The black-and-white surveillance video outside the restaurant was shaky and grainy.
“Well, I want to, ah, you know, get you on my team,” said the odd dining companion of Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt after the two had gotten together on a Saturday evening in February of 2009.
Amid the rustling of paper, an envelope was exchanged.
“Little something to start,” suggested the man who Van Pelt knew as David Esenbach, a fast-talking guy claiming to be a New York developer with a portfolio of potential projects in New Jersey.
“Well, I’ll hold onto it,” said the Ocean County Republican. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”
This week on our “Eating at the Scene of the Crime” summer tour, which has taken us to restaurants and diners where some of the state’s more notorious tale of crime and corruption played out, we make a stop at Morton’s Steakhouse at Caesars Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. It was here where the cash payment to Van Pelt was captured so graphically on video and later shown to a jury by prosecutors looking to prove that the elected official had been all too willing to sell his political influence for cash.
The pricey restaurant in fact would be just one stop in one of the most far-ranging undercover sting operations to ever play out in New Jersey — ultimately leading to corruption charges against dozens of elected officials, political operatives, candidates for public office.
At the center of it all was a failed real estate…
