The meeting was set for an out-of-way place where no one was likely to recognize either man at the table.
The informant who had arranged the meeting picked a restaurant far from Bayonne, where his target was running for mayor. Instead, he suggested, they get together in Manhattan.
This week in our “Eating at the Scene of the Crime” summer tour of restaurants and diners that played a supporting role into some of the state’s more infamous stories of crime and corruption, we make a trip to New York to revisit the case of a former Democratic Assemblyman and the bribery case against him that prosecutors say began at a table at Scarpetta.
The popular Italian and Mediterranean restaurant off Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s NoMad District might seem like an odd place for a New Jersey corruption sting to play out. Most of the Garden State’s best Italian restaurants have a cozy, homey feeling. Exposed brick, checkered tablecloths, a wait staff with familiar faces who have worked there for years.
Not here.
Scarpetta is so chic it borders on sterile. Even the bar area where we were seated had plants hanging from the ceiling, accented by high-tech lighting and contrasting slate gray walls and marble tables.
You wouldn’t catch Tony Soprano dead in the place.
Yet this was where Matthew O’Donnell decided to dine with a Hudson County pol in February of 2018 to launch a long-running sting operation set up by state law enforcement authorities.
O’Donnell, a tax attorney, had been nabbed in an unrelated criminal investigation involving tens of thousands in illegal campaign contributions offered to elected officials across New Jersey in exchange for lucrative municipal contracts.
Secretly working undercover as an informant for the state Attorney General’s corruption unit in hopes of avoiding a lengthy prison sentence, O’Donnell’s guest for dinner that night was Jason O’Donnell, who was not related to him, then campaigning to become the next mayor of Bayonne.
We can only take the word of prosecutors about what was said there. Court filings make no mention of any recordings and Scarpetta is not a quiet venue, offering no guarantee that a surveillance recording would have picked up what was being said even if anyone had been wearing a wire.
At the same time, the service at Scarpetta is far too attentive to give any sense of anonymity, with water glasses constantly being refilled and cutlery immediately being replaced as soon as the salad or appetizer plates leave the table.
But almost a year later, Jason O’Donnell was arrested on charges of taking a $10,000 bribe in exchange for allegedly promising over pasta in New York to make Matthew O’Donnell his “tax guy” if elected in Bayonne.
The matter has yet to be adjudicated. The indictment remains under appeal before the state Supreme Court, and it remains unknown if the case will ever go to trial.
We can, however, make a judgment on the pasta.
Sitting down where the two O’Donnells met, albeit ordering from the less expensive noontime menu, we ate amid a Wednesday afternoon power lunch crowd. Diners at more than one table opted for Scarpetta’s signature house-crafted spaghetti with tomato and basil dish. We did, too.
With its impossibly posh, classic one-word restaurant name, Scarpetta is meant to impress. The restaurant, which chef Scott Conant opened on 14th Street in 2008, now nestles within the first floor of what is now the renovated Hotel James Nomad. Inside, the black, riveted ironwork of the landmark 1904 beaux-arts style building dominates the space, thrusting from floor up to the ceiling.
Scarpetta’s name translates to “little shoe” in Italian. Nothing says “mangia” like a shoe, right? It also refers to the act of sopping up the sauce left on your plate with a piece of bread. That bread, like a shoe, drags up what’s on the ground. A stretch perhaps, but we’ll give them a pass since there’s nothing better than dipping bread in leftover sauce.
According to court records, Matthew O’Donnell told his handlers he first met the Bayonne Democrat at a golf outing in Monmouth County. He claimed that the former legislator was short of money needed for his upcoming mayoral election. Notes of his interviews with investigators say he proposed setting up a meeting with the candidate at Scarpetta to see if a quid pro quo might be in the offing.
Jason O’Donnell allegedly told the attorney at dinner he was seeking to raise $10,000 in “street money” for his mayoral campaign — cash typically used to pay people to get out the vote on Election Day. The complaints alleged that as payback, he promised he would make him the city’s tax attorney if he was elected.
Three months later, claim prosecutors, the lawyers walked into the candidate’s campaign headquarters and slapped down a pink-and-white Baskin-Robbins bag.
“This is what we talked about at Scarpetta’s,” the lawyer told the mayoral candidate in a conversation that authorities this time said was captured on surveillance recordings.
The bag did not contain ice cream. It was filled with $10,000 in cash.
Dance to my tune
While Scarpetta might have been a curious choice to launch a sting against a Bayonne political candidate, it would not be the first time that the lure of New York City would figure prominently in a New Jersey criminal case.
Sometimes the city can simply be the more convenient place to meet, as it was for David Samson, then the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, when the politically powerful New Jersey lawyer orchestrated a bizarre shakedown of United Airlines that began in 2011 at Novita, a casual Italian restaurant in New York’s Flatiron District.
Samson, a former state attorney general, sat down to dine with four United executives to talk about an airport project. But talk soon turned to the real point of the evening. The chairman wanted a direct flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to a local airport near his South Carolina getaway home and was willing to play hardball to make it happen.
“I hope they dance to my tune,” Samson would later tell a political operative who served as his go-between with United, according to court filings. “Let me know if there’s a way to keep the pressure on this issue.”
He ultimately pleaded guilty to using his influence as Port Authority chairman to coerce one of the nation’s largest airlines to meet his demands and was sentenced to a year of house arrest.
The menu
No one was dancing when we had lunch at Scarpetta.
A meal there begins with bread on the table. And what comes in the basket is delicious. There is a rosemary focaccia and two types of stromboli. The sauce you dip it in? Offerings of olive oil, mascarpone butter and a tomato-and-eggplant puree.
A tuna “susci” (their spelling) appetizer of thin-sliced tuna wrapped around carrot, chive, preserved truffle may have been cutting-edge years ago, but now is put to shame by most fancy sushi restaurants in New Jersey. Give us the eel hand roll with chocolate soy sauce from DomoDomo in Jersey City any day.
As for the $34 spaghetti with tomato and basil ($29 at lunchtime), the dish is a picture of presentation. A reviewer for The New York Times, back when Scarpetta first arrived on the scene, offered effusive praise for its roundness of flavor and nuance of sweetness “that amount to pure Mediterranean bliss.”
Yet while the pasta was indeed very good, it tasted like something you could make it at home for a fraction of the price. Yes, the spaghetti is fresh and perfectly al dente. The sauce is indeed silky smooth and creamy. However, you’re not paying for a great pasta dish here. You’re paying to say you paid for a $34 plate of spaghetti with tomato and basil.
Perhaps even more ridiculous is the $38 lobster salad, featuring a small mound of limp, flavorless lobster meat atop a mountain of peas. Yes, peas.
The lobster, already an overused and overrated menu item, was under-seasoned and underwhelming. Lest we forget the tarragon dust atop the whole thing.
The roasted carrots with Sicilian spices and yogurt were pricy at $16, but somehow the most impressive part of the meal — delectably charred and aesthetically pleasing with different colored carrots. Still, when the most striking part of the meal is carrots, something has gone terribly wrong.
We didn’t stay for dessert. Keeping with the narrative offered by prosecutors, we instead searched out a local Baskin-Robbins. The one on Fifth Avenue parked inside a Dunkin’ did not have the kind of white-and-pink paper bags that prosecutors claim was stuffed with $10,000 in cash dropped off by Matthew O’Donnell as a bribe. But we did pick up some cups of coffee and mint chip ice cream.
The case against Jason O’Donnell, meanwhile, continues before the New Jersey Supreme Court. After he was charged in December 2019 with four other political candidates and officials, who were accused of taking thousands in illegal campaign contributions and cash payoffs, a Superior Court judge unexpectedly threw out the case against the former Bayonne firefighter (who likely knows a thing or two about making spaghetti himself).
Superior Court Judge Mitzy Galis-Menendez in Hudson County concluded that the state’s bribery statutes only applied to elected and party officials. As a candidate, she said O’Donnell had no power to make any promises in return for the cash payment that prosecutors say he accepted.
The state appellate court thought otherwise, reinstating the charges against O’Donnell this past April. The panel said that to accept that those who are running for office were not subject to the bribery statute would be to “declare open season” on the bribing of candidates for public office.
O’Donnell’s attorney is now asking the state’s highest court to hear the matter.
As for Matthew O’Donnell, he pleaded guilty last year to misconduct and records tampering charges in connection with the scheme that first brought him to the attention of authorities and is awaiting sentencing.
We walked out of Scarpetta with a $115 bill and headed back to Jersey.
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