Fort Lee’s police chief testified on Tuesday that he grew suspicious about the “Bridgegate” traffic jam when the general manager of the George Washington Bridge would only discuss the situation with him at a clandestine meeting in a parking lot.
Fort Lee Chief Keith Bendul said he just wanted an explanation for the lane closures — which he was later told were part of a 30-day traffic study.
“I was asking him, trying to get information, trying to get some kind of relief,” Bendul said of his conversation with the bridge’s general manager Robert Durando on Sept. 9, 2013. “He told me to meet him in the municipal lot.”
Durando refused to see him at Port Authority headquarters — or even on Port Authority property.
“I thought it was very weird . . . cloak-and-dagger,” he told the Newark federal jury. “It just struck me as very, very odd.”
During the parking lot meeting, Bendul said he berated Durando after being told the lanes had been closed for a traffic study.
“I told him it was a miserable failure,” Bendul said.
“I told him bluntly that if anybody dies I will tell those people to sue him and everybody in the Port Authority.”
Durando suggested that Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich call Bill Baroni, the former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, for more information.
“He told me that if anybody asks if this meeting occurred he would deny it,” Bendul said.
Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, a top Christie aid, are currently on trial for the scandal after being charged with helping orchestrate the lane closures.
Federal prosecutors have said the plot was political payback because Sokolich didn’t endorse Christie’s re-election bid.
The Democratic mayor also took the stand Tuesday, saying he had a great relationship with Christie — until he refused to publicly endorse him.
Sokolich said he told Matt Mowers — Fort Lee’s liaison to Trenton who had been urging him to consider endorsing the governor — around August 2013 that he
wouldn’t be backing Christie.
A month later, the three lanes on the GWB were shuttered. Sokolich frantically texted Baroni, who he used to have a good relationship with, saying, “Who is mad at me?” according to text messages shown to the jury.
“The only feasible, plausible response was that someone was mad at me,” Sokolich said in his first day of testimony.
Before Christie’s re-election campaign, Sokolich was treated well by Christie’s administration, he said.
He received tickets to governor’s box to watch NY Giants football games, invitations for him and his wife to have holiday cocktails with the governor and his wife, and lunch at the governor’s mansion.
“That’s a bucket list item for a small town mayor to have lunch with the governor in a small setting,” he told the jury.