PORTASH: Could More Have Been Done?

The next installment of a series on Joseph Portash, who helped fashion the township as a seasonal alternative for retirees who thought Florida was too far, and too hot for them to treat as a year-round home.

This installment features interviews with people who believe more could have been done to unearth what happened 20 years ago:

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One warm June day in 1990, with no one other than the police looking on, Manchester, N.J.'s mayor spent his day at the landfill, directing people where to dump the records documenting the then-record-level amount of fraud and deception that would shadow the township for years to come.

Several months earlier, the mastermind of, arguably, the worst political fraud scheme in New Jersey's history, Manchester Township Administrator Joe Portash, died almost mysteriously.

His death appeared so strangely timed that even the then-Ocean County Prosecutor James W. Holzapfel sent an investigator up to Maine to confirm it - though some still put quotes around "confirm."

Later, even as nearly everyone involved in the $10 million government heist admitted to wrongdoing, not everybody went to jail. Some were too sick to go; others, according to a source connected to the investigation, weren't even indicted.

More than two decades later, what happened in this most unlikley of places for a fraud case - a township that's predominately inhabited by pine trees and senior-citizen communities - still resonates with many inside and out of Manchester.

The memory of it still haunts those who either tried to stop it before it got worse, or felt too powerless to do anything at all. Some of those same people believe the investigation - 23 years after it was revealed - is incomplete, and has shadowed virtually every corruption case in Ocean County since then.

"Crooks are crooks," said one source who was tangently involved in the investigation. "They're the same breed everywhere."

Even Holzapfel, now a state senator, now acknowledges that the public may never really know the amount of money that was actually stolen, or the extent of damage caused by the scandal, because of Portash's death and other factors.

"At the end of the day, nobody really knew how much was taken," he said. "[For years], very few people came to a town hall meeting. You had people who would routinely come to the town hall and they were tracking what was going on."

Holzapfel, however, said during a recent interview that his office did everything it could to uncover the corruption that left Manchester's treasury with mere dollars in its accounts.

"As far as I was concerned, it was a clean sweep," Holzapfel said. "This was a criminal case. We did everything by the book, period."

The case was revealed to the world by Holzapfel on July 16, 1990.

That day, at a press conference, Holzapfel said Portash received checks drawn on various township accounts totaling $254,810 within the previous year year, when he was entitled to be paid just $68,663 in his position as administrator, according to Star-Ledger reports on the case.

Holzapfel said then that, at least as far back as 1986, Portash was overpaid from the salary account, according to The Star-Ledger.

"Financial chaos" had been caused by "improper financial transactions" that included altered and missing checks, forged billings, other improper salary payments and the spending of two bond issues totaling $1 million that should have been used to close and cap the Manchester Township landfill in Whiting, Holzapfel said at the press conference, according to the newspaper.

All in all, more than $10 million was believed to be stolen from the township.

Some, however, believe the case didn't go far enough, that more people should have been indicted but weren't, largely because they had "political connections" to those who were brought down.

They point to the initial stages of the investigation that took place as township officials loyal to Portash were being forced out of office, just over two weeks before the case was revealed.

On former Mayor Ralph Rizzolo's last business day in office, the last Friday in June 1990, police officers at their headquarters next door to the town hall noticed that municipal employees were carrying boxes of files to township trucks, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Following in unmarked cars, the officers saw the workers dump the records at the county landfill and watched Rizzolo direct them, pointing where he wanted the papers dropped, right where sewage sludge would be sprayed on them, the Inquirer reported.

A source connected to the investigation said there were other names of people on some of those records that were connected to the crimes. But their role in the scandal was never seriously investigated - either because of political connections, or because the amount of money they took was too small for anybody to worry about, the source said.

"There were checks in the landfill that were signed over to other people," one source said. "But they were never followed up."

Holzapfel, however, strongly denies that politics were involved in the case at all, noting that he - as a Republican - "probably put more Republicans in jail than anybody."

Ocean County, as it is now, was dominated then by Republican leadership, and many of Manchester's leaders were members of the Republican Party.

Back in June and July 1990, just as he took possession of the records, Holzapfel called the state Attorney General's Office, under then-Gov. Jim Florio. Even though Holzapfel was a Republican, he said, the Democratic administration worked well with him on the case.

"They loaned a couple people," he said. "I then went to the county freeholders and said it looked like a major investigation, and they supplied me with additional funds."

His office then sifted through records for "days and days," with the help of a new Manchester administration - one that was elected based on the corruption rumors and took office on July 1, 1990.

"We chased all kinds of leads down in Atlantic City," Holzapfel said. "We had men who talked to all the pit bosses."

State auditors, meanwhile, joined the detectives and began poring over the books, according to news reports. They found that more than $1 million from a bond fund to close an old landfill was gone.

For some, the case is hauntingly similar to the crimes committed by the disgraced former superintendent of Toms River Regional School District, Michael J. Ritacco, who recently was sentenced to 135 months – just over 11 years – in prison. A federal judge called that scandal the "worst case of public corruption he has ever seen."

Ritacco pleaded guity April 5, 2012 to two of the 27 charges he was facing, and admitted his role in years of corruption at the school district, where as much as $2.5 million in bribes were allegedly passed between Ritacco, insurance brokers and intermediaries.

The superseding indictment alleged Ritacco, as well as former district insurance broker Francis X. Gartland, agreed to inflate contracts in exchange for kickbacks over years through 2010 at Toms River Regional.

Some note that at least a few of those people who were connected to Ritacco were connected to the Manchester officials - some of whom are still in leadership positions in Ocean County - who ran the the local governments back when the Portash scandal became publicly known.

Portash himself was a freeholder and a mayor before he was forced aside when he was convicted of taking a kickback in 1976. When his case was thrown out by the Supreme Court, he returned to Manchester as administrator, and served until his 1990 death.

"It was too political," a source said.

In his investigation, however, Holzapfel said he "left no stone unturned," and found no evidence that the scandal extended beyond those were indicted and convicted.

"I was satisfied - it wasn’t like a one-time thing," he said. "Finally it [the fraud] caught up to him [Portash]."