By Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
The ex-director of the agency that once managed Newark’s water told federal investigators in 2015 that she pressured vendors to make campaign contributions to then-mayor Cory Booker and his political friends, new court records show.
Linda Watkins-Brashear, who is currently serving an eight-year sentence for soliciting bribes in exchange for no-show contracts, said a Booker ally at the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corp. set a donation goal for vendors who usually bought $500 fundraising tickets without question, she told the FBI. If they refused, there were repercussions, her testimony said.
Watkins-Brashear’s 2015 interviews with federal prosecutors were filed as part of an ongoing federal court case of another contractor allegedly involved in the $1 million kickback scheme that eventually toppled the NWCDC.
The records raise new questions about Booker’s record as mayor of Newark, the 2006-2013 tenure that was a springboard to his successful U.S. Senate campaign and his current bid to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency. Booker has repeatedly said he was unaware of the corruption that eventually led to the agency’s downfall.
“Without any supporting evidence or corroboration whatsoever, this baseless story rests entirely on the disputed words of a person who, to feed an out-of-control gambling addiction, schemed to defraud the people of Newark and lied to the FBI about it,” Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for his presidential campaign, said Thursday after the story published.
Singh previously told NJ Advance Media Booker “faithfully executed his duties” at the NWCDC “where a small group of employees and contractors conspired to conceal their criminal enterprise so effectively that accountants and even independent auditors didn’t discover the fraud.”
“For years as mayor, Cory waged a public battle to reform Newark’s water system, but those efforts were repeatedly blocked by opponents,” she said in a statement. “When serious evidence of wrongdoing at the watershed emerged, then-Mayor Booker took immediate action to dissolve it and bring its operations under direct control of the city.”
The NWCDC was tasked with managing the city’s reservoirs and treating water at the Pequannock water treatment plant that now serves more than 300,000 customers in North Jersey. But the plant has come under fire in recent years after failed treatment caused lead to leach into the city’s tap water in 2017. The city this month began distributing bottled water as lead levels remain high.
“I find it very alarming that this was the entity set up to ensure water quality in Newark and this is what they’re doing, they’re putting the squeeze on contractors and vendors for campaign contributions,” said Guy Sterling, a Newark resident who helped expose wrongdoing at the NWCDC and a former reporter for The Star-Ledger.
A scathing February 2014 state comptroller report found rampant abuse of public funds, illegal payments and sweetheart deals at the NWCDC and said it operated free of meaningful oversight despite $10 million in annual service contracts from the city to manage water assets.
