The Confession by James E. McGreevey

Author:James E. McGreevey [James E. Mcgreevey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061740657
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

WHITMAN AND I AGREED TO TWO TELEVISED DEBATES. THEY WERE a huge opportunity to improve my name recognition, and we rehearsed like madmen. As a stand-in for Whitman we recruited Marianne Espinosa Murphy, an articulate former state superior court judge who also happened to be the former wife of Michael Murphy, the candidate Andrews and I had bested in the primary. She was a formidable adversary, but I kept my message tightly focused: education, taxes, and auto insurance.

Jimmy Kennedy was the coach I listened to most closely. He and his wife, Lori, were always trying to quash my professorial tendencies, my wonkishness. “Go to the real Jim,” Jimmy told me. “Play this thing like you were back at the monthly Woodbridge Town Hall meetings. Just bantering and sharing your perspectives with the locals. That’s your strength.”

It’s going to take a lot more than that, I thought. Whitman’s job approval rating was back up to 55 percent, and polls showed her beating me by a wide margin. And then, just before the debate, Ray Lesniak came to me with a problem.

“There’s a hooker in the Middlesex County Jail who’s calling around saying she knows you,” he said.

Myra Rosa was a heroin addict from Woodbridge who’d spent the better part of the last decade in and out of jail. Two years earlier, in 1995, she’d started peddling this story that we’d been involved. It was a pure lie. This is no whitewash: I’ve made it clear that I’d known many women, and men, through the years. Rosa was not one of them. We never even met. I still wonder why she targeted me for her dubious claims—or, perhaps more to the point, who put her up to it.

I told Ray the truth—that I had no idea who she was. He believed me, even though he knew as much about my personal life as anybody at the time. He had already sent one of his men to the jailhouse to talk to her, hoping to ascertain just how crazy she was: very crazy, it turned out. “She says you used to pick her up in a white van, for over two years, sometimes screwing her at your condo. She can even identify the cat and the blue rug.”

“I haven’t had a cat since I was fourteen years old, Ray. And I’ve never had a white van. Yes, I have a blue rug, but what American doesn’t have a blue rug?” I was angry. “She says I was picking up a streetwalker in my own legislative district? I may be crazy, Ray, but I’m not that crazy.”

Right after Ray’s man interviewed her in jail, a guy from a place called Lucky 7 Bail Bonds bailed her out, representing an anonymous source. Gary, who had a million connections in Woodbridge, wracked his brain wondering who might be posting her bail. “The Star-Ledger?” he wondered.

That made little sense—they didn’t need to spring her from jail to get her story. “Republican State Committee,” I suggested, half seriously.

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