Chertoff: Calling Marra political 'a stretch
Early life
Chertoff was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Rabbi Gershon Baruch Chertoff (1915-1996), the former leader of the Congregation B'nai Israel in Elizabeth and Talmud scholar, and Livia Chertoff (née Eisen), El Al flight attendant. His paternal grandfather, Rabbi Paul Chertoff (who emigrated with his parents from czarist Russia, present day Belarus) was a noted Talmud scholar.[3]
Chertoff went to the Jewish Educational Center in Elizabeth as well as the Pingry School. He later attended Harvard University, where he was a research assistant on John Hart Ely's book Democracy and Distrust, graduating in 1975. He spent one year of this studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1978, going on to clerk for appellate judge Murray Gurfein for a year before clerking for United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan from 1979 to 1980. He worked in private practice with Latham & Watkins from 1980 to 1983 before being hired as a prosecutor by Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, working on Mafia and political corruption-related cases. In the mid 1990s, Chertoff returned to Latham & Watkins for a brief period, founding the firm's office in Newark, New Jersey.
A former federal prosecutor and top Justice Department official from New Jersey said today it was “a stretch” to say that a federal prosecutor discussing why corruption happens was an ethical violation designed to help Republican Chris Christie’s anti-corruption campaign for governor.
Michael Chertoff, who also served as a federal judge and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, generally echoed the comments that reportedly have put acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra in hot water with Washington.
The Associated Press, quoting unnamed sources, reported Tuesday that the Office of Professional Responsibility in the Justice Department was investigating whether Marra violated department guidelines governing what comments are appropriate about pending cases.
Speaking at a news conference last month following the arrest of 29 people in a public corruption investigation, Marra had said the state could easily pass reforms to make prosecutors’ jobs easier, but does not because “too many people profit off the system the way it is and so they have no incentive to change it.”
Christie, who was U.S. Attorney for more than seven years before launching his bid for governor, made similar comments as a candidate and throughout his term as a prosecutor.
Chertoff said he found federal laws adequate when he investigated corruption, and noted that U.S. attorneys cannot prosecute people for violations of state law. But he also said corruption in New Jersey has more organic roots, including the proliferation of local governments and regulations, and voters need to be engaged and cannot rely on prosecutors alone to oust the corrupt.
Chertoff now runs a private security consulting firm. He was asked about the flap at the National Press Club before he appeared on a panel about the privatization of intelligence gathering. Here’s what he said:
Q: Did Marra cross a line with his comments?
A: I’m not going to comment on something somebody said that I didn’t see or hear.
Generally there are a set of rules, you’re not supposed to comment, give a personal opinion about someone’s guilt or innocence, you’re not supposed to talk about evidence that hasn’t actually been made public in court.
So those are pretty clear rules.
I think every U.S. attorney always has a little rhetorical flourish. I don’t ever remember seeing a U.S. attorney, including myself, get out and say we’ve arrested people for horrendous acts of terrorism, we don’t want to comment about whether we think it’s good or bad. That’s obviously a little foolish.
So I think the key’s generally to avoid saying anything that would prejudice the defendant in the case. Hear the audio clip:
Q: Does the fact Mr. Marra’s former supervisor is a candidate for governor running on the a reform platform--
A: [Interrupting]I think it’s a stretch to try to fit this is into a political discussion.
The rules are – Obviously a US attorney won’t come out and say I support a political candidate, but you know there’s always an election in this country, and if the rule is you can’t say anything that might be a topic of public interest then you wouldn’t be able to have a press conference.
So I think generally the rule is not to comment on guilt or innocence, not to talk about evidence that’s not in the case. But I think general comments about the significance of the case, whether it’s a corruption case or a bank fraud case or a securities fraud case, a mortgage fraud case, that’s kind of common frankly.
Hear the audio clip:
Q: What about corruption. You must have had one or two corruption busts in your term.
A: I was thinking about this. We had the Essex County executive, we had the mayor of Jersey City, the mayor of Passaic, the mayor of Parsippany and numerous other public officials, so it seems to be a feature of life in the U.S. attorney's office to have a series of corruption cases.
Hear the audio clip:
Q: Why do you think that is?
A: I do think there is -- it’s a hard answer. I don’t know that New Jersey is actually worse than other places. If you look at what’s going on in Chicago, if you look at what’s gone on in New Orleans, if you look at what’s gone on even in Pennsylvania, there’s a lot of corruption. One argument I’ve heard that probably has some merit is there are a lot of government, levels of government in New Jersey. You have hundreds of levels of government. Just statistically that’s going to create opportunities that a state that has less government mechanisms isn’t going to have.
The second thing is, the more permitting, the more legal requirements you have the more people are going to be tempted to try to get around the rules. In a way, the more legal hurdles you have to jump through to do a project, the more temptation there’s going to be for people to circumvent the bureaucracy. I mean, in a way, too much regulation actually creates an environment in which people decide they want to cut through it by breaking the law.
So you want smart regulation, you don’t necessarily want to have overly complicated regulation.
Hear the audio clip:
Q: Did you get the sense that the people who had the power to make laws that would make it easier for you to crack down on this were not doing it because they were benefiting from the system?
A: I thought our, we use federal law, so I can’t speak to the state laws. Those weren’t important for us. And there was plenty of federal law in terms of what we had to do. I don’t know if the issue is law as much as it is the character of people who are in office. But I will say that to some degree it is up to the voter. The voter in those areas of New Jersey which are repeatedly the scene of corruption, over and over again, and sometimes the public re-elects those who are actually indicted or shrugs their shoulders, somehow or other that is the public not taking its role seriously. If the public cares enough about this issue, then the public’s going to start to really insist that candidates walk the walk as well as talk the talk. And in the end, in a democracy, that’s what you want to rely upon. The elected the people, or the people who elect, the electors. You don’t want to have a situation where the voter shrugs his or her shoulders and says well, if someone’s corrupt, the prosecutors are going to get them. That’s not a healthy system.
Hear the audio clip:
August 20, 2009 | Permalink
Technorati Tags: Chris Christie, Michael Chertoff, Ralph Marra
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Updated: May 13, 2005, 6:22 PM ET
Wilf built wealth in shopping centers
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Associated Press
NEWARK, N.J. -- The New Jersey man leading a consortium trying to buy the Minnesota Vikings is the son of Holocaust survivors whose family business is among the largest owners of shopping centers in North America.
Apparently a newcomer to football, Zygmunt Wilf serves on the boards of several Jewish educational and charitable institutions that have been the recipients of millions of dollars from the family, including Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Associates expressed surprise at his interest in the team, and that he has become the public face of the prospective buyers, since the family is known for keeping a low profile.
"They're incredibly quiet, wonderful philanthropists. They don't get into the limelight in major ways. They are an incredible family," said Leonard Bielory, the immediate past president of Congregation Israel in Springfield, the Orthodox synagogue where Wilf and his wife and four children attend services not far from their north Jersey home.
"I know he enjoys sports. He enjoys the outdoors tremendously," hiking at the Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey as well as near a home in Aspen, Colo., Bielory said. "He's a very outgoing guy."
Wilf, a lawyer who is in his 50s, prefers to be called Zygi (pronounced Ziggy), associates said.
Wilf was not the lead person in the group seeking to buy the Vikings when the deal was announced three months ago. That role was held by Arizona businessman Reggie Fowler. Wilf was one of four limited partners.
The reason for the switch has not been disclosed, but league rules require that the general partner must have at least a 30 percent stake in the franchise.
Red McCombs, who is selling the club for a reported $625 million, said Wilf now heads the group. McCombs said he expects league owners to approve the purchase at their spring meetings on May 24-25 in Washington, D.C.
"It's really quite an unusual situation, particularly since the guy that was announced [Fowler] would have been the first black majority owner of an NFL franchise," said Dan Kaplan, NFL writer for Sports Business Journal.
Wilf's business background has raised questions as to whether he is more interested in building a shopping mall around a new stadium than operating the Vikings, Kaplan said.
"Guys who buy football teams usually do it because they love football; they usually don't do it because they think it will be a great investment, although it has turned out to be a phenomenal investment for some of them," Kaplan said.
John K. Mara, the chief operating officer of the New York Giants and a member of the family that owns half the team, said he does not think he has met Wilf. "As far as I know he has not reached out to anyone here," Mara said in an e-mail.
Wilf, chief operating officer of Garden Commercial Properties, did not return messages left at his Short Hills office this week.
In comments published May 7 in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Wilf said he would not move the team and that Fowler was still part of the consortium.
"We are still in discussion regarding the structure of the group," Wilf told the newspaper. "The NFL is fully aware of everything."
He declined to discuss his net worth or the value of his company. "We have a family business that has operated over 50 years," he said. "I have made it a practice not to discuss financial issues."
The company had the 17th-largest amount of leasable space, 25.9 million square feet, among North American owners of shopping centers in 2004, up from No. 21 in 2003, according to Shopping Centers Today, an industry journal. It has 109 properties in at least five states, primarily New Jersey, but also Florida, Georgia, Illinois and New York.
David Bodamer, managing editor of Retail Traffic, another industry journal, noted that nearly all the company's competitors are publicly traded. "They're a private owner, which is rare for this industry, and they've historically kept a low profile," Bodamer said.
In five years covering retailing, "I've never spoken to anyone over there," he said.
Garden Commercial Properties had revenues of $101.1 million and 5,000 employees in the last year, according to Hoover's Inc.
It acquired about half of the properties and developed the rest, and has anchor tenants that include Home Depot, Lowe's, Walgreen's and Wal-Mart, Hoover's said.
The company is a subsidiary of Garden Homes Management, a home and apartment developer founded in the early 1950s by brothers Joseph and Harry Wilf.
Zygmunt is one of Joseph's sons. In a 2000 interview with Retail Traffic, Zygmunt Wilf said the company will continue to build its business one shopping center at a time.
"Replicating our success is neither a predictable science nor smoke-and-mirrors magic," he told the journal. "It's the result of skill acquired over time, and only after gaining vast experience in the market. It presumes a mastery of our industry, along with a reputation for stability and integrity that, taken together, have become the cornerstone in our ability to attract strong anchor stores and successful tenants to our projects."
"It is the Garden Commercial way of doing both business and life," he said, "which we hope to pass on to our children."
Wilf spoke at Yad Vashem in March when the memorial opened a $56 million museum for which the Wilf family gave over $1 million, said Shraga Mekel, director of development of the American Society for Yad Vashem.
"He is one of the most important leaders of the society," Mekel said.
Wilf was elected in fall 2003 to the Board of Overseers of Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, which is based in the Bronx, N.Y. Yeshiva's campus in Washington Heights is named for the entire Wilf family,
Another longtime beneficiary of the family's donations is the Jewish Educational Center of Elizabeth, an Orthodox temple and 1,000-student day school whose graduates include Michael Chertoff, now U.S. homeland security secretary.
Joseph Wilf is still a congregant, and Zygmunt is on the board of trustees, executive director Steven Karp said.
The Wilf Family Building houses part of the girls' high school, while a wing of the boys' high school is named for Harry Wilf.
Rabbi Elazar Teitz, dean of the school, said he has known the family since the 1950s. He said he has not kept records on how much they have donated, but said it is in the millions of dollars.
Zygmunt Wilf only attended the school through sixth grade, the rabbi said.
"He had the ordinary, healthy American's interest in sports. I didn't notice any particular interest in football," Teitz said.
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Profile: Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
Aggressive Prosecutor Named to Be 'Key Leader in War on Terror'
February 15, 2005
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Michael Chertoff made his name by getting the bosses of the five biggest Mafia families in New York off the streets. In his new job of secretary of Homeland Security, he will be responsible for keeping America's streets safe from terrorists.
"Mike has shown a deep commitment to the cause of justice and an unwavering determination to protect the American people," Bush said when he announced the nomination. "Mike has also been a key leader in the war on terror."
The Senate approved his nomination in a 98-0 vote on Feb. 15, 2005. He succeeds Tom Ridge as head of the Department of Homeland Security.
"I believe the secretary of Homeland Security will have to be mindful of the need to reconcile the imperatives of security with the preservation of liberty and privacy," Chertoff said in a prepared statement for a hearing on his nomination before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Chertoff, 51, has been a federal judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2003 and was the director of the Justice Department's criminal division from 2001 to 2003.
He has been concerned with the terrorist threat against the United States for a long time, and in 1996 argued in an article published in the New Jersey Law Journal titled "Tools Against Terrorism" that law enforcement and prosecutors need greater leeway in their pursuit of suspected terrorists, even if that involved a limiting of some of the civil liberties that Americans have grown accustomed to.
He is known as an aggressive prosecutor and a good manager, though his critics have claimed that he has sometimes gone overboard, such as in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks; his opposition to allowing judges discretion in deciding sentences; and his position, argued in an amicus brief he co-wrote for a case before the Supreme Court, that there is no constitutional right to be free of coercive questioning by the police.
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Giuliani Link
Like former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, Bush's first nominee for the Homeland Security job, Chertoff first gained attention as a result of his association with Rudolph Giuliani. Chertoff was the former New York City mayor's assistant when Giuliani was a federal prosecutor working on a case against organized crime families.
Just as the case was due to go to trial in 1985, Giuliani decided to lead the prosecution of a municipal corruption case, leaving Chertoff in charge of the organized crime prosecution. The assistant prosecutor got the conviction, and the headlines that went with putting top-level mobsters behind bars.
His success eventually brought him the job of top U.S. prosecutor in New Jersey, where he went after electronics tycoon "Crazy Eddie" Antar, who was convicted of racketeering and securities fraud.
He went into private practice in 1994, as a partner with Latham & Watkins, but was also the special counsel for the U.S. Senate Whitewater Commission, which investigated the involvement of President Clinton and members of his staff in an Arkansas real estate company.
His campaign appearances for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who ran against Clinton in 1996, raised some eyebrows among other former special prosecutors, who questioned whether that was appropriate.
Chertoff returned to government service in 2001, taking over as chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, and has pushed for greater powers for law enforcement to pursue and prosecute suspected terrorists.
Even though he has been an aggressive champion of the administration's legal tactics in the war on terror, he joined with a group of other conservative lawyers who criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.
Chertoff, who was born in Elizabeth, N.J., on Nov. 28, 1953, received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1975 and his law degree from Harvard University in 1978.
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