She got her hooks into young Richard, the son of a prominent political figure in one of the towns she covers.
“He’s real taken with her,” the PR woman from the congressman’s office said.
Richard works under her.
This may also be true of the police director, with whom she deposited her so called stalking evidence against me.
If you’re a man, then you’re likely going to fall for her.
But Richard is different. As the son of a prominent political figure, he may well be a back door access for her to his father.
“They’ve been talking secretly via email and text for some time before I found out about it,” the PR person said.
She used the son to uncover a supposed scandal with his father.
“She told Richard she wanted to help his father, but needed to have his cell phone number,” the PR person said. “And Richard believed her and gave her the number. I shut it down. I told Richard I want to know what he is telling members of the media, regardless of whether it is by phone, text, or email.”
She apparently feels the need to go through Richard because the PR person won’t give her what she wants.
“But she crossed the line when she texted Richard,” the PR person told me. “He trusts her and thinks she will help him when he needs help. But I told him I don’t’ like her or trust her – and I don’t. She’s a black widow and she bites people.”
Richard has a girlfriend he’s been dating for more than three years, and yet according to the PR person, he’s become infatuated with her.
She has discovered just how much power she has as a media person, and after two successful hard-hitting stories, she’s on the hunt for more.
Tom, an old school political operative, warned me over the summer about someone else being behind all this, a guy named RR, who is apparently romantically involved with her and using her to advance his own political agenda.
She is trying to find out if Richard’s father did something illegal in regard to an apartment complex, rigging approvals so that tenants can move in before these apartments are ready and then allowing the landlords not to have to make necessary repairs, using his political position to influence the local judge if and when anybody complains.
The truth turned out to be less odious than she presumed, but this hasn’t stopped her from bragging to one of the office gossips about all the scandals she’s investigating. Those two talk a lot, a fact I only learned later when the gossip appeared to know more about me and her than was comfortable, making it clear I need to be careful what I say when I talk to the gossip since gossip runs both ways.
The gossip is my friend and her friend but can’t resist telling any secret she hears from anybody, even at the risk of exposing herself.
And she can’t resist bragging to the gossip either, needing to leave an impression, a sense of importance.
So when she trotted back up to her desk, I trotted down to the gossip’s desk on the first floor, where I got an earful of boasting, although such conversations rarely get to the point at first, starting usually with the current status of her health or the health of one of the owners, eventually repeating nearly word for word what she told the gossip a few minutes earlier, and in this case, starting with the tale of poor Richard, and then expanding into an even bigger story in which the congressman allegedly ordered the Cuban mob to intimidate a key witness in a corruption case to remain silent, a tale told from nearly two decades earlier in which her new boyfriend supposedly played a role as whistle blower and was fired. Her boyfriend, RR (who turned snitch for the feds), later got his salary returned, but not his job.
The truth was a lot more complicated than she let on to the gossip, or even what the gossip let on to her.
RR liked to take credit for helping the feds bring down a corrupt police chief in the town she covered two decades earlier. But in fact, he did not.
RR got caught by the feds shaking down illegal immigrant workers at the local eateries, collecting a piece of their weekly salaries to not report them to ICE. RR then turned in other cops involved in the scam. The police chief was caught separately, offering protection to a local Cuban gambling operation.
RR’s firing had nothing to do with the federal sting, but because he acted as a snitch, the cops protected him.
The firing came when he got caught printing Nazi symbols on a wall and this required, he take a new psyche test, which he failed.
RR went to the newly elected mayor (who was later elected congressman) to get his job back. The mayor said the best he could do was allow RR to retake the psyche test, which he refused to do, and harbored ill feelings against the mayor ever since. This won him a reputation has a crank.
But he could also be charming, a womanizer, who cheated on his wife so regularly, she eventually divorced him.
He allegedly had proof of bribes and the threat against the witness – which he offered to give her as a big scoop.
Our owner asked me if I believed he had such evidence. I did not know.
But Tom said RR had offered to provide this evidence a few years earlier when the congressman was being challenged by the mayor of Perth Amboy.
“He never produced the evidence,” Tom told me. “I don’t think it exists.”
Tom believed RR was simply trying to impress her since they were romantically involved, and possibly to get her to print something that would hurt the congressman.
Since Richard’s father is also connected to the congressman, I have to assume her trying to damage him through Richard was something else concocted by RR
RR latched onto the new mayor to get what the old mayor would not give him, his job back on the police force. RR headed a small Latino organization that helped the current mayor get elected.
“Actually, he didn’t do much in that election,” one of that town’s commissioners said. “He was here and there.”
He also used his connections as a snitch for the feds to get inside information about the current mayor’s legal troubles, which he fed to her in order to give her scoops – showing that he wasn’t above biting the political hand that fed him.
The attorney that worked with RR during his heyday as an FBI snitch represents the current mayor who is facing federal charges and is feeing RR information that he feeds to our writer.
Rumor claims RR broke with the new mayor with the idea of possibly running for mayor himself.
“A lot of people hate him (RR) because of the way he turned on his own friends,” the commissioner said. “I’m told he’s a bad guy who got caught and the feds told him to cooperate or go to jail. So, he started turning in all his old friends, while he still pretended to be their friends.”
Much of this I learned after making a number of phone calls, one of which I used to add a few lines to my column about a rumored investigation into the witness, who was facing jail time in the corruption scandal, and the reports that he would not give up other people involved – such as the congressman.
Since our former temporary boss edits my column, I have to assume he’s the one who alerted her.
When she called me, she actually sounded humble, saying my column might undermine her big story.
I told her RR could not be trusted.
“You really need to be careful with him,” I said.
“He’s a good man,” she said. “And he’s not just doing this. He’s got other things I can’t talk about now that he’s working on that are even more special.”
I had heard tales of RR before from another young writer in our office, who said RR had offered her similar “special” projects, but she eventually got the feeling that he was all talk and that there was no validity to any of these projects.
“He’s someone with an agenda,” I said.
One of my former bosses that covered the same beat she did now verified some of the claims against RR.
“He claims to have worked undercover with the FBI,” my former boss said.
“Claims?” I said.
“Unverified,” he said. “He’s a bit of a quack, always anti whatever administration is in power. Your writer needs to verify anything he says.”
When I told him the story RR was pitching, my former boss said RR had tried to pitch the same story to him years earlier.
“But he never had anything concrete to share,” my former boss said.
This was not the case with her apparently. She told the owner that RR was willing to provide her with hundreds of pages of documents that would prove his case, documents with dates, times and other details she was convinced would bring down the congressman.
It is difficult to know just when RR latched onto her, although he began feeding her information less than a month after her being hired at our office. A few months later, she pushed to have him named number 13 in the county’s most powerful people, raising a lot of eyebrows among the political elite who thought he had no business being on the list at all.
RR is a good talker, as one of the commissioners in her town pointed out, but also a strange, unfocused kind of guy, who could charm women into his web, painting himself as an action hero and still relevant. He lured one of our former writers into his web a few years ago, telling her he was on a “secret mission,” and all the earth-shaking things he was involved in.
“He’s a fraud,” this woman told me. “He was always going away somewhere, but he never did any of the things he said he did. Frankly, he scared me.”
When he couldn’t get his job back as a cop, he became a private investigator, but was always jealous of the former deputy police chief from a neighboring town, who had also turned private investigator and was constantly feeding us dirt on the mayor of that town.
“He (RR) wants to be top dog,” another source told me. “He hates the other guy for getting more attention than he gets.”
“The two of them hate each other,” another source said, something the other private detective admitted when I spoke with him.
“There’s more that went on with him back in the 1990s than he lets on,” this private investigator old me.
Most people don’t even know who RR is, though he has a reputation for serving as a professional witness in anti-cop legal cases.
RR is seen as an odd ball that is always carrying a video camera and chasing behind cops.
Hearing all of this conspiracy theory about how RR might be using our office to promote his own agenda sent shivers down my spine.
How far all this goes back, I can’t say for certain, maybe all the way to the beginning when RR first started feeding her stories about the mayor.
But since August, she’s become much bolder and more confident about her control at our office.
Her objecting to my adding lines to my column about all this suggests she doesn’t want to let the cat out of the bag too soon.
During my testing with her, I laid out my concerns about RR’s character and pressed the fact that she needed to get real proof, and not depend upon these unsubstantiated claims. I said her emotional involvement with RR could be a problem in being objective.
In texting my concerns to her about the story, she reminded me of her list of demands, and then got nasty.
The problem is if RR plans to run for mayor, then he needs this block buster story to damage the one creditable obstacle – which is the congressman – so that he can claim his ticket is the only ticket without ties to corruption.
“Let her write the story,” Tom told me. “She’s going to drag your office into a real legal mess and look like a fool for it.”
The congressman’s PR person concurred.
“You’ve done your best to warn them,” she said. “Just go back to what you’re doing. This is not your imagination. They really are trying to take over the paper. But you can’t do anything to stop them.”
No comments:
Post a Comment