Police chief & Clark Mayor under state investigation for corruption.

CLARK
Police whistleblower: Fairness was my goal, not the money

Former Clark Police Lt. Antonio Manata speaks at his lawyer’s office last week. Dwayne Uzoaru, for the Star-Ledger.

“I was put through hell” after exposing racist recordings, former Lt. Antonio Manata tells NJ Advance Media.
Former Clark Lt. Antonio Manata insists that he was never seeking a payday.
He has heard the criticism that he extorted the township of more than $400,000 by threatening to expose its mayor and police brass as racists. That he cared more about the money than the racial slurs he had secretly recorded.
But in a lengthy interview last week with NJ Advance Media, Manata said he was only trying to do the right thing when he came forward to the township in November 2019 with his explosive tapes.
Instead, what followed was a two-year ordeal in which, he said, he has repeatedly been punished for blowing the whistle — not only by township officials who made clear his law enforcement career was over but also by a county prosecutor’s office that Manata maintained showed no interest in holding those officials accountable.
“I had evidence, undisputed evidence — not ‘he said, she said’ — evidence of civil rights violations,” Manata said. “And look what happened to me: My career was cut short. I was put through hell. I was harassed. I was retaliated against. And the one agency that had the power to change it covered it up.”
Manata, a 46-year-old Clark resident with a wife and children, spoke to reporters for nearly three hours on Wednesday at his attorney Valerie Palma DeLuisi’s Clifton office. He offered wide-ranging criticism of all the key players in a scandal that has engulfed Clark, including Mayor Sal Bonaccorso, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office and the state Attorney General’s Office.
Manata described a police department closely controlled by Bonaccorso, a six-term Republican who Manata charged
handpicked new officers and contributed to the department’s abysmal diversity record. A department so rife with racism and sexism among its old guard, Manata said, that he started secretly taping his conversations as early as 2013, using an app on his iPhone.
“If there was a risk of me coming into contact with someone that would put me in a bad situation due to their racist and sexist philosophy, I was recording it,” Manata said.
“They played God with people’s lives, not allowing people to excel in life solely because of their race,” he added. “That is something I could not be part of.”
Manata said he waited as long as he did to complain because he was hoping things would get better, and knew it would be career suicide to come forward.
NJ Advance Media last month published audio recordings made by Manata that captured Bonaccorso, Police Chief Pedro Matos and internal affairs Sgt. Joseph Teston referring to Black people as “spooks,” “shines” and the N-word. The news organization also revealed the details of a 2020 settlement that quietly paid Manata and a lawyer $400,000 to keep a lid on the scandal, while allowing him to remain on the payroll for more than two years without working until he could retire.
The revelations have rocked Clark, a town of 15,500 that has long had a reputation in the Black community as a racist place. In their wake, a host of elected officials and community activists across the state have called for the resignation of Bonaccorso, who initially denied using racial slurs and claimed he knew nothing about the recordings. He has since apologized for using racist language and said he is a changed man.
In the meantime, Matos and Teston remain on Clark’s payroll, having been on paid administrative leave since July 2020, when the Union County Prosecutor’s Office took over the department. A police captain, Vincent Concina, whom Manata had accused of retaliation, also remains on paid leave.
Matos, Teston and Concina have not publicly commented on the allegations. Bonaccorso did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
MAYOR CRASHES MEETING
It was November 2019, Manata said, when he decided he couldn’t take it anymore.
His outspokenness and career ambitions had run him afoul with the department’s leadership, Manata said. He was being harassed at work and subjected to internal affairs investigations that sought to undermine his hope of becoming a captain and eventually chief of police, he said.
“It was unbearable to the point that I would sit in the parking lot every day before going into work,” Manata said. “For like 10 to 15 minutes, I would sit in my car and muster the strength and settle my stomach down to walk in.”
The time was right, he concluded, to file a discrimination complaint with the township. He said he tried to follow proper procedure, with his lawyer, Patrick Toscano Jr., scheduling a meeting with the township’s attorney to air the concerns formally.
“As we’re in there, in bursts the mayor,” recalled Manata, who said Bonaccorso berated him and accused him of disloyalty.
When Toscano tried to intervene, the mayor also snapped at him, Manata said.
“Shut up. You don’t know anything about running Clark,” Bonaccorso allegedly said.
It went even further south after Bonaccorso heard some of the recordings Manata had secretly made.
“He flipped out even worse, to the point that he had to be escorted out by the township attorney to an adjacent office,” Manata said.
Manata said it was clear then and there that his career was in ruins.
“We left out of there like, ‘Damn, I’m screwed,’ ” Manata said. “There’s no way I could survive this.”
Within days, Manata said, his office was ransacked, he was physically barred from entering police headquarters and access to his work email and other software was shut off.
Manata said he had no choice but to seek financial compensation to cover the final years of his career as he remained two years from retirement but was unable to return to work. He rejected criticisms that his threatened lawsuit amounted to a shakedown.
“All I asked was to be made whole,” he said.
Manata and the township entered into the settlement in January 2020. Under the terms, he turned over the recordings and agreed not to file a lawsuit. Though township records indicated that he ultimately retired at the rank of captain, he disputed that to NJ Advance Media, saying he remained a lieutenant.
Manata said there is no doubt in his mind that in settling the case, township officials hoped to cover up the scandal.
“The problem is this: If the chief was the only culprit that I was complaining about, the mayor has a legal responsibility to suspend the chief, right?” Manata asked.
“But how is the mayor going to suspend the chief when the chief knows that there’s also recordings about the mayor? ... And how is the chief going to suspend the captain, when the captain knows there’s also recordings about the chief?
“So this is where the nepotism and favoritism in the town take over, and it’s a lot easier just to pay me off and shut me up,” Manata said.
THE RACE FACTOR
When he joined the Clark police department in 2007, that wasn’t the end he had envisioned.
Raised in France and Portugal by Portuguese parents, Manata had immigrated to the United States as a teen, speaking little English.
Becoming a cop started as a practical decision — “it was either that or construction” — but ended up being a profession he said he took pride in.
After stints as a corrections officer, Manata landed at the Newark Police Department, where he spent time as a homicide detective and in the specialized unit that provides protection for the city’s mayor.
By 2007, recently married and looking to start a family, Manata wanted to get away from the “nonstop, 24/7 work” in Newark. So he applied through civil service for a transfer to Clark, a much quieter suburb.
He was called in for an interview and showed up at the police department expecting to meet with a captain or the police chief.
“The secretary goes, ‘No, you’re going across the street to meet the mayor,’ ” Manata recounted. Bonaccorso offered him a job after a brief interview.
Yet Manata claims the department used the same hiring process — known as an intergovernmental transfer — to discriminate against prospective officers of color.
“I saw this with my own eyes,” Manata said, alleging he once witnessed Chief Matos check security cameras to get a glimpse of an applicant who had dropped off a resume to determine his race.
The man was Black, Manata said, so the application went “right in the garbage.” In other instances, he claimed police supervisors looked up applicants on Facebook to determine their race.
Clark, where just 1.5% of the population is Black, has a long history of making minorities feel they are unwelcome, an image the longtime mayor well knew, the recordings show.
“They try to stay away from Clark because we’re labeled a racist town,” Bonaccorso told Manata in May 2019, according to one unaired recording obtained by NJ Advance Media. “You guys keep doing your jobs. We won’t have no problems.”
The mayor’s other recorded comments have since caught national attention: The N-word. A joke about where to “hang the spooks.” His view that female police officers are “all (expletive) disasters.”
A STALLED INVESTIGATION
Union County prosecutors took over Clark’s police department in July 2020, announcing an investigation into “credible allegations of misconduct” among its leadership but offering no details. That investigation continues, though the Attorney General’s Office assumed control of it this month following NJ Advance Media’s reporting.
Manata said county and state prosecutors sat on the recordings and other evidence of township officials’ misconduct and showed no interest in pursuing those caught on the tapes. He also said that since taking over the department, authorities have “never” interviewed him as a witness in the investigation — a necessary step, he said, if they were serious about the probe.
“I’ve solved homicides with less evidence in less time,” Manata said, calling for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to take over the investigation. A spokesman for that office declined to comment.
The Attorney’s General’s Office says it will ultimately release a public report of its findings, and that it takes seriously its responsibility to ensure policing isn’t done with bias.
“We can assure the residents of Clark, the members of the Clark Police Department, and the public at large that the investigation, once completed, will have been comprehensive, thorough and impartial,” the office has previously said.
Manata charged that the retaliation continues even with the settlement long behind him. He said his personnel file is larded with false allegations — that he was absent without leave for weeks and fired by the township — which have hampered his ability to secure jobs with background checks.
This month, Manata filed a federal lawsuit against county prosecutors, charging they are preventing him from receiving his pension to punish him for making the tapes.
Manata, who retired on Feb. 28, has been unable to collect his $7,600-a-month-pension due to an internal affairs investigation that the prosecutor’s office is pursuing against him, the suit says. Manata said the move has also left him and his family without health insurance, which would otherwise be provided through the pension system.
The suit alleges that the internal affairs charges are directly related to his whistleblower activity. They include claims that he violated police department policy when he made the secret recordings, and that he should have reported the language used in his presence sooner.
Manata said the biggest lesson he has learned is that “the police can’t police the police.”
The state Attorney General’s Office announced April 7 that its Office of Public Integrity and Accountability has taken over the probe.
But top officials in that department were also involved in the early days of the Clark takeover, including former acting Union County Prosecutor Lyndsay Ruotolo, who is now the director of the attorney general’s Division of Criminal Justice.
Manata has yet to hear from any of the attorney general’s investigators.
“Not one person has contacted me or my attorney,” he said. “It’s not that hard. We’re all over the news. Pick up the phone.”