Questions rise in New Jersey about mafia ties
For a time, Richard Weiner had three
things in common with Richard Weiner. Both men were attorneys. Both had
offices in Hackensack, across the street from the county courthouse
(and, as it happened, across Essex Street from each other).
Each
man prided himself as a doer, a man who accomplishes big things. One
Richard Weiner represented accident and burn victims, winning some of
the biggest settlements in the history of New Jersey jurisprudence,
including $23.5 million for the family of a Saddle River eye surgeon who
was killed in an automobile crash.
The other
Richard Weiner has spent three decades at the pinnacle of North Jersey’s
legal establishment, specializing in family and business litigation
while serving at various times as president of the Bergen County Bar
Association and chairman of the association’s ethics committee.
And
then there are the names. Who could forget the names? The two may share
a moniker, but the subject of names is where the lives and reputations
of these two very different Richard Weiners begins to radically diverge.
The
Richard Weiner of the establishment — the one whose corner office
windows face the county courthouse, the former member of the Wyckoff
Recreation Advisory Board, president of the Wyckoff Free Public Library
and an imposing fixture on the tennis courts of the Indian Trail Club
— was born in 1959 with the middle initial “H,” for Harris.
“I’ve
known him over 30 years,” said Peter Doyne, who was praised as the
“Atticus Finch of Bergen County” when he retired from the bench in 2015.
“I have always found him to be an honorable man.”
Richard
Weiner the injury lawyer, meanwhile, was born in 1939 with the middle
name Joel. In 2009, he paid $5,000 to settle a civil lawsuit alleging
that he violated federal law by attempting to solicit victims of a plane
crash before the mandatory 45-day waiting period had ended.
He also remains a named party in an explosive, long-running lawsuit
in which the family of Frank P. Lagano, an alleged mobster who was
murdered in 2007, maintains that Weiner, Lagano and Bergen
County's former chief of detectives, Michael Mordaga, engaged in a
“business arrangement” in which Lagano loaned money to Weiner’s firm.
The suit also alleges Weiner paid Mordaga more than $100,000 for
“illegal” referrals to his firm on behalf of injury victims with cases
potentially worth millions of dollars.
Crucially, the Richard Weiner with the alleged connections to organized crime is dead.
The
Richard Weiner located at the physical and institutional heart of
Bergen County’s legal community, on the other hand, remains quite
happily alive.
“The Rich Weiner that I know has
always been a man of tremendous integrity,” said Frank O’Marra,
executive director of the county bar association. “He is not the bad
Richard Wiener with all of these shenanigans.”
Enduring confusion
Despite
these many differences, however, some people continue to get the two
Richard Weiners mixed up. This confusion recurs every time this
newspaper, the Star-Ledger or the New Jersey Law Journal publishes
another story about the lawsuit that Lagano’s heirs filed against
Mordaga and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.
The
stories in The Record have identified the Weiner in question as Richard
J., not Richard H. They have stated that he is deceased.
People
read quickly, however. Perhaps that's why some continue to conflate
Richard H. Weiner and his allegedly disgraced, decidedly deceased
doppelganger.
Distinctions between Richard H. and Richard J., between the living and the dead, get lost.
“People
often want to confuse me with him,” said Weiner — the living one, who
is 59 — “and each time it appears in a publication, the level of concern
is heightened.”
That
level of concern is expressed through various means. Sometimes an
acquaintance approaches Weiner at his tennis club or inside the
courthouse to ask how he ever got mixed up with the Mafia.
Others ask his friends.
“When
the stories about the bad Rich Weiner started appearing a few years
ago, I got calls saying, “What the hell is going on?’” O’Marra said.
“And I would say, ‘Wait a minute, you know Rich. You know this can’t be
the Rich Weiner we know.”
Weiner’s wife is a
personal trainer in Wyckoff and surrounding towns. His mother is 87, his
aunt is 93, and both live in North Jersey. Every time a news story
surfaces about the Lagano case, people who consider themselves longtime
friends of the family approach the women closest to him and ask how
Richard Weiner could have sunk so low.
“My
mother and my wife are often confronted by people in the community
raising questions about my credibility, my integrity and my appearance
in these various publications," Weiner said, "which clearly denote a
negative connotation with my name.”
At least those
people have the guts to say something. How many others — fellow
attorneys, perhaps, or even potential clients — harbor identical
concerns about the interchangeable appellations but stay silent,
depriving Weiner of the opportunity to clear his name (and win their
business)?
“That’s what I worry about, the
unknown,” Weiner said. “My concern was always: Who is not telling me,
who is not confronting me, and who was not coming here as a client
because they Googled my name?”
Physical differences, too
Whoever
these people are, they certainly have never met both men. One Weiner,
Richard H., stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 225 pounds. His dark brown hair
is receding and graying at its fringes. He possesses the broad shoulders
and powerful presence of a man who lifts weights six days a week.
The other, Richard J., who died in 2015, was short, red-headed and tubby.
“The
other Rich Weiner was considerably shorter and older,” said Doyne, who
watched both attorneys try cases in his court. “And fuller.”
Despite
the physical differences between the two men, the confusion
appears likely to continue. The Lagano case is still moving forward. As
it does, news organizations, including this one, will continue trying to
suss out whether there was ever a relationship among Lagano, rumored to
have been a soldier in the Lucchese crime family, Mordaga and Richard
J. Weiner.
That leaves Richard H. Weiner wondering
what to do. His best guess is to try subverting the dead man online.
Currently he is paying an expert in search engine optimization to
promote the website of his firm, Aronson Weiner Salerno & Kaufman,
to the top of Google searches, while demoting websites related to the
other Richard Weiner.
The
effort appears to be working. Type “Rich Weiner,” “Richard Weiner” and
“Richard Weiner Hackensack” into Google, and the living Richard Weiner's
website comes up first every time. One must scroll past entries for
Richard Weiner the Czech journalist, Richard Weiner the Romanian
theoretical physicist, and Richard Weiner the therapist in Rochelle Park
before finding any mention of a certain deceased attorney.
Even
a cursory investigation can confirm that none of these Richard Weiners
is the Richard Weiner at the center of the Lagano case.
“I’m
not related or affiliated, and I don’t even know who he is,” Richard
Weiner, the therapist, said last week when reached by phone. “I just
started practicing in Rochelle Park a few months ago.”
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/christopher-maag/2018/02/23/richard-weiner-hackensack-attorneys-who-share-name/317095002/
0 comments:
Post a Comment