One insider told me that he was asked, as a favor, to have lunch with Gary Taffet, McGreevey’s campaign manager, before McGreevey was even elected governor. “While we’re at lunch, his cell phone keeps going off, and to show his immaturity, he keeps taking the calls,” the source says. “One of the calls was from Kushner, and he was, in very strong and angry terms, letting Taffet know he wanted the deal to redevelop the waterfront in Perth Amboy. It was a huge deal, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and it had gone to another developer.

“While I’m sitting there, Taffet calls the mayor of Perth Amboy and puts in a big play for Kushner, talking about how ‘he’s our guy and how important he is to McGreevey.’ The mayor then said something about Kushner losing the bid. Taffet said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ And guess what? Kushner eventually did get part of that deal.”

New Jersey politics is a tangled web. McGreevey’s current chief of staff, Jamie Fox, used to be Robert Torricelli’s chief of staff. MWW, the public-relations firm that hired Golan Cipel when his career in government was over, was actually started by Torricelli and Jim Florio. The law firm of State Senator Ray Lesniak, McGreevey backer and confidant, was chosen by then-Mayor McGreevey to represent the town of Woodbridge.

“From day one of the McGreevey administration, everything became a fix again,” says Marcus, a voluble political veteran in a white shirt, gold cuff links, and Gucci loafers, who was only 21 years old in 1968 when he was an assistant to Richard Nixon’s campaign manager. “You couldn’t discuss a policy issue with them. They were only interested in who the contributor was and who they had to take care of.”

Though the locus of this story is McGreevey’s sexuality, it is the overlay of corruption and abuse of power that makes it a uniquely New Jersey tale. Though corruption happens elsewhere (witness Connecticut), it is as much a part of New Jersey as Princeton, Atlantic City, and Bruce Springsteen.

Part of the problem is the fragmentation of local politics. New Jersey has more than 600 school districts and 566 municipalities. And each one of them has to hire a lawyer and an accountant and an administrator. This is where the “pay to play” issue takes hold: These jobs are often parceled out to the people who contribute the most to local politicians.

New Jersey is also a newspaper state in an electronic world. There is no network-affiliated television station serving the state, and as a result, voters often elect people they don’t know very well. TV advertising is exorbitantly expensive, because candidates have to buy time on New York or Philadelphia stations, where 70 percent of the people they’re paying to reach aren’t Jersey residents.

The near-prohibitive cost of running for office is a principal reason Senator Jon Corzine has become the white knight of New Jersey politics. Not because of policy initiatives but because he had the financial muscle to spend $65 million of his own money to get elected. But even without the encumbrances that come from having to raise huge sums of money, Corzine is still completely entangled in the web of New Jersey politics. His mentor and political rabbi was disgraced senator Robert Torricelli. He was business partners with Charles Kushner in the failed attempt to buy the Nets. And he is close to McGreevey as well.

The appointment of Golan Cipel went way beyond the normal practice of rewarding a faithful supporter with a sinecure. It was, in its way, McGreevey’s Gary Hart moment. Though he didn’t actually issue a verbal challenge to the media like Hart did—“If you think I’m up to something, follow me. I dare you”—he might as well have. “I think that giving Cipel that job was borderline insane,” says David Twersky, the head of international affairs for the American Jewish Congress, who knows McGreevey well. “Either the governor was just so arrogant about this that he lost all sense of judgment, or he was so torn up inside about his sexuality that he simply couldn’t take it anymore and he purposely put him where everyone would find him.”

They found him quickly. Within days of the Cipel appointment, the Bergen Record ran a story asking who this unknown Israeli named Golan Cipel was and why, given his obvious lack of credentials, he had been named to a homeland-security post. The story even went so far as to describe Cipel as the governor’s traveling companion.

And there it was. It was subtle, but for the first time, a window on the governor’s sexuality had been opened. From there, it didn’t take long before an Associated Press reporter stood up at a press conference in March of last year and bluntly asked the question everybody in Trenton was gossiping about: He asked McGreevey if he was gay. The governor, of course, dismissed the question as ridiculous.

Without the Cipel appointment, McGreevey undoubtedly could have continued his double life. There had been rumors about his sexuality as far back as his ’97 race against Whitman. And they were raised again in 2001 by Torricelli’s people when, for a bruising twelve-day period, the senator decided he wanted to push McGreevey aside and run for governor himself.

Near the end of 2002, McGreevey named Kushner to head the Port Authority. It is one of the most powerful posts in New Jersey, a job that would give him extraordinary control over hundreds of millions of dollars in development contracts—just as the redevelopment of downtown Manhattan was about to begin.

Kushner, however, was never confirmed. Within weeks of McGreevey’s announcement, William Gormley, head of the State Senate’s Judiciary Committee, demanded that Kushner come to Trenton to answer questions about potential conflicts of interest and other issues or else he’d move to block the appointment. Kushner didn’t blink. He had no intention of submitting to any kind of review. He simply resigned.