Julian Dorey Podcast - 😱 [VIDEO] - The COLDEST CASE in NJ History | Nancy Solomon • #118

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Listen To Nancy’s Investigative True Crime Podcast Special on The Sheridan Murders, “Dead End”: https://link.chtbl.com/deadendpodcast?sid=trendifierpodcast (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Nancy Solomon is an investigative journalist and podcaster. Her recent Podcast Series, “Dead End” explores the unsolved Sheridan Cold Case — a mysterious 2014 double homicide in Skillman, NJ that has implications far beyond the crime itself. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Background on John Sheridan’s public life 19:02 - Nancy breaks down the crime scene, the aftermath, and what went wrong w/ the investigation 42:16 - Sheridan sons turn against the investigators; Hiring Michael Baden to examine the bodies; Mark Sheridan’s relationship w/ Chris Christie 56:30 - In-depth details investigators missed at the crime scene 1:15:50 - The Most powerful man in NJ & his relationship w/ Chris Christie 1:34:40 - The Camden Waterfront deal (tied to the case…?) and the law that brought it about EXPLAINED 1:52:16 - Mark Sheridan uncovers a treasure trove of disturbing documents his father left behind 2:04:32 - George Norcross’ unbelievable political power in New Jersey 2:20:33 - The Sean Caddle - Michael Galdieri 2014 Hit SOLVED…and tied to this case??? 2:34:54 - Legendary Defense Attorney Michael Critchley and Nancy go toe-to-toe 2:53:35 - The problem with the Attorney General when the case was under investigation; Why didn’t FBI get involved? 3:04:04 - Nancy’s podcast made the government officially REOPEN THE CASE; Nancy gives the latest updates ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Intro Music Via Artlist.io Intro Video Credits: -Don’t Breathe 2 (2021) -The Guilty (2021) -Captive State (2019) -Wildlife (2018) -Prisoners (2013) -Julien Hulin -ABC News -NJ.com -Eagleton Institute of Politics -Axios (HBO) -The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon -CBS News Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Before sunrise, a neighbor, next door neighbor, smells smoke and he goes outside and he thinks he can see smoke coming out of the Sheridan house. He calls 911 and they send out fire and police right away. What they found was Joyce Sheridan had been stabbed multiple times. She was dead. She was lying on the floor. They find John Sheridan under the armoire. He's stabbed and on fire. John Sheridan had worked basically his whole career in New Jersey politics, and he was sort of an informal advisor, if not an official advisor, to several governors. So the detectives and the prosecutors sit down and meet with the brothers and they say,

well, look, your father killed your mother and then tried to stab himself and couldn't do it. Then the brothers get access to the house and they just can't believe what they find. Like the rug that their father died on, that is a blood stain, is sitting rolled up in the hallway. There's no fingerprint dust how soon did they start looking into a guy like boden immediately yes that week now what did he find well see this is super interesting right what's cooking everybody i am joined in the bunker today by the reporter who potentially

may have broken this whole case you just heard about in the intro wide open nancy solomon of wnyc now what do i mean by that well nancy did a deep dive investigation on the sheridan murders for about two years she'll talk about it today and some of the process. And what that culminated in was a podcast called Dead End. And Dead End is released on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts on audio. It also has the audio versions on YouTube as well. And I will put the links to it down in the description below. Please go check it out. It's incredible work. Anyway, Nancy put that out in April and May. And by the time she got to the end of the podcast, she actually had to put out

an emergency 10 minute episode to announce that the case had been reopened officially as a result of her work. Now you'll hear all about the implications and why this isn't just some normal murder. And you're also going to hear all about some of the other investigations nancy's done that could or could not be tied directly to what happened to the sheridans in their home almost exactly eight years ago as this episode is coming out in september 2014 this one was a wild episode i really really appreciate nancy coming in and i'd appreciate you guys sharing this around on the different platforms as well because we'd love to spread the word it's just just amazing work she's done and I hope it can solve the case too. Sounds like we're on a good path. Anyway, if you're on YouTube right now, please

hit that subscribe button. Please hit that like button on the video. And as always, please give me your thoughts about this episode and the case down in the comments below. To everyone who has been sharing around the episode with their friends, thank you so much. That's a huge, huge help. Let's keep that rolling. To everyone who is on Apple or Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, please be sure to leave a five-star review on either one of those platforms, and I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, this is Trendafire, and please welcome Nancy Solomon. Nancy Solomon, thank you for coming down here. Thanks for having me. Nice long ride down the turnpike

into South Jersey. That's exactly right. Don't hold the South against us here. Never do. My favorite part of the state. It's so interesting. Oh, really? Yeah, I love it down here. Where are you originally from? Massachusetts. Okay. Yeah. And how'd you end up in New Jersey? My partner at the time got a job at Rutgers. Okay. So I had been living on the West Coast for many years, and we moved with our son to South Orange, New Jersey. Gotcha.

Okay. But you have now been entrenched in covering what's mostly New Jersey politics for a lot of years for WNYC. That's right. And the reason I'm having you in here today is because you released an unbelievable podcast that everyone here should listen to. It's called Dead End. It's on all platforms, including YouTube. But it's audio only i think right yes okay and you went way below the surface of what is probably the coldest case murder definitely in the political sphere in the history of new jersey and one of the coldest cases period in the history of New Jersey and one of the coldest cases, period, in the history of New Jersey on the Sheridans. So quick question before we start. What got you into this? How did you end up in this story? Because this happened in 2014 and maybe, if you don't mind, provide a little

background on who the Sheridans were and what went down. Sure. So John and Joyce Sheridan lived in the suburbs outside of Princeton. And John Sheridan had worked basically his whole career in New Jersey politics. He started out working for, after law school, he went to work for a governor. And then he became the transportation commissioner, so a member of the cabinet for Governor Tom Kaine in the 80s. And then he went from that to working at one of the top law firms in the state as a lobbyist. So he worked in Trenton building relationships with people in the legislature and working on public policy and lobbying for clients. And he was sort of an informal advisor, if not an official advisor to several governors. He had a close relationship with Christine Todd Whitman. When was she governor again? So yeah, in the 90s, like the late 90s.

Okay. And then I think when george w bush became president in 2000 she went to the um environmental protection agency and was in his cabinet became the commissioner for that so yeah it was right up to 2000 and then mcgreevy was after her yes right okay no I got it. a guy who was not a household name, was not known by the public, but was known really well in political and sort of power circles of New Jersey. There were 1,800 people at his memorial service, which included the entire state legislature. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients.

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fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. And every other, you know, and four former governors. It was just, you know, a real showing of who he was. So that's John and Joyce Sheridan. They were found dead in their bedroom in September, the morning of September 28th, which was a Sunday morning. So Saturday night into Sunday morning in 2014. And at the time, I was editing and supervising our New Jersey coverage for WNYC. We're the NPR affiliate in New York, so public radio, we run the NPR shows

that people are very familiar with and then put our own local reporting into those shows. So I was focused on New Jersey news coverage at the time, as I have been for many years. And the murders, or at the time, the deaths, we didn't know what had happened, were just incredibly intriguing to pretty much, you know, anybody power broker, a party boss. We'll definitely talk about him today. We will be talking about that. So, you know, the fact that John Sheridan worked for this man who's so well known and so powerful in the state in terms of New Jersey politics. Yeah, that was immediately intriguing to me, to many reporters. scene and the little bit that the the detectives weren't talking much but the little bits and pieces that were dribbling out in the month after that it just got kind of stranger and stranger

which you know makes you more curious about something so i was very curious about this in 2014 uh because we're a new york station and we cover really like the northern half of New Jersey and we don't cover South Jersey that much. So it was really kind of far afield for us and we didn't assign a reporter to the story. We didn't cover it in that way. So I was just kind of keeping tabs on it and watching it myself. Fast forward to 2019, I was working on a series of stories all year long during the calendar year of 2019, looking at the political machines in New Jersey and the party bosses and how that system works. We often hear about political machines, but how do they work exactly? How do

people gain power? How do they hold on to that power? What do they benefit from it? And how do they use those levers of power? Those were kind of the questions I was interested in. I never really got beyond George Norcross and Camden because I started reporting on him first, and there was just so much to do. It took up the whole year, and that's all I had for that project was a year. To be clear, I just want to make sure I'm following correctly here as well. Because I was, as I told you on the phone, I was actually way less knowledgeable on Norcross and his whole history because he's more of a behind-the-scenes guy. But my understanding is that he's also, he's effectively like the head of the New Jersey machine himself, like not just South Jersey. Well, you know, every county has its own political machine, but he effectively built a statewide operation.

And he did it in a couple, you know, a few different ways. But he basically created a coalition that was sort of allowing him to handpick, you know, the Senate president. He had insurance, he has insurance business all over the state. So he builds political relationships that lead to being able to get some of that government business, insuring, you know, town councils to city halls, police fire, that sort of thing. So he was really building, after he solidified and built the South Jersey Democratic machine, he then started working in many ways that would be considered statewide. So he has, he's often referred to kind of in shorthand in news articles as, you know, the most powerful political person in New Jersey who's unelected because, you know, the governor is more powerful on paper at the very least.

On paper. But here's a guy who has relationships and has been able to, you know, do it. I mean, he does it quite well. Yes. And some of it is like genuine, you know, using professional pollsters and using data and running campaigns. Like he brought a level of success and professionalism to many South Jersey campaigns.

And, you know, he built this operation through, you know, smart investments in these campaigns. So anyway, so in 2019, I was working on looking at how the political machine operates. And I kind of tripped into a, the waterfront development in Camden and George Norcross's involvement in it. And that's when I realized that John Sheridan, who had been kind of just this mystery off in the back of my mind for many years, was connected to that land deal and what was going on in Camden at the time in 2014. And I was told that he had had a major falling out with George Norcross over those land deals and waterfront development in Camden. While you were investigating this. In 2019 while I was investigating that stuff. So that kind of like, you know, you could have knocked me over with a feather. While you were investigating this. a true crime podcast, um, and I pitched the idea that we could dig into the crime story, uh, and also tell a story about political machines and possibly corruption in New Jersey.

And that the, that the, the one, you know, it would be a great story to tell to get folks interested by, with this really interesting, compelling really interesting compelling mystery and then do a little explaining of how the system works and you know where we could make the connections we would and where we couldn't we wouldn't and when did you start actually worry that you pitched the idea in 2019 yeah at the very end of the year and then when did you start because it people will find when they listen to this podcast it's not like this kind of podcast you went and did interviews in person with people you had narratives to it you had you had music in there it was so well produced everything was so well done but like when did you i guess like commence the actual recording

january 1st 2020 we started right away wow. I mean, I had pitched the idea in probably, you know, in September, October of 2019. I was starting to think about it. And so it went through that process at the end of 2019. And we were ready to hit the ground running at the beginning of the year. I didn't realize you were recording this for like two years. Yeah. Well, there were a few breaks. So January 2020, we start working on it. March 10th, 2020, we go home and stop going to the office.

And COVID obviously was so huge. I just went back to my news job in the newsroom covering New Jersey because it was just, there was too much going on and I was needed. It was an all hands on deck kind of situation. And it was hard to think about this other project. It was just so such a, and we didn't realize how long it was going to go on for. You know, we thought, okay, you know, we're going to stop the curve. Yeah, exactly. So it was about it, I didn't really pick it back up until January of 2021. So it was the rest of that year. So good eight months or whatever that is still a long time working on right. So then I really worked on it that year, I took another long break of about six weeks in the fall of 2021 for the gubernatorial election in new jersey

uh when phil murphy got reelected so i worked on that um and then i went back full time onto the podcast and we uh it we launched at the end of april of 2022. right and you put it all out over like what a six week period something like-week period, and there were eight total episodes. Yeah. And the seventh was unplanned. Yes. We'll get to that. I'll leave that one there.

So thank you so much for the full background because there's people right now listening. Their heads are spinning because there's a lot on the bone there. Yeah. So we will – I wasn't stopping you on Norcross and some of that other stuff. We will get to that all in due time. But to go back to the actual murder itself, which you did outline the basics of who the Sheridans were, it was a husband and wife. You mentioned who John was and another thing in there that I don't know if you said, like unanimously said, is that he was in an unbelievably corrupt state. He was a very well-liked guy. He was a – there was someone I was listening to who had a perfect term for it like on the morality spectrum where he was – they were like he was – I forget the word. It's on the tip of my tongue.

But they were basically saying he was uncorruptible. I think that's what they were saying. Like he was one of those guys who truly in the politics, wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, understood that things were not exactly on the up and up in certain places. But on his end of things was someone who was reliable to both parties to be able to go to and have a friendly ear and so like you said he ends up being the ceo of a major hospital i mean cooper is a big time hospital it also happens to be in camden which for people listening right now who don't know about camden new jersey i was showing you the map of the fake map in new jersey before we started i'll put that in the corner of the screen for people where it renamed stuff. But they call Camden basically Detroit because the state has just over the years just crushed it of its resources and certain deals maybe took certain parts of the neighborhoods into account that didn't take others into account. We'll talk about that but you know there were so many business and

political meeting and butting heads things in the middle of this and yet when john sheridan died none of that to your point was really looked at they the the case itself was actually a cluster fuck from the beginning let's call it what it was so you you mentioned when they died. It was July 2014, and I think you did say – I'm sorry, September 2014. Thank you. That's why you're here. I think you did say that they were – the husband and wife were stabbed to death in their home in the wee hours of Sunday morning, late Saturday night of that time but what were can you just take us to the crime scene and what happened from the first step which you had a lot of people on your podcast detectives everything talking about this you gave

a great picture so i'd love to paint that again here sure so uh before sunrise on september 28th uh a neighbor next door neighbor smells smoke he's's up early and he goes outside and he thinks he can see smoke coming out of the Sheridan house. It's hard to tell because it's dark, but he can definitely smell the smoke. He calls 911 and they send out fire and police right away. And they ask him to go knock on the door and see if he can get anyone who's in the house out of the house um and wake them up so he starts banging on the door and all of this is on the 911 recordings um and he's trying to he's ringing the doorbell banging on the door and he nobody comes and um the police and firefighters get there they They go inside. The house is filled with smoke. They eventually clear the bottom floor.

They go upstairs, and the master bedroom door is closed, and they can't open it. And so it takes them a while to get into the bedroom. turns out that a very large wooden armoire was tipped over on its you know on its bottom uh laying on the floor blocking the door so this turns out to be a crucial piece of information because what they found was joyce sheridan had been stabbed multiple times. She was lying, she was dead. She was lying on the floor. And John Sheridan was, and the room is on fire. They have to put out the fire. They find John Sheridan under the armoire. He's been, he's stabbed. And the armoire is on top of him and on fire.

And, um, so this is the, and so this is the scene that they find. So, and the firefighters put out the fire and start tossing everything that's in the room into the bathroom that's adjacent to the bedroom. I guess, you know, it's smoldering and they want to like and so anyway so the crime scene you know we all watch these detective stories right the crime scene's really messed up because of the fire essentially yeah and they they've and then uh they bring the bodies out to the front to the ambulance um and when the detectives arrive, they're told, the detective that I interviewed, whose job it was, was to photograph the house, the crime scene, the bodies. He was told, don't worry about the stairwell, ignore that, because there was blood all along the walls

of the stairwell and on the stairs and he was the his captain told him that the firefighters had told the captain that this was the blood that spilled when they took joy sheridan out of the house on the walls on the yeah the bottom of the walls um and it was smudged and it was like they were carrying her out and they spilled, you know, there was a lot of blood spilled and it smeared on the walls. And so he didn't photograph the stairwell, which turns out to be another crucial issue later on. So the detectives take one look at this situation. The room is blocked from the inside. They couldn't get in at first.

They know that the firefighters and police couldn't get in at first. They know that the firefighters and police couldn't get in at first. There's almost $1,000 in cash sitting out in the open on the bedside table. There's an iPad. There are phones. So robbery's out. And so they think this isn't a robbery. This isn't a home invasion. There was no sign of forced entry at either the front or the back door. There are no broken windows.

So they decide really quickly that they think they're dealing with a murder-suicide. And that pretty much governs everything that they do going forward, which turns out to be a real problem. Were the bodies, when they brought them out to the ambulance, you know, that fire had been going, at least had started effectively for at least a half hour before then, I would imagine. Something like that yeah and the detectives were quickly were able to determine that there was a gas can in the room and that their gas had been poured on the floor and lit there was a pack of matches the gas can so it was all there in in the room so i'm not a fire expert but i know fire spreads pretty fast especially with gas cans how were their bodies not just completely burned i think that because all the doors were closed and the windows were closed, the fire lacked oxygen.

No one ever told me that, but that's kind of, I think, what could be deduced at this point. Okay. I never really got into that question. It's a good one. But I think the fire definitely burned. There was a lot of damage in the room and John Sheridan's body was badly burned.

But it wasn't like a raging fire to the point where it destroyed everything. Okay. So they bring the bodies out. They didn't collect the blood, as you said. And somebody told somebody who told somebody and the guy taking the pictures that, oh, it got smudged on the wall on the way down. So as you said, we'll get to that and where that came up. But what else besides also the firemen having to move some of the stuff out of the way as they were trying to put it out, what else was wrong with the scene um so well let's let's how about if we back up a little bit and we introduce mark sheridan the son of john and joy share yeah let's do it uh because he he ended up being very dissatisfied with the investigation and doing a lot of his own investigative work. So I think it makes sense to kind of introduce him. So Mark Sheridan is an attorney in New Jersey.

He, at the time of his father's death, he was the attorney for the state Republican Party, and he worked as an attorney for the Chris Christie campaign. So Chris Christie was the Republican governor in 2014 at the time of when this happened. who's got a lot of important people in his cell phone. And, you know, when... At first, he's sort of believing everything that the detectives are telling him because he's an establishment guy and he believes that these people know what they're doing. They're the professionals, and why would you question them?

How old was he at this time? Roughly. Good question. Maybe in his 40s. Okay. I hope I'm right on that one. I hate it. So what happens is, so this is early Sunday morning.

On Tuesday, Mark Sheridan and his three brothers meet with the county prosecutor and the detective. So in New Jersey, all major crimes are investigated by a county prosecutor's office, not the local police. So a death like this goes right to them immediately. The local police don't get this case. So they, the detectives and the prosecutors sit down and meet with the brothers and they say, well, you know, they're sort of beating around the bush a little bit and they're kind of

trying to be kind of gentle with this information, but they, they're, but they tell the brothers that John Sheridan had hesitation wounds and they're like, what, what, like, what's a hesitation wound? What is that? And they're sort of not, the prosecutor tries again to explain it, but he's trying to be super, like, careful and gentle,

and he's not being very clear. And finally, like, the assistant prosecutor jumps in and says, look, your father killed your mother and then tried to stab himself and couldn't do it. And so, yeah. And just like your reaction, the brothers just like it's like a tinderbox. They explode and they're like, no way. Yeah.

That did not happen. And so that leads them down a path. Uh, the next day they're given access back to the house. The crime scene and part of the investigation of taking evidence is done and they turn the house back to the family. Is that fast? Because that's only Wednesday. That's three days later. Is that fast for a crime like that? It seems fast to me. I mean, I think what we now know looking back is that they didn't do a whole lot of analysis of that crime scene because they had made up their minds that it was a murder-suicide. to everyone who has been sharing around these episodes on social media and with your friends whether you're on youtube apple spotify etc thank you so much that's the best possible thing we can do to grow this show and continue to get great guests like this so let's keep that rolling and to everyone who hasn't done that yet i really really appreciate it if you got on board thank you and you know i've i've talked to other, many other homicide detectives or, you know, former detectives who now teach in, you know, at a university on criminal justice.

And, you know, what I've been told is, you know, quite clearly, like, it doesn't matter if you think it was a murder-suicide or not, you're still, you know, responsible to do a full investigation, to take all the evidence, to analyze it, to keep an open mind and look at every possibility, to, you know, to not just come to a judgment and not go look any further. So that was the first mistake, I think you could rightly say that they made um then the brothers get access to the house and they just can't believe what they find i mean they're just like you know really upset and shocked because they see a lot of material in the house that wasn't taken into evidence like the rug that their father died on that is a bloodain is sitting rolled up in the hallway and there's no fingerprint dust and so they start to see things like wait a minute you know this doesn't look

right and they already are upset about this determination but I think at that point I mean what the way mark sheridan talked about it is he was still it wasn't until the day that he went to the house and saw the crime scene that he started to doubt the prosecutor's office because he also and again a guy who is a high level attorney he works in the state just like you said works he was it was chris christie's election campaign right that's who he was the head attorney for so i would imagine as much of a shock and disbelief that that first news comes from the detectives for a guy like him it still would probably take going there to actually be like wait a minute because he's not the kind of guy who's like well i could do this job better

than these people then you get there you see a lack of fingerprint dusting going on, like all these problems, and he immediately turns. What's curious to me though is when they had that meeting with them, that was on Tuesday, you said? So when the prosecutor is meeting with the sons, did they – after revealing that, did they try to get at a motive? Had they even thought about that? Or was this just clearly, no, he had hesitation wounds, so he must have killed her? They said, listen, we see this all the time. We're going to find something. Mom had a boyfriend.

Dad had a girlfriend. Not to be too heteronormative about it but that's what they said um you know and or there were money problems or there were work problems or you know there were or there were drug problems we'll we don't know what the motive was but we'll find out and we'll tell you and we will find out and we will tell you and so that's that's what they were told on that Tuesday. And that news didn't break yet, right? Because the memorial was later that week or something.

No one knew about this. They just thought they were murdered still. When did it hit the public airways where the detectives were saying, hey, we think he killed his wife and then killed himself? I don't think that was public until February or March of the following year. But there were rumors and there were, you know, Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor, told me that at the memorial service, rumors were flying and the story was unbelievable. So she kind of hints that she knew that the detectives believed it was a murder suicide at that point because she and but certainly, you know, the first the the information came out in bits and pieces. And, you know, first it was that the fire was intentionally set.

Then it was that they about a month later that they were stabbed to death um you know when you're hearing this stuff well the the the fire was intentionally set but he was underneath the armor like what the hell is that about it's like yeah he shot himself and drowned himself at the same time it's it's one of those you hear that and this this is a he was 70 years old right yeah 70 so it's not like you know a 35 year old guy benching 225 or anything this was an older man and like to me i'm not a detective i'm not i'm not an expert by any means in that stuff but from an armchair quarterback perspective the first time you hear just the basics of the crime scene without any of the fingerprints, which they didn't even get without any of the other data, you're like someone else had to be there. This makes no sense.

And the thing that I don't know that you said, but it's worth saying at least for people wondering, well, how does someone just get in the house? This was in Skillman, New Jersey. Skillman is outside Princeton. It's Bougieville,ville usa they don't let people like me in places like that it's very very nice my understanding is that no one in the neighborhood even locked their doors this is a rural very high-end neighborhood and it wasn't even like a thing so it's perfectly reasonable to say based on what all the other neighbors said that someone could just walked in the back door yes that is true that there was everyone

that i talked to confirmed that the sheridans did not lock their doors um you know this was farmland that had been like carved out and suburbs had been built on on it i mean that when the sheridans moved there in the 80s or late 70s or 1980 maybe it was. It was just being converted from farmland and they were one of the first people to build a house on that street. And, you know, you could hear cows mooing in the distance when the kids were growing up there. And so it was, yeah, it was considered a very safe place. You know, the local police had only been called to the house once in the 30 years that they lived there, and that was when Joyce fell down and injured her hip.

And, you know, there just wasn't a whole lot of crime. And there was also, I think you had this in your podcast as well. If you didn't, then I may have read it somewhere. So you can tell me if this is true or not. But there was apparently a neighbor who the week before, theay morning before like a full week he was pulling out of his driveway at around 5 a.m something like that and as he's again rural place the people aren't coming through there 5 a.m he goes to pull out and he almost hits a car that's sitting in the middle of the cul-de-sac staring at the sheridan's house with the lights off and he's like oh shit and there were two people in there and he didn't think anything of it pulled away drove away rest is history the cops didn't was it that the cops didn't even

interview that guy or take that into account was that another thing there yeah yeah you got that almost exactly right uh the only thing i would edit there in that telling is that um he thought it was extremely weird when he nearly hit the car backing out of his driveway he thought it was it was really strange that there was a car sitting there at five in the morning um and what was even more strange was that they quickly turned on the engine, peeled out, and took a right turn at the next street, which is right before the Sheridan's house, which is another dead end cul-de-sac. Oh, I don't remember that. This guy thought, these people don't know where they are. They're not local because they're going at a very fast clip right into another dead end.

And he wanted to follow them and see what the hell they were up to. But he was afraid. And he felt like that's probably a bad idea to be confronting these people in the dark alone. And I, you know, that's how menacing and sinister it seemed to him at the time and he didn't call the cops uh he did not and then a week later the you know the Sheridans are found dead in their bedroom and the whole neighborhood is of course talking about it non-stop and the even though the police have told the neighbors there's nothing to worry about, it was a family matter, there's no intruder, the people in the neighborhood are like, that couldn't wait a minute, I saw this thing a week ago, that was really suspicious. And you know what, it was at exactly the time it was on,

it was Sunday morning, five o'clock in the morning, exactly the time the Sheridans were killed. But a week earlier, could these people have been casing the joint? That's what he thought. So he called the police and they took a report. And he could remember, he said at the time he could remember a lot of detail about the car. When I finally, you know, tracked him down seven years later, you know, he couldn't remember the make of the car and, you know, but he remembered the story quite well. And so, you know, but he never heard back from the police. You know, they took his report, but that's all he ever. They never interviewed him. No, as far as I know, no. I think was with Joyce's best friend. And she ended up becoming a character in your story, which we'll explain a little more later. But she was explaining how at her at Joyce's memorial,

five days later or whatever, she's up on the stage with her husband, giving a eulogy to Joyce. And she mentions how she had lunch with Joycece two days before the murder and as she said it you interviewed her husband and her husband also said like that moment i'm like oh shit now the cops are going to talk to us right after this but the cops never came right so someone one of the last people besides her husband obviously to see joyce alive was not interviewed by the cops and also one of the guys calling in a literal tip of something he saw a week before was not interviewed by the cops and also one of the guys calling in a literal tip of something he saw a week before was not interviewed by the cops right those two things we'll all the other stuff we'll talk about too but like those two things alone right there before you even get to

the fire poacher or the 70 year old putting an armoire on top of himself and then stabbing himself to death i mean yeah it's's almost like whoever's pulling some strings here just thinks everyone's stupid. I don't know about that, but, you know, it's a real shame that they didn't focus on that car that could have been casing the place because there's only one real main road in and out of that neighborhood.

And there could have been video of cars that night coming and going. But that's long gone now, you know, so to have been able, like, I mean, maybe I can't say that they didn't look for that car and they didn't look at the video and they didn't look for a license plate, they might have. But it seems to me that given everything else we know, it's not likely that they did. And that could have been a major break in this case. And the thing with Chris is it's not just that she was one of the last people to see Joyce Sheridan alive. They had a three-hour lunch. They were best friends. And Chris insists that if anything was going on that was problematic in her relationship with her husband,

that Chris would have known about it. So if you're the detective and you think that this was a murder-suicide, wouldn't you want to go interview the best friend who had lunch with her to find out what they talked about that day? So, yeah, that was an amazing story to hear from Bob Stevens, who also, by the way, happened to have worked at the Attorney General's office and really knew his way around an investigation. Who's Bob? Chris's husband. Husband, right, okay. So, you know, he really understands how you do an investigation. And, you know, he canceled the rest of his work day and went home with his wife, Chris, figuring the detectives would be waiting on their doorstep

uh and the only thing they found was a business card left by a reporter asking to be called oh my god wow so now like you were saying people were gossiping at the funeral and everything but now the friends who already couldn't believe it pretty early on they're thinking not just oh we can't believe this but now they're thinking all right some something's up here too like something's being covered because word like that's traveling fast yeah i'm i think i'm not sure what people thought about the motives of why the investigation was going so poorly. But I think most of the talk centered on this investigation is going poorly and we need help. We need somebody to really investigate this thing. So the brothers, I mean, very quickly, early on in this process, they do a few things.

They hire an independent medical examiner to do a second autopsy they didn't just hire a independent and independent they hired the guy yeah yeah he's getting yes he's a little long in the tooth these days but uh he's had a long storied career that's michael bodden um medical examiner to the stars. JFK, MLK, Jeffrey Epstein, George Floyd. I'm missing a lot of people in between those years too. Yeah, and he was a New York City medical examiner and they put out his own shingle. And he's had, yeah, some of the biggest cases in American history.

How soon did the brothers get to, you said they came home on Wednesday. So they, they thought something was up. That was three days after. How soon did they start looking into a guy like Biden? Immediately. Right. That,

yes, that week. Um, I believe it was, uh, it was before the memorial. So I believe it was about five days after their deaths that he conducted the second autopsy. Oh, wow.

Right away. So, yeah. Now, what did he find? Well, see, this is super interesting, right? He found that the knife wound that killed John Sheridan, there was really no question killed John Sheridan. There was really no question about Joyce Sheridan. It was, she had large knife gashes that matched a knife that was found in the bedroom,

a kitchen, a big chef's knife, a kitchen knife. And so that wasn't really what was, you know, in question, but it was more John Sheridan and the so-called hesitation wounds. Um, so Bodden looks at these wounds and sees that they're about two inches deep. Um, and they're very, and it's, it's not that it's a's a large knife that didn't go in very far, only like a hesitation wound means the tip went in, you felt the pain and you brought it back out. As if you're fighting back. Yeah. Like when someone's trying to stab you. Or you're trying to stab yourself and it hurts and you can't get yourself to do it. So he said, no, it was a narrow blade that went deep, like a stiletto, you know, a knife, you know, like a switchblade.

And he said, so the murder weapon for John Sheridan is not the knife that they found in the bedroom, the kitchen knife that came from the Sheridan's kitchen. It wasn't a large carving knife. It was a thin bladed knife like a stiletto or a switchblade. And that knife was never found. So that's huge, right? That the knife that killed John Sheridan was not in the room. And so I'm interviewing the, the Mr. Dr. Bodden, the medical examiner, and I say, well, I can't imagine any scenario in which someone commits suicide with a knife and the knife's not found near their body like how because he had sort of minced his words like well it seemed you know it's suspicious and it's a red flag but you never know kind of a thing you could have walked a mile away and came back and died yeah so uh he said

well you know odd things happen there was the time he was investigating a case where somebody had tied a bungee cord to the knife and stabbed themselves and the knife flew out the window. But then at least you'd see the knife hanging out the window, right? So, you know, he acknowledged that he believed the knife was missing, but he said, you can't say definitively because odd things happen as he put it uh but uh to me you know and this was just a huge revelation for the sheridan brothers uh and immediately they learn that and mark sheridan calls the county prosecutor and says you got to come back out and process that crime scene again. And you have to reinvestigate this. You have a missing murder weapon.

And then he got on the phone with the state attorney general's office. Because remember, I mean, this is a guy who has big connections and he has people in his phone. Had he called Christie yet? Chris Christie called him that Sunday that his parents were found dead to offer his condolences. Not since he was actually looking into this though. No. And I asked him about that. And he, he never, Mark Sheridan says he never called Chris Christie and asked for his help and that it would have presented it would have been unprofessional and presented a conflict of interest as his attorney to do that um as the

attorney who worked on the campaign and the attorney for the state republican party that he'd be asking him to do a favor for him in a way that he didn't feel like he should a quick quick question though because I mean that's nice of him to think that. I actually wouldn't have that thought. I mean, your parents were just murdered. I don't think that's the case, but I appreciate him trying to be balanced. What's the big difference, though, between calling Chris Christie

or calling some of the other guys involved with the case who know who he is? It's kind of, I mean, obviously, Chris Christie has more power. He's the governor of the whole damn state, but... I think the difference is that Chris Christie was actually his client. And so he has a different kind of relationship with him. It's his job to represent Chris Christie and Chris Christie's interests legally. And I think that there are certain ethical guidelines that lawyers go by in that situation.

It didn't stop him from, and I don't think there's, I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with this. He called the chief counsel, who is the, you know, top lawyer in the state government. He's counsel to the governor, but he's really works for the state. He's the chief lawyer for the state of New Jersey. He called him first thing when he was on his way to the house Sunday morning. He knew he needed to reach the county prosecutor. He didn't know the county prosecutor. And so the chief counsel to Chris Christie, Chris Perino, made

the call to the prosecutor, asked him to call Mark Sheridan and gave him his number. Who was the prosecutor again? to call mark sheridan gave him his number who was the prosecutor again uh his name was is jeff soriano okay and what was his what was his tie to christy because wasn't there stuff after this too was he like someone christy had appointed to that position well the governor appoints all the county prosecutors but christy um kind of made a little bit of a show after like a year later when things had really gone south uh christy made a bit of a show sort of looking like he was firing him it was really he didn't reappoint him as prosecutor and it it kind of got played in the media as that soriano was fired over the sheridan

case but really he he got a job at the attorney general's office so he wasn't it wasn't really like a real firing a politician doing a fake headline i've never seen that before so yeah so that was jeff soriano so um anyway so now you've got going back to the missing knife Mark Sheridan is just you know furious that they've done such a bad job um and things he really at this point he expects to see action and he still doesn't get anything and there were three other brothers who were helping him with this he was just kind of the point man because of his connections and he was the eldest brother and all that pretty much right yeah but wasn't there also forgot to ask about this wasn't there also

one of the brothers one of the younger ones had a whole tiff himself with the police while this investigation was going down and did that. And if you don't mind explaining that, number one, but number two, did that also contribute to some of the, let's say, lack of transparency between the detectives and the family? Yeah, this created a lot of tension between the family and the prosecutor's office so um mark sheridan has there are four brothers and mark and his brother matt are twins and they're the oldest and um matt at the time of their parents' deaths, was living at home. And he had gone away for the weekend. He's really into fishing. And he was away with a friend fishing for the weekend.

Comes rushing back to New Jersey when he finds out what happened and when he arrives the brothers have been asked to come to I can't remember if it's either the police department or the county prosecutor's office to meet with detectives and give statements this is like the very first contact and so he arrives at the police station and in the process that they, they're giving their statements and suddenly the detectives, it had to have been the county prosecutor's office detectives. They want to, they want to search his car. And as Mark Sheridan says, you know, it was like, it was just kind of weird. Like, what, what are you doing? He was away for the weekend. There's no reason to search his car. And he, everyone knows that he wasn't there. And it just seemed odd. They were all there

giving voluntary statements, trying to be as cooperative as possible, the way Mark tells it. So they search his car and they find some drug paraphernalia. So they arrest him. So here the brothers are dealing with the death of their parents, the violent death of their parents. They're in shock, for sure. Mark talks about it. And now they've got the detectives who are supposed to be finding out who killed their parents arresting their brother. And so that causes all this conflict too. Ultimately, they would move the case to a different county, and that search would be found to be illegal.

And, I mean, you know, the Sheridan family hires a lawyer to defend him, and they contest the search, and the whole case gets thrown out. Okay. thrown out okay i just and so there were some like there were rumors flying in the you know in the town about oh this was like some someone was looking for matt because he owed the money because he was doing drugs and that this is what it was tied to and mark i asked mark sheridan about this and he said uh there were his mother had had had back surgery and back problems, serious back problems and was on like, you know, opioids. Oh. And so there were opioids out in the open in the bedroom. There was a pile of cash.

His brother had money in the bank. He wasn't like broke and struggling right and um they're just like none of the actual facts really lead up to that being a viable motive and they quickly confirmed that he was in fact out of state while this was going on yeah there's there's the cell phone the cell phone data checked on all three all four brothers that they were where they said they were because i just thought of something while you were saying that thinking outside the box a little conspiracy in my head but he gave the statement at the prosecutor's offices right yeah and that's where they conducted the search of his car i believe so i could be wrong and it could have been at the local police

department but i think it was at the county prosecutor's office same difference did he so he he was these charges were dropped because it was illegal but in the in the conversations with various reporters like you or whatever has he gone on the record denying that that was his the drug paraphernalia i don't think he's ever spoken about it publicly okay then i won't go i won't go past that thenia i don't think he's ever spoken about it publicly okay then i won't go i won't go past that then i i don't think because i would assume he probably was just having a good time with a friend that weekend and you know a lot of people do that obviously and then the cop searched his car which wasn't really a fair thing to do. But if he's not going out and denying it in the whole bit, then I won't go past that.

I had another thought about something. But anyway, sorry, not to bring a soft track. So they're given all the statements. This whole thing, they arrest him. That was the other thing. I didn't realize they literally handcuffed him there and charged him right away. I didn't realize that.

So there's now a ton of animosity between the two and then they have the meeting on tuesday where now the prosecutor as you said says hey we're working on a theory that your your dad killed your mom so bodden looks at the body at some point in the next let's call it a week week and a half sooner he yes okay he even better he determines that of the two knives i think that were found at the scene there's a third knife that's missing because as you said i fucked that up in the moment when you were saying it but the hesitation wound obviously was them suggesting that like oh he didn't you know it's hard to i can't imagine stabbing myself i'd imagine i'd

probably hesitate too right so bodden comes in and says well no it's just a different knife so now you have just reviewing the things we've gone through you have the blood splatter on the wall that never had a picture taken of it you have the best medical examiner of all time saying they're missing a literal murder weapon you have a 70 year old man who was found beneath an armoire in his house where his wife is dead and the room is on fire. He did all this. No problem apparently. And you have the prosecutors and the sons going at it over something.

You have the prosecutors not going and interviewing either Joyce's best friend who met with her two days before or the neighbor who put the neighbor who pulled out of his house the week before and saw this car and what what else i mean there's a lot i can't even think of anything else to fuck up but they they had other problems too there was like a fire poacher or something was that another thing well let's go back to the blood spatter on the wall let's do it. In the stairwell, because this is crucial. So the significance of the detective not taking the photos of the blood spatter is that the detectives aren't later down the road able to determine whether the smoke stains, there's soot on the walls from the smoke, right? And so that kind of creates a timestamp where you have blood and you have soot. And when the blood is under the soot, the soot's on top, then you know that the blood was there before the fire was started. And when the blood is on top of the soot, then you know the blood was there, say, when the blood is on top of the soot then you know the blood was there say when the firefighters dragged out the bodies after the soot was on the walls so in the stairwell

and i love this story because it happened you know mark sheridan is uh you know notices this when he goes up the stairs for the and is looking at the crime scene. But then he allows a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Barb Boyer, to come and inspect the house. And that was the only reporter he let into the house at that point. Why didn't he let her in? She was doing some really good reporting about the case and sort of breaking details and getting you know stuff that the Prosecutor's office wasn't releasing and I think he thought she was good at what she does and I don't know

he liked her and he let her in and she brings with her a veteran Philly homicide detective Eddie rocks is that the guy you interviewed yeah okay and he's now retired but you know so she at the time I he I don't know whether he'd retired yet but he's you know he knows what he's doing and they they're going up the stairs and they immediately Eddie Rock says well look at that and it's a spatter of blood on the wall, but it's not like down where the blood is smeared at the bottom of the wall.

It's up high. And it's not a smear. It's a spatter. And what Eddie Rock says is that shows conflict. Like that's a stab wound happened here and the blood squirts out of a body onto the wall. It shows you direction and it shows you action. And so, and then Mark Sheridan

sort of examined the whole thing and realized that this spatter on the wall basically matched the height of his father's chest wound if he were like standing at the top of the stairs and they took pictures of all this the family took pictures but the detectives did not um so uh here you have i mean this is a major piece of evidence they didn't test the blood of that spatter they didn't do anything with that spatter in the prosecutor's office the family had the blood tested and it turned out to be their father's blood. So it's a very different kind of scene. I mean, how does he – he stabs himself standing at the top of the stairs? That's a little odd.

Okay. And so – I agree with that argument. Let's pull in one other thing to see if there's even a realm of possibility here looking at how the prosecution might have looked at this. That fire poacher I mentioned was found in their bedroom. The fireplace was downstairs, so it would never be in the bedroom. It was obviously a part of whatever went down. Is it possible, according to Eddie Rock was his name?

Yeah, Eddie Rocks. is it possible according to eddie rock was his name yeah okay is it possible according to detective rocks that john may have stabbed his wife to death and then knew he wanted to start the fire i don't know why he'd get a poacher but okay he goes downstairs to get a poacher and somehow the blood ends up there because maybe she fought him a little bit and he had a cut or something like that is that possible that the detective from the somerset county prosecutor's office that i interviewed um actually made that argument he said it's not surprising that there would be a blood spatter belonging to John Sheridan on the stairwell what the detective was saying is he went down to get the gas can he got brought up the fire poker um you know there are there are many reasons why his

blood could be on that wall that's his argument i think it's a bad argument by the way i want to be clear i'm just you know taking my hail mary pass yeah what they might do so the fire poker is another just you know astonishing detail uh the sheridans were avid avid antique collectors in fact we're sitting in mullica hill and they had a stall at an antique shop in mullica hill that they sold they loved like buying and then selling antiques on this it was a hobby yeah so um anyway they had a uh vintage antique fireplace set that included this long wrought iron fire poker and it was found not down by the fireplace, but up in the bedroom. And it was bent.

And John Sheridan had bruises across his chest that were thin and narrow and ran horizontally across his chest. And he had four or five broken ribs. So he, well, could the ribs have come from the armoire? That's what the detectives thought. They thought that his, he had a chipped front tooth and he had the broken ribs and the bruises and they said that was all caused by the armoire falling over on him. And they believe the armoire fell over on him because the fire, which was started on the floor, right? The gas was poured on the floor, it was lit,

and then the front legs of the armoire had burned and so that the whole thing tipped over. Others say that this armoire didn't really even have legs it was kind of one of these big chunky things that sat very low to the ground and um that that didn't seem possible wow so so the fire the fire poker the police don't take it into evidence the detectives um they just left it there and it was in the bathroom remember the firefighters are throwing stuff when they're putting out the fire into the bathroom an insurance adjuster had come to look at the house a few weeks after the crime and the insurance adjuster is going through the stuff in the bathroom, and he finds the fire poker. And here's another situation where Mark Sheridan goes to the detectives and says, hey, you missed this.

There were a few of those. Add it to the list. Wow. So, yeah. So there's the blood spatter, the fire poker there's also blood on the thresh oh well really the biggest kind of like blow your mind moment is um that there is in the sheridan's bedroom there is a door that leads to like a dressing room. And if you go through the dressing room, it leads to a set of stairs, back stairs, that go down to the back door.

Oh, so they, wow, this is a weird house. Okay. So there are, it's a big house. You know, and a lot of big, some big older houses, not modern ones, often had like what are called service stairs in the back for the servants to come up and down. Like the grand main stairs and then there are the back stairs that go to like the kitchen or the back mudroom. So anyway, that's. But they didn't have any live-in servants or anything no no no no but um remember the reason the detectives are so certain that this was a murder so that because the stairs are through the closet so there is a way out yes and there was blood you know it was a very bloody scene the crime scene and there was blood spilled joy Joyce's blood, across the threshold of that back

door. But when the detectives arrived, when after the fires started, we know for a fact that that back door was closed. So Mark Sheridan is the one who made this argument to me that the back door to the bedroom was open. At the time that the knife attack is happening, the back door is open and blood is spilled across that threshold. And then after the fire has started, that back door is closed. And you can tell that the back door was closed because there were suits hanging on the door, and there was a soot stain so that it was clean where the suits were, and then the rest of the door was, like, gray from the smoke soot. So that shows that the door was closed because it got, like, a blast of smoke soot. So that shows that the door was closed

because it got like a blast of smoke on it, but it had been open. And I believe, I mean, it's also another reason why the room didn't burn as badly as it could have is because everything was closed up and there was no oxygen so the door was open and then it was closed and there was an another exit that the detective somehow didn't pay attention to can we back up to that door for a second actually so as you were

just explaining that and you're talking about the door shutting i want to make sure we understand there's two that would be in question though because you have the downstairs back door which we already covered at some point was unlocked as all the doors were and then you have this door that was correct me if i'm wrong it was through the walk-in closet truck month is on at chevrolet get zero percent financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500 Custom Blackout or Custom Trail Boss. With Custom Trail Bosses available, Class Exclusive, Duramax 3-Liter Diesel Engine, and Z71 Off-Road Package with a 2-Inch Factory Suspension Lift, you get both on-road confidence and off-road capability.

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Upstairs? Yeah. visit visa.ca slash fintech is it behind the bathroom upstairs yeah yeah okay and that led to these like service stairway that went downstairs it then had the back door right there okay so when you're saying the door shut you're obviously talking about the one upstairs where the suits were hanging and therefore like the person if it shut, that means that the person left and shut the door behind them, and then obviously went downstairs through that, and of course shut that back door, so there's no signs of anything. Could have. Could have. I would say, yeah.

I mean, what we know is that both doors to the bedroom were shut. One was blocked by the armoire and was difficult to get in or out at that point until the armoire was moved. And the back door that led to the back stairs and the back door was also shut at the time during the fire and when the police and firefighters responded to the scene. And then I could throw in one little more detail, which is that Barb Boyer, the gumshoe reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, explained to me how when you walk in the back door, the first thing you would come to was the fireplace. And the fireplace had the fireplace tools on a rack.

And the very first tool that you would come to was missing. And so, you know, when she walked through the house, she saw, like, oh, there's something missing there that's not hanging. It's like there's a clip to hang it and there's nothing there. And then we now, you know, would later find out that the fire poker was upstairs. And did, I don't know if I remember this detail. You definitely said it though. Who found the fire poker again? The insurance adjuster.

That was it. Okay. So that was a few days later. A few weeks, actually. A few weeks. So that evidence was just sitting in there the whole time. No one had looked at that. And did you imply that the detectives didn't even bother to realize there were stairs there?

That's the implication. I, at the time that I interviewed the one detective that I spoke with, most of the, like, the official Somerset County Prosecutor's Office people who were there, working there at the time that I was doing all this reporting, would not speak with me. And basically, they say it was an open investigation, and they couldn't talk about it. I did track down this one detective who was there at the scene,

he was one of the first people to arrive. And, and he had since retired, and so he was willing to talk to me about it. And he, at the time that I interviewed him. What was his name? Uh-oh. How could I forget? There were a lot of people. Barry Jansen. Barry Jansen.

Okay. And at the time that I spoke with him, I didn't know about the back door. And so I didn't ask him about it. I asked him about other things, the fire poker and the missing knife and such. But I didn't ask him about the back door. But what I do know is that that was the reason that they told the family over and over again is why it had to be a murder-suicide. Wait, what was the reason that there was no way out of that room once right so which was a lie yeah or they were mistaken or mistaken wow yeah i mean you would just think one of the first things and again not a detective here

i'm literally some guy sitting doing a podcast but one of the first things and again not a detective here i'm literally some guy sitting doing a podcast but one of the first things if you're looking at a crime scene that i would ask for is a layout of the scene like if i'm in a building give me a building layout i need to know where everything is i need to know where the air ducts are all of it because you can find evidence you can find ways out and they bothered to do none that. And this wasn't even like a huge building. This was a house. I mean, it just doesn't, it seems like, you know, can there be incompetence in cases? Of course.

Sure, it happens all the bodies to the blood splatter to things not recovered at the scene to not knowing the layout of the house to inexplicably having some reason that a 70-year-old man would have put an arm on top of himself. It's too much. I try to find a reasonable explanation of stuff because we like to turn everything into a conspiracy but it's just like there's so much here it's offensive so they this whole investigation they make that determination in like roughly three days and then they confirm it at some point in the few weeks after that did they essentially close the case when they did that and stop tracking leads? They do not say that that's what happened, but I think that's every indication in terms of what we know about who was interviewed, what physical evidence was processed. I don't think there's any reason to believe there was much investigation

once they decided that it was a murder suicide right and they'd already missed all that other stuff too and some of the stuff you can't even get afterwards okay so let's fast forward for a minute three years later i think there's a I guess, like, what's it called? A petition that's signed by a ton of powerful people. I believe Chris Christie even signed it. That was sent to the state of New Jersey that asked the New Jersey State Medical Examiner's Office to change the cause of death on John Sheridan's death certificate to undecided. It was listed as suicide and they wanted to officially change it to undecided. And the medical examiner agreed and did that.

At that point, the case was not reopened. So how normal is it for a petition to go out and the official state office to change a cause of death and then also on top of that how normal is it that they don't reopen the investigation when that happens right um so chris christie didn't sign that letter but but christine todd whitman did okay and i can't remember if there was another former governor on that list. But there were definitely like some former attorneys general and a former Supreme Court justice, a lot of, you know, important, powerful people signed that letter. So the, what the family wanted was for the death certificate listed the manner of death as suicide and they wanted that changed um and ultimately what they got was um undetermined

as the manner of death the cause of death was the knife wound to his jugular. But the manner of death, they, you know, had been suicide, and they changed it to undetermined. You know, at the time that they were making this fight, I thought it was really odd that the Republican governor of New Jersey, who is, I mean, governors are very powerful in New Jersey, more powerful than most state governors. The governor of New Jersey, who had a personal relationship with the family, wouldn't have like picked up the phone and called the medical examiner and said, change the death certificate. Like there's a lot of problems here that are being raised. Like, let's just, just change the death certificate. It's an easy thing to do, presumably, you know, apparently. Um, and at the time that it was going on, I was just like,

why wouldn't he want to do that? Uh, And I don't really have an answer to that question. I'm not trying to raise it as like, I mean, I don't really know why that didn't happen. But to me, it was sort of raised a red flag. Like, there's just, there have been so many things about this story that didn't add up. And that was another one. I mean, so they did get the death certificate change, but the lengths that they had to go through to do that did not make sense to me. Does, I assume, Mark Sheridan has no relationship with Chris Christie today? Am I right about that? I, it's a good question. I did never ask him um I don't know I don't know if he does or not

because Chris Christie you know Chris Christie was like a perfect New Jersey political machine symbol he he could talk the national politics talk to try to keep himself relevant. That didn't end up working out for him, but he could do that. And then the way it seems to me as someone – it's not like I sit here. I certainly didn't report on it like you did, New Jersey politics and stuff. we saw what happens with like bridge gate when he does stupid shit to you know settle political scores and stuff like that but one of the unique things about him is that you have george norcross who we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast who's effectively just on the surface he's a he's maybe the political boss of new jersey but but he's one of them, right? And he's certainly the boss of South Jersey. He happens to represent the Democratic Party in this case. Christie's a Republican. Norcross is a Democrat.

They're supposed to hate each other, right? Not the case. They actually are good friends and work together a lot and work together rebuilding some things in camden together so to me that's really really unique which take away all the context here i would love to see more republicans and democrats being friends but that's not in new jersey for people listening you know our state is uh not exactly on the up and up about a lot of things so that's you know you start to think about that and you're like that's interesting to me that that would be happening so you had said that you started you fell into this with the camden waterfront deal and i didn't ask you for details on that but maybe now is a good time

to explain exactly what went on there and i think we can piece that back to some of the stuff that mark then later found in his parents' house. That would make sense. Yep. And let me just say about Chris Christie and George Norcross. Neither one of them reaches their height of power without the other. It was an incredibly useful symbiotic relationship. Why do you say that?

Because Christie, the Republican governor, needed the democratically controlled legislature to get things done and he and he had the state senator steve sweeney who's the most powerful figure in the legislature and has the ability to move bills to put things you know to assign people to committees i mean it's a it's a powerful position and sweeneyey is basically the handpicked loyalist to George Norcross. And one of the things I had found in 2019 in my reporting, and we certainly will get to all of that, is that I have in my possession an email exchange in which Steve Sweeney, president of the Senate, gets a list of bills that are ready to be put up for a vote. They've gone through their committee process and now it's ready to schedule a vote. It's his choice to approve what comes up for a vote and what stalls and never goes anywhere. That's just part of the political system, really. So his assistant sends him,

look, these are the bills that are ready to go. Do you want to schedule them for a vote? When is this? This is also 2014. Okay. And Sweeney takes that email with the bills listed on it, forwards it to George Norcross, and says, anything on here bother you? And George Norcross replies simply with one word, good.

So, you know, when you're talking about, I mean, no one's ever been able to really kind of prove how much power or control that George Norcross had over Steve Sweeney. Like you'd often see in news articles would be like Steve Sweeney, the childhood friend of George Norcross. And so reporters would basically say, look, these guys are tight. They're close. Sweeney is a Norcross ally. But like, you know, this is an example of a level of power that nobody had ever really been able to put out there and prove. So to me, that's like just a super important little fact. So getting better bona fides for a successful politician are there than to say, hey, look, I'm the Republican governor of a democratically controlled state, and I got a lot done. I worked with the Democrats, and I got this and I got that.

So that was part of his, I believe, his national strategy of how, big part of it was building a relationship with George Norcross, who could deliver those votes in the democratically controlled legislature. So they do a bunch of stuff. And a lot of it does have to do with Camden, which is the center of George Norcross's world. And it's his passion project. He was born in Camden. His father was from Camden and loved Camden. He was a labor activist, blue collar guy. And I think, you know, George Norcross, you know, genuinely loves Camden

and wants Camden, you know, to do good by Camden. I think, you know, you can take issue with how he does it and how he ends up making money from it too. But I think it is a genuine love of the place. So he and Chris Christie work on a bunch of things. And the most important one for this story is that they pass a bill that kind of supercharges the corporate tax breaks in New Jersey. And it sets aside a special pot, like a, it's not, that you get these supercharged tax breaks just to move their company sometimes from like six miles down the road in cherry hill or you know marlton like the suburbs of camden they would move into the city and they would get these enormous tax breaks now just looking at this on the facts of what that is and not any context around it, hypothetically, a bipartisan bill that invites in corporate investment to a place that needs it. People would have a problem with this if they were taking it to an already burgeoning place because then it's like, well, all these corporations are getting tax cuts. What the fuck do we get?

But the idea is that they're bringing it into Camden where you would then attract more investment. You would attract all different types of people to come in and make it an area where instead of just poverty and crime, the people in the area could also get jobs for this corporation. It could change you know literally the lines of generations potentially so on the surface that seems really really good but is this when you were looking into the deal was the deal an offshoot of this bill like was it made possible by this bill is that what you're getting at yes okay uh it was definitely part of the bill um so there had been a tax break program that you know that allowed companies to get tax breaks for either moving into the state or not leaving basically because

you could say your company um and companies did this all over the state, like, okay, we're going to move to Pennsylvania, it's cheaper to do business there, or South Carolina. And then the state would come in and say, okay, stay, and we'll give you a tax break. So you could stay and get a tax break, or you could move in from out of state and get a tax break. In 2013, they do a bunch of things with this bill, but one of them was to say, but if you're going to move to Camden, you get even a bigger tax break, and we're going to take away some of the other rules. You don't have to hire anybody. You can move jobs into the city that already exist with your company six miles down the road. You don't have to like hire Camden residents as a new thing.

At all. At all. See, that defeats half the purpose. It does. Right there. Okay. So, and, you know, there are all kinds of things. I mean, there's a debate that goes on across the country about whether corporate tax breaks are an effective tool for economic development. And I think, you can argue that.

They are not designed to help the people of Camden. No. So. Norcross though wanted this to go through. Because his business interests. I don't need to go through all of them. But like we'll get to some of them naturally. Like he has a lot of them in Camden.

But taking a step back for one second for people wondering like how the hell does this guy have all this power or whatever and they've never heard of him chances are he made i believe like hundreds of millions of dollars founding being or at least one of the founders of connor strong which is a major insurance brokerage that was when did he find that company like end of the 70s beginning of the 80s something like that yeah i think at the end of the 1970s or sort of in the second half somewhere he so he went to rudgers camden for a year, dropped out. He's got some really funny stories about that that are on interviews with him on YouTube.

Where? You want me to tell you one of these? Yeah, please. So he tells this story of how he'd meet up for breakfast with his college friends. And they'd all go off to class, and he'd sit and read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And then he'd go in the afternoon to Philadelphia to court, and he'd sit in court and observe court. So he, I think, felt that, you know, and he'd grown up at the, you know, knee of his father, who was a major, you know, he was a blue collar guy, but he rose up in the union structure.

And he became like he was a major figure in Camden County and had high level meetings with governors and state senators. And he always brought one of his sons with him on the weekends when they weren't in school to these meetings. So George Norcross grew up learning the art of politics and the art of the political deal and power from his father. And he spends a year at Rutgers and and decides, you know, I know more than

these professors do. What am I doing here? He drops out. And he starts a, an insurance company. And at the same time, he starts working in local campaigns in Camden, you know, raising money, being a gopher whatever he could get whatever any way he could be involved he got involved and he starts like being successful um and uh you know and this is right about the time of ab scam i don't know how many of your listeners have seen the movie american hustle it's. I was going to say, yeah. Great, great movie. Great movie. And, you know, it's about this FBI sting in which the mayor of Camden, among others, falls into and gets trapped in,

and it's a, you know, a bribery scheme. And so, you know, that's the, not just the movie, but in real life, the mayor of Camden goes to, he's also the party boss for Camden, and he goes to prison. And that – there's now a shuffling of power and positions, and Norcross is kind of in at the ground level and starts really making his way up the ladder at that point. So he's simultaneously starting a business which to his credit very successful a business that makes a lot of money on government business because how so because every town every school district every sewer authority in the state every government entity has insurance. And if you can get those contracts, you can make a lot of money. Okay.

So he makes relationships in the political realm, opens up a business, brings the political realm right into the business, does a service they need for them, probably gives them a deal or ten in there. And then actively as he's building wealth and power, rises up through this power vacuum that's now happened in the wake of Abscam. And without ever – as you said, he was unelected at all points. He's never been elected to a position. Without ever being elected to a position, he used money, relationships, and influence to effectively make himself the guy who you have to send an email to saying is all this cool for me to pass yeah okay so now let's get to back to the camden thing so they passed that bill and did you say 2017 2013 oh that was 2013 when they did that the tax break bill yep okay so norcross now has this deal we've been referring to on the waterfront let me add a couple things about that deal please in 2013 it's called the economic opportunity act and parts of it we

learned in 2019 and this was reported by the new york times uh parts of that bill were written by the law firm that is owned and operated, he's a partner in, is the brother documents for the bill show that that a lawyer in his office was editing and helping, you know, which, you know, sometimes it's super effective, because, you know, you might you want someone who understands the insurance business or understands the energy industry helping you write, you know, do public policy. So there is a legitimate way that this works. But it also, you know, know i don't i think we all know that there are cozy relationships that happen between corporations and business and business interests and industry and the way legislation gets made and passed and so it's a mixed bag but what we do know is that uh george norcross's brother was involved in that way in crafting these Camden provisions in that tax break bill. And he was a private attorney, you're saying.

He was a private attorney. And then Parker McKay went on to represent many, many of the companies that got those tax breaks because they were like this was their deal like they would go out they had like a a powerpoint and they would go and meet with business executives and say look we are the experts the policy experts on this tax break and we can help you usher you through the process with the state to get them wait a second so i'm not a legal expert but that's that's not a conflict of interest nope because i know one thing that people complain about a lot and they have every right to i complain about it too is that you will see for example prosecutors prosecute vigorously a type of crime right so let's say like in new york this was a this was

one that's i've had raj raj ratnam on the podcast like it was something that he was the first domino to fall on that but their office prosecuted insider trading like crazy in their early 2010s after the financial crisis a lot of those prosecutors then took a job as a defense attorney where their specialty was defending insider trading and then they even started to work on legislation that you know would say hey some of this really isn't fair even though they made their careers on it you also saw early on new york legislators basically legislate bitcoin out of the city in 2014, and the same guy who led that whole thing then took a job in the private sector where his job was to interpret the law he wrote. So it's not like we don't see something like this, but as a – these are people I just mentioned who are in the public sector. These are prosecutors.

These are legislators. You're talking about a private attorney had access to and therefore at least some provable influence over a law where I'm sure the idea is that he was being paid to look at this by the government. And now they're allowed to go hire, get clients to defend them, I guess, like against this law. Yeah. So the way it's supposed to work can you pull that mic in a little bit sorry yeah the way it's supposed to work is that there is the um there's the transparency laws and there's the state election commission and if you are if you are lobbying for a business with legislators or, you know, in the political process, which helping write legislation is a form of lobbying, then you have to report when you're a lobbyist who your clients are and on what issues and what bills you're lobbying for them on their behalf. Right. and what bills you're lobbying for them on their behalf. So any, you know, typically, you know, the public, which is often a reporter, can go in and look at these documents

and report on, hey, you know, that company, you know, the state paid all that money to build that airport. Well, you know, I'm making this up, but, you know, United Airlines was lobbying the legislature to build that airport and they're gonna benefit from it now like that's the that's supposed to be the checks and balances of the system that we we at least know who who the lobbyists are they have to register with the state and they have to have to file disclosure statements about who they're lobbying for and on what issues. Phil Norcross, in addition to being a majority owner of Parker McKay.

That's the brother. The brother. He's also an owner of a lobbying firm, and he's a registered lobbyist. And what I can say about that, you know, this particular issue is that at and referred for a as a criminal matter to the Attorney General's office was cases of unregistered lobbying, which is against the law. It went kind of into the black box of the Attorney General's office. Like, they made the recommendation, they made it public, or it became public, that they made that recommendation. I think maybe a reporter broke it, so maybe they didn't make it public.

And then we never heard. Like, I know who wrote that bill. I know who helped write that bill from Parker McKay. I never – he seems to still be at Parker McKay, still practicing law. So – And that's not the other brother's Donald. He's an actual House of Representative for New Jersey, right? Yes.

So this is a different brother. He represents Camden in the House of Representatives. Was he a lawyer, though, too? He is not a lawyer. He actually came up through the – it's either the electrical workers or the Carpenters Union. I think it's the electrical workers. Of course he did. And, yeah, so he was in the state senate.

He sponsored the tax break legislation and then he moved up to Congress. Okay. So now that we have – that's great context on that deal and everything. So we know that there was even look through on it directly related to Norcross. Yeah, right. Was there anything else to add there as well? No, just that we could talk about how the reporting that I did in 2019 and then that I put in the podcast about the Camden waterfront and how it's all related to the tax breaks and the Norcross family.

So let's go there right now. So let's get to your reporting. You start in 2019 how again you may have said this but why did you have some sort of lead that made you want to look into this or it just was a big deal and you're like oh let me check this out it's a good question i'm trying to remember how i got started i know that what i wanted to do was really like understand the party machine system and the bosses and how it works um and then I can't remember exactly but in 2019 I remember being at um Governor Phil Murphy's state of the state address, which is an annual thing that happens in either January or February.

And I'm sitting there just to cover it and as a reporter, and he spends like the first 20 minutes of an hour long speech, so like a third, talking about these tax breaks. And it was kind of, it was surprising. It was different. You don't usually see that. I mean, usually it's like, they go through the whole laundry list of all the things that they care about and are, you know, either want to fight or want to do. It's kind of like their, you know, agenda for the year. And the speech ends, and I'm sitting with all the other reporters and they're like you know what the hell was that why did he talk about tax breaks for so long like you're supposed to come up with some new ideas why are you railing on tax breaks like most of the reporters were not impressed and i'm thinking whoa this amazing. He just like shot, this was a shot against the bow at the most political, the most powerful political boss in the state. He spent 20 minutes like railing on these tax breaks that I knew, you know, I knew about the Camden tax breaks and I knew that this involved George Norcross. And it was just like, whoa up there's something here there but i don't know

quite what it is democrat on democrat crime basically well he was basically just he instead of going and kissing the ring of george norcross as a new governor he was taking him on and that And that was unusual. And it's interesting. It should be said, too, you know, Murphy is also a very wealthy guy. I don't know. I mean, I'm probably missing someone. I think Tom Keene back in the day had some money. I don't know that we've ever had a governor who had that much of his own financial ability to maybe well don't forget john corzine oh that's right i forgot all about him you're right christine todd whitman is from a very wealthy family i'm not sure her about her individual wealth but they're like she and

tom kane are like jersey bluebloods um they come from old old money got it um and john corzine made a bunch of money on hedge funds in the stock market in goldman sachs and so did phil murphy and corzine also it it takes away my argument right there a little bit because corzine who's governor for eight years or six four okay so he was governor for a little bit and he did have a clear solid hand-in-hand relationship with norcross because that was in the 2000s right yeah okay yeah and some people believe that this is really getting far afield but maybe not but some people believe that it was a falling out between norcross and corzine that torpedoed Corzine's re-election bid, and that's how Chris Christie got elected. That Norcross kind of undermined him in the state and certainly in South Jersey, and that's how he lost the election.

Got it. Okay. So you were saying this happens where Murphy comes out and rails against this deal, which was basically chefs kissed by Norcross. So you're now going, wait a minute, and you decide to go look at it. But somehow you end up, instead of just the actual bill itself, but a vast, the vast majority of the $1.6 billion worth of tax breaks, we start looking into them. And I'm the vast majority of them that went to Camden have various connections to the Norcross family. The company is either from a business partner with George Norcross, or it's a client of Phil Norcross, or it's a client of Phil Norcross, you know, or it's directly a George Norcross business, or he owns the building and the company coming in and leasing the space and

getting the tax break is paying their rent to George Norcross. So there was some significant connection to the Norcross family on a large number of these tax breaks, and we totaled them up, and it was $1.1 billion worth of tax breaks went to companies allied with the Norcross family in some way. In one case, the second biggest tax break ever given in New Jersey and the biggest one in Camden went to this nuclear power and manufacturer of nuclear power plant parts named Holtec. And George Norcross is on the board of Holtec. So there is different kinds of connections, but they're basically his stable of business associates or somehow connected to his brother.

So, and we're looking at these and we start kind of mapping out where they're building their buildings. And it's all, you know, in this one section of the Camden waterfront. So we start just looking at that and we start talking to people who are involved in redevelopment the Camden waterfront. So we start just looking at that and we start talking to people who are involved in redevelopment of Camden. And that's when we stumble into

this organization, a nonprofit that was basically the de facto development arm for the city of Camden. They're the ones who recruited businesses to come to Camden for 30 years. They were working on this, you know, trying to keep Campbell's Soup in Camden. They're the ones who recruited the aquarium to be built in Camden. And the baseball field, which is no longer the minor league baseball field. So they were doing like these good good deeds for camden and um and so we call them to see what they think about all these the tax breaks and these buildings that the that george norcross is putting up and uh and that's when we realize

that john sheridan the man who was murdered in 2014 that we're talking about. CEO of Cooper Hospital. The CEO of Cooper Hospital was the chairman of the board of this nonprofit. Oh. And that he was, and I was told that he was fighting with George Norcross and had had a major falling out with him not long before his death. Who's also his boss at Cooper because Norcross is the chair of the board of Cooper. Exactly. So you find this out pretty quickly. You just call them and well you know i've got that like information and i'm not sure what to

do with it and we're kind of talking to people trying to figure out what we can learn about it did you find out what his problem with the deal was like why he was against it well so we're trying and somebody says to us well you should talk to mark sheridan i i you know i knew who mark sheridan was but i didn't i had never talked to him i'd never met him um but jeff pillitz my reporting partner had a had met him and had talked to him over the years because he was like a you know the lawyer for the republican party. And so he calls him. And sure enough, like it took a while to get him to agree to talk with us and to give us the documents. But he has these documents related to this fight that John Sheridan was having with George Norcross

about the Camden waterfront. How long had he been aware of those documents? Since about two to three months after his father died. So he sat on these for like five years, technically. He didn't sit on them. And can you explain what they were yeah yeah so let's start at the beginning of this one so um mark sheridan needed to do his parents taxes after their deaths and because that doesn't go away even when you die. Yeah, they're comfy.

And so he's looking for their tax documents. And he remembers, I guess, that they had been sitting out on the dining room table. And he kind of knew that that's where they'd been sitting. And so he reached there and they're no longer there. So he reaches out to the Somerset County prosecutor's office, which is investigating the crime, and says, you know, can you provide me with copies of the documents you took from the house? I need to do my parents' taxes. And he gets a banker's box full of documents, like hundreds of them. And they were all taken off the dining room table.

And mixed in, like they just grabbed stuff and threw it in this box. And mixed in between the tax documents were printouts of emails and handwritten memos, like in ink on a yellow pad um and reports about like uh there's there's all this information about a real estate deal and like you know this thing called the proformer which looks at different options and um reports about real estate prices and appraisals on the Camden waterfront. So they're like, there are reports. And the emails he can see are, you know, at first he can't hardly wrap his arms around it. He just doesn't understand what it is. And then so he goes through it and reads it all. And he comes to understand that this they can see that his father was having a dispute with his boss, George Norcross, that involved this nonprofit, Cooper's Ferry Partnership. a very kind of choice property on the Camden waterfront, which suddenly goes from nobody caring about it a whit

to it being valuable. The state owns it. Who was purchasing it, Norcross? The Cooper's Ferry Partnership, the nonprofit that John Sheridan was on the board of. And the do-gooder developers who brought in the aquarium and brought in the baseball park and tried to keep Campbell's successfully kept Campbell Soup the anchor business of Camden in Camden so what's nor I just want to understand how does Norcross play into

that then if he's not right so um you know this is the curious thing about George Norcross is that he, it appears that he wields so much power that he can, you know, tell people to do things that they don't necessarily, like that he's in no position to direct them to do. So he has no official position with this nonprofit developer. I mean, there are, you know, this is a group that has on its board members of some of the big businesses and, you know, what they call like the stakeholders of Camden, like the big companies that are there, political figures, you know, the priest of the big church in Camden, you know, Rutgers University, like someone from the university. So it's like all the big players that are there currently in Camden have a seat on the board and are there to advise this group on what's good for camden right i guess what i should be asking the question i should have asked is that what what's in it if he's not on it what's in it for him well um you know he is amassing property on the Camden waterfront because suddenly it is more valuable.

Now that you can, the way the tax break works, I know this is horribly complicated, but the way the tax break works is, let's say you're the Philadelphia 76ers. There's a good example. Great one. Is there right there? And they want to build a practice facility and it's cheaper to do it in camden than it is in philadelphia so it turns out and they hire phil phil norcross to get themselves get the 76ers to get a tax break to build a training facility in Camden. Now, what you get when you move your business through this tax break program into Camden, you get a dollar for dollar match on everything that you spend on your physical property where you're going to do business.

So if you buy a piece of property and you build a building on it, all of that cost, the total of that cost is the total of your tax break. And it's paid out over 10 years. And you might and you don't necessarily have to even have a tax bill that high. Because tax breaks, actually, most people don't understand this but they actually there's a market and you can sell them so you could be um a business that doesn't have a huge tax liability and not a huge tax bill you could get a very very large tax break and you could sell it to companies in new jersey that do have a big tax bill and you could carve it up so you can sell it 90 cents on the dollar to Verizon and to Sony and to Panasonic or to any company to

Goya all the big companies in New Jersey the pharmaceuticals they all have tax bills and they can lower their tax bill by buying a tax break for less than you know the hundred pennies on the you know the dollar they could buy it for 90 pennies on the dollar and and lower and when you pay millions in taxes that lowers your tax break by a bunch it's like selling someone a gift card it's like selling someone a gift card you don't want $20 gift card sell it for for $15, but it's taxes. Yeah. So that makes those tax breaks really valuable. And so you can also, so what you can do, it's like it's a financing mechanism. You get the state to give you a tax break. You show the bank that, look, we're going to get this tax break over 10 years,

and we're going to build a building that's going to cost us $150 million, and we're going to get $150 million over 10 years in a tax break, and we're going to sell that. Every year we get our tax break, we're going to sell it, and we're going to pay you back the money you give us to build the building. So we have the ability to – it's a good investment. We have the ability to pay you back the money you give us to build the building. So we have the ability to – it's a good investment. We have the ability to pay you. You know what else this could be? I'm just thinking out loud and shut me down.

That's legal, by the way. But go on. My mind is blown on that. I was in finance. I had no idea about that. But if you have these tax breaks and they're sizable in chunks, if there are people who are not so good within the organization – so I think in the Sixers example, that's probably not the case. do a little bidding war with different places that may have certain lobbyist power and stuff like that other corporations and give them a deal on a handshake agreement of hey when we want to do x politically you're gonna back that with the politicians you bought off probably i mean i

think even on on its face like what we do know is that all of these companies that moved to Camden made a big show of how much they want to help Camden. And they would donate to nonprofits in Camden. And they would talk about how they're creating jobs. And there was a Camden local activist, a guy who died recently in his 80s, named Kelly Francis, who stood up at a town hall meeting with the 76ers when they were going for this tax break and said, and local folks were like, they were sort of like, how are, you know, what are we getting out of this deal? Like, where are the jobs? And so Kelly Francis stands up and he asks the head, the president of the 76ers,

are you going to be hiring Camden residents to work at your training facility? Is this Scott O'Neill? Yeah. And he says, I think we're looking for a point guard, which is everyone laughed, but it's also like incredibly insulting. Like there are a lot of unemployed people in Camden who need jobs. And basically they they don't they didn't hire anybody. They hired a few people, but I'm trying to get Scott O'Neill. I haven't reached out yet, but I'm trying to get him on this podcast. I'll ask you to Scott O'Neill. I haven't reached out yet, but I'm trying to attract business to come to Camden. And what that is, and so what he wants is to be able to buy up property on the Camden waterfront, build buildings that he himself and his business partners get a tax break for. So they're basically free buildings, right?

Because you get a tax break, a dollar for dollar match on the cost of your building. So he built a 17-story office tower on the Camden waterfront with a drop-dead view of city center Philadelphia. Yeah, I've seen that. It's nice. And the state is paying for it and he could want to as someone who wants to build up camden like you said he could have an incentive

here and with a good intention to want to then collect some of these tax breaks so that okay i built my place and whatever i got my tax break too so that's nice but then i can get some other people here where it's not just me building this up and these other corporations will actually come in and we can make this extend even farther than the waterfront hypothetically yeah or just even at the waterfront i mean i think you you know if you've ever been to jersey city and they call it like the riviera right but the the waterfront property in Jersey City has been completely built up it looks just like lower Manhattan in fact when you're driving on the turnpike towards Jersey City you can't really tell what's Jersey City and what is Manhattan

and you know it's that's like been an enormous economic boon to Jersey City and Hoboken. So I think there is a legitimate vision of we're going to do that. Why shouldn't Camden have that? Right. I mean, the Delaware River is more narrow than the Hudson River. That property has just a gorgeous view of Philadelphia. And it's obviously a short trip between the two places. So I think there is a legitimate argument for looking for the state to help create these investments,

but there are just so many problems. And, you know, and so, so let's talk about the property that the nonprofit developer had a deal with the state to buy. Okay. Okay? Yeah. So this property is called L3. And it was built in the late 90s with the help of the state. Yeah, there's been this effort to try to help Camden. Much of it has not helped. And I would say personally that it's to no fault of the people of Camden that they've basically gotten royally screwed. things so um in this case this build the these two buildings were built for a um an aerospace tech

company l3 and there are two three-story buildings and it's like a block back from the delaware river so it's really in this same section of the waterfront. Approximately how big a deal are we talking, like money-wise? So the Cooper's Ferry Partnership, the nonprofit, had a deal to buy it for... I'm so bad with remembering numbers.

I think it was $62 million. Okay. I'm afraid it was $32 million. I think it was $62 million. And by the'm afraid it was 32 million. I think it was 62 million. And by the time the deal was sealed, because the tax breaks had gone through and property values on the waterfront were starting to rise,

the appraisal on it was like double, whatever the number is, and I'm afraid I might be wrong, but whatever it was, like by the time the and i'm afraid i might be wrong but whatever it was like by the time the deal the place was actually sold from and the state sold it it was like worth double that okay yeah i think the original was around 35 so okay so it was up to 32 yeah um so thank you so uh cooper's ferry partnership has this deal from the state. They saw the tax breaks. They knew that they were coming. They knew that it was going to, you know, raise prices on the Camden waterfront. And they knew that they were going to have no trouble renting out this space because any company coming in was going to get this really generous tax break so they hop on early and they get a signed deal to buy the place at a price that's a good one and he's the chair of

their board and he's the chair of their board and he's helping them yes and um and so now phil norcross gets wind of this deal and says and i've've seen the emails where he's to the CEO of the nonprofit. He says, I want to talk to you about this. And the nonprofit CEO sends that, takes that email and forwards it to John Sheridan and says, John, I just want you to know that Phil Norcross wants to talk to us about this. And, you know, you know that we believe we can do this deal and we can do it on our own. And we're going to need some help from you navigating these waters. So that kind of hints it like you asked, how do these guys, they're not on the board of this nonprofit. They're not elected to the city council. They're not the mayor.

How do they have the power to stop this deal? And what the emails lay out pretty darn clearly. And this is what Mark Sheridan found. Found and eventually, years later, gave to us was these emails show at a certain point they're trying to work out something where it's like okay we'll take in a partner and we'll partner with somebody because the phil norcross was saying to them you know this is not the kind of signal we want to send to the market that non-profits are buying these buildings we want profit you know making companies blue chip companies to buy these buildings. We want profit, you know, making companies,

blue chip companies to buy these buildings, and that'll bring in more investment. So they're like, okay, we'll take on a partner, and they get a pretty good one to come in on them on on this with them. And that's not good enough. No, we have our own guys, we want to buy this building. And we want you to sign over the deal to them. You can't even be partners with them. They want the deal. So in these emails and memos laid out, the CEO and the president of this organization, the two top guys, are hauled in on the carpet

to Phil Norcross's office and they're basically told that you know george wants them to sell their you know give turn over the deal to these developers of the norcross brothers choosing and if they don't they'll be persona non grata in Camden. And so what does that mean? That means that their careers and what they're involved in, which is real estate, like they will not be able to do any work in real estate in Camden. They won't be able to do any work in Camden, basically.

And that is the threat. And, you know, I know that that sounds like fantastical and unbelievable. But when you start like trying to prove it and going down every road, what you find is Camden's mayor in the pocket of George Norcross. Camden City Council in the pocket of george norcross oh really camden city council in the pocket of george norcross uh you know camden county commissioners like it's just he has built such a powerful you know and this is where the word machine comes in but it's such a powerful political organization that it's actually true if he tells somebody that they're going to be persona non grata they are going to be persona non grata and done there's and you know he's such even though he's been an unelected guy his whole career like we were saying obviously he's very

well known in every political circle and therefore you know people who are working around the state everyone knows who george norcross is and even like plenty of the public more than he'd probably like know about him and who he is and stuff like that but in the past when on totally unrelated matters when any agency worked into like making some sort of corruption case against him nothing ever happened i'm talking like federal agencies like the fbi and stuff like that that said he did have remember they leaked like some wiretap that was on him from back in the day where he's like listen if if mcgrady wants to make a deal he's got to come through me of course i want to make a deal he's got to come through me if he wants to do this he's got to fucking come through and you know he's saying all this stuff and is it surprising no not at all like this how you think it kind of works but when you hear it when you hear that like

you have it on tape and then you hear a story like this where they say oh you don't want to play ball you're done it doesn't take a genius to say that's probably more true than false at the very least yeah that i think the line is the magrives the corzines they're all gonna be with me not because they like me but because they have no choice that's it that was that was word for that was really good you practiced that one in the mirror i've heard it a lot of times so you know and and here's the thing here like we're talking about this and people at home are putting their mind together because they know we're talking about this other case and whatever and it's not like you know anyone knows what happened here. It's just very suspect that a deal like this was going down. And in, maybe in like, quote unquote, the defense of Norcross, the one thing that gives me pause

in looking at this is that, yes, is this a large deal? 35 million on the Canada waterfront? Sure. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying to a guy guy like this he's done a lot of those deals before you know i question the motive of you know if he had something to do with this of him taking out a guy that was on another side of a deal why not to me it seems very easy for him to just they're gonna make money on this deal like they're still going to get influence and then they just get to say someone else's persona non grata it's like a pet you know what i mean like there's kind of a payoff for him because then he can use that he can make money not get the deal he wants but still get a deal still get something to happen

here and then also be able to make an example out of people who didn't completely play ball the way he wanted to so when we jump right to the oh well did he have something to do with it i'm like you know say what you want about a guy anyone who's running a political machine is is there's some level of corruption for sure but like that's kind of stupid to me that doesn't make you know what i mean like that kind of rings like of a guy who's clearly made a lot of smart moves in his career, albeit for the wrong intentions in many cases. Like it seems kind of dumb that he'd be like, yeah, you know what? Let me play mob boss for a minute and whack this guy. Yeah, I'd say it seems pretty stupid. I think that and I'm not saying that's what happened, by the way. Neither am I. I don't know that it did.

I can't prove that. I found no evidence to suggest that. But what I think is important to understand in terms of like what someone like George Norcross gets out of two real estate developers who aren't him, they're not his family. They're the ones who are going to buy this property and make the money on it and they're going to you know benefit from the tax breaks and they're going to get a great deal and make money on it but but this is this is the genius of how the way business and politics and the party machine works together. So you have all of these people who get a benefit from being in favor with George Norcross, right? That if you're his chosen guy and he says, hey, I got a deal I want you to do.

Look at this building. It's a great business deal. You're going to love it. And they do it. And then they've got this great deal. They're thankful to him. They can turn around and donate to his political action committee, which is what funds the people like Steve Sweeney who put up the bills for a vote,

you know, by checking with and checked with him first. So, you know, the political side of the work, you need money. And if you can raise the money from grateful business people who find it a lot more lucrative to be on the inside rather than the outside, then you've got this self-sustaining operation where you get your people in and they make donations to your political action committees so that then you can get the people elected who make the decisions like the tax breaks to feed the business people

who then feed the political action committee so it's a very nice sustainable setup circle of life if you will something circle of politics and money in politics so you get all these documents that mark gave over to you there was also you mentioned something in there like i don't know who told you this but maybe you'll remember someone said they got lunch or breakfast or something with Sheridan the month before he died where he and again he wasn't a bombastic guy he was very reserved and true to form he just they were talking about his relationship with his boss Norcross at Cooper and he said that's not too great right now and so he was keeping all these emails and then also you mentioned he was keeping yellow legal pad like written minutes if you will yes of all the

conversations that he had and he had this stored with his tax documents you know which is important paperwork so it was obviously this was a clear message of like it's almost to me like he was if i were guessing it's like he was collecting evidence to use in a civil suit when he got fired from cooper because norcross was pissed he was on the other side of this other deal could be or he was documenting you, creating a paper trail that showed illegal activity, let's just say. And he felt like, A, it was going to clear him of any wrongdoing to keep all these documents. And B, you know, maybe it was going to shed light on something that was wrong. So there's that possibility. I mean, I think, you know, to me, I feel like what I can say for as a fact is that these documents,

he was clearly keeping documents to memorialize and and document this work this issue he was uh he was printing out emails he was writing down notes from he had notes from a like the persona non grata conversation what we have is the sheet where he says, you know, he's, he's jotted down while the conversation's happening. Persona non grata, George says, you know, Phil angry, you know, like he's just listening to these two guys and he's jotting down notes. Then he sits down and he takes those notes and he writes out a narrative. You know, they called me. They were very upset, although they were calm. And they told me about the meeting.

And they said that this was said and this was said and this was said. So what's he doing? He's creating a paper trail. And, you know, his son, Mark Sheridan, a lawyer, believes that he was creating a paper trail and that that's what those documents are but the detectives also had this sorry to cut you off it's just like that blows they had this in a banker's box with his taxes as evidence they took from the scene and they never yes and when mark sheridan realized what all this was and what it was about and what it signified, he went back to both the prosecutor's office and the attorney general and said,

you've got to look at these things. This is what my father was concerned about at the time of his death. This is what was going on in his life. I don't know what it means. You figure out what it means. When did he do this? Approximately. Yeah, approximately it would have been in 2015.

Okay, so back, okay. And they didn't do anything with it, obviously. Not that I know of. so there was another little news item that came out maybe this is a good time to wire this in just to see for a little parallel here you said you started reporting on this at the beginning of 2020 you got cut off on covid cut off but you got hard back into it january 1 2021 and then built it all throughout that year and then released the podcast this year in the beginning of 2022 another case was seemingly solved that had to do with new jersey politics and a murder with a knife and a fire yeah can you tell people about this one? Sure. Oh, it's crazy.

So there was in the end of May of 2014. Same year. Same year. What's that? June, July, August. So four months before the Sheridan murders. There's a guy in Jersey City named Michael Galdieri who was found in his apartment, stabbed to death, and his apartment had been set on fire.

And it never got solved. And who was he? He was like a really, he was the son of a state senator but he had as far as i can tell he had drug issues and he had never really wasn't really going anywhere um and he would was involved in political campaigns as sort of like the guy who's like putting up posters and stuff like he's sort of a street guy is how he was described to me um so you know and if there's like sometimes you know the all across new jersey um you know on election day they pay people to go vote so that's like what street guys do as you get you find somebody like you pay somebody 25 to go vote um so that's so that's what he was doing and

what had emerged in uh late january or february of 2022 was that the uh federal prosecutor's office in New Jersey had gotten a plea deal, and that's how it became public, is they announced this plea deal by this guy named Sean Cattle, C-A-D-D-L-E. Eight years later. is the use of dark money organizations to bring in donations that don't get reported as, you know, you don't know who's making the donations and then that money goes to campaigns. Legal, Citizens United, Supreme Court put a rubber stamp on this,

a stamp of approval, we should call it. But, you know, so he's been involved in that kind of work as well as just like running campaigns like standard political work sean cattle pleads guilty to hiring two hitmen uh to go and kill michael gieri, and then he paid them at a New Jersey diner after the murder. That was sort of one of those details that everybody loved because it was so Jersey. Just like the shirt. Yeah, exactly. I wore this one on purpose today.

I knew. Um, so, uh, but what's interesting and got the attention of many reporters is that the, um, you know, and nobody's talked about the Sheridan case and I'm just like the top of my head is exploding because I'm trying to finish the podcast and get it out and I'm thinking oh my god are they going to solve the case um but in fact so there were some similarities but nothing really went anywhere so far with it the similarities are obviously the stabbing and the lighting on fire um and then one of the hitmen who lived in connecticut uh he was pulled over by and he's arrested it's a federal case because it's a bank robbery it had already happened before it wasn't like that day it was it had been pretty recent i think it was over the weekend or it was sometime maybe in the previous week uh don't hold me to that one but it wasn't

that far back um there were a bunch of things that had happened there was a carjacking there was a car that was lit on fire there was a bunch it was a bit of a crime spree by a guy who's basically spent a big chunk of his life in prison and what and when they arrest him, they find in the car a large kitchen knife. And this is George Bratsanus. Yes. Okay. Now, I have no, to me, that's not like it's that common. Like the predilection, like if he's got an interest in kitchen knives,

the knifing, the lighting of the fire, the political, that they're all involved in politics. But it's like a lot to, it's like a lot of red flags going up. But I can't say – I've been working on this and I can't say that I've been able to find anything that proves that the Sheridan case is connected to the Galdieri. Sure, which is perfectly fair because it is like – it just seems suspect but we got to have something hard here. So two questions on this. First of all, how did the case break open and lead to sean cattle eight years later like they obviously didn't have him as a suspect or anything and then suddenly as far as i can tell i'm trying to think if i could say

this is it a fact or is it just something i kind of know that I can't say? I think it's pretty well understood that, yeah, because I think this is in the court documents, that so Bratsenis and his co-hitman basically were both arrested and kind of ratted each other out, or one of them ratted the other out and in the effort to get on the galdieri murder and in an effort to get a plea deal and a bargain and better you know time served they uh they basically said that they were hired by sean cattle so but again because brett senes was arrested back in 2014 yeah so his co-defendant whoever that was wasn't arrested for a while a while but not that i mean i can't remember how long it was i remember that there was trying to i read all these court

documents and i'm trying to bring it back up into the memory bank. I believe that Bomani Africa, the co-hitman, he had a deal. He was supposed to be sending Brett Sennis' girlfriend money after the arrest. And he fell behind in those payments. And that's when Brett Sannis fingered him and started working on his plea deal. And I believe that somehow between the two of them, then they pieced together this story. And they got – they arrested Sean Cattle and got him to make a plea deal that he would cooperate on a political corruption investigation for better sentence on the murder. So he – yeah, and he pled guilty in court. So they didn't even go to trial or anything but okay do we did we get a motive through that though too from sean cattle has he said why he wanted colliery no and it's really kind of curious and questionable i have to say the more i look at it the less sewed up it seems to be

um it's not clear why he would do that at all i mean i you know you never know right there could be something yeah um so but i i don't know okay the second question i had had with this whole thing was the knife they found was a kitchen knife. But the missing knife at the scene, if it is the only one at the scene that's missing, if there's not another one that might be missing that was similar to the ones found, the missing knife was a switchblade. Yes. Good point. You're paying attention to the details. I'm impressed. I'm trying. Um, there was in a, so yes, the missing knife that killed John Sheridan was not a big chef's knife, kitchen knife kind of knife.

There was a knife missing out of the knife set in the kitchen. There were two knives in the bedroom, a bread knife, a serrated bread knife, and a chef's knife. And the chef's knife is the murder weapon that killed Joyce. It had her blood all over it. The bread knife was brought upstairs and not used from what I understand. I wanted choices. There's another space in the wooden block that holds the knife set. And their knife is missing and that was just never followed up on i mean i think at one point detectives called the sheridan

brothers and asked them if there was a knife missing from the house because they were trying to put together the whole knife thing and they they noticed that there seemed to was a knife missing from the house because they were trying to put together the whole knife thing and they noticed that there seemed to be a knife missing. And in fact, there was a knife missing. Now, hypothetically, if they recovered that knife from his car, don't we have that in evidence? a source who's telling me that they they hadn't looked at this the connection between these two cases originally when they're working out this plea deal and working on the galdieri case they hadn't put the two and two together but fire stabbing but yeah but but then this year um This year, they did look at it, I'm told. And as far as I know, they don't think that Brett Sanis and Beaumonti were responsible for the Sheridan murders. But I got that, like, that's like, you know, it's secondhand information to begin with and it's um

you know they may have a good reason to believe that like for instance i know in the court documents for the galdari case against uh brett senes and and africa there is discussion of the cell towers and where they were at the time of the murder, where their phones were. So it makes sense to me that that could be a pretty, like, pretty shut, you know, open and shut thing, find out where their cell phones were at five o'clock in the morning on september 28th um and maybe they've got that information and they know where they were and they weren't in skillman new jersey so that's a possibility um but i don't know that's like me guessing let's just be clear hey look yeah we that's kind of all we can do with some stuff that when i try to think of like most likely scenario here

if you were holding a gun to my head and just like you i'm guessing with this even if the cattle case isn't officially connected in that he didn't have anything to do with ordering a hit on the sheridans and the guys he ordered to do he didn't have anything to do with ordering a hit on the Sheridans and the guys he ordered to do it didn't either it happened four months before so in an effort to make it look clean seeing as that one wasn't solved four months later and there didn't seem to be leads someone may say well that worked let's do it here and so I think a strong possibility here could be that not even necessarily someone in the political realm – it could be just in the corporate realm or both – wanted to curry favor by getting deals through and knew this guy was in the way of the deal and felt that if he could get Sheridan out of the way and get rid of him, whatever other deal that they wanted to go through could go through and people that that person was friends with could then curry favor with Norcross, who's the boss of it all. That, to me, makes a lot of sense. I think, though, that everyone here, including Norcross, and I actually, trying to put myself in his shoes, I get it with this. It just, the whole thing smells to everyone.

They know what this looks like no matter what. They know what it could look like. Let's say that. So any distance that they can keep from anything around this is critical, and that's why – we haven't said this yet, but this is a very important part. One of two things we haven't talked about with your podcast that was very important. But episode four or five of your podcast, whatever the one was after the first one where you mentioned George Norcross, you get a call from Michael Critchley and you were allowed to record what happened. But for listeners out there, Michael Critchley is a guy that Jim DiIorio, FBI agent Jim DiIorio on the show has talked about before. Huge fan of him. He's like – I had asked him in one of our podcasts.

I said, who's the best defense attorney you've ever seen in Jersey? Because he did a lot of cases in New Jersey. And he goes, oh, Michael Critchley. He goes, we have made slam dunk cases where we are walking into court like, wow, we got him. This guy is guilty as fuck. And that guy will get up there talking and a half hour in we're both looking at each other the agent's like holy shit he might have not done it he's that good and so i hear this in your podcast and i hear you go on to a zoom with

critchley where as you put it other people were on the call muted without the camera on norcross was one of them because critchley represents norcross in other matters and so his point was to come out and say hey i don't know what you're getting at here but george had nothing to do with this and if you assert that and try to say oh he did it you're gonna have a point at you you're gonna have a problem so as you've already said on this episode and you said on your own just thought it was kind of weird that you did that. You said, I don't have any proof that George Norcross had anything to do with this. It's just kind of weird because I'm looking into this. So when he reached out to you, what was going through your head?

Well, I had encountered the team of lawyers for George Norcross when I was doing the original stories in 2019. And it's pretty intimidating, you know? Like, they come at you, and it is a team. And, you know, the team in 2019 included Michael Chertoff, who was the first director of homeland security after 9-11 yeah and he's a jersey guy um wasn't he a former prosecutor too yeah he was and he's also like he runs some like cyber security firm that's kind of scary like they know how to really break into your computer and do stuff like cia level uh cyber stuff anyway um so you know they come at you and and basically or

you know say oh i mean as is their right you know if you know we want to make sure that you represent our client fairly and you're reporting which is fair enough yeah um you know but like i said the the undercurrent is one false move and we will sue your ass and so it is it's intimidating um and you know, which I'm not saying it's, there's anything wrong with it. Um, but so they reach out to us again when, uh, what happened was that I really didn't want the Norcross brothers to know that I was working on this for, for all that time. Like I just felt like I wanted to wait until I had most of it sewn up before asking my questions of them. And I had done an interview with George Norcross in 2019, and I had already talked with them about the whole deal on the Camden waterfront. And, you know, so

I had a lot already. And so before we we were several weeks before we were going to launch the podcast, we, um, sent letters to both Phil and George Norcross saying, we're going to put out this podcast and in the podcast, we're going to say X, Y, and Z. And, um, and here are some questions we have for you. Uh, And then I listed all my questions. So they were, you know, so I had reached out to them. And then I get from the lawyer, you know, we want to talk to you and we want to talk to your editor. And you are unfair, you're biased, and this is an outrage, basically. And so we arranged that meeting and we said sure we're happy

to talk to you which we were uh but it's got to be on the record and it's got to be on tape and they didn't have a problem with that so that's actually promising we do the zoom call and um and they you know and michael critchleyitchley basically, they don't want to answer my questions. What they want is for me to promise that I will say in the podcast that I don't have any evidence that George Norcross had anything to do with the death of the Sheridans. And I kept saying to them, okay, I hear you that you want me to do that. And I'm not like the decider here. I have an editor, I have a producer.

Like we will talk about it and we'll take your request into account. And they're like, no, you have to promise that you will do that or this call is over. Or your persona non grata yeah and um this went on for like you know like 45 minutes of back and forth and every time i i try to say okay you know let's talk about something else here um i have some questions I'd like to ask. It's like, no, you have to say this. So they ended the call. And the tape just proved to be really powerful. Because, I mean, I've just heard from so many people who thought that that basically um and at after in the

in episode four you hear that conversation you hear them say if you won't say it we're leaving and they leave um and then i actually say what they wanted me to say because it's true. I don't have evidence that George Norcross had anything to do with the Sheridan deaths. And I'm willing to say that. Yeah. So we say that and that's kind of the end of episode four. Now, I'm thinking about this out loud right now as you're explaining that because we talked very quickly before we went on. I mentioned this.

I thought it was sketchy. But I actually think – I should have thought of this at the beginning. But this is a private guy. George Norcross is not a dude who begs for attention. You know, you can find some videos of him doing like a little speaker thing at a college or something, but this is not a guy who's out there in front of TV cameras left and right. The fact that they reached out seemed unnecessary to me. I think they were drawing conclusions because, and again, I don't have any context. I wasn't there. I don't know, but you probably pissed them off. It's fair to say, in 2019 because you were looking into this and the implication is, oh, we're going at the powerful guy and this guy wants to rebuild Camden and he's like, well, this record it. I'm going to be – the guy was there too. I'm going to be – he didn't talk, but I'm going to be there as well.

That's very interesting to me because I would think with something like this, if he were actually really concerned about it and not just concerned about PR, which are two very different things. It would have been the opposite. I don't think he gives you anything on the record. I'm just, I'm kind of, I don't know if I'm going to disagree with myself later on that, but I think it was a dumb move where the intention was more aggressive. Does that make sense? I think it was a dumb move. Yeah.

I think... I don't think it was a dumb move to have an on-the-record conversation. I think it was a dumb move to, on the record, with tape rolling, to sound like a bully. Yeah. And what I... with tape rolling to sound like a bully yeah um and what i i i mean george norcross runs a super super effective business he runs a super super effective political operation

the guy's smart and he does he what he does does well. And he has made a tremendous amount of money doing it. So I don't understand why he's got guys giving him advice that would have advised that. Because really, instead of calling me names and telling, you know, I mean, on the one hand, I understand what they were doing. They were building. They were laying the groundwork for a libel case. Right. They were sort of like setting, putting me on the spot and trying to get me on the record, uttering something that was going to allow them to.

And they may still to sue us for libel and bankrupt us. How could they do that, though? Because you did say it, and you said it again today. Right, but you could see it's possible that that was the strategy, because in there, what they've written to me, you know, on paper is that they think that I am biased, irresponsible, and that I am defaming them. And so they use all this language that is, you know, seems to be laying the groundwork for we're going to sue you, and you're in trouble um but so i understand that but really like their pr guy was there and with the lawyers like to me in my mind what they needed to do was say you know hey you've got this all wrong you know we're all about making i'm all about making

camden a better place. And, and, you know, yeah, you could twist the facts and make it look this way. But this is really what I'm about. And this is what I'm doing. Like, they needed to make a better argument in defense of him, or he needed to make a better argument. And, you know, to me, that's the mistake. Like, they could'm coming from, and this is what it's about, and you're misconstruing. You're putting these facts together, and you're misconstruing. That's what I wanted to hear from them. I wanted them to tell me where I'm wrong

so that we could get the story right. We didn't get that. I'm guessing when I say this, because I don't know, but if I were a betting man, with that big a team and all that human capital on there, very, very bright guys, that's why the feeling I get is that they weren't advising him that. He wanted them to do that because that's his – when he actually feels like something's coming at him that is ridiculous, that's when he steps out. When it's all the stuff behind the scenes that sometimes could be true, you know, with political deals and stuff, that guy doesn't say shit. Says nothing. And it's stuff that sometimes, based on where people's imaginations go, fairly, unfairly, I don't know, there could be something there. He might take a deal with somebody that's a little bit of a bribery scandal or something like that. And he's never said anything, even when he was under investigation, very, very little. So now he comes out and aggressively says something. And I completely agree with you.

It just came across as really stupid. I just don't think that a team of all those people would have advised that. It just goes against what they say. And yeah, you ended up doing what they wanted you to do, but you probably I had from your full podcast is that, number one, they said this was a murder-suicide. We can almost definitively say at this point that's fucking ridiculous. Number two, they say that this was some sort of isolated incident, in their case the most isolated, husband killed wife. We can say someone else was there number three they say they scanned the crime scene and they have the evidence we can say they didn't do that here's all the things they missed or failed to represent correctly yada yada yada

number four this guy was very very powerful and influential it influence i'll use the word influential i think i think uh sheridan was more of as you described him a behind the scenes broker power broker but he wasn't in this in this deal maybe he had some power because he was chair of the board of that one company but he was a guy who was respected and people listened to what he said and so if he didn't want to do something he wasn't going to do it and so we can take that away that perhaps there's very reasonable evidence to say based on what he saved at the rest of his life, all the emails and everything, this is tied to it. And number five, we know the killer is still out there. So who it is actually is – I don't want to say it's irrelevant. It's it's like it's like anything else when you see any kind of murder and you don't catch the killer people want to know who that is that's why people are into cold cases because they're like wait there they could still be out there and killing people that's one thing but also what's behind it what's the motive behind it and how much does that change the course of

like a state's politics as a result that's a very open-ended question from your podcast yeah and you know mark sheridan who's very very smart guy he made the point that you know he's not he also wanted to be very clear that he was not pointing the finger at george norcross he hasn't yeah and he said you know there were a lot of people involved in that deal who stood to make a lot of money. And all he's wanted from the very start was for a good investigation, like follow the leads and figure out what happened. And look at that Camden waterfront deal and investigate it that's all like yeah you know because it could have been any number of people someone with money to whoever you know i can throw the theories out like i've thrown out but that aside whoever was behind this did have at least access to, even if it wasn't their own, they had hard access to people who had significant means and sway.

Because to me, there is no solid argument to say that there was not some sort of – somewhere in the investigation. I don't know if it was one person, two people, three people. I have no idea on on that but there was some sort of purposeful yeah we're gonna we're gonna let this yeah don't don't worry about that you know what i mean like there was some sort of purposeful cover-up type deal oh man i wish i could prove that i mean i think the inaction by the attorney general's office raises huge questions about the effectiveness of that office. You know, there's a new attorney general and now he's investigating, we can talk about that. But I think the other thing, you know, there are, I spoke to numerous people who were involved in either Camden business, Camden real estate or Camden politics, who told me that they were afraid to, you know,

to fight back in Camden after the Sheridan murders, like that, that was so fundamentally scary that, you know, real estate developer, real estate developers sold out. Political figures, city council people, afraid to challenge the machine.

So it's just, and a lot of people were afraid to talk on the record. So, you know, it... There's a murderer who walked free. Um... and there... But there was also like a ripple effect of creating an environment in which people felt afraid for their lives.

And that, I think, also raises some really troubling questions. Yeah. And the... Who was the Attorney General in 2014 at the time? John Hoffman, who was acting. That's what I was gonna ask. Took the words out of my mouth. So he... What is the deal there, like, quote-unquote, potential question marks? Is it that there could have been some sort of incentive with behind the scenes problems going on with this case where he wanted to make sure he was named full-time attorney general yes exactly okay um so remember chris christie's

governor he his he he brings in so, so Chris Christie was the federal prosecutor, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey before he ran for governor. And when he became governor, he brought in just a slew of people from the U.S. prosecutor's office in Newark to work in top positions in state government, which included the attorney general's office in Newark to work in top positions in state government, which included the attorney general's office. And he had a particular style of governing that really was kind of, I'm not sure what word to apply to it, but sort of more like all-powerful than most governors. I mean, governors are very powerful in New Jersey because there are no other statewide elected officials.

It's the governor that runs the state government, and there's no, like, controller or attorney general or public advocate. Most states have between four and ten other elected statewide officials um and new jersey just has the one you could say he wanted to throw his weight around so anyway that's a little side story but the so um his attorney general, Chris Christie's attorney general that he appoints, Jeffrey Chiesa, becomes when Senator Lattenberg dies, Jeffrey Chiesa is sent to Washington to sit in that seat until the election. Oh, 2013. Yeah, before Cory Booker gets elected.

Okay. Yeah, before Cory Booker gets elected. And I think and that kind of served his purposes anyway, Chris Christie's purposes, because he was worried about Cory Booker running against him in his re-election. So now there's an empty spot at the Attorney General's office, and John Hoffman is put there and is kind of warming that seat, but isn't really intended to be the guy. But he wants to be the guy but he wants to be the guy and the guy

and so in the meantime then bridge gate happens and one of the people that was can you tell people what that is just yeah so bridge gate is the um in september of 2013 chris christ, political allies of Chris Christie tried to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who's a Democrat. All these Democrats were endorsing Christie, and some Democrats were holding the line saying, no, I'm not going to endorse that guy and the mayor of fort lee was one of them and they did this scheme where they punished him by uh blocking lanes to the george washington bridge which blocked traffic back into fort lee for a week and nobody could get anywhere nobody could get across the bridge but nobody could get to school or to work in fort lee they were just... And so that became Bridgegate. And one of the people implicated in the Bridgegate scheme was Chris Christie's chief of staff, Kevin O'Dowd.

This is so... It's just like going down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry. But Kevin O'Dowd, his chief of staff, also a former prosecutor from the U.S. prosecutor's office in Newark, is widely believed and expected to be the guy that, and I think it's, no one contests this, that Christie's going to have to come to the senate for confirmation and chris christie and odowd don't want to be asked questions about bridgegate so that gets put on ice and instead kevin odowd get this kevin odowd is hired by george norcross

to be the ceo of cooper university, which is the job that John Sheridan had before his untimely death. And meanwhile, John Hoffman, who's just like the acting attorney general who was meant to be there for a few months, is there for three years, longest ever time that we have an attorney general who's acting. And what acting means is that the way the New Jersey Constitution works is we don't elect our attorney general, the governor appoints and the Senate confirms. But the idea is, is that that attorney, the attorney general is meant to be strong and independent, because they can't be fired by the governor once they're confirmed. So they're appointed and chosen by the governor,

but if then the attorney general does something the governor doesn't like, after they've been confirmed by the Senate and they become the attorney general, they can't be fired until the end of their term. I mean, then they could be not reappointed, but not fired. So John Hoffman can be fired at any moment by Chris Christie. And so he's in a position where he wants to be named Attorney General, and he certainly doesn't want to be fired by Chris Christie. And he's the guy deciding that the Attorney General's office, which has, supervises the county prosecutors and has every

right, I mean, it's standard practice for the Attorney General's Office to, it's called supersede cases, to come in, step in and take over cases where they really need, like it involves more than one county. It involves organized crime or criminal networks. It involves more investigative power than a small county prosecutor's office in rural New Jersey can handle. Everything about this case suggests that the attorney general's office should have superseded it and taken it over and given it to their crack division of criminal justice, which had taken down the mob in the 1970s in New Jersey and had at one time been considered one of the best state investigative units in the country.

They sit on their hands, and they don't do anything. Wow. So the only other question I would have on on which office would supersede it though is one that i actually have on most cases i see that goes one way or the other where you get like the fbi coming in what is there i guess the question i should pose here for this case is that why wouldn't the FBI get involved with a case like this versus other murder cases that they happen to get involved with as opposed to local investigators? Okay, well, you know, I'm not a lawyer. We'll say that. But my understanding is that the FBI gets involved if the crime crosses state borders. So anything that moves between two states. So, for instance, the murder of Michael Galdieri in Jersey City.

George Britsen is the hitman, drives from Connecticut to New Jersey to commit the murder, and it becomes a federal crime because of that, because he crossed state lines. It's not, I don't think there's anything like screaming about the Sheridan case that suggests the need for, you know, the FBI, because I don't see it as necessarily going beyond i mean i think there is a case to be made that when you have tax breaks and there's a whole aspect to the tax break program that we haven't talked about but there was this thing where companies you would certify on their application that they were considering going somewhere else.

And so they would kind of cook up these leases for office space, say, in Philadelphia or across the border into New York State. It had to be out of New Jersey. So they would say that they were leaving the state and get the tax break or some of them might have left the state. I'm not saying it was all fraudulent, but but it doesn't there was that aspect to it. And some of the Camden tax breaks that are connected to George Norcross certainly raise those red flags where there are um that task force that i mentioned that was investigating found uh evidence of fraudulent office space you know that was sort of it was it was never seriously really pursued it was like emailing a guy and saying hey i need a quote quick give me

a quote from a place in in uh city center Philadelphia for 1,800 square feet of office space and send me that on letterhead. Hypothetically, at the time, if the local office had really looked into the things in that banker's box and seen a potential connection between some deal that happened and the crime that happened here they'd uncovered some of these corporations that were involved in those deals then it could have been superseded to the fbi because now it's like oh this might be like also like a commerce thing attached to this and it's interstate all right that makes sense because the thing i wanted to ask on the record is what you and i were literally talking about right before we turned on the cameras because i was asking you a couple details on the current investigation. So you put out this podcast. It was supposed to be seven episodes.

It turned into eight while you were putting the podcast out. You put out a very short episode, number seven, because the case was officially reopened. As a result, this is why people have to listen to Dead End, the podcast on Spotify, Apple. It's on YouTube as well, WNYC, that you did. Terrific. But as a result of this podcast, it got people talking about the case. You revealed all this significant, highly great circumstantial evidence around the scene itself, other players who could be involved, stuff like that. And so the people who you interviewed in the very first episode, Joyce's best friend and her husband, they then

came back and confirmed that they had been called to go down to, I believe, Trenton to interview with the people investigating the case. And if I heard this correctly before we went on, you said that they also said there was an FBI investigator present for that interview? But I didn't have it confirmed. And so we're like putting out every week a new episode. And we've got sort of our narrative arc planned out for seven episodes, seven weeks of release. And at the same time, I'm like, wow, I really think the AGs actually opened up this case. And that would be a huge piece of news related to all this. But I couldn't get the AGs office to confirm it because they just don't do that they when they have a open investigation they won't talk about it so then i started i thought okay but if they're investigating

then they got to be talking to the same people i've been talking to. So I just started calling people back and checking in with them. And indeed, I heard early, uh, I heard from, uh, Chris Stevens when I reached out to her. I think we were texting each other, and she told me that she'd been contacted by an investigator. And I was like, yes, I got it. Wow. And then she got back to me. I was like, yes, I got it.

And then she got back to me. I was like, okay, I'm calling you. Let's do a quick interview on the phone. And then she got back to me and she's like, Bob doesn't want me to talk about it. He thinks we could be breaking the confidentiality of the investigation. And so I was like, okay, cool. And so I just kept finding, you know know reaching out to more people and I got a couple other people

to confirm so I did know like I felt like I had enough people to say that the investigation was happening and then I went back to them and at that point I think I can't remember why they changed their minds but Bob changed his mind and basically I talked to Bob and I said listen I won't we don't have to talk about what you said per se in the interview I just want to confirm that they did interview you and yeah I've already got it from two others so I'm gonna I'm gonna put make this public and so then he said okay and chris gets on the phone and she's like well bob doesn't want me to talk about it and i said what but he

told me it's okay so ask him and she's like bob nancy's on the phone can i talk to her and i get all this on tape and uh and he says yeah and she's like, he said yes. She was surprised. I love her. And so, you know, both of them told me about the interview, but not like a lot of the content of the interview because they felt like they shouldn't. Yeah, that's fine. Confirming it's big. But they did. I kind of feel like they let it slip about the FBI.

Like they said it without, I don't think they realized that that was something I didn't know. Who else told you that they were, that they had been contacted? I'm not sure who I can say because I was sort of doing it on background with people. I don't think I can say because I was sort of doing it on background with people I don't think I can really say but people who are you know close to the case and were contacted by the AG's office to be interviewed and so anyway then they told me that besides the state investigator that there was also an FBI agent so that was sort of like oh I didn't know that and their recollection of it was they or the impression they got was as that the

federal the FBI guy was there related to the Michael Gold Derry Sean Cattle case that that's why they were there I was gonna ask that so that makes sense so they're looking at it even though you you've heard, as you said, from back channels that they don't think that that knife that was found was related. They are at least now monitoring because they believe that there could be some, let's say, network connections that exist from that one. Because it also was, as we said said an identical type of murder which doesn't mean they were together this copycat stuff happens all the time like oh that worked let's kill him that way i get it but it's certainly suspect yes and it also could be true that bob and chris don't really understand why the fbi was there and they were sort of you know making a a guess and maybe

the fbi is there because as we discussed a few moments ago there is a cross-state fraud case that is related to all of this having to do with the tax breaks on the camden waterfront well man so we just did like three hours and five or three hours and ten minutes or something like that and i say that because ever on the phone you're like three how are we going to talk that long i said you'd be surprised so are you a bit surprised uh i think you said you'll see it goes by fast and um it did yeah because I'm thinking about it out loud. There's a lot of other stuff that we could really dig into right now. But then we'd be doing two podcasts.

And what I'd rather do is start with this because this was a really, really good podcast. Your reporting was excellent. I really, really appreciate you doing it. But start with this. See where we get and then see how this thing develops. And if some newer things come out as well, let's bring you back in in a few months and then we can dig into some of the other stuff but there was just like there's so much on the bone from this podcast the level of detail is incredible so i'm really glad you've brought a light onto this case and i hope we get something you know i hope

you know not just for the sake of like you'll to see murder solved, of course, but you want to make sure that if there's implications to stuff similarly to how there was implications on the Sean Cattle one, that that is nipped in the bud. So that people who are in charge in society are also not taking part in things like this. And who that may be, we don't know. But certainly, there could be corporations involved with this. And I would love to see that unmasked. And it will be in large thanks to your reporting, for sure. So thank you for all you've done. Well, it's a good thing we're not going to go any longer, because if we were, you were going to have to feed me. Well, I'll still do that. Don't worry about that. I take care of people.

But thank you so much for coming down. Thanks for having me. Of course. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to it. Peace.