Former Passaic Mayor Sammy Rivera was sentenced to 21 months in a federal prison for taking a $5,000 bribe to steer public contracts. That’s the identical sentence given to former Marlboro Mayor Matthew Scannapieco, who took $245,000 in exchange for delivering contracts.

Former Marlboro Mayor Matthew Scannapieco was sentenced to 21 months in federal today, three years after pleading guilty to accepting about $245,000 worth of bribes.

Scannapieco admitted in 2005 to accepting payments from developer Anthony Spalliero in exchange for supporting his projects, and pleaded guilty to tax evasion as well. 

Scannapieco, served as mayor from 1992 to 2003, could have been sentenced to up to 15 years in prison but was granted a lenient sentence for cooperating with the investigation. 

In Marlboro, Democratic Mayoral candidate Jon Hornik is demanding that Republican Mayor Robert Kleinberg give back money he took from former Mayor Matthew Scannapieco, who admitted to taking $245,000 from developers.

"Mayor Kleinberg has taken money from felons and given Marlboro the highest property taxes in New Jersey and overdevelopment," Hornik said.

Marlboro Mayor Robert Kleinberg
How a sleepy hollow farming burgh became a build-out crossroads and earned itself a shot as a sprawl capital may have roots in human nature but surely can be immediately traced to the world of New Jersey politics.

When the daughter of a local market farmer here died in child birth in the 1970s, that death was symbolic of a transition to a time when people not only didn’t work the land anymore but cashed in on wrecking it as at no other time. Surrounded by new development and still deaf from artillery fire in Vietnam, another farmer retreated to a broken down school bus on his dried up spread on the side of Route 79 before he left town. Now it’s the senior citizens clinging to a last shred of space, wondering whether to sell and move to Florida or keep forking over money.

Headed into a November general election, two Democratic senators hope to burnish their reformer credentials by kayoing the discredited Victims of Crime Compensation Board.

For one of them the legislation marks a return to an old battlefield.