New Jersey Archives - MICHAEL O. ALLEN

A Brief Thought on 9/11

By michael o. allenHomepageOne Comment

I had not left home yet to go to work that day when an in-law called to tell me to turn on the television.

One heavily-fueled jet had already slammed into one tower. People were dying, desperate to be saved from whatever this was, wherever this attack came from. I was a reporter at the New York Daily News then and the biggest story in several lifetimes hit the city and I was separated from it by a river and bridges and tunnels that were blocked, with no way to get in.

I considered myself a hard-bitten reporter and I’d covered cataclysmic events, usually in other countries. But, the day after the attacks, as I walked through Lower Manhattan, I was shocked to see army tanks and heavilly-armed U.S. military personnel rumbling through the cindered city.

I quickly lost whatever degree of arrogance or pride girded my professional self. Feelings of loss, anguish and more than a little bit of dread nestled within me.

I ran into Daily News colleague Maki Becker walking toward me, coming seemingly from the deepest reaches of the disaster zone. We hugged, told each other where we were going and what we were doing, then continued on our ways.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, I remember covering funerals all over the place, in Jersey and on Long Island and in every borough–Cantor Fitzgerald traders in Passaic, New Jersey, firefighters, police officers and people from all walks of life. I was witness and chronicled those remembrances and memorials.

One of my strongest memories occurred the very day after the attacks. A friend of mine helped reunite a young family that had become separated after the attacks.

Usually, you try not to get too close to the people that you write stories about, or those who help you get those stories. You want to remain objective and keep a clear eye. In Rowena’s case, it was difficult to hew to that principle. I don’t remember when or on what story I first met Rowena but she was a bright shining light from the very first moment I met her, armed with an in infectious smile that would quickly grow into a chuckle, then a laugh.

It was impossible not to like her. So we became friends.

I may have sought her out the day after the attacks because I knew she lived not too far from the towers. Or, maybe, I just ran into her.  In the seemingly endless procession of lost people leaving those doomed towers and its neighborhoods, Rowena was busy reuniting a couple and their five-year-old son who had become separated after the attacks. Either the boy and his father were looking for his mother, or the boy and his mother were looking for his father. I forget which. Rowena came across a pair of them during the day’s tumult, cared for them in her apartment, then helped them scour the city until the whole family was reunited the next day.

The man was Egyptian and the woman was either a Swiss or German. They had met when the woman vacationed in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh and, against impossible odds, had married. They were vacationing in New York City when the attackers brought death and destruction to us.

I was very moved by them, their story, which I never got to write, and by Rowena, who remained true to form.

Much, of course, happened in the intervening years since the attack. I wonder what happened to that couple and their son. Did their family grow, remained intact and thrived?

Or did the wars and the ugliness of the world that followed swallow them, too?

Me, I drifted out of journalism and out of touch with Rowena. My two sons–one was four and half years old the other was six months old–grew, with the older one growing taller than me this past summer and starting high school this fall.

Rowena got married and now lives in Brooklyn. Though we remain tethered by social network connections, we have not seen each other in years and those years have really worn away the very real connection we had.

I know wherever she is today, Rowena is brightening someone’s life, offering a hand of help or support, doing some good in the world.

My thought on this terrible anniversary is that we should all aim to be a little bit like my friend.

September 10, 2011

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N.J. Wins Battle In Sewage-Dump War

By michael o. allenHomepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

February 19, 1997
by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer
New York retreated in the Great Sewage War yesterday after tough talk from New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman.

After a day of counter-charges, the city and state agreed to at least a year-long delay in plans to release 560 million gallons of raw sewage into the East River — a plan Whitman (below) warned would trigger environmental damage.

“We are going to agree to go through further review process to make certain that there are no questions about this, to make certain that it is perfectly safe,” Mayor Giuliani said.

Under the agreement, city, state and federal environmental officials will conduct months of study on the consequences of a massive sewage release. That means the release will be delayed until at least next winter, because the dumping is allowed only in cold weather.

The concession, announced after renewed threats of a federal lawsuit by Whitman, avoided a showdown that would have pitted her against Gov. Pataki and Giuliani — fellow Republicans.

Whitman claimed victory, saying the decision would help preserve New Jersey shellfish beds.

“It is utterly medieval when you talk about putting this kind of raw sewage into the waterways,” Whitman said.

The battle erupted last week, after New York State environmental officials approved the city’s plan for shutting down a lower East Side sewage treatment plant for repair work on two valves.

The shutdown would have released the massive quantity of untreated sewage into the East River over four days, the first release of its kind since 1987.

State and city officials initially said the release would cause few environmental problems.

Whitman, however, warned that the sewage would flow through Lower New York Harbor to the Sandy Hook and Raritan Bay area, damaging shellfish beds there.

Before the agreement, city officials accused their cross-Hudson counterparts of maintaining a sewage double-standard. They said the New Jersey communities of North Bergen, Woodcliff, New Brunswick, Perth Amboy and Rahway have dumped untreated sewage in the shared waterways for many years.

Whitman spokesman Pete McDonough said the city’s planned sewage release would have been far more massive than anything from New Jersey.

Original Story Date: 021997

February 19, 1997

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THE BIG FIX IN JERSEY; a brighter Star-Ledger

By michael o. allenHomepageNo Comments

May/June 1995

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN

The Star-Ledger has always seen New Jersey — from the shore communities in the south through the urban/suburban sprawl of its central counties to the exurban north — as one big hometown, and it has chronicled its citizens’ common concerns. A common concern these days is the tumult of change at the Ledger.

Comprehensive, successful, and dull, the newspaper was shaped by the obsessive vision of editor Mort Pye, who retired in December after three decades at the helm. It is being reshaped by James P. Willse, who has all of the state wondering what its somnolent giant of a newspaper will be like when it’s finally wide awake.

The Newhouse-owned Star-Ledger was little more than a scandal sheet when Pye arrived as a top editor in 1957. Assuming full leadership six years later, he tied its fate to that of New Jersey. The paper aggressively promoted development and commerce in New Jersey and followed its largely white, upper-middle-class readers out to the suburbs after they fled the paper’s urban base. The Ledger thrived while its main competition, the respected Newark Evening News, closed up shop in 1972 after a disastrous strike.

Pye’s formula included covering the hell out of local sports as well as the state government, building an enormous statehouse bureau. He dropped the word Newark from the masthead in the early 1960s. “What we set out to do was very simple,” Pye says. “It was to create a paper that anybody with interest in what is going on in New Jersey would find it in the paper.” All this for 15 cents, until its climb to a quarter in 1990.

In a business sense, Pye’s strategy worked. The Ledger has a circulation of 455,919 daily and 685,551 on Sundays, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, making it respectively the fourteenth- and twelfth- largest paper in the nation. In a journalistic sense, however, even the paper’s admirers had to admit that The Star-Ledger could be mind-numbing. Its clumsily designed look was vintage 1949, heavy gray with hard-to-understand headlines; its gigantic newshole was both a blessing and a curse — a huge beast with an insatiable appetite that, combined with weak editing, often produced lifeless prose. The paper sometimes gave the impression it produced type only to wrap around the voluminous ads.

That Willse’s every move since he took over in January is still subject to speculation and analysis all around New Jersey illustrates the delicacy of his task. How do you fix a newspaper that, in an economic sense, ain’t broke?

E. Donald Lass, editor and publisher of the Asbury Park Press, the state’s second-largest paper, wonders how much he would change the Ledger if he were running it. Why change when you have such a potent formula for success? he asks. But in a six-page “Memo” to Willse the New Jersey Reporter’s Stephen Barr, the “spokes-man” for “Ledger Junkies of New Jersey,”offered a not-so-modest list of requests: better writing, editing, photography, and layout, less dependence on institutional coverage, more explanatory and investigative work, thoughtful editorial and op-ed pages, and so forth. The Ledger, the memo said, is “indispensable, but not admired.”

In a competitive market, Willse has been reluctant to disclose his vision for the paper, but he leaves no doubt about the company he’d like it to keep. The Star-Ledger, he says, can play in the same league as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald,The Boston Globe, and The Dallas Morning News, regional newspapers that are both economic and journalistic successes. “The trick,” he says, “is to not lose sight of what is good and valuable about the Ledger: its commitment to New Jersey and its communities and the breadth of its information.”

Ledger junkies already see a better newspaper, somewhat cleaner looking with more inviting headlines and sharper stories. Reporters say their pieces are now getting “massaged.” “He is asking questions about stories that we’ve never heard before, which is very exciting,” says general assignment reporter Bill Gannon.

One of Willse’s first moves was far from subtle. He hired Richard Aregood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, to rejuvenate the Ledger’s editorial section. Aregood, simply put, is everything that The Star-Ledger’s editorial page never was.

That section had long spoken with a weak, inconsistent voice in editorials that were no more than summations of the news and suggestions and expectations about the future. Aregood, by contrast, writes editorials that are witty, engaging, and combative. “Somebody sedate the senator while we take a look here,” he wrote in March, after quoting an emotional Republican state senator who wants to free developers to build in a protected watershed. And for the kind of money that Henry Cisneros is alleged to have paid to keep his girlfriend quiet, Aregood wrote that the HUD secretary “could be wallowing in a vat of lime Jell-O with four hookers, twelve consenting farm animals, and a partridge in a pear tree to this very day.”

The twenty-six-newspaper Newhouse group has a reputation for running some of the most profitable but mediocre papers in the nation. In the past few years, however, it has been hiring respected editors and apparently giving them resources to improve their papers.

In Willse, it got a well-respected and well-organized editor known for his ability to spot talent and give it room to grow. The son of a New York City detective, he was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1944, and caught the journalism bug by working summers as a copy boy at The New York Times and as an intern at The Wall Street Journal. At Hamilton College, he studied Yeats by day and covered the cops by night for the Utica Daily Press in upstate New York. He joined The Associated Press in 1969, becoming its San Francisco bureau chief, then city editor and managing editor for the San Francisco Examiner. It was while he was at the Examiner that his photographer, Greg Robinson, was killed, along with congressman Leo Ryan, by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple cult in Guyana just before the mass suicide there. A grief-stricken Willse put that day’s paper to bed and flew to Guyana to cover the tragedy himself. He produced solid journalism at the New York Daily News, his most recent career stop, during some of the toughest periods in the paper’s history, notably the bitter 147-day strike in 1990-1991, the death of its phony “savior,” Robert Maxwell, in 1991, and its subsequent bankruptcy. When the News was finally sold to Mort Zuckerman, Willse had to walk the plank with scores of Daily News staff members.

Now he has been handed one of those rare jobs in journalism, a chance to shape a paper that is willing to spend money to improve. “I don’t think there is a better editing gig in the country,” he says. “This is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.”

Allen is a reporter for the New York Daily News. He did not work under Willse.

June 1, 1995

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COMMUNITIES AS CRIME FIGHTERS MUST ACCEPT LARGER ROLE, EX-JUDGE SAYS

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, May 13, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | 4 Star | NEWS | B03

The head of a state committee looking into ways of relieving New Jersey’s overburdened criminal justice system said Tuesday that communities have to take on an expanded role in fighting crime.

“A growing reality among laymen and experts alike is that communities must accept significant responsibility for addressing problems of crime and corrections,” said retired Superior Court Judge John Marzulli.

“The idea of shared responsibility by the community in law enforcement is not new, but generally it has not been effectively achieved.”

Communities are best equipped to know who needs drug or alcohol treatment, employment counseling, or other remedial efforts, Marzulli said. They also can establish programs uniquely suited to the locale, he added.

Marzulli, chairman of the Sentencing Pathfinders Committee set up by the state Supreme Court, was the keynote speaker at a conference at William Paterson College.

About 100 volunteers and social service workers from around the state attended to discuss among other topics replacing jail sentences with humane, rehabilitative, and effective community-based corrections programs.

Workshops also explored how to establish programs to aid ex-offenders and ease their transition back into society. Among other things, the workshops focused on the role of churches, how to volunteer for advocacy programs, drug and alcohol abuse treatment programs, education, and support services for ex-offenders and their families.

Karen Spinner of the New Jersey Association on Corrections, a citizens organization that serves inmates, said there is a need for prisons and jails for the most violent criminals. Those who commit minor crimes need not go into the corrections system, where they are socialized into a criminal lifestyle, she said.

“The point is that we’ve gone so long with other people being responsible that now nobody is responsible,” Spinner said. “We need to talk about a system that is accountable, because if you are not accountable, it is not going to work.”

Caption: PHOTO – Clarice King, left, director of a Paterson family support group, speaking at the Wayne forum with Barbara Astrella, center, and Andrea Capuano, co-authors of a book of community resources for ex-offenders. – STEVE AUCHARD / THE RECORD

May 13, 1992

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SPOTTING DRUG USE; Police Trained to Test Drivers

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, May 6, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | B01

In a program hailed as a new weapon against drugged drivers, state and local law enforcement officials Tuesday dedicated a center where suspected impaired drivers will be tested. They also recognized 40 police officers who have completed training as the state’s first drug recognition experts.

The Drug Recognition Enforcement program takes the guesswork out of prosecuting motorists suspected of using drugs, said Paul Brickfield, first assistant Bergen County prosecutor.

Instead of relying mainly on a police officer’s description of a motorist’s conduct, prosecutors will be able to use the results of a set of tests administered soon after a driver is stopped.

The officers 20 from the state police, 10 from the Bergen County Police Department, and 10 from municipal police departments have been trained to recognize and measure symptoms induced by various types of drugs, Brickfield said at the dedication.

The testing center is located in a wing donated by Bergen Pines County Hospital in Paramus.
John Pescatore, director of the Bergen County Office of Highway Safety, said the program plugs a gap that exists in the prosecution of drunken and drug-impaired drivers.

“Take the Bergen County Police Department,” Pescatore said. “They make over 200 drunk-driving arrests each year, well over 300 arrests of people driving with narcotics in their car, but fewer than 10 arrests of those under the influence of drugs.

The Drug Recognition Enforcement Program was developed in Los Angeles and is now used in 20 states, including New York, Brickfield said.

The state Highway Traffic Safety Division, working with a $14,000 seed grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, chose Bergen County as the place to test the program because of its almost 3,000 miles of interstate, state, county, and municipal roadways.

The training included classroom examinations and practical experience working with drug suspects and identifying what types of drugs they were using, Brickfield said. The officers worked with suspects arrested on sweeps by narcotics bureaus in Jersey City and Paterson.

An examination of a suspect should take about 45 minutes, said state police Sgt. Frank R. Emig, who, along with Bergen County Police Sgt. Robert Brenzel, is a coordinator of the program. Some tests, such as the balance, walk and turn, one-leg stand, and finger-to-nose, are similar to the roadside tests administered to suspected drunken drivers.

Others, such as examinations of pupils, measurement of pulse rate, blood pressure, and body temperature, and toxicological tests, are scientific tests designed to determine which category of drugs a person may be using, Emig said. By the time a test is concluded, the officer would be able to testify as an expert in court on the category of drugs the suspect was using at the time of the arrest, he said.

About 18 people have been charged since DRE officers began issuing summonses to people for driving under the influence of drugs in January, Brickfield said. A few suspects pleaded guilty while several cases are pending, he said.

No one has been convicted in a contested case, however. Brickfield said the first case was lost last week when a Bergen County Superior Court judge questioned not the credibility of the drug recognition expert, but the initial stop that led to the suspect’s being charged.

He added that the program also would have to survive a judicial challenge of a conviction in New Jersey, as it has in other states, before it is accepted as an established enforcement mechanism.

James A. Arena, director of the state Highway Traffic Safety Division, said it was a natural evolution from drunken driving enforcement to trying to get drugged drivers off the road. In 1981, he said, 33 percent of fatal accidents in the state involved a drunken driver or victim, compared with 18.7 percent in 1991. The national average for 1991, the latest figure available, was 39 percent, he said.

“Consistent with the scourge of drugs in our schools, workplace, the whole society, really,” he said, the percentage of drug-related fatal accidents and injuries has increased alarmingly, to as high as 30 percent in 1991.

Caption: 2 COLOR PHOTOS – The testing center includes a holding cell, top. 2 – Above, Sgt. Frank Emig watching Jennifer Dalton, a public information assistant, in a simulated driver test. – PETER MONSEES / THE RECORD 1

May 6, 1992

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FEDERAL LIMIT ON INMATES ASSAILED; Del Tufo Weighs Legal Challenge

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, April 1, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | 5 Star | NEWS | B01

New Jersey Attorney General Robert J. Del Tufo said Tuesday that he is considering challenging federal court orders that limit the number of state prisoners in some county jails.

“I would prefer not to have a federal judge telling the state what it can and cannot do,” he said.

Del Tufo said he talked Monday with U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr about a new U.S. Justice Department policy to provide legal help to states that are trying to lift court-ordered limits on prison populations.

He said he wants to review the current consent decrees restricting the number of state inmates in the Essex, Atlantic, Burlington, Monmouth, and Union county jails, with an eye toward challenging those limits.

Bergen County Sheriff Jack Terhune said lifting the cap on state inmates at other jails might help the Bergen County Jail because some state prisoners could be removed, but that the problem would remain with the state.

“If the state realizes it has an overcrowding problem, then it must address it at the state level, not at the expense of the county jail system,” Terhune said.

The new Justice Department policy was first put forth by Barr in a Jan. 14 speech in which he said the ability of states in recent years to manage their own prisons has been hampered by lower federal court rulings that came out of lawsuits filed by inmates.

“Many courts went far beyond what the Constitution requires in remedying purported Eighth Amendment violations,” Barr said in the speech. “Caps, in particular, have wrought havoc with the states efforts to get criminals off the street.”

But on Jan. 15, the day after Barr’s speech, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that undercut his position, said Elizabeth Alexander, deputy director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ruling, in a case originating in Boston, made reopening consent decrees easier, but put limits on how much they could be rewritten, Alexander said.

“I’m really surprised that Barr is continuing to make this argument,” she said. “In the face of the decision, I would have thought that he would stop, because it was so soundly rejected by the Supreme Court.”

The Bergen County Jail operates at an average of 235 percent of its rated capacity of 423 inmates, with its population hovering around 1,000 during the week and exceeding that on weekends. The county and state are co-defendants in a 1988 lawsuit filed by inmates who charged that their constitutional rights were being violated by conditions at the jail.

James Stabile, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, said the state prison system currently runs at 135 percent capacity. Although the department removed 1,559 inmates from county jails in February, the caps in the five counties prevented the state from spreading that number out, he said.

For instance, the department removed 348 prisoners from the Essex County Jail, one of the jails under consent decrees, but only 72 inmates from Bergen County. The number could have been divided more evenly among the counties if the state could be flexible with the cap, Stabile said.

April 1, 1992

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SEX-ABUSE CASE TIED TO SNAPSHOTS; Bergen Teen in Photos, Not Baby Hope

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Sunday, March 15, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | A03

The Baby Hope mystery will have to endure, for now at least.

New York City detectives, who attached the moniker “Baby Hope” to a dead girl whose body was found last year in a cooler near the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan, continue to search for the girl’s identity and the circumstance of her death.

Bergen County prosecutor’s sex crime investigators identified a 13-year-old Paterson girl who last week reported that she had been sexually assaulted as the person in photographs widely held to be of the dead girl.

Welling Wedemeyer, 54, of 123 Kennedy Drive, Lodi, was charged Friday with aggravated sexual assault on the girl, Bergen County Prosecutor John J. Fahy said. He was being held Saturday in the Bergen County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.

Though she is older than Baby Hope is believed to have been, authorities are sure they have the right girl, attributing the difference in age to the fact that the photographs show only the victim’s head and shoulders.

The mystery of the photographs began June 14 when an unidentified man walking west on Route 46, near the Midland Avenue overpass in Garfield, found a brown paper bag containing five glossy snapshots that show a girl being sexually assaulted and being forced to perform a sex act with man whose head is not visible. He turned the bag over to police.

Construction workers found the body of a girl in a cooler near the West Side Highway more than a month later. The girl, thought to be 3 to 5 years old, was malnourished and had been beaten, sexually abused, bound, and suffocated.

A Bergen County prosecutor’s sex crimes investigator made the connection between the two cases in October when he noticed similarities in the features of the girl in the snapshots and New York City police composites of Baby Hope, leading to cooperation between the two departments.

There were other clues that seemingly tied the dead girl to the girl in the snapshots: Route 46 is one route leading to the George Washington Bridge, which has an exit to the Henry Hudson Parkway.

An anthropologist working at the FBI crime laboratory in Washington, D.C., created a single photograph from the five snapshots, then compared the photograph with the skull of the girl in the cooler.

Saying he was 90 percent positive the highest degree of certainty in cases like this, Fahy said Saturday the anthropologist three months ago concluded the dead girl and the girl in the photographs were the same.

The mystery of the girl in the snapshots began to unravel last week, however, Fahy said. A 13-year-old girl, accompanied by her mother, went to Lodi police Monday. Directed to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, which investigates all sexual abuse cases in the county, the girl alleged that Wedemeyer sexually assaulted her, Fahy said.

Wedemeyer was arrested Tuesday and charged.

An investigator, who noticed the similarities in the features of the girl and the girl in the snapshots, asked her more questions and she told them that photographs had been taken of her. Authorities executed a search warrant at Wedemeyer’s home and found several photographs.

“The background of the house was the same as the background in the pictures found on [Route] 46 the drapes, the couch, windows, and things like that,” Fahy said. “I mean, there is no doubt that this girl is the girl in those photographs.”

Wedemeyer was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and Superior Court Judge William C. Meehan added $75,000 to the $25,000 bail from his arrest on the initial charge Tuesday.

March 15, 1992

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INMATE SUIT CHALLENGED; Case Against Bergen Jail Unproved, N.J. Says

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Wednesday, March 11, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | 5 Star | NEWS | B05

The state has asked the federal judge presiding over a lawsuit by Bergen County Jail inmates to reduce overcrowding at the jail to dismiss the suit, arguing that the inmates failed to prove their case.

When the state Inmate Advocacy Office, which represents the prisoners, finished presenting its case on Feb. 24, it did not prove that “deliberate indifference” by the state and county led to cruel living conditions in the jail, Deputy Attorney General Catherine M. Brown said in her motion.

Brown cited a July 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made it tougher for inmates to sue to improve living conditions in prisons. Inmates must show not only inhumane conditions, but “deliberate indifference” by prison officials, the court said in a 5-4 decision.

Assistant Deputy Public Advocate Audrey Bomse said the state’s arguments in the motion for dismissal were without foundation.

“They are misreading the law,” Bomse said. “To show deliberate indifference, you don’t have to get inside a person’s mind. All you have to do is show knowledge for a long period of time, and failure to act.”

Moreover, her office has shown that conditions in the jail have worsened, she said.

The state is a co-defendant with the county in the 1988 lawsuit. Bergen County’s two jails house about 1,000 inmates in space meant for 423. About 400 of the inmates are state prisoners.

Overcrowding exacerbates violations of the inmates constitutional rights, the lawsuit maintains. The rights are eroded through conditions and policies affecting housing, health services, sanitation, and other areas.

Jerrold Binney, assistant to County Executive William “Pat” Schuber, said the county continues to defend itself in the suit. But he added that the state is still responsible for a significant part of the jail’s overcrowding.

“Regardless of the outcome of the case,” Binney said, “we will continue to push for relief from the state financially.”

When the three parties in the case failed to reach an out-of-court settlement, Ackerman appointed James A. Zazzali as special master to conduct fact-finding hearings and to make recommendations. A yearlong break in hearings so the parties could negotiate a settlement last year ended in failure, and the hearings resumed.

Ackerman is scheduled to hear Brown’s motions on April 13.

March 11, 1992

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FUGITIVE CAUGHT IN PARAMUS; Killer Is Found at Shopping Mall

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By David Gibson and Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writers | Sunday, January 19, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | Page A01

The wide-ranging manhunt for a killer who fled a Connecticut prison on New Year’s Eve ended late Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of Garden State Plaza, where Paramus police arrested him in the car he allegedly had stolen.

Frank Vandever, a 37-year-old former stockbroker with a penchant for dressing as a woman, was arrested about 5:15 p.m. and was in men’s clothes, said New York State Police Lt. Arthur Hawker, who coordinated several agencies in the weeks-long search.

“Paramus police saw the car in the parking lot,” Hawker said. “They had it under surveillance when Vandever came out, and as he approached the car, he was taken into custody without incident.”

Vandever was presumed to be armed and dangerous, but police found only a small pocket knife on him; he did not resist arrest.

“He appeared very surprised,” said Paramus plainclothes Detective Joseph Ackerman, who collared Vandever with Detective Jerry May. The detectives said they neared the car with guns drawn as Vanderver got inside.

“He tried to give us a story about how it is his car and he doesn’t know why we are stopping him,” Ackerman said. “He wasn’t convincing at all,” he added.

An eyewitness who claimed to have seen Vandever earlier in the day in a Bergenfield 7-Eleven said he looked “a little scroungy and was wearing a red flannel lumberjack coat, a scruffy beard, and his hair looked uncombed.”

But police said they weren’t sure it was Vandever. He was wearing a dark blue jacket when police transferred him to the Union County Jail on Saturday night; they declined to describe what he was wearing when he was arrested.

“7-Eleven was just one of many look-alike sightings,” Hawker said. “We had numerous sightings during the day. Citizens kept calling us saying they’d seen him here and there.”

Federal marshals were examining cash the man in the lumberjack coat used to buy a money order in Bergenfield to see if they could draw a connection to Vandever.

Vandever was serving a 40-year sentence in Connecticut for murdering a client who had caught him embezzling.

Because of his escape, he now faces federal complaints as well as a host of criminal charges in three states.

The arrest was a low-key finale to an occasionally frantic and sometimes antic manhunt that led hundreds of police with helicopters and dogs from Connecticut to New York to New Jersey and back again, tracking down dozens of false leads and at least twice letting Vandever flee from right under their noses.

On Saturday morning, Vandever apparently stole the car he was found with in Paramus when he returned to the Spring Valley, N.Y., motel where he had eluded FBI agents three days earlier.

Police said Vandever stole the 1984 Dodge Omni at 8 a.m. Saturday from an EconoLodge motel on Route 59.

The fugitive had been at the motel with a fellow escapee since a few days after their New Year’s Eve flight from Somers State Prison in Connecticut, about 100 miles away. They were recognized on Thursday afternoon by a motel resident, but fled when confronted by two FBI agents who apparently moved in before sufficient backup units arrived.

Vandever hopped a fence and bolted into nearby woods; his cohort, Ronald Rutan, ran but was arrested. Rutan was serving a 19-year term for burglary.

Police continued combing the area near the motel on Friday, with reporters in tow and often with unexpected results.

A man in a tattered green coat, described as looking like Vandever’s double, was stopped in Spring Valley three times on Friday by the FBI and police before he was finally cleared of suspicion.

“It’s crazy,” the man said. “These people have no idea what they’re doing. They made me miss my bus. ”

The focus shifted to Nyack, N.Y., later Friday, when a man wearing heavy makeup and carrying a fake bomb stole $10,000 from a drive-up bank teller there. Police still are not sure whether the robber was Vandever, or whether Vandever dressed as a woman during his flight.

As news of the manhunt spread on Saturday, the number of reported sightings some legitimate, some wild goose chases increased.

“It’s like a public phone booth in here,” a trooper at the special command center in West Nyack complained at one point. Officers on both sides of the state line followed up dozens of tips phoned in to police from Bergen, Passaic, Hudson, and Rockland counties.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, Vandever was seen in Clarkstown. At 11 a.m., he was in Upper Saddle River. At noon, he was in Closter. At 2 p.m., he was in Bergenfield, getting a $70 American Express money order at a 7-Eleven store. A half-hour later in Wayne, a suspicious hitchhiker answering Vandever’s description was spotted.

“He acted just like anybody else,” said the 7-Eleven cashier, who declined to give her name. “I guess he figured nobody knew him anyway. He was dressed like a regular guy. ”

Local police stopped by about 30 minutes later with photos of Vandever, whom the cashiers recognized, in part from his striking hazel-green eyes. FBI agents immediately followed, hot on the trail again.

At about 4:30 p.m., Paramus Officer Kenneth Ehrenberg, on routine patrol at Garden State Plaza, noticed the blue Omni in the shopping mall’s west parking lot. He called for backup, and waiting for Vandever, who emerged from the stores carrying no packages and got in the car.

“He returned to the car like an average person, got in the car, and at that point he was placed under arrest,” Ehrenberg said.

Vandever was convicted of killing a client, Ronald Hiiri of Stonington, Conn., who discovered that the stockbroker had been skimming his account.

Caption: PHOTO – STEVE HOCKSTEIN / THE RECORD – Fugitive suspect Frank Vandever, center, behind uniformed Officer Kenneth Ehrenberg, leaving Paramus police station Saturday night.

Notes: Late run version

January 19, 1992

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TRACK WORKERS UNDER SCRUTINY; REGULATORS VOW BETTER CHECKING

By michael o. allenHomepage, The RecordNo Comments

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Thursday, November 21, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | 5 Star | NEWS | Page B03

The New Jersey Racing Commission plans to meet with state and federal agencies in a effort to tighten up its worker licensing procedures, after 70 Meadowlands Racetrack stable hands were taken into custody Tuesday as illegal aliens.

Bruno Verducci, assistant director of the commission, said Wednesday that except in obvious cases, Racing Commission workers cannot determine the authenticity of immigration papers presented by the workers.

Allen Kampel, a supervisory special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said most of the workers taken into custody obtained licenses from the commission by using false immigration papers. The workers need the state licenses before they can be hired by trainers.

The INS investigation has now shifted to the trainers, Kampel said. The agency will try to determine whether they knowingly hired illegal aliens.

Verducci said that he would meet with immigration officials and state police to talk about teaching commission workers how to do a better job of spotting bogus documents.

Describing the current procedure, Verducci said: “If there is ever a question as to the identity of the individual seeking a license, or the credentials that he presents, that person is refered to the state police racetrack unit that is lodged at the backstretch of the track. So, that is the safety valve. If they don’t come back, then you know.”

Although the state’s five racetracks check workers commission licenses, horse trainers like small businesses are responsible for ensuring that the stable hands they hire are authorized to work, Verducci said.

The INS recognizes that it is hard for employers to determine the authenticity of resident-alien ards ndth orkthiauments that people present to them, Kampel said. The INS would not hold them responsible if they could show they made good-faith efforts to determine whether the employees are legal.

In the next phase of the investigation, Kampel said, the INS will check whether the trainers knowingly hired illegal workers or checked their documentation. The 1986 Immigration Reform Control Act mandated that employers fill out a special form verifying that each worker is authorized to work in this country.

If it can be proved that the employers either knowingly hired illegal workers or did not fill out the form, the employers could be fined, Kampel said. Fines could range from a minimum of $250 per illegal worker in a first offense by an employer to a maximum of $10,000 per employee, he said.

Meanwhile, the 70 stable hands detained Tuesday by the INS, with assistance from the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department and state police, were released pending deportation hearings.

Most of the stable hands are Mexican.

November 21, 1991

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