So it Ens – er, ends – not with a bang but a whimper.
In mid-2011, the federal government touted quite a scheme that it claimed EnCap founder William Gauger had concocted: forcing a longtime friend to pay him $100,000, via Gauger’s brother-in-law, for items ranging from NHL season tickets, a $10,000 donation to a soccer club where Gauger’s children played, and a 37-inch HDTV. One of the charges was extortion, in fact.
But after 2 1/2 years and untold cost, we wrapped things up yesterday in a federal court in Newark with Gauger being convicted for improperly being reimbursed for a $299 plane ticket that had already been refunded by the airline because the flight was canceled.
That’s it. The entire Asbury Park condo land deal case was dropped, as was a count of supposedly falsifying a $10,000 bill to EnCap for a study of a train station for the doomed golf and housing project plan in the dumps of Lyndhurst, Rutherford, and North Arlington. Ten counts in all were dropped, leaving only the plane ticket.
The case, by this point, felt like an anachronism anyway. The supposed misdeeds – and really the key points in the EnCap saga – occurred from 2004 to 2007, and the latter year is when this falsified expense report was made. I guess most of us will never know why this case dragged on so long, especially if it was going to end with such a relative afterthought.
Even the sentencing, part of a plea deal agreed upon in principle six months ago, was not quick. A 2 p.m. hearing didn’t get going until Judge Claire Cecchi summoned the attorneys to chambers at 2:15 p.m. for a 10-minute chat, leaving Gauger alone in the “front row” while this lone reporter and four friends or family sat mostly silently in the “pews.”
They were back in chambers at 2:35 p.m. – “for a minute,” a court official said, that again lasted 10 minutes.
Then after three minutes of Gauger’s attorneys whispering the details, the attorneys had to go back in one more time, this time really for less than a minute.
There was some quibbling about a couple of lines in a pre-sentencing report, but that ended once the judge said that issue would not be relevant to her sentence.
Laurence Shtasel, one of Gauger’s attorneys, referred to a “politically charged Meadowlands development” – which of course is EnCap and not Xanadu. Gauger, his attorney noted, spent months or years commuting from New Jersey to his North Carolina home as he tried to make the ill-fated EnCap plan come to fruition.
Gauger expressed his remorse for his “sloppy, stupid” mistake, and the prosecution declined to comment to the judge. Cecchi then noted Gauger’s involvement in his community and with his family, and imposed the one-year proboation and $5,000 fine (also a $100 “special assessment” and no firearms or illegal controlled substances during the probation, and no new credit charges unless government-approved).
“I wish you good luck in the future, and I know I won’t be seeing you here again,” Cecchi said.
And with that, Gauger was free to go – leaving the rest of us to wonder what the federal government was doing holding onto this case for so long.
State Senator Wayne Bryant was acquitted of fraud in another Encap investigation, and the state never proved its case against project attorney Eric Wisler, either, before he passed away at age 54.
Somehow, more than $50 million in state taxpayer dollars were lost here, as those loans were due to be paid back from future tax revenues from the project. A hint to elected officials: What happens to our money if the project never gets built? The same thing that has hamstrung the city of Harrison from unrealized revenues from development surrounding Red Bull Arena that mostly has yet to occur.
For more – a lot more – on what happened at EnCap and why, read the New Jersey Inspector General’s report from 2008. For some reason key figures like formers Governors James McGreevey – EnCap’s biggest champion – and Richard Codey were not even interviewed, but even with that glaring flaw the report does string together a comprehensive – in some places – narrative.
It’s a long, strange saga – even by Jersey standards.
