2022_09_New_Jersey_Monthly

STRIKING SIMILARITIES
A
soft-spoken
corporate attorney,
Mark Sheridan is a commercial
litigator by trade who also worked
for many years as general counsel for the New
Jersey State Republican Committee. He speaks
in measured, analytical paragraphs. He does not
excite easily and is not given to exaggeration.
Soon after reading about Bratsenis and his
kitchen knife, Sheridan dashed off a letter to the
state Attorney General’s Office asking that the
investigation of his parents’ deaths be reopened
in light of what he described as the “eerily similar”
circumstances surrounding the murder of
Michael Galdieri.
“You’d have to be blind not to see the similarities,’’
Sheridan said in a recent interview with
New Jersey Monthly.
Sheridan says he never heard back from the
attorney general. But on May 31 of this year, the
office of acting attorney general Matt Platkin
confirmed that they were indeed taking another
look at the Sheridan case.
Platkin’s decision may have been prompted by a
series of podcasts produced by WNYC Public Radio
that revisited the Sheridan deaths and raised troubling questions
about an allegedly botched investigation and other issues.
“At this point, after all this time, I’m not sure what can be
uncovered by a new investigation. But I’m grateful to know
somebody is finally making an attempt to set the record right,’’
Sheridan tells us. “There are so many questions. Who knows
where it might go?’’
Federal agents, meanwhile, continue to work with Caddle
in what they have cryptically termed “a major investigation.”
Even after admitting to arranging Galdieri’s murder, Caddle
remains out of prison in the relative comfort of home confinement,
wearing not shackles, but an ankle monitor. Prosecutors,
who have postponed his sentencing for months, say Caddle
isn’t a flight risk.
So now, with investigators digging again into the Sheridan
case and continuing to press Caddle, the state is awash in intrigue
about what comes next. What secrets might ooze out as
investigators probe the deaths of two men who made careers
in the rough-and-tumble world of Jersey politics?
In and out of Trenton, elected officials, lobbyists, and everyone
else who is part of that political world have been waiting
anxiously for some other shoe to drop. Just where and when
it might fall, and on whom, makes for the kind of parlor game
played here since Jimmy Hoffa’s body was allegedly dumped
in the Meadowlands.
The cases are in many respects parallel mysteries: Both John
Sheridan and Michael Galdieri died amid fire in late-night
scenes of extraordinary violence.
Both men had tussled with powerful political forces and may
have paid a price for it.
The only reason for his parents’ deaths that Sheridan could
come up with was that someone killed them.
GRIEF A memorial
service for Joyce and
John Sheridan was
held on Oct. 7, 2014,
in Trenton, days after
they were found dead.
A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE
Galdieri was a college dropout who played bit parts
for the Hudson County Democratic machine. He’d
been arrested on drug charges and spent two years
in prison before going to work for Caddle, a political consultant
who allegedly created a string of dark-money political funds.
At the end, he was living alone in a tiny second-floor apartment
over a barber shop in the west end of Jersey City.
His political struggles began in 2005, when he decided to run
for Jersey City Council, a move that put him in direct conflict
with a Hudson County Democratic machine that had strict
control over elections and public jobs.
During the campaign, Galdieri threatened to expose wrongdoing
inside city government, including what he alleged to be ongoing
corruption in the Jersey City water-supply agency. In a public
debate held before the election, Galdieri announced that he would
hold a press conference and identify corrupt local officials.
“I…uncovered a scam where a systematic diversion of Jersey
City’s water had been ongoing,’’ Galdieri later wrote in an email
to a popular local blog, Hudson County Facts.
On the eve of the election, in 2005, Galdieri was arrested and
charged by Hudson County prosecutors with possessing illegal
drugs. He admitted to having ecstasy, methamphetamines and
cocaine, and served two years of a five-year prison sentence.
New Jersey state investigators later found widespread financial
abuses at the water authority and discovered that some
300 million gallons of water had been illegally diverted during
a period when the authority was raising rates for water users.
Galdieri never ran for office again and was murdered in May
2014 by hit men hired by his boss and colleague, Sean Caddle,
PHOTOGRAPHS (SHERIDANS):AP PHOTO/MEL EVANS; (GALDIERI CRIME SCENE): RICHARD J. MCCORMACK/THE JERSEY JOURNAL
76 SEPTEMBER 2022 NJMONTHLY.COM