Because this fall marks the 50th anniversary of the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation (SCI), a retrospective is appropriate. As a commissioner and then chair of the SCI from 1984 to 1994, I believe that the Commission has done invaluable work over the years, although there have been unfortunate detours. That said, the SCI has learned from its experiences and is the stronger for it. This article avoids a straightforward chronology in favor of a discussion that identifies the SCI’s successful efforts, its wins and its warts, and the reaction of the three branches of government to the SCI’s journey over half a century.

New Jersey in the late 1960s mirrored a nation preoccupied by war abroad and social unrest at home. Amid that upheaval came a series of revelations that shocked the Garden State. In 1967, Life magazine published the first installment of an exposé that revealed the scope of organized crime across American society, with New Jersey at its epicenter. Among the highlights: the backyard “incinerator” on the Livingston estate of Ruggiero “Richie the Boot” Boiardo; the mob burial ground on an old chicken farm in Lakewood; and the efforts by Simone “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante “to develop a garbage disposal unit,” Life reported, “that would reduce a human body to a meatball.” Meanwhile, as this was being digested by a concerned public, New Jersey Assistant Attorney General William J. Brennan III, son of Justice Brennan, gave a controversial speech to newspaper reporters in which he labelled certain Trenton lawmakers and others as too cozy with the mob.

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