The former deputy mayor of New Jersey's second-largest city faces additional federal extortion and bribery charges as she prepares to go to trial next month.
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In a superseding indictment filed last week, a federal grand jury charged former Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini with new extortion and bribery counts to go with an existing extortion conspiracy count filed in August.
The new indictment details additional meetings and phone conversations between Beldini and other charged coconspirators, including one at City Hall in which she allegedly accepted $5,000 that had been provided by a federal cooperating witness posing as a corrupt developer.
According to the indictment, Beldini converted it into campaign donations to Mayor Jerramiah Healy's re-election campaign, for which she served as treasurer. Healy has not been charged.
The cooperating witness, Solomon Dwek, was at the heart of parallel money laundering and corruption investigations that led to the arrests of 44 people in July -- nearly two dozen of them elected or appointed public officials. Several prominent rabbis from Brooklyn and Deal, N.J., also were arrested and charged with laundering millions of dollars through Jewish charities.
Unlike most of the other defendants who requested and received extensions to study the government's evidence against them before deciding on a course of action, Beldini attorney Brian Neary has pushed for a trial that is tentatively scheduled for mid-January.
"This doesn't change our approach,'' Neary said Monday. "There was no quid pro quo and these are legitimate campaign contributions.''
Beldini is scheduled to be arraigned on the new counts Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Newark. She is charged with attempted extortion and accepting bribes for allegedly taking $10,000 on two occasions that was funneled from Dwek through former Jersey City housing commissioner Edward Cheatam and late political consultant Jack Shaw.
Beldini, the owner of a real estate agency, is charged with a third count of bribery for allegedly scheming with Dwek to act as a real estate agent for the fictitious condominium tower he spoke of building in Jersey City.
Healy, who has acknowledged he is one of the unidentified Jersey City officials referred to in the indictments, said Monday he continued to be ``dismayed by the negative light this has cast on Jersey City.''
``That being said, we continue to conduct honest, open and efficient government and are focused on moving our city forward,'' he said.
According to the indictments, Healy met twice with Beldini, Dwek, Cheatam and Shaw at Jersey City restaurants to discuss Dwek's purported project.
In scores of previous meetings between coconspirators described in voluminous federal charging documents in July, money changed hands at private offices and, more commonly, in restaurants and diners or their adjacent parking lots -- never in a government building.
But the superseding indictment describes a meeting between Beldini and Cheatam at City Hall on March 26 in which Cheatam allegedly gave her two $2,500 checks from straw donors to hide the fact that they came from Dwek.
At an earlier meeting secretly recorded by Dwek, Beldini allegedly urged the others to be cautious, warning, "There are too many snakes around.''
Beldini and Cheatam were to go to trial in late October, but Cheatam pleaded guilty in September to extortion conspiracy and is to be sentenced later this month.
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