Home

The recent FBI corruption busts make Dr. Marc Mappen's "There's More to New Jersey Than The Sopranos" a particularly timely release, but that doesn't make the Jewish author from Highland Park happy about the Garden State's latest black eye.

"If I get publicity from that, it's a little bit embarrassing because [corruption] shouldn't be happening in the first place," Mappen said.

In Mappen's fifth book, the former Rutgers dean highlights New Jersey's little-known feel-good accomplishments, ranging from the lives of local heroes like Alice Ramsey, the first American to drive from coast to coast, to New Jerseyans' hand in innovations such as transistors, drive-in movies, Teflon, and saltwater taffy.

The book will be introduced at a free launch party Sunday, Sept. 13 at 4 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 869 Route 1 South in the North Village Shopping Center, North Brunswick. The celebration will feature selected readings from the book, questions and answers with Mappen, and refreshments. Spectators can purchase signed copies of the book.

Mappen said that his work is in no way a response to 2008's "New Jersey: The Soprano State" by Bob Ingle and Sandy McClure, since Mappen was inspired to write this book long before the other was published.

Four years ago, one of Mappen's friends told him that while she was on vacation in Gdansk, Poland, the first reaction she got when telling a local she was from New Jersey was, "Ah, Sopranos!" The story motivated Mappen to couple his New York Times columns on New Jersey from the 1990s along with new material into a book that showed how the state was about much more than just corruption.

Still, the book does discuss corruption in a chapter called "The Serpent in the Garden State: a Brief History of Corruption."

"My main goal was to give people a better understanding of the state that we live in, both the good side and the not so good side," Mappen said.

Corruption in New Jersey dates back to 1703, Mappen explained, when Lord Cornbury, a royal governor for the British colony, would take bribes in exchange for land titles in dealings that eerily resemble contemporary corruption involving public officials and real estate developers. Cornbury, who New Jerseyans called a "detestable maggot," was also accused of dressing up as a woman.

"It wasn't illegal, but it was bizarre," Mappen said of Cornbury's transvestism. "It's not something that respectable people did."

In the book, Mappen cites a study of public malfeasance that shows how New Jersey may not be as corrupt as the public perceives. Using federal corruption convictions from 1992 to 2003, a study by the newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter in 2004 calculated a state-by-state corruption rate per hundred thousand residents. Mississippi was the most corrupt state in the study, and New Jersey was way down in 16th.

Mappen writes that one factor which may lead to corruption in New Jersey is the state's diverse immigrant population. Two Harvard faculty members who crunched the numbers in the Corporate Crime Reporter scale with other nationwide data concluded that ethnic heterogeneity is correlated with corruption, as traditional ladders to success are closed off to newly arrived immigrant groups, making illegal avenues to success an alternative option. Today, about one-fifth of New Jersey's population is foreign-born.

Another factor in corruption is the fact that New Jersey has 566 municipalities, coming out to more per square mile than any other state in the nation, Mappen writes. In a home-rule state, he writes, corruption results from municipalities having a remarkable degree of authority over zoning and development.

On the positive side of things, Mappen writes how scientists from Bell Labs in Murray Hill first identified the echo of the Big Bang, describes New Jersey's legacy as a center for transportation between northern and southern states, and points out that Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley actually spent most of her life in Nutley. He also recounts the heroic efforts of New Jersey men who were captured by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War (some argue that the Mason-Dixon Line actually ran through part of South Jersey).

Regarding Jewish accomplishments in New Jersey, Mappen reviews figures like David Wilentz, the prosecutor in the famous Charles Lindbergh, Jr. kidnapping case of 1935, and Selman Waxman, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the streptomycin drug.

Mappen even finds a silver lining to New Jersey's history of corruption, noting that the state's third constitution, of 1947, established unique anti-corruption measures such as centralizing law enforcement agencies under the attorney general and ensuring that government purchases were subject to competitive bids from other sources. These days, at least New Jersey is arresting its corrupt officials, Mappen said.

"[Readers] could take comfort in the fact that New Jersey is taking steps against corruption and is not the most corrupt state in the nation," Mappen said. "It's not like we are totally drowning in corruption that we can't fight back against."