David Friedland

Frank "Pat" Dodd (D-West Orange), above, wanted to serve as second two-year term as Senate President, but dropped out when Majority Leader Matthew Feldman (D-Teaneck) had the votes.

Post-Election Day politics in New Jersey might feature as many as five contested races for Legislative leadership positions: Senate President, Assembly Speaker, Senate Majority Leader, Assembly Majority Leader, and Assembly Minority Leader. 

Senate President Richard Codey (D-Roseland) faces a challenge from Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D-West Deptford).  Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts (D-Camden) is retiring; Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman is running for Speaker against John Wisniewski (D-Sayreville), and possibly against Democratic State Chairman Joseph Cryan (D-Union) and Sheila Oliver (D-Adubato).  Those races create openings for Majority Leader; perhaps more importantly, the contests create campaigns for Senate Judiciary Chairman and for Budget and Appropriations committee chairmanships in both houses.

Some of New Jersey's best leadership fights:

N.J. State Library Photo

Thomas Kean and David Friedland, both Assemblymen, in 1971.

Assembly Minority Leader David Friedland said he entered Mayor John V. Kenny's hospital room at Jersey City Medical Center and handed him the kris knife he had collected on a recent honeymoon excursion to Nepal.

"Mayor, I want your assurance that you'll get the votes to make Assemblyman Tom Kean the Speaker of the Assembly," said Friedland, a flamboyant Hudson County labor attorney who was already politically radioactive as someone "entirely too comfortable with organized crime," in the words of U.S. Attorney William Brennan.

Sure, sure, said Kenny, but what's with the knife?

Friedland told Kenny about climbers in Katmandu who link themselves together by a rope and jump one by one over treacherous mountain chasms. The first man in each chain who jumps is vulnerable because the others behind him outweigh him and can jerk the rope back, knocking him into the chasm.

If that happens, and he survives, it is understood, according to folklore, that the man will seek revenge with the kris knife and disembowel those climbers who double-crossed him.

"I'm going to jump across that crevice first," Friedland told Kenny. "Just make sure your guys follow me."

He left the knife with Kenny. It was a gift.

And a symbol.

For Friedland had other ways of disemboweling Kenny politically if it came to that, if the mayor of Hudson County's biggest city didn't deliver at least four Assembly votes he said he could as part of a deal sprung by Friedland when his fellow Democrats, jittery over his reputation, balked at making him speaker and instead lined up behind Assemblyman S. Howard Woodson (D-Trenton).

Democrats had won a narrow 40-39 majority in the 1971 mid-term election, and were looking to reclaim leadership in the lower house. Powerful Assemblyman John Horn (D-Camden) forged an alliance with Woodson to block Friedland, who was in line for the speaker's chair.

Denied the top Assembly post by his own party, Friedland planned to back Kean, a rising star from Essex County. In exchange, Friedland wanted 50% control of committee chairmanships, 50% control of the money in the lower house, a conference committee that had the power to remove any bill from committee, and a generous North Jersey aid package for Essex and Hudson counties.

He had four votes - including his own - without Kenny. Kenny's contribution would give him a total of seven to add to the Republicans' 39, which would propel Kean well past Woodson for the Speakership.

"On the night before the vote, I was at the governor's mansion playing 'Waltzing Matilda' on the piano," Friedland told PolitickerNJ.com. "It turned out to be prophetic, because that was the theme song for a movie at the time where the planet was destroyed by atomic energy."

Former State Sen. James Galdieri, who won a special election after David Friedland's criminal conviction, died on Saturday.  He was 74.  Galdieri, a Jersey City Democrat, served in the Senate from 1980 to 1982.  He did not seek election to a full term in 1981.

Former State Sen. David Friedland faked his death in a scuba accident while awaiting sentencing on federal corruption charges. He was caught two years later on the Maldives Island.

A list of the most memorable characters of New Jersey political history would have to include David Friedland, a Jersey City Democrat who served in both houses of the Legislature and then went to prison only after leading federal marshals on a worldwide chase to find him.

After his 1980 criminal conviction for taking a $360,000 kickback for arranging a loan to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 701 pension plan in North Brunswick, Friedland agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors and was placed in the witness protection program.  He was later indicted on charges of defrauding the Teamsters pension fund while under federal protection.

In 1985, while awaiting sentencing, Friedland disappeared.  He faked his death in a scuba diving accident in the Bahamas, but authorities found the evidence suspicious and continued to look for the former Hudson County Senator.  Using a fake U.S. passport, he had traveled to Europe, Asia and Africa.  Two years later, the U.S. Marshal from New Jersey, Arthur Borinsky, captured Friedland in the Maldives Islands, off the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.  As the owner of chain of five scuba diving shops, Friedland was living an opulent lifestyle that attracted the notice of local officials.

One of the classic stories of the New Jersey Legislature in 1968 were allegations that a Newark Assemblyman wanted to cancel a hearing on organized crime under pressure from a "lobbyist" representing Geraldo (Jerry) Catena, one of the state's most powerful mob bosses.

Senate Law and Public Safety Committee Chairman Joseph Woodcock held a news conference in December 1968 to say that his aide was told by Assembly Law and Public Safety Committee Chairman Richard Fiore that he was being pressured by Catena to stop legislative proposals to create the State Commission of Investigation, and to legalize wiretapping, and to permit certain witnesses to receive immunity from prosecution.

Claire Curran Johnson, a former New York Mirror crime reporter who worked for Woodcock, told investigators for the state Attorney General's office that Fiore, a 36-year-old substitute teacher and Recreation Director for the Newark Board of Education, claimed he wanted to head the Assembly panel "to stop these kind of things." "There is a lot of pressure. You just don't know how much pressure. Jerry is unhappy about it," Curran quoted Fiore as telling her.

The Democratic response to former Governor Thomas Kean's charges that U.S. Senator Robert Menendez was unethical and part of New Jersey's culture of corruptuion: an attack on Kean's 1971 legendary deal with a Hudson County Democrat to become the new Assembly Speaker.

Kean was the Assembly Majority Leader in 1971 when Republicans lost twenty seats in Governor William Cahill's mid-term election, giving the Democrats a 40-39 majority; the last seat was won by an Independent candidate, Anthony Imperiale of Newark. S. Howard Woodson, an African American Minister from Trenton, was slated to become the new Speaker.

But Kean forged a coalition with four Democratic Assemblymen -- David Friedland, Silvio Failla and David Wallace of Hudson County and Joseph Higgins of Union County -- to win enough votes to become Assemby Speaker. Those four Democrats all received Committee Chairmanship and a small share of the tiny amount of Assembly patronage.

At the time, Friedland was the Assembly Minority Leader, but Democrats declined to pick him as their candidate for Speaker because of a scandal involving a loan sharking case that caused him to lose his law license for six months. Democrats won 26 more seats in 1973; Woodson was elected Speaker -- the only African American to ever hold the post -- and Kean became the new Minority Leader.

But some Statehouse watchers from the 1970's say that Kean had less to do with the Friedland deal than people think, arguing that the coalition was formed with then-Assemblyman Richard DeKorte -- and that when Friedland realized that Kean, not DeKorte, would be Speaker, he suggested that he might have been double-crossed.

Friedland, called "entirely too comfortable with members of organized crime" by the Deputy State Attorney General, did not run again in 1973, but won a State Senate seat four years later when he defeated incumbent Joseph Tumulty (whose uncle had been Woodrow Wilson's Secretary) in the Democratic Primary. He was removed from office in 1980 after his conviction on federal corruption charges; just before his sentencing, he faked his death in a scuba diving accident off the coast of India and remained free until his capture in the Maldive Islands several years later.

Failla was murdered by a pimp and a prostitute outside a bar in Neptune in 1971, while Wallace and Higgins lost party backing for re-election in 1973.