Mediaite Confessional: I Was The New Jersey Hacker Mayor’s Campaign Manager

In 2009, Dr. Roque was a fresh-faced outsider—a man with no record of corruption (in New Jersey, read: no record of anything whatsoever), a quirky speaker who gave his campaign staff headaches by accidentally quoting Fidel Castro to a group of former Cuban political prisoners and actively surrounding himself with incompetent people with criminal pasts. As manager, there were people I had to kick out of the office four or five times (including an octogenarian who insisted on belting out opera in the office, every day, for hours) before Roque stopped contradicting me, and campaign literature I had to physically toss out the door after rejecting the Photoshop document sent to me multiple times. The most egregious campaign literature I rejected was a letter to the people of West New York in illegible light gray font superimposed over an 8.5 x 11” close-up of Dr. Roque’s face. I threw away eight boxes of copies of that one.

You see, I was 21 and spoke English (a rarity in the campaign and in West New York generally) and had just written a book on New Jersey politics heavily analyzing the tenure of Mayor Vega (my college thesis), none of which qualified me in the eyes of haggard 50-something campaign veterans to speak at the very loud weekly campaign meetings. But I got my literature through eventually—with perfectly normal black font—circumventing the treasurer and waiting for Roque to leave on vacation to be able to do anything. Thankfully, Roque was rather fond of vacations, but even more fond of talking about his vacations. They proved he had money.

It wasn’t till the day an underling independently decided to toss my correspondence with the local papers in the garbage, the day Roque was slated to speak in public and the treasurer yelled profane orders at me to go to Staples, that I quit. I tossed my campaign phone at his medical assistant (the medical and political offices were across from each other) and ran out the door in a huff, my body heavy with August fumes and disillusion and the reality of a sure loss in my first campaign. “The way you’re going and with Christie as governor, you’ll be in jail soon,” I remember saying, or some variation thereof. Given the sabotage of the logistics of the recall campaign by everyone else from my perspective, I expected the loss—and it came (Roque lost the recall bid but became mayor in the next scheduled election). The rest is history after spending my funemployment surfeiting on hours of Glenn Beck and Red Eye as emotional anesthetic, the sort of road that could only lead to Mediaite.

Among the things the treasurer had been doing behind my back, it was later found, was allowing fake names and names of the dead to get on the recall petitions, intentionally or otherwise. But I expected more of perennial loser and unrealistic “evil politician” stock character Mayor Sal Vega, a man rumored to have installed a refrigerator under his desk just for the liquor. A rumor, it is worth noting, that may or may not be true; in the magical realist world of Hudson County, NJ, there is no such thing as true or false, only muddy brown rumor.

Knowing him before he had experience as a public official, I knew the bait that would hook Roque would not be money. He was fond of telling passersby on the street that he owns a Bentley, apropos of nothing; he insisted his Rolex be visible in all his campaign literature (much to my chagrin as a campaign manager in a populist region). As the Times report notes, he told the judge on Thursday that he was okay with jail because he was “financially well-off.” He likes to tell people he had money, which is a form of power, so I knew that telling people he had power would be his downfall. There he is, on the cover of Times, for allegedly threatening to abuse his status as a member of the Army. It may not be true, but his reputation precedes him.

There are some claims in the story that necessitate correcting, however. For one, Roque’s alleged “close ties” to Gov. Chris Christie are only alleged by Roque himself; Christie only visited the town seldom times since Roque had been there, and did nothing public to support Roque’s bizarre decision, as a Cuban-American Democrat, to refuse to endorse Cuban-American Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez and instead support Central Jersey state Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (an endorsement he retracted after the FBI raided his office computers, though he still did not attend Sen. Menendez’s campaign kickoff and denied the search had occurred). As with all stories that end up in the Times, there is a clear attempt to fit Roque, a local kook, into the left-right paradigm that exists nationally; it is doomed to failure, because Roque has no ideology—he’s just a local kook.

I am one of the luckiest to have been part of the popular revolt in 2009 that led to local kook Felix Roque winning election in West New York. I neither work nor live in West New York and owe nothing to that Town Hall. This is not true of most of his campaign staff—volunteers who have been ravaged by the Obama economy; who are struggling not to lose their homes in the wake of Mayor Vega’s 47% tax increase. As the nation points and laughs at New Jersey for its uncanny ability to generate the most woefully incompetent publicly elected thieves in the nation, it serves us well to keep in mind that the aftermath of having a mayor arrested after his predecessor’s policies left many without their homes cannot be described as anything but ugly. Good government comes from the people, yes, but a desperate people rarely make good decisions—I certainly didn’t— and in the likely event that the small town of 45,000 mostly Cuban exiles has to choose yet another mayor in two years’ time, they will need in the truest, least ironic sense, change they can trust.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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