When Gov. Chris Christie
pushed to expand financial incentives to keep businesses in New Jersey,
one of the first companies to benefit was a client of David Samson, a
lawyer with a long and close relationship to the governor.
When
Mr. Christie announced government-backed financing for college and
school construction projects, Mr. Samson’s firm got a piece of that
business.
And after Mr. Christie named Mr. Samson chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
they both benefited when Mr. Samson and the board he led approved
billions of dollars in bridge construction contracts. Labor unions
grateful for the hard-hat jobs threw their endorsements to Mr. Christie,
and clients of Mr. Samson’s firm wound up with the work.
The
lane-closing scandal that has enveloped Mr. Christie’s administration
and the Port Authority for months has focused intense scrutiny on Mr.
Samson and the 120-lawyer firm that he helped found in 1972. A number of
potential conflicts have been reported by other news media, and the
agency’s executive director, Patrick J. Foye, last week said that Mr. Samson lacked the moral authority to remain chairman.
A
comprehensive examination of Mr. Samson’s dealings with Governor
Christie and his administration, both inside the Port Authority and out,
shows the extent to which their ambitions and successes became
intertwined. Mr. Samson and his law firm benefited financially. Mr.
Christie benefited politically. And each enhanced the other’s stature as
their relationship deepened in ways that were not apparent at the time.
Mr.
Samson has had a long career at the nexus of law and politics in New
Jersey. But since Mr. Christie took office in 2010, his firm, Wolff
& Samson, has risen to become one of the biggest bond counsel firms
in the state, advising scores of private clients and state agencies, and
jumped up in rankings of the state’s biggest lobbying firms.
The
efforts of the two men became increasingly bold as Mr. Christie’s
national profile increased and Mr. Samson became a central figure in the
region’s construction field.
Perhaps
the clearest example of this symbiosis, previously unreported, came
last April, when Mr. Samson presided as the Port Authority awarded two
bridge construction contracts worth a total of $2.8 billion.
Mr.
Samson paused after the vote of the 12-member board to call the
occasion “joyous and happy.” It certainly was for two clients of his law
firm.
One
longtime client was I.M.T.T., which owns a liquid storage facility on
the Bayonne waterfront. The company is half-owned by the Macquarie Infrastructure Company,
one of the contractors Mr. Samson and his fellow commissioners awarded
$1.5 billion to replace and maintain the Goethals Bridge.
A
second contract, for $1.3 billion, was to raise the Bayonne Bridge to
allow clearance for the largest container ships — though Port Authority
experts had seen the project as a lower priority. Mr. Samson “came in
like gangbusters” and insisted on proceeding immediately, one former
project official said.
The
Port Authority awarded that contract to a team including Skanska Koch, a
division of a multinational construction company based in Sweden and
another client of Mr. Samson’s firm. Wolff & Samson lawyers were
then in the throes of settling a costly dispute for the company in
federal court on Long Island.
Mr. Samson did not recuse himself from either vote, according to minutes
of the meeting. Mr. Samson’s spokeswoman, responding to multiple
requests delivered by phone and email, declined to comment on the votes
or other apparent conflicts that have been raised in recent weeks.
Asked
about the potential conflicts in Mr. Samson’s votes, his spokeswoman
provided a one-sentence statement from Mr. Samson’s lawyer, Michael
Chertoff, who is a former secretary of homeland security.
“Since
assuming the chairmanship of the P.A.N.Y.N.J., David Samson’s
commitment has been to benefit the region and not about personal gain,”
Mr. Chertoff said in the statement.
None
of this occurred in a vacuum, of course. Both Skanska and Macquarie are
worldwide leaders in their field, and no one has suggested that the bid
process was tainted. Mr. Samson’s law firm has a deep bench of skilled
lawyers who handle a broad range of complicated matters. And both he and
Mr. Christie operate in a state with a long history of cozy,
back-scratching relationships among politicians, lawyers and businesses
tied to real estate and construction.
But
the April 2013 vote was just one of many instances in which Mr.
Samson’s work at the Port Authority lined up with the interests of his
law firm — and, in many cases, with Mr. Christie’s political priorities.
Jameson
W. Doig, a scholar who has long studied the Port Authority, said that
while the Port Authority had not been immune to allegations of political
influence, he had not seen anything in his research going back to the
1920s that compared to how Mr. Samson and Mr. Christie have used the
bistate agency’s vast resources to advance the governor’s interests, at
times benefiting Mr. Samson’s clients in the process.
“Chris
Christie has been very active in using the Port Authority for his own
purposes, more so than any other governor,” said Mr. Doig, a research
professor at Dartmouth College. “And that increased when David Samson
arrived.”
‘The General’ and Christie
Mr.
Christie, 51, and Mr. Samson, 74, were lobbyists and lawyers in the
1990s, Mr. Christie at Dughi Hewit and Mr. Samson at his own firm. They
served as the state’s top law enforcement officers for a brief period of
time: Mr. Christie as the United States attorney from 2002 to 2008, and
Mr. Samson as the attorney general for 13 months starting in 2002.
Mr.
Christie still refers to Mr. Samson as “the general.” The governor has
said that at one point during that brief overlap he and Mr. Samson were
informed that members of the Latin Kings gang had threatened to kill
them both.
“That brings you together,” Mr. Christie joked.
In
2007, Mr. Christie gave Mr. Samson a $10 million contract to be the
compliance monitor for a medical implant company, a position that was
part of a settlement under which Mr. Christie agreed not to criminally
prosecute the company on federal kickback charges.
Two
years later, when Mr. Christie ran for governor, Mr. Samson was the
lawyer for his campaign. After he won the election, Mr. Christie chose
Mr. Samson to lead his transition team, along with Jeffrey S. Chiesa,
then a new Wolff & Samson lawyer who had befriended Mr. Christie at
Dughi Hewit and followed him to the federal prosecutor’s office.
Soon
after he took office in 2010, Mr. Christie, a Republican, pushed for a
vast increase in the tax breaks and other subsidies that could be
awarded to businesses if they remained in New Jersey. He held a news
conference that summer at the headquarters of Honeywell International,
in Morristown, warning that the manufacturer planned to move to
Pennsylvania, and arguing that New Jersey needed a major increase in its
business-retention program.
What was not widely known at the time was that Honeywell had hired Mr. Samson’s law firm to lobby for retention subsidies.
Lawmakers
passed the legislation, a more than sixfold increase to the maximum
per-job award. Honeywell later dropped that program after Mr. Christie
pushed for an increase to a second program. Wolff & Samson lobbied
for that legislation, and helped persuade the state Economic Development
Authority to award Honeywell $40 million in tax breaks, the most
allowed, under the second program.
Mr. Samson’s firm received $540,000 in lobbying fees from Honeywell from 2010 through 2012.
Mr.
Christie, in turn, trumpeted a major victory in an otherwise painfully
slow economic recovery, saying his legislation had been “instrumental in
Honeywell’s decision to stay and expand their operations in New
Jersey.”
Last
year, Honeywell announced it was moving one town over to Morris Plains
and putting its 147-acre Morristown campus up for redevelopment —
prompting critics to ask whether that had been the company’s intent all
along.
“You
just have to wonder if the threat was real or if it was idle,” said Jon
Whiten, deputy director of New Jersey Policy Perspective, a
liberal-leaning nonprofit group.
Booming Bond Business
Along
Route 3 in the Meadowlands sits a developer’s garish folly, a
long-unfinished mall and amusement park once known as Xanadu. In 2011,
Mr. Christie pressed for another change in state law, this time to make
incentives available to Triple Five, the new developer of the project,
now renamed the American Dream.
Its
lawyer: Wolff & Samson. In November, the state Economic Development
Authority awarded Triple Five tax credits worth $390 million.
Mr.
Christie pointed to Triple Five when he accepted the backing of the
Laborers’ International Union in December 2012, one of the first major
endorsements of his re-election campaign. “Here I’m looking at the men
and women who are going to take that thing and turn it from ugly and
into a job machine for the men and women of New Jersey,” he said.
“The
Christie train has left the station and we are driving it,” said Ray
Pocino, regional manager of the laborers union. He singled out the
Bayonne Bridge, the Revel casino in Atlantic City and American Dream as
projects Mr. Christie championed that were putting his members to work.
During
Mr. Christie’s first three years in office, New Jersey awarded $2.11
billion in business incentives, almost double the $1.25 billion awarded
during the prior decade, according to a report by New Jersey Policy
Perspective.
“The state has been a one-note band for the last couple of years,” Mr. Whiten said.
Yet
as of December, New Jersey had recovered only 44 percent of jobs lost
in the recession, compared with a national average of 87 percent, Mr.
Whiten said. New York was at 156 percent.
In addition to its lobbying work, Wolff & Samson serves as counsel on municipal bond
issues, including being on the list of firms that can be hired to
perform legal work when the Economic Development Authority issues bonds
to support projects.
So
when the development authority approved $102 million in tax credits to
help Panasonic, which had threatened to leave the state, move instead
from Secaucus to Newark, Mr. Samson’s firm was listed as bond counsel
for a related $10 million bond proposal.
It
was bond counsel when the authority issued $237 million in bonds to
support a major expansion at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and on
at least three bonds totaling about $43 million to support the
construction of privately run charter schools, something the governor had pushed to expand.
Since
Mr. Christie took office, Mr. Samson’s firm has served as counsel for
$10.3 billion in municipal bonds, WNYC radio reported. Its share of the
municipal bond counsel business has jumped to 22 percent under Mr.
Christie, from 2 percent during the administration of Gov. Jon S.
Corzine, according to an analysis by Thomson Reuters.
Marc
Pfeiffer, who worked in municipal financing for New Jersey for decades,
said it would not be surprising that a firm known to be close to any
governor would pick up business.
“The
bond counsel selection process is not immune to the political process,”
said Mr. Pfeiffer, now a research fellow at Rutgers University’s
Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
Mr. Christie, shovel in hand, got to take credit for putting New Jersey back to work.
“This
is another success story about one of our largest businesses choosing
to stay in New Jersey, continue to grow and invest in our state and
people,” Mr. Christie said at Panasonic’s groundbreaking in 2011.
‘An Activist Chairman’
When
Mr. Samson arrived in 2011 as chairman of the Port Authority, an unpaid
position, he made clear that, unlike most prior chairmen, he intended
to insert himself into the day-to-day operations of the $8.2
billion-a-year agency.
He
commuted to its offices near Union Square two or three times a week,
meeting with Mr. Christie’s other two top appointees at the authority,
Bill Baroni and David Wildstein, according to people who worked closely
with them.
“He
really decided to be an activist chairman from the beginning,” said one
former authority official who spoke anonymously so as not to damage
business relationships.
Under
Mr. Samson, the Port Authority approved transportation projects that
critics said New Jersey would have otherwise had to pay for itself, most
notably upgrades to the Pulaski Skyway. That allowed Mr. Christie to
avoid raising the state’s low gas tax, keeping a campaign promise.
Meanwhile, commuters at Port Authority bridges and tunnels saw their
tolls rise sharply. Mr. Christie spoke against the increases but did not
stop them.
In
another project, Mr. Samson and Mr. Baroni, the agency’s deputy
executive director, arranged for the Port Authority to take over the
failing Atlantic City International Airport.
Some
Port Authority executives saw the move as an expensive effort to boost
Mr. Christie’s re-election efforts in South Jersey. But New York’s
turnover of an airport in Orange County to the Port Authority had given
New Jersey’s governor a coupon to do the same someday.
“It
was always thought that Atlantic City would be the one they’d try to
dump on the Port Authority, because Atlantic City loses money, it’s
always lost money, it’s a dying town,” said a person who worked on the
takeover who spoke anonymously to avoid hurting professional
relationships.
The
airport was being served by just one carrier, Spirit Airlines, with 27
domestic flights a day from Atlantic City. A Port Authority study found
that to break even the airport would need about 22 more flights a day.
In
March 2013, Mr. Baroni assured the Port Authority’s board that the
takeover would “create a more integrated airport system” and perhaps
even “create additional capacity in the region.”
Mr.
Samson thanked him. “That’s really exciting and is consistent with all
our thoughts on where we’re going with this exciting operation
agreement,” he said.
What
he did not say was that his firm served as bond counsel for the South
Jersey Transportation Authority, which was suffering under the burden of
running the Atlantic City airport.
A
transcript quotes Mr. Samson calling for the vote but does not list who
voted in favor. Another document, the minutes, says Mr. Samson recused
himself. But two people who were involved in internal discussions on the
effort said Mr. Samson played an integral role in promoting the
initiative.
The Record, a New Jersey newspaper, reported last year that Mr. Samson took the lead in explaining to reporters the reasoning for the takeover.
Port
Authority policies allow for discretion by commissioners over when to
recuse themselves from votes or discussions over issues, and if they do
recuse themselves, they are not required to publicly divulge why.
It
is clear Mr. Samson made his support for the plan known to his fellow
commissioners and was involved in planning. Mr. Doig, the Dartmouth
professor, said the recusal afforded Mr. Samson an ethical fig leaf.
“And the fig leaf is not adequate,” he said.
During
talks about the airport takeover, Mr. Samson and Mr. Baroni also were
seeking to finance the extension of the PATH train from Lower Manhattan
to Newark Liberty Airport. United Airlines, the primary carrier at
Newark, had long pushed for the extension.
In
August, Mr. Christie and Mr. Samson met with United’s chief executive,
Jeff Smisek. In November, they announced that United would begin making
two daily flights to Atlantic City.
And the Port Authority recently announced a $1.5 billion plan to extend the PATH to Newark Liberty, which would save Manhattan travelers from having to switch trains.
The
Atlantic City airport takeover did not just help a Wolff & Samson
client. It also helped Mr. Christie bolster his relationship with
Stephen M. Sweeney, the president of the State Senate, who has been
crucial to his support in southern New Jersey and his ability to move
initiatives through the Legislature.
While
the investigations into the George Washington Bridge lane closings
brought the relationship between Mr. Samson and Mr. Christie into focus,
Mr. Samson’s role in that event is less clear. But there are
indications that he was not in the dark.
In
September, after Mr. Foye, the Port Authority’s executive director,
reopened the lanes to the bridge that Mr. Christie’s appointees had
ordered closed, Mr. Wildstein angrily sent an email saying “Samson
helping us to retaliate,” records show.
Mr. Samson has denied involvement, and Mr. Christie has stood by “the general.”
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