Wayne Bryant

Former Assembly Minority Leader Willie Brown passed away on Monday.    He was 68.  Brown spent 24 years representing Newark in the State Assembly.

First elected in 1973, at age 33, he was a member of a freshman Essex Assembly delegation that included Richard Codey.  He was re-elected eleven times.  He was the Assembly Minority Leader in 1988 and 1989.  When Democrats took control of the Assembly in 1989, the caucus picked Joseph Doria for Speaker and Wayne Bryant for Majority Leader; Brown became the Speaker Pro Tempore.

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Senator Bill Baroni, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement today regarding a state appeals court ruling prohibiting convicted former State Senator Wayne Bryant from using his campaign funds for legal defense:

Disgraced former state Sen. Wayne Bryant will not be able to use campaign funds to pay for his legal offense, according to report from the Associated Press.

Bryant was convicted last month of every count of bribery and pension fraud brought against him by federal authorities.

Earlier this year, before the verdict, Bryant’s lawyers asked the Election Law Enforcement Commission whether he could use $640,000 in left over campaign funds to pay his lawyer bills. When the advisory commission said that it was not permissible, Bryant’s attorneys tried again with an appeals court.

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Former State Senator Wayne Bryant got a smack on the back of the head from a jury of his peers today when they found him guilty of all eleven charges against him. On the third day of deliberations the jury delivered their verdict with a very sound, “Hey…..what the heck did you think you were doing?” Bryant will be back in court in March to hear what his sentence will be; it would seem that he will have four months to disburse his accumulated ill gotten gains or what is left of them after his defense attorney takes his cut.

There are those who have been frustrated of late because as fans of Bryant, they were not able to sing his praises in court. They wanted to espouse the good things that he has done, as if those deeds should carry weight in the jury’s decision-making process when trying to decide beyond a shadow of a doubt if he committed any criminal acts. Perhaps Bryant’s most egregious crime was his betrayal of the voters' trust in a district that encompasses what can only be considered New Jersey’s very own “war zone” and home to some of the poorest in the USA. The city of Camden, the county seat of Camden County -- Bryant’s stomping grounds -- has an unemployment rate of 16.3 percent, compared to the national average of 6.9 percent, according to Federal figures on the employment website simplyhired.com.

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U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie says that Wayne Bryant's conviction will wake up the state pension board

A story by the Gloucester County Times' Trish Graber must have been a real sphincter squeezing moment for more than a few politically active lawyers: "The conviction of former Sen. Wayne Bryant rang the alarm on public-sector attorneys who sent subordinates to perform their work, a practice the defense argued was common throughout New Jersey." Especially since outgoing U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie says that the Bryant trial "has woken up the pension board.... I think the pension board is going to be much more active in looking at these pension applications .. If you did it in a serial way like Wayne Bryant did, you should go to the pension board now and make good."

Graber suggests that among the first pension cases to be reviewed will be those of former State Sen. Raymond Zane and Gloucester County Democratic Chairman Michael Angelini, who "were key to the defense's argument that the practice of Bryant sending associates to perform his work at the Gloucester County Board of Social Services, and taking the pension credits, was common."   Zane, who served in the Senate from 1973 until his defeat in 2001, collects a pension based on nine part-time public jobs.

12TH District legislators Senator Jennifer Beck, Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande today urged the legislature to pass A-1444 and S-686, which would change current law by forcing any public official convicted of corruption to forfeit all their public pensions and applying to all public officials, regardless of when their crimes took place.

A jury convicted former State Sen. Wayne Bryant today on federal corruption charges

Former state Sen. Wayne Bryant has been found guilty on every count of bribery and fraud that he was charged with.

The jury concluded that Bryant, a Democrat who used to represent Camden and Gloucester Counties, was given a low-show job at the University and Medicine and Dentistry in exchange for his political influence in obtaining grants for the school. That job, in turn, significantly boosted his pension.

Today’s verdict comes one day after U.S. Attorney Chris Christie announced that he planned to resign at the beginning of next month – possibly to launch a gubernatorial bid. The conviction puts another high profile feather in his corruption crusader cap.

More from the Courier-Post, Bergen Record and Star-Ledger.