Witness Recovers From
Overdose
to Describe New
Jersey Graft
By LAURA MANSNERUS,
NYTimes on the Web, June 7, 2006
NEWARK, June 6 -- The case of
Raymond J. O'Grady is the culmination of years of work by federal investigators,
a tale opening a window on small-town graft that brought down more than a dozen
public officials in a New Jersey county run by old-fashioned patronage politics.
Now the trial has turned out to be a story of its own: the pivotal
government witness — one day into his testimony last week against Mr. O'Grady, a
longtime friend from Monmouth County politics — swallowed 60 to 80
blood-pressure pills in a suicide attempt.
But on Tuesday, the government salvaged its case, which a prosecutor, Ricardo
Solano, had described in his opening statement last week as "an inside look at
how public office is sold."
The prosecution witness, Anthony J. Palughi, took the stand again in Federal
District Court here despite objections by the defense to allowing the testimony
to continue so soon after what Mr. O'Grady's lawyer called "a miraculous
recovery."
Mr. O'Grady, 56, a former committeeman in Middletown Township, N.J., is charged
with taking $8,000 in cash to help steer municipal work to contractors,
including two men who turned out to be agents from the F.B.I.
Mr. O'Grady was among 15 local officials arrested in February and March 2005 in
a continuing investigation called Operation Bid Rig, which started in 1998.
He is the first to go to trial; most have pleaded guilty, and two have died.
Mr. Palughi, 70, who recently retired as the Monmouth County superintendent of
bridges, agreed to tape conversations with Mr. O'Grady, among other officials,
when he was arrested in December 2004. He pleaded guilty in August 2005 to
setting up bribes to local officials and pocketing money for himself.
On Tuesday, jurors heard nothing of Mr. Palughi's attempted suicide last Friday
morning before he was to resume his testimony. In arguments before Judge
William J. Martini, Mr. O'Grady's lawyer, Kevin Roe, said that Mr. Palughi was
surrounded in the hospital by F.B.I. agents.
"They had to patch this guy up or their case tanks," Mr. Roe said in a
courthouse hallway during a brief break.
But Judge Martini, citing a psychiatrist's report that deemed the crucial
witness lucid and able to testify, brought in the jury.
No sooner did Mr. Palughi answer a few questions than he offered an apology for
his apparent confusion. "I'm not a professional informant, and not really
that bright," he said.
But he forged ahead, testifying about tapes of his conversations with Mr.
O'Grady that the prosecutors played for the jury.
Along with other recordings that the jury heard when the trial opened last week,
the tapes track the two men discussing their "deals," all in dialogue that could
have been lifted from a "Sopranos" script — accents and expletives included.
In the first conversation, which was recorded in October 2004, Mr. Palughi was
at Carmela's, a restaurant in Neptune Township, with two federal agents posing
as employees of a construction and demolition company. They were
conferring about Mr. O'Grady, whom they were about to meet. Mr. Palughi
advised them to give him no more than $1,000, adding, "I don't know why I'm
telling you this, but I love you guys."
At lunch that day, the agents recorded their conversation with Mr. O'Grady, who
was the director of the county motor pool at the time. Mr. O'Grady
accepted their offer of "a little early Christmas gift or whatever."
Then, in a taped conversation of a subsequent meeting in February, Mr. O'Grady
told the two agents that he would look for small jobs for them, as they had
asked, to avoid bidding requirements.
In several tapes played on Tuesday, Mr. O'Grady and Mr. Palughi worried aloud
that investigators might be closing in on them, finding out about the payments
from the construction company as well as previous dealings involving fake and
inflated invoices from a trucking company that Mr. Palughi said had also passed
cash to Mr. O'Grady through him.
Mr. Palughi, who was questioned by James Nobile, an assistant United States
attorney, also described Mr. O'Grady's badgering of one owner of the trucking
company for contributions to the Monmouth County Republican Organization.
Yet Mr. Palughi volunteered that it was his own idea to call the owner, a man
named Matty, to ask for money when he and Mr. O'Grady found themselves broke in
Atlantic City one night.
"We wanted to gamble," Mr. Palughi said, "So I said, 'Let's call Matty and see
what he can do.' He wired it down to the hotel."
The defense contends that Mr. Palughi lied to investigators and cooperated with
them in part to save his county pension.
Under cross-examination by Mr. Roe, Mr. Palughi conceded that with a ninth-grade
education he had no apparent qualifications for the county jobs he held for more
than 20 years. In his $92,000-a-year job as superintendent of bridges, he
said, he worked mostly as a chauffeur for Freeholder Director Harry W. Larrison
Jr., one of the two arrested officials who died.
"Basically, my job was driving Mr. Larrison around," he said.
But Mr. Palughi disputed the lawyer's accusations that he had defrauded
taxpayers or lied to get his jobs.
"That's how the system worked for years and years, no matter what party was in,"
he said. "It's a sin that it had to work that way, but it did."
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