent persons.’
“Here, the government failed miserably! Through Dwek, the government was cavalierly shoveling over monies to candidates for use in their campaigns – some $400,000 – knowing that most of this cash was going to be used in the ongoing and active campaigns. In fact, it was actually suggested by Dwek.
“There was no authorization, nor could there ever have been, for this conduct,” Manzo concludes. “[F]ederal laws, Department of Justice guidelines, and the United States Constitution prohibit the federal government from affecting the outcome of an election. The money was spread over Hoboken’s mayoral race and Jersey City’s mayoral and city council races. The monies corrupted the election results and disenfranchised every voter and the nearly one-million inhabitants of the two cities.”
Manzo refers to a federal report that found the FBI ignoring Justice Department rules in other cases nationwide, “including some in which informants allegedly engaged in illegal activity without proper oversight or permission.”
“Rather than risk the millions already invested in the investigation, the government tried to be creative and shoehorn the state campaign and election crimes into federal extortion and bribery charges,” he alleges. “They wanted to have it their way – able to prosecute candidates for office as public officials, when their guidelines, the law, and the courts said they could not.
“They gambled that the poor Hudson County pols would never be able to mount the resources necessary to fight a federal criminal prosecution and just plead out. They took the chance that the members comprising New Jersey’s press corps were not perceptive enough and too lazy to pick up on their legal gambit. Then, with all the bold arrogance afforded them by their unchecked legal authority, attempting to run-up a record-breaking body count, they rolled the dice.”
Manzo also refers to federal prosecutions headed by Christie into former Gov. Jim McGreevey and U.S. Rep. Robert Menendez, as abuses of power in an attempt to position the outgoing Republican U.S. Attorney for a gubernatorial run.
He also points to public admissions that Christie consulted GOP strategist Karl Rove, an advisor to President Bush who was involved in the Congressional-investigated firings of selected U.S. Attorneys nationwide for not acting in the best interests of the Republican Party.
“Dwek had been instrumental in raising approximately ‘$50,000’ for President George W. Bush’s election, and more than $65,000 towards Republican Party candidates and political action committees in Monmouth County,” Manzo notes in his first email to CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Dwek’s father sought a presidential pardon for his son, Manzo claims. Instead, he says, the younger Dwek received “the most bizarre plea deal of the century…. He would be excused of ‘thousands’ of crimes and would face mitigated consequences for the bank fraud for agreeing to cooperate as the Confidential Human Source.”
Manzo cites a huge volume of text messages between Dwek and both his targets and FBI agents that the government admitted “accidentally” deleting, after being pressed by defense attorney Michael Critchley (a former federal prosecutor) to account for them on the eve of Ridgefield Mayor Anthony Suarez’s trial.
Manzo quotes Critchley, who said he was formally told: “ ‘The FBI retained text messages of its agents only for so long as limited storage space on its servers allowed’.”
A federal prosecutor later blamed the deletions on “happenstance.”
Evidence is evidence, Manzo argues. The disappearance of texts – particularly between Dwek and his handlers – constitutes destruction, he says. “It did not matter if the instructions were verbal, texted, or chiseled on stone tablets; the guidelines required that they were to be preserved.”
As the judge in the case noted, there never was a “clear explanation as to why some of the text messages were preserved and some were deleted.” He later instructed the jury that those messages should have been preserved.
The jurors eventually acquitted Suarez.
It was later made public the close relationships Christie had to Michele Brown, Ralph Marra (his temporary successor as U.S. Attorney) and division chief Charles McKenna, among others.
Manzo contends the possibility exists that the text messages could have spoiled any of their chances – along with those of others in Christie’s federal administration – of landing state jobs after he became governor, “[e]specially, if they had texted anything, whatsoever to anyone, concerning Christie’s status in the election and the effects of the sting on the gubernatorial election.”
After all, Christie had promised during his campaign to bring his crack staff to Trenton. Some of them, and their family members, were contributing heavily to his gubernatorial campaign while “Operation Bid Rig” was in full swing, Manzo says.
“You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
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