The American Way of Graft
By George Amich

Welcome To Jersey City

The simple power of a local government to stall, to misunderstand or misfile or misdirect, to swallow up requests for cooperation in the bowels of the bureaucracy, is a formidable extortion tool. We have seen in Chapter One a variation of this technique - the deliberate holdup of payments owed to vendors or contractors.

The stall technique is most effective when the victim is operating within close financial tolerances, with large amounts of money and manpower committed and creditors watching closely for any sign of incipient failure.

EZRA SENSIBAR was from Chicago, Ill., and he had heard about Hudson County, N. J., so he knew local governments were not always run by genial and cooperative people. He knew the risks he was running in getting involved in a waterfront development project in Jersey City.

All the same, the stakes were big. The city's Hudson River frontage was one of the most inherently valuable pieces of property in New Jersey, and Sensibar and a group of associates had a chance in 1966 to buy a 223-acre piece of it at municipal auction for a low $2.04 million. Much of the land was under water, but Sensibar's company, Construction Aggregates Corp., had the equipment and know-how to dredge and fill and reclaim, so the whole could be developed as an industrial park and containerport. Sensibar, a man of distinguished appearance with a record of business success, decided to get the cards on the table at the outset. He went to John V. Kenny, the county Democratic boss, and announced that his company had only $50,000 invested in the project as of that moment and would walk away from it if the right assurances weren't forthcoming.

"I said to him," Sensibar later told the State Commission of Investigation, "that I wanted to be sure that we would get the cooperation that we were entitled to and that nobody would have his hand out; that we wouldn't be harassed."

Kenny replied that the so-called Port Jersey plans were "the best thing he had heard, the first spark of development on the waterfront and that he thought that we were doing a great deal more for Jersey City than they could do for us. He said that he would guarantee every form of cooperation by the city, and they wanted us there. And he said that if any son of a bitch asked for money, to come to him and he would take care of him."

Sensibar should have remembered those wise words of Sam Goldwyn: "An oral agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on." John Kenny's promise failed to hold up. Either Kenny had no intention of delivering, or he overestimated his ability to control the city's leaders, who by now had a power base independent of the county organization.

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