For Mark Sheridan, an attorney whose father and mother were killed in their Somerset County home in a homicide that remains unresolved after nearly a decade, Monday’s indictment of the political boss George Norcross tore open old wounds.
One section of the indictment in particular -- the one involving his dad. It describes a real estate deal that created a serious rift between Norcross and John Sheridan, Mark’s father, a deeply respected advisor to governors in both parties. Norcross and the senior Sheridan had been friends, but in the months before Sheridan’s violent death, he told his son that he was deeply troubled by a stubborn argument with Norcross over a patch of land on the Camden waterfront. At the time of the Sheridans’ death in September 2014, the dining room table was covered with documents about this dispute.
The land at stake was controlled by a non-profit, Coopers Ferry, and John Sheridan, the chairman of the board, wanted to hold onto it, and use it to support the non-profit’s mission. The indictment issued Monday accuses Norcross of using strong-arm threats to force the non-profit to surrender the land and yield to a partnership that was partially controlled by Norcross himself.
After the killings, Mark Sheridan brought those papers to the attorney general’s office, encouraging an investigation into the dispute between the two men.
“They did nothing,” he says. “I provided the Attorney General with evidence of the crimes related to the real estate deals that are outlined in the indictment nearly nine years ago. Imagine how much of this could have been avoided if John Hoffman did his job.”
Hoffman was Acting Attorney General at the time, but he left office without finding the alleged crimes that Attorney General Matt Platkin now describes in grotesque detail. As if this case needed still more political weight, Hoffman was recently nominated for a seat on the state Supreme Court by Gov. Phil Murphy. Calls and emails to his office went unreturned Monday.
At Platkin’s press conference, WNYC’s Nancy Solomon asked the question that is now on many minds: “John Sheridan was trying to fight off this deal, and those documents were found on his dining room table the morning after he was murdered. Is your office looking at that case? And how do you see the murder of John and Joyce Sheridan as connected to the conspiracy you laid out today?”
Platkin said he had “nothing more to add.”
To be clear, there is not a scrap of evidence that Norcross ordered the Sheridans killed; and Solomon, who has done the deepest dives into Norcross’ shady real estate deals on the Camden waterfront, has never explicitly accused him of that. But the more you learn about the deaths of the Sheridans, the harder it becomes to dismiss the idea as a nutty conspiracy theory.
Some background: The Sheridans’ bodies were found after their home burned down on Sept. 28, 2014, and the investigation was marked from the start by incompetence that is almost hard to believe. Somerset County prosecutors quickly concluded that it was a murder-suicide, that John Sheridan stabbed his wife, Joyce, started the fire by spreading around gasoline, and then stabbed himself in the neck.
There was no history of violence, no gambling debt, no drugs, not even a theory as to why a marriage of 47 years – a happy marriage, according to family and friends – would suddenly explode into such gruesome violence. Could they have been killed by someone else, who lit the fire to cover up evidence?
No one dusted for fingerprints to see if an intruder entered the house through one of four unlocked doors. Two months after the killing, an insurance adjuster inspecting the home found a bag full of jewelry in a closet off the master bedroom. Investigators had somehow missed it.
Finally, the Sheridan family paid for a private autopsy, which showed the knife that killed Joyce Sheridan could not possibly be the same knife that killed John Sheridan, as prosecutors said. That knife was never recovered.
In the end, the authorities conceded that the murder-suicide theory was bunk. The case was reclassified as an unsolved mystery. The prosecutor was later replaced.
Norcross, always the aggressor, showed up at Platkin’s press conference Monday and took a seat in the front row. He ain’t afraid of nothing. One of his attorneys, Mike Critchley, denied any wrongdoing in the Coopers Ferry land deal, one of several deals cited in the indictment, and said he has documents to prove it. He said Norcross has been offering to talk with Platkin’s investigators for six months, but they waited until last week and gave him two hours.
“Why didn’t he (Platkin) subpoena him (Norcross) and let him talk to the grand jury?” Critchley asks.
The politics behind this are hard to decipher. Gov. Phil Murphy smoked a peace pipe with Norcross a few years ago, and even helps him raise money these days.
Murphy has been furious with Platkin, according to several sources, since Platkin went rogue and intervened in the federal case on ballot design in Democratic primaries, siding with Andy Kim, who successfully argued that the ballots tipped the scale in favor of endorsed candidates. That ruling put a knife through the heart of Tammy Murphy’s Senate campaign.
As for the governor’s race, this is bad news for Steve Sweeney, the former Senate president, who is a lifetime friend and ally of Norcross. Norcross’ iron grip on South Jersey, a pillar of Sweeney’s strength, is likely a thing of the past.
And as Platkin noted, this investigation is continuing. Who knows where the next blow will land?
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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