The Jersey City Independent "

“God gives you character; man makes your reputation,” said L. Harvey Smith after a jury found him not guilty on all six charges of the United States’ indictment against him this afternoon. Standing with his law team and his family just outside of courtroom 5D, where Smith had spent much of the previous weeks, he and his wife openly wept while he answered reporters’ questions.

“The defendant in this case wants you to believe that he was only in public service in the interest of the public,” begins federal prosecutor Sandra Moser. “$5,000 [of bribe money] went into his campaign account, [and] $10,000 went into his basement. In other words, the defendant wasn’t only about public service, but self-service.”

According to Smith, it wasn’t until he received a call from Edward Cheatam and Solomon Dwek while on the road that he knew something was amiss with the envelope in his car. It was, he remembers, Dwek saying: “and we’ll keep those FedEx’s coming.”

Defense attorney Peter Willis calls L. Harvey Smith down from the witness stand to the center of the room. He faces the defendant towards the judge and puts a width-wise folded FedEx envelope — a stand-in for the actual cash-filled envelope provided by Solomon Dwek — in his hand, just as Smith remembers Edward Cheatam holding it the day he either “threw,” or “gave,” him the envelope.

The moral character of Leonard Harvey Smith — previously questioned by hidden video footage and photographs — is now reassessed by some of that very same video. And if a photo has been used to try to damn Smith, then it is only appropriate that a photo is used to speak to the mindset that could well justify some of his actions.

A photo of Edward Cheatam leaning into the passenger side window of L. Harvey Smith’s car is projected onto the side wall screen in Judge Jose Linares’ courtroom. In his hand is the second cash envelope delivered to Smith in four months, this one with $10,000 of cash inside, though you can’t see it in the photo. The jury has to take FBI Special Agent Robert Roman’s word on that.

Peter Willis greets Edward Cheatam this morning with a setup of his own, one that ends in the vicinity of perjury — if not for the intervention of Judge Jose Linares, who once again inserts himself into some of the stickier points of the proceedings.

Despite always having an answer usually delivered with a mechanical evenness, Cheatam now finds himself resorting more often to some equivalent of “I don’t remember” or “I didn’t know.” So when Peter Willis turns the tables on Cheatam, who is here to testify about bribes taken by Smith, about the bribes he took from FBI informant Solomon Dwek, Cheatam says it was all just a simple misunderstanding of what constitutes a bribe in the first place.

Thursday’s proceedings again find Cheatam sitting at the witness stand, this time for the day’s entirety. In part this is because of Cheatam’s explanatory answers, which were somewhat minimal and required exhaustive probing from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenny Kramer. This extensive testimony is also made necessary by the video, which was often shaky and at times hardly audible, presented to highlight the prosecution’s somewhat understated evidence.

“Stop talking — just, I understand — you make me feel like I want to pat you down,” says federal prosecutor Jenny R. Kramer, quoting from a video recording of L. Harvey Smith at the start of her opening remarks. This parking-lot conversation, with all its sad irony, represents what the government contends was the culmination of a cash-for-favors deal made between the defendant and informant Solomon Dwek outside of a Bayonne diner.