New Jersey’s attorney general has pushed back against the request for dismissal of the criminal indictment that includes NFI CEO Sidney Brown as a defendant, arguing there is no legal reason not to let the process play out before a jury.
Defendants including Brown – who filed a separate motion last month to be dismissed from the indictment – have not argued that the actions and conversations in the indictments over development on the Camden, New Jersey, waterfront didn’t take place. Those aren’t disputed (and many of them were captured on wiretaps).
Rather, it is that the pressures brought by a group that includes Brown but was headed by South Jersey power broker George Norcross might be rough-and-tumble but are ultimately politics as usual and not illegal.
Norcross has never held office and has never run for one. But his clout in Democratic politics in South Jersey is legendary, and it was his indictment – not Brown’s – that captured the headlines when it came down in June.
The 133-page response filed Nov. 22 with the Superior Court for Mercer County, home of state capital Trenton, is actually longer than the original 111-page indictment. The indictment has 13 counts, only eight of which charge Brown, and the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is the basis for several of the counts.
NFI is not a defendant in the indictment. A request for comment from Brown’s legal team had not been responded to by publication time.
“Defendants now argue that, even accepting each of the Indictment’s allegations as true, this was all legal — so obviously legal, they argue, that there is no need for a trial, or even this Court’s review of the evidence before the grand jury,” the state said in its filing.
But the indictment isn’t everything, state Attorney General Matthew Platkin says in the filing. Many of the claims in the various requests for the case to be thrown out are not on solid enough ground to end the Norcross and company prosecution before any testimony has been heard, Platkin’s brief says. “Rather than actually accepting each of the grand jury’s allegations as true, [defendants] overlook inconvenient allegations, urge fact-specific inferences, and sometimes inject new facts — all of which may be appropriate for trying to persuade a trial jury, but are wholly out of place in asking this Court to nullify a grand jury,” the brief says.
Rejecting Brown’s arguments specific to the CFI chief
Brown’s arguments come in for a small degree of specific pushback from the AG’s office. (Platkin is a Democrat, like Norcross, but some of the dates on evidence culled from wiretaps suggest that the investigation of Norcross and his allies goes back to the administration of Republican Gov. Chris Christie, whose term ended in early 2017.)
At the core of the indictment are actions undertaken by what prosecutors called the “Norcross Enterprise” that sought to pressure Camden developer Carl Dranoff – identified only as Developer 1 in the indictment but who has a separate civil suit against the Norcross defendants – to give up certain development rights to allow new construction on the Camden waterfront that would benefit from newly approved tax credits. Dranoff ultimately caved under the pressure, and one of the buildings constructed that benefited from the tax credits – the Triad1828 Centre – is now the corporate headquarters of NFI.
The former mayor of Camden, Dana Redd, was also indicted. The AG’s recap of the case gives it the opportunity to repeat some of the heated language caught on the wiretaps, including Norcross calling Dranoff a “putz” and his statement that “you can never trust [Dranoff] until you got a bat over his head.”
As stated in the indictment and repeated in the recent AG report, NFI has reaped benefits of $7.8 million in tax credits from moving its headquarters into Triad, where Brown is also a partner in the ownership. NFI sold those credits for $7.1 million. The tax benefits are ongoing.
The AG filing also took the opportunity to note again that between 2012 and 2023, Brown made $60 million from NFI, though it isn’t relevant to the indictment and reads more like an attempt to diminish any sympathy Brown might find coming his way. Brown is also a member of NFI’s founding family, which still owns the carrier.
Not a minor role, AG says
Brown’s argument also is that he had a minor role in the standoff between Norcross and Norcross’ also-indicted brother Philip on one side and Dranoff on the other.
The AG disagrees. “To the extent Brown argues that the Indictment does not properly allege he agreed to participate in an enterprise that would engage in a pattern of racketeering activity, his argument improperly seeks to make a sufficiency of the evidence argument in a facial motion,” the AG writes. “The Indictment plainly alleges an agreement to a pattern. Brown ignores the Indictment’s allegations that he agreed, among other things, not to a single phone call, but to a scheme to take [Dranoff’s] rights through extortion and coercion, and then to cash out on the scheme using Brown’s own capital and company through obtaining and selling tax credits.”
Another section of the AG’s response pushes back against arguments that there was only a minor role played not only by Brown but also by John O’Donnell, a real estate developer who like Brown is a partner in Triad1828 and other Camden waterfront buildings, as well as having his company’s headquarters in the office tower.
“O’Donnell and Brown were businessmen, who, among other things, participated directly in plotting to use a municipal entity to file a condemnation action to gain leverage against or punish [Dranoff], supplied financial capital and in turn used their various entities to collect the tax credits at the heart of their conspiracy,” the AG writes.
Separately, the AG’s office says, “without any supporting authority or developed argumentation, O’Donnell suggests that this Court should not consider the receipt and sale of tax credits as part of the charged conspiracy because the credits were directly received and sold by uncharged business entities controlled by [the Norcross defendants], rather than directly by [them] … . But the indictment alleges defendants controlled these entities for criminal ends, and details how their control of these entities to commit the alleged crimes resulted in millions of dollars of gain to the defendants personally.”
But ultimately, the AG’s brief comes down to one overriding argument: It’s too early to toss out the case, and the charges should get their day in court.
“Defendants resist any further scrutiny of their actions, claiming that this is all just ‘garden-variety politics,’ ‘how deals get done’ and even ‘a feature of democratic self-government,’” the AG’s office wrote. “But the grand jury did not think so, and nothing about its view is manifestly or palpably wrong. This Court should deny Defendants’ facial motions to dismiss.”
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