This week’s bombshell South Jersey corruption indictment will take awhile to unpack, Save Jerseyans, but let’s face it: veteran New Jersey political watchers are laser-focused on one eerily familiar facet of the bombshell 13-count indictment…
John and Joyce Sheridan.
I know. It’s morbid and upsetting. And to be clear, neither victim in the recently reopened murder investigation was actually mentioned (by name, at least) in the indicment, but a storyline central to John Sheridan’s last hours on earth figures quite significantly in the jaw-dropping 111-page document unsealed by the New Jersey Attorney General on Monday.
The storyline in question is the sordid saga of the Coopers Ferry land deal of the mid-2010s when Chris Christie was still New Jersey’s governor (h/t ProPublica):
On a frigid morning in March 2014, Philip Norcross met with Cooper’s Ferry’s top executive at City Hall. Norcross told him that even though the nonprofit had exclusive rights to buy L3, another group was now interested in purchasing and developing the complex, according to correspondence among nonprofit officials. That group’s principal player was one of George Norcross’ former business partners.
Cooper’s Ferry’s leaders initially resisted. “As you know, we do believe we can do this on our own,” the nonprofit CEO wrote to its board chairman. “I am OK w a conversation but don’t want to lose out on the opportunity.”
Three months later, however, the nonprofit changed course. It wrote a letter to the state that June, saying it wanted to transfer its option to buy the L3 complex to the group connected to George Norcross. By the time the deal closed at the end of the year, there was another partner as well: a subsidiary of Cooper University Health Care, where Norcross is the board chairman.
How does this episode intersect with the indictment?
Continuing, with a h/t to the NJ Monitor:
Cooper’s Ferry Partnership, a nonprofit redevelopment organization, was seeking to purchase the L3 site. Norcross allies intervened, according to the indictment, by having the Camden mayor’s office instruct the nonprofit’s leaders to meet regularly with Philip Norcross “so the Norcross Enterprise could monitor what the nonprofit was doing,” the indictment says. Philip Norcross then told the nonprofit it would suffer repercussions if it chose their own developer instead of one of the Norcross team’s choosing, according to the indictment.
In the end, Cooper’s Ferry — which could have partnered with a developer and earned millions from shared profits — instead sold the property at a “discounted price” to the Norcross-chosen developer, the indictment says. Cooper University Health Care then bought a substantial ownership share in the developer and over the next four years, won $27 million in state tax credits, the indictment says.
The state also claims that after this episode, a Norcross ally threatened the Cooper’s Ferry CEO, forcing him to resign. Cooper’s Ferry became Camden Community Partnership in 2021. Redd is now its president and CEO.
Now, lastly, what does this bare-knuckle land sale brawl have to do with John Sheridan, president and chief executive officer of Cooper Health System at the time of his death?
Well, in the lead up to Sheridan’s untimely passing in fall 2014, his son (Mark, a respected attorney) reported that his father was visibly and uncharacteristically upset over an alleged ugly conflict with George Norcross concerning a patch of land on the Camden Waterfront. Mark Sheridan even recalled seeing his father’s dining room table cluttered with documents pertaining to the land deal which vexed him.
The plot of soil at issue was land under the dominion of – you guessed it! – Cooper’s Ferry.
After the grisly September 2014 killings, Mark Sheridan reportedly asked the state AG to consider the aforementioned documents and investigate this particular aspect of his father’s final days. Hoffman apparently opted to do nothing.
Flash forward to this week. Nearly a decade later, law enforcement is finally doing something about the land sales (the indictmnet) and John Hoffman (the acting attorney general at the time of Mark Sheridan’s unaddressed appeal for scrutiny) is a brand new Phil Murphy nominee to the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Isn’t that something! It’s all something, folks. All of it.
The end result is, at least for now, a growing pile of questions desperately in need of answers. WNYC’s Nancy Solomon – who produced the intriguing “Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery” podcast delving into the Sheridan murders back in 2022 – showed up at Monday’s indictment announcement presser and asked Matt Platkin the question which, as I said at the opening of this article, is presently on everyone’s mind who’s been following the Camden saga for more than five minutes:
“John Sheridan was trying to fight off this deal, and those documents were found on his dining room table the morning after he was murdered. Is your office looking at that case? And how do you see the murder of John and Joyce Sheridan as connected to the conspiracy you laid out today?”
Platkin’s response? “Nothing more to add.”
Ever? At this time? For now?
Who knows. Platkin didn’t modify his statement, but this is a “conspiracy” indictment so it’s not out of the question for new angles (and defendants?) to emerge down the road. Solomon’s line of inquiry might truly be at a dead end. And to be 100% clear, there is no evidence that anyone indicted by Matt Platkin this week was involved – directly or indirectly – in the Sheridan couple’s deaths.
But isn’t it also worth taking a fresh and serious look at what I think we can say, at the very least, presents as a deeply disturbing confluence of events?
Specifically, (#1) the apparent murder of a politically powerful figure (Sheridan) who was – immediately before his unsolved slaying – (#2) upset about a land sale that turned into a CENTRAL PIECE of a one-quarter-of-a-billion dollar RICO conspiracy case less than one decade later?
We may never know what John Sheridan knew about the subject matter of this blockbuster indictment. I sure as hell wish I did. You should, too, if you care about the rule of law in this deeply troubled state of ours.