Something Smells in This Bathroom Stall and It's Not What You're Thinking
Issue No. 20 | June 2026
On June 3, 2026, in a federal courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo sentenced a former Deputy Mayor of one of America’s largest cities to twelve months and one day in federal prison. His name is Carmelo Garcia. He is 51 years old. He is a former Democratic state assemblyman from Hudson County. He was personally recruited into Newark city government at the request of Mayor Ras Baraka. And in the words of the United States Attorney for New Jersey, he ran a corrupt scheme to obtain bribes and kickbacks from two Newark business owners in exchange for steering city-owned property into their hands (U.S. Department of Justice, Hudson County View).
The total value of what he took: $156,810. The most cinematic single transaction: a gym bag set down on the floor of a restaurant bathroom stall in Mountainside, New Jersey, while Garcia washed his hands at the sink and an intermediary dropped an envelope holding $25,000 in cash into the bag (NJ.com, News 12 New Jersey).
Search the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal for any of the names in this story. You will find nothing on the sentencing of a sitting big-city deputy mayor for a six-figure bribery conviction. That silence is the first scandal. The conduct is the second.
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them describe exactly what happened inside Newark City Hall.
The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Carmelo Garcia did not safeguard anything. He was the official inside the building who decided which developers got preliminary designated developer status on Newark-owned land. He sold that decision. The special interest was a pawnbroker and his partner. The extreme tactic was a stream of cash, watches, and a paid luxury hotel stay routed to a public official whose entire job was to act on behalf of the people of Newark (U.S. Department of Justice).
The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Garcia got twelve months and one day. Any ordinary American who walked into a New Jersey restaurant bathroom to collect $25,000 in cash from a stranger would face the same federal statutes Garcia did. But ordinary Americans do not get recruited into deputy mayor jobs by mayors. Ordinary Americans do not get the long, slow path Garcia got: indicted in October 2021, allowed to plead guilty in June 2024, sentenced almost two years after that (New Jersey Globe, Patch).
The seventh reads: “Govern with a Balanced Approach. Reject both government overreach and government absence. Provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline.” The Newark Department of Economic and Housing Development exists to provide an essential service: turning vacant and city-owned property into housing and economic activity for Newark residents. Garcia ran that department. He used it as a private auction house. There is no balance here. There is only government as instrument of personal enrichment (Hudson County View).
The Sordid Details
The two businessmen who bought Garcia were Frank Valvano Jr., 57, of Florham Park, and Irwin Sablosky, 66, of Springfield. They co-owned a New Jersey pawnbroker, jewelry, and check-cashing chain operating under the name William Rich and Sons. Sablosky was also a former president of the Springfield Board of Education. The two men wanted Newark-owned real estate. They wanted the city to hand them designated developer status so they could acquire and redevelop city properties through limited liability companies they controlled. They needed an official inside Newark city government who could make that happen. They paid for one (New Jersey Globe, Hudson County View).
The payments began in 2017. On June 28, 2017, business records later seized by federal agents from the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons show that Valvano and Sablosky provided Garcia with a high-end watch valued at approximately $7,500. By November of that year, the Newark City Council had adopted resolutions approving redevelopment agreements for two Valvano and Sablosky entities, 123-131 Riverside LLC and 281 Passaic LLC (U.S. Department of Justice).
The big moment came on June 14, 2018. Garcia by then was Acting Deputy Mayor and Director of the Department of Economic and Housing Development. The meeting was arranged by twenty-one phone calls and text messages between Garcia and an intermediary the federal indictment calls Individual 2. The location they settled on was a restaurant in Mountainside, New Jersey. Garcia arrived carrying a gym bag. He told Individual 2 to meet him in the bathroom. Inside the bathroom, Garcia set the gym bag on the floor of a stall and walked to the sink to wash his hands. Individual 2 entered the stall, placed an envelope holding $25,000 in cash inside the bag, and left. Garcia picked up the bag and walked out (U.S. Department of Justice, NJ.com).
Four days later, on June 18, 2018, Garcia sent an email from his official City of Newark email address to the department’s Director of Redevelopment, moving the Valvano and Sablosky entities forward in the city’s designated developer pipeline. The cash had cleared. The official act followed in ninety-six hours (New Jersey Globe).
On April 12, 2019, Garcia took another $5,000 in cash. Between those bookend payments, federal investigators documented additional benefits: jewelry from the pawn shop, watches, a $2,994 four-night stay at a luxury Florida hotel that Valvano paid for, and cash payments of $250 to $1,000 at a time that Garcia personally walked into the pawn shop to collect to fund his attendance at political fundraisers, golf outings, and mayor’s balls (U.S. Department of Justice, News 12 New Jersey).
When federal agents searched the Belleville location of William Rich and Sons in September 2020, they found handwritten notes. One column was labeled with the letter “C,” almost certainly for Carmelo. The bottom of that column carried a horizontal line and one final figure: 156810. That is the running total of what the pawn shop paid the deputy mayor. The bookkeeping was not even encrypted. It was a column of numbers on a piece of paper next to a cash register (U.S. Department of Justice).
By late 2018 the businessmen were complaining in text messages that Garcia kept asking for more. “We’ve done nothing but spend tons of money and give away jewelry,” Sablosky wrote to Valvano. “Carmelo wants more too. We can’t afford it.” This is what public service looked like in Newark City Hall (U.S. Department of Justice).
And Garcia was not operating alone. A parallel federal investigation produced sentences last December for two more men inside the same Newark machine. Former Newark City Councilman Joseph A. McCallum Jr., 70, also a board member of the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation, got 18 months in prison for wire fraud and tax fraud tied to a separate bribery and kickback scheme involving Newark development projects. Malik Frederick, 65, the consultant who moved money between developers and McCallum, got 25 months. The same federal indictment that named Garcia as a co-conspirator named McCallum and Frederick. Three convicted public-corruption felons. One Newark city government (U.S. Department of Justice, RLS Media).
Valvano and Sablosky have both pleaded guilty and been sentenced. The pawn shop is on the public record as the financing arm of a deputy mayor’s corruption. Garcia, who had previously been Executive Director of the Hoboken Housing Authority, of the Irvington Housing Authority, and a one-term Democratic state assemblyman before Mayor Baraka brought him into Newark, is on his way to federal prison (New Jersey Globe).
Both Parties Have Failed Us
Carmelo Garcia is a Democrat. So is Joseph McCallum. So is Ras Baraka, the mayor who recruited Garcia into city government. So is every member of the Newark City Council who voted those redevelopment agreements through in November 2017. This corruption was not bipartisan in execution. It was one-party rule in a one-party city using one-party machinery to convert public land into private wealth, with a pawn shop as the cashier.
But the failure here is bipartisan. Republican-run cities have produced the same kind of conviction. The bathroom-stall handoff is a recurring scene in American public-corruption indictments because the incentive structure on both sides of the aisle rewards exactly this conduct: lucrative discretionary decisions about public property, controlled by a small number of officials, with no party competition strong enough to police it. Where one party dominates, whether the color is blue or red, the bribes follow.
And the national press, which spent the last two years writing tens of thousands of words about federal politics, could not be bothered to write a paragraph about a sitting deputy mayor of one of New Jersey’s largest cities trading public housing decisions for cash in a gym bag. The story exists only because the United States Attorney for New Jersey, the FBI, and a handful of New Jersey local reporters at the New Jersey Globe, NJ.com, Hudson County View, News 12, and Patch did their jobs. The institutions Americans pay to inform us about how their cities are run looked away (Hudson County View).
We do not have time left to keep tolerating this. A democracy that lets one party run a city as a closed shop, that lets a deputy mayor take $156,810 from a pawn shop over two years and serve roughly one day in prison for every $429 he stole, that lets the national press treat the conviction as too small to mention, is a democracy living on borrowed time. The Centercratic Party exists to insist on the alternative: term limits that break machines, one law that actually applies to everyone, and a politics where the people deciding what gets built on public land are not the same people taking envelopes in restaurant bathrooms.
We must save our democracy before it is too late.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com