The former chairman of Bergen County’s Democratic Party used his position to pay kickbacks, ask for bribes and extort an out-of-state company — the former developer of Xanadu, the proposed retail and entertainment center in the Meadowlands — that wanted to do business here, federal prosecutors alleged in a sweeping racketeering indictment announced Wednesday.
Here’s a link to the 75-page indictment here - the Xanadu-related material is pages 22-35.
The charges against Joseph A. Ferriero, once one of the state’s most powerful powerbrokers, come three years after he walked out of court a free man when a judge vacated a previous conviction on federal corruption charges. The new indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Newark, includes charges related to Ferriero’s earlier conviction, as well as two new alleged schemes involving a Virginia-based real estate company and a Nutley-based attorney and software developer.
See more here at northjersey.com, where we’ll have more updates later.