Posted on 08/07/2005 8:58:19 AM PDT by dead
In the coldest and loneliest winter of his life, Jim McGreevey went off to the poorest corner of Appalachia in search of a story.
He spent two days in a place called War, a faded West Virginia mining hamlet whose 900 or so remaining residents like to plan their days around the 90-minute drive to Wal-Mart.
He told the people of War that he was traveling to the Mississippi delta, the forgotten Indian reservations and the barrios of East Los Angeles to write down the stories of America's neediest people.
Before New Jersey's ex-governor left town, the dignitaries of War and McDowell County feted him to a dinner of turkey casserole with all the trimmings. When McGreevey drove off, one or two ladies cried.
"I kept thinking to myself, 'What a waste. What a terrible waste,''' said 52-year-old Marcia Timpson, a lifelong resident who is in charge of education programs at the community center. "How could such a wonderful, caring, talented man be out in the cold when there is so much that government needs to do?''
Friends say McGreevey's Appalachian sojourn, and his plan to write an oral history of poverty in America, are only the first steps back from the bitter exile he entered after announcing his resignation one year ago this week in a gay sex scandal.
By the end of summer, they say, McGreevey will accept a high-profile job with a nationally known public policy organization. Without naming any names, McGreevey's friends say anti-poverty groups, childhood education foundations, even stem cell advocates, are all vying for the services of New Jersey's 51st governor.
In addition to his ongoing writings on poverty, which McGreevey hopes to publish in a major magazine, the ex-governor has sold his memoirs to tell-all imprint Regan Books of Manhattan. The deal, announced last week, will bring McGreevey a six-figure advance for the gubernatorial confession.
McGreevey also will assume a much more visible role in the gay community.
Laura Pople, president of the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Coalition, says she and McGreevey are working on a plan to create counseling programs for school-aged lesbians and gays.
"Jim's coming out is encouraging many young people who were too afraid to do the same,'' Pople said. "They need support.''
Since leaving office Nov. 15, McGreevey has struck up a close friendship with David Mixner, the Bill Clinton friend and wealthy Democratic donor Newsweek magazine called "the most powerful gay man in America.'' McGreevey has also grown close to Scott Widmeyer, the media consultant and gay rights advocate who specializes in helping old politicians segue into the post-electoral world. Widmeyer's famous clients include Walter Mondale, Jay Rockefeller and New Jersey's own Thomas H. Kean.
"Jim's been through some rough times but he's put his life back together and he's going to be unstoppable,'' Widmeyer said in an interview last week. "He's getting ready to reclaim his life."
McGreevey did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
A new Comeback Kid?
McGreevey's life in recent weeks has been a blur of activity as he prepares for his comeback. He's traveled to Washington, D.C., for discussions with national and international labor union leaders and met with openly gay U.S. Rep. Barney Frank to talk about Democratic politics. Back in New Jersey, he sat down with Kean to talk about the delicate process of returning to private life.
There have been meetings with his publisher, contracts to read, job offers to consider, an outline for the poverty piece. Friends say McGreevey has been deeply moved by his long conversations with America's poor, whom he believes are in danger of being forgotten by the political establishment.
"In some ways Jim McGreevey is the same guy that he always was. Constantly busy, constantly consumed with public service - the guy's always making plans to do good somewhere,'' says Sen. Ray Lesniak, the ex-governor's longtime friend and mentor.
"But after all the pain he's been through, he's really a changed man at heart. This time around, you're going to see a Jim McGreevey with some different priorities."
McGreevey, a former altar boy from a staunch Irish Catholic family, has always been a regular churchgoer. But Lesniak said his protégé has undergone "a profound spiritual transformation'' and now attends weekly prayer meetings, partakes in church focus groups and spends time doling out food at a soup kitchen in Newark.
As the Democratic leader of Union County and chief partner in one of the state's savviest law firms, Lesniak is a powerful political boss who has sponsored the careers of countless councilmen and freeholders. McGreevey, a former Woodbridge mayor, traces his party pedigree directly to Lesniak and other Central Jersey kingmakers like retired state Sen. John Lynch.
McGreevey even worked for Lesniak's law firm, briefly, after he resigned. But when news leaked that McGreevey was doing legal work on issues he championed as governor, he was forced to quit to quiet critics who said he had a conflict of interest.
Several sources say McGreevey received a generous severance package from Lesniak. Lesniak declined to comment on this.
These days, Lesniak says, politics takes a back seat to prayer when he gets together with McGreevey.
"I'd say the primary thing we talk about is the spirit, how to keep God as the most important thing in your life," Lesniak said. "Sometimes we just open up some Scripture and start to read.
"Jim knows he let his ambition get out of hand before," he added. "I don't think you'll see that happen again because he has learned how to put balance in his life. He will never again allow himself to slip as low as he was."
Shocking revelation
On Aug. 12, 2004, James E. McGreevey stepped before a room full of television cameras in Trenton and announced that he was "a gay American." With his stunned wife and stone-faced drill sergeant father at his side, McGreevey explained how his political ambitions had forced him to conceal his attraction to men and create the trappings of a heterosexual lifestyle acceptable to Garden State voters.
There was more. Someone else knew his secret and was prepared to act in a way that would hurt him and the office of governor. McGreevey said he had no choice but to resign.
McGreevey's own aides later identified the other man as a young Israeli national named Golan Cipel, a public-relations man McGreevey had met four years earlier during a trip to the Holy Land. McGreevey brought Cipel to the United States and gave him a $110,000-a-year job as his top adviser on homeland security, despite his lack of qualifications. "He's my eyes and ears,'' the governor said in February 2002.
What really happened between McGreevey and Cipel remains a mystery. Cipel claimed he is a straight man who was sexually harassed by his powerful patron. But after the scandal broke he returned to Israel without filing a threatened lawsuit against the governor.
McGreevey and those around him claimed his relationship with Cipel was consensual and that the Israeli was threatening to blackmail him for $5 million. But McGreevey has never explained exactly why the relationship forced him to leave office.
There had to be more to the story, many wondered, more dirt that McGreevey was concealing. If he had told the whole truth about Cipel and his homosexual secrets, why would he be forced to leave office? One year later, the full story about McGreevey's maneuverings to protect Cipel, find him a job, a visa and a place to stay remains unknown.
How Jim McGreevey managed to pursue men while being a married father also is a tantalizingly open question.
The public is not likely to get answers from U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, the aggressive corruption-buster who promised to probe "all aspects" of the Cipel affair. While Christie's office declined to comment on the status of its investigation, several sources close to the inquiry said it turned up nothing criminal and no suggestion that Cipel was trying to blackmail McGreevey.
After the scandal broke last summer, one federal source said, FBI agents who traveled to Israel found a frightened Cipel who was so afraid of being arrested he refused to come to the U.S. Embassy to be interviewed.
"We had to interview him in his parents' apartment," the source said.
Cipel's whereabouts in Israel remain a closely held secret. Neither of his U.S. lawyers, Allen Lowy and Paul Battista, would discuss Cipel's movements. Meir Nitzan, the mayor of Cipel's hometown of Rishon Lezion and a former employer of Cipel's, said he had seen or heard nothing of Cipel for a year.
"He's not living in my city anymore,'' Nitzan said.
A 'humiliated' wife
But by everyone's account, Jim McGreevey does need family. And friends say the genuine joy of his shattered life is his 3-year-old daughter, Jacqueline. McGreevey sees her almost every Sunday, when he picks her up for church and breakfast.
Jacqueline came into the world just days after McGreevey won election in a landslide in November 2001. It was because of Jacqueline that the state finally had to remove the lead paint in the antiquarian governor's mansion, where McGreevey and his wife, the former Dina Matos, settled in as the first couple to use the official residence in Princeton since the Florios.
It was a touching picture, a handsome and energetic young governor, his shy and comely Portuguese wife who had been born and raised in Newark's Ironbound section, and a beautiful baby girl.
But Mrs. McGreevey, who married Jim just a year earlier after an awkwardly quick-paced romance, did not know she was a conjugal prop in her husband's elaborate ruse. Several friends of the fractured first family - the pair split after McGreevey came out - say Dina was blindsided by the news that she was married to a gay man.
That is why Mrs. McGreevey, to this day, does not speak to the ex-governor, friends say.
"It's so, so sad,'' said one family friend. "This woman was completely humiliated. Jim just made a fool of her. He told all his political buddies he was gay before he told her. She was the last to find out about Golan.''
Several sources close to McGreevey said Dina, who now lives with Jacqueline in a modest ranch home in Springfield, is determined to exact a measure of humiliation on her estranged spouse through the last weapon she has: the divorce papers.
While no papers have yet been filed, sources said Mrs. McGreevey is playing hardball and has threatened to release all sorts of juicy personal details about the ex-governor's doings.
"It's going to be nuclear,'' said one source.
Dina McGreevey did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
McGreevey now makes his home in a spacious $2,600-a-month rented apartment at River Place, a condominium complex tucked between the river and train station in downtown Rahway.
He can be spotted running on the river dike some mornings or walking with his old friend Jim Kennedy, the owner of a jewelry store not two blocks from McGreevey's apartment.
Some nights he goes to the Irish pub and steakhouse on Main Street. In the mornings he stops downtown for a paper or walks down East Cherry Street to the Beat Café for a coffee and croissant.
"He comes in with his friends or his sister and sits talking to people," said Joe Levi, a worker at the café. "He's like a rock star, people always coming up to say hello or pat him on the shoulder."
"I think he's a great guy," added Levi. "I wish he'd move to Manhattan and run for mayor. He'd get things done."
For a while after his resignation, friends say, McGreevey was very depressed and spent hours alone thinking about his life and his values. They say he fought off pangs of guilt about Dina and his broken family, about the end of a storybook political career, about the embarrassment he caused to his father, a retired Marine.
He was also angry, friends say, at the press. At the people he felt had betrayed him. At politicians who he thought were his friends but deserted him when things got bad.
"But all that passed with time," Lesniak said. "He's not mad at anybody anymore. Not even Golan.
"Not even himself."
By the time he came to War, W. Va., Marcia Timpson said, there wasn't a trace of anger or regret in McGreevey. The ex-governor, she said, "radiated" confidence and compassion.
Timpson said her 15-year-old son, Tyler, who suffers from a form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome, usually runs and hides in his bedroom when a stranger comes into the house.
But when McGreevey came calling, she said, Tyler sidled right up to him. By the time McGreevey left, he and the boy had become great friends. Tyler hugged him before he walked out the door.
"I don't know anything about what Jim McGreevey did in New Jersey," Timpson said. "But I saw what he did in my own house. I saw what he did with my boy. That counts for something, doesn't it?"
E-mail: pillets@northjersey.com
I just threw up a little in my mouth.
McGreevey should be in prison for his crimes! And all the crap about his “coming out” being a shock to everyone is bullsh*t from top to bottom, and this shameless lying author knows it.
The former governor's got more people doing his whitewashing work than Tom Sawyer.
It sure didn't come as a shock to all the presstitutes who were covering up for him. Just to the voters.
But when McGreevey came calling, she said, Tyler sidled right up to him. By the time McGreevey left, he and the boy had become great friends. Tyler hugged him before he walked out the door.
Wonder if the ex-governor hugged back.
the inept Republican party in NJ didn't help either. this was known about McG (and far worse) for a long time.
"The former governor's got more people doing his whitewashing work than Tom Sawyer."
That's good, I like it. Thanks.
Puff piece designed to rehabilitate the creep.
"Sometimes we just open up some Scripture and start to read."
Why don't I believe this?
I'll never forget McGreevy's poor father at that press conference. The man looked like some cartoon anvil had fallen on his head.
I liked McGreevy ok for a democrat, but what he's done to all his families is a disgrace.
Such a wonderful and caring man would not do this to his daughter.
I doubt if the vast majority of this article ever really happened.
If he needs a title for his book, I would suggest "I was elected Governor but I blew it".
That sentence stopped me in my tracks too. Please tell me the New Jersey Record is one of those rags you pick up free at the head shop. They couldn't have published this in a newspaper. (Joking, but I sure wish I wasn't)
Say hello to the next star of the Democrat party. Within a year we'll start seeing him as a regular fixture on the talk shows talking about "the unwanted and forgotten of this country--the gay, the poor, the non-white males" and blah blah blah.
He's a coward and a liar who's turning his ruining of his wife's life into an opportunity to REALLY become known as a big star.
If he wasn't gay, no one would give him the time of day.
Your original subtitle had me LOL!
He sold out the defense of his state so his foreign national homosexual lover would have a job. End of story.
However, I'm thrilled to learn Mrs. McGreevey was not only not part of this charade, but determined to make him pay for it.
Go, Dina, Go!
Unforgivable.
He's working on a new government funded program for poor Appalachian gays. "They are so poor they have no closet to come out of" he was heard lamenting.
This piece is whitewash trash.
I live in the Appalachias, and most of us are not poor. Most of us are not gay, either. In fact, those who are usually chose to stay in the closet around here.
He only took it in the rear to save same.
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