In bridge trial, a flawed star witness is the center of attention

NEWARK, N.J. - David Wildstein's big, boxlike desk phone with numerous buttons was conspicuous. His colleagues at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wondered if it was configured to spy on them.

"We had concerns about whether there was a possibility he could be monitoring our calls," John H. Ma, chief of staff to the agency's executive director, testified in the George Washington Bridge lane-closure case Thursday.

Then there's the issue of Wildstein's self-described "insanity gene," a key, he says, to being successful in New Jersey politics.

These are just a couple of Wildstein's many idiosyncrasies, which some at the Port Authority feared bordered on the malevolent.

Even though Wildstein, one of the top New Jersey appointees at the bistate agency from 2010 through 2013 and the government's principal witness, didn't take the stand until Friday afternoon, he was the center of attention all week in a federal courtroom here, along with Gov. Christie.

The governor, too, has come under harsh scrutiny.

A federal prosecutor said Wildstein and another top Port Authority official "bragged" to the governor about traffic problems in Fort Lee, Bergen County, as the gridlock was crippling the town, suggesting Christie knew about the lane closures earlier than he has said.

Witnesses called by prosecutors said the governor's office was intimately involved in Port Authority matters. "Trenton" was understood to mean Christie's office. And it was "Trenton" that wanted the lanes closed again after Patrick Foye, a New York appointee as executive director, ordered them reopened Sept. 13, 2013.

Wildstein said Christie and others in the governor's office directed him to use Port Authority resources - commemorative steel from the original Twin Towers, for example - as inducements to local officials to endorse Christie's reelection campaign.

By any measure, Wildstein is an imperfect star witness. But exposing his past lies and "aberrant behavior," as Foye put it, likely won't be enough on its own for Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly to win acquittal.

Prosecutors say Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff, and Baroni, Christie's former top executive appointee at the authority, conspired with Wildstein to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse Christie's reelection campaign in 2013.

Their method: closing access lanes to the bridge from Sept. 9 to Sept. 13, 2013, causing gridlock "as far as the eye could see," as Fort Lee's Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, told jurors.

To achieve maximum punitive impact, Kelly, Baroni, and Wildstein agreed not to alert local officials about the lane realignment ahead of time, prosecutors say. Then they allegedly covered it up with a story that the agency had closed lanes to review traffic safety.

Kelly and Baroni are charged with misusing Port Authority resources, wire fraud, and civil rights violations, among other counts.

Wildstein pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy charges.

While defense attorneys are licking their chops to take their shots at Wildstein, prosecutors have done quite a bit to inflict damage on Kelly and Baroni.

Sokolich and Fort Lee's police chief testified to the havoc the lane closures unleashed on the town; top Port Authority officials said that the lane closures didn't follow proper agency protocol and that Baroni had previously acknowledged the importance of long-term planning and communicating with towns that would be affected by its projects. Baroni's own aide said his testimony on the matter to the Legislature in November 2013 was "untruthful."

When the aide, Tina Lado, relayed to Baroni that officials in Fort Lee were caught off guard and outraged by the lane closures, he offered a curious response: Don't call them back, because the Port Authority had been racking up phone bills.

The agency generated $4 billion in revenue in 2013.

Jurors have heard testimony about the danger posed to public safety: There were calls about a missing 4-year-old and someone in cardiac arrest.

For their part, defense attorneys have elicited testimony that Fort Lee has long struggled with gridlock and was even sued by an adjacent town for allegedly shutting off access to the borough, causing traffic backups and threatening public safety.

They've also forced key witnesses - Sokolich and Foye - to admit to having lied in some instances about the lane closures, undercutting some of their credibility.

Without having to ask Wildstein a single question, defense attorneys have drawn court testimony showing that Wildstein instilled fear in "hundreds to thousands" of Port Authority employees and had surreptitiously set up websites in the names of political enemies that, at least in one case, redirected to the New York Yankees' home page.

He stole Sen. Frank Lautenberg's jacket during a 1982 debate so the senator would look uncomfortable, the defense said. And he falsely claimed to have spearheaded a charity and donated $20,000 to a baseball field, Baroni's attorney said.

On his job application to join the Port Authority, Wildstein claimed he had graduated from George Washington University; he never graduated from college, defense attorneys said in opening arguments.

As for his Port Authority desk phone, Wildstein told jurors he had at least 20 buttons he used for speed-dial.

Under questioning by prosecutors, Wildstein claimed to have an "insanity gene" and a "dead-to-me gene," as in, "If somebody were to not be your friend, somebody were to cross you . . . they would be dead to you. . . . They would not have a chance of recovering that relationship."

"My belief was: In politics, especially New Jersey politics, we were all a little crazy," he added.

Prosecutors have not completed their questioning of Wildstein, and defense attorneys are to cross-examine him this week.

In the government's opening statement Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna conceded that Wildstein had "engaged in a lot of dirty tricks, a lot of bad things" - but that Baroni and Kelly "knew all about them" and "accepted him anyway."

Wildstein, Khanna said, "will also tell you that what happened here in Fort Lee: This was different from just a dirty trick. This was wrong. And he pled guilty to it - for a federal crime."

The question moving forward for jurors, of course, is whether Kelly and Baroni joined him.

aseidman@phillynews.com

856-779-3846 @AndrewSeidman