Angry in the Great White North

From the Star-Ledger on September 9:

Someone broke into the administrative building at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey on two consecutive nights this week, entering the same suite of offices burglarized earlier this summer, campus officials said yesterday.

One or more burglars broke into offices on the 13th floor of the Stanley S. Bergen Jr. Building in Newark on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, UMDNJ officials said. They entered offices in the government affairs and university affairs departments, the files of which have been subpoenaed in a federal corruption investigation.

The latest break-ins prompted an angry acting Gov. Richard Codey to initiate a state review of the school's security yesterday.

"I am immediately calling on the attorney general and the State Police to do a complete review of security at UMDNJ. If we need to, we'll put the State Police at the door," Codey said.

Too bad those State Troopers weren't in place when the plague mice went missing.

So what exactly is going on at UMDNJ? To start, illegal donations to the Democratic Party:

A senior administrator at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, whose actions are being investigated by federal and state investigators, has been reprimanded for using school funds to make political contributions, three university officials said.

Christy Davis Jackson, UMDNJ's vice president for government affairs, reimbursed the university $800 to cover three contributions made in violation of school policy and had a letter placed in her personnel file. No additional action was taken, but the board of trustees was notified.

The three donations Davis Jackson authorized were: $500 to Newark Mayor Sharpe James, $250 to the Democratic State Committee and $50 to the Union County-based Hispanic American Political Action Committee.

But that's small potatoes:

Earlier this year, The Star-Ledger reported Davis Jackson approved a $10,000 donation to an unregistered charity run by a Newark politician. Petillo later said the donation to Women With Hats on for the Cure, a breast-cancer awareness group run by Newark Councilwoman Gayle Chaneyfield-Jenkins, was improper.

Less than two months before approving the donation, Davis Jackson was working as a lobbyist for Babyland Family Services, a Newark nonprofit founded by Chaneyfield-Jenkins' mother, according to records on file with the state Election Law Enforcement Commission, which regulates lobbyists.

The $10,000 was not reimbursed and has become a key area of inquiry for federal investigators, according to two people familiar with questions being asked by FBI agents.

That prompted a break-in as well, a different one from the September 9 report:

Davis Jackson's department has also received attention from investigators and the media in recent weeks after someone broke in to UMDNJ's administrative offices in Newark during the July 30-31 weekend. The thief went through file cabinets and at least one briefcase in the government affairs and university affairs offices and took an unknown number of files, including political donation records.

But there were more financial shenanigans:

In June, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office subpoenaed thousands of pages of university documents related to no-bid contracts the school awarded to politically connected firms and consultants.

Questions about UMDNJ's finances began last spring after The Star-Ledger reported that the school awarded a $75,000 consulting contract to a former top fundraiser for former Gov. James E. McGreevey shortly after the 2001 election. The university also made donations to political candidates and awarded millions of dollars in contracts without competitive bidding to firms with political ties.

UMDNJ officials have spent weeks compiling records for the FBI and a similar probe launched by the State Commission of Investigation, a bipartisan arm of the New Jersey Legislature.

As well as allegations of conflict of interest putting the institution's accreditation at risk:

Meanwhile, two agencies that accredit the university -- the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, and the accrediting arm of the American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association -- have raised red flags about potential conflicts on the board.

The trustees include Christopher Paladino, president of the New Brunswick Development Corp., a nonprofit group building a new dorm and other projects with the university. Fellow trustee John Hoffman is a managing partner at a Woodbridge law firm that worked on the financing of the dorm project.

Sonia Delgado, head of UMDNJ's board, is a health care lobbyist in a firm that represents a hospital affiliated with the university and another health care system negotiating to sell a hospital to the school.

Other trustees include Newark City Council President Donald Bradley and Hackensack University Medical Center president John Ferguson. The city of Newark has contracts with UMDNJ and the Hackensack hospital competes with the university for some of the same resources.

In fact, McGreevey, the former governor who received that questionable $75,000 consulting contract, was himself on the board of UMDNJ in order to solve a conflict of interest problem:

This isn't the first time UMDNJ has faced questions about a potential conflict of interest on its board. In 2003, former Gov. James E. McGreevey replaced board chairman Harvey Holzberg amid concerns about his dual role as a UMDNJ trustee and head of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, one of the school's teaching hospitals.

What a huge mess.

So why all the break-ins? In part because security was a joke:

The security system that allowed a thief to break into offices at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark and steal files and records requested by FBI investigators lacked sophistication and left the institution vulnerable, a former state security expert now working for the United Nations maintained yesterday.

Gregory Sanders, a retired State Police sergeant who until recently designed and implemented security systems for state properties, said he would recommend that UMDNJ undergo a sweeping security assessment aimed at updating a system that is far too easy to penetrate.

"There is an expectation that UMDNJ would not be using the same technology you would use at home to protect your closet. There is no sophistication here whatsoever," Sanders said, referring to the fact a thief needed only a key to enter offices in the Bergen Building containing files relating to political donations, which the FBI is probing.

Now these break-ins are focused on the administrative building of UMDNJ, and on the financial scandal. No one has linked the missing mice to the perpetrators of the summer break-ins.

But having said that, to locate a Biosafety Level 3 containment lab on a campus in such disarray, where the board is alleged to working for interests other than the university's, where security is poor and is publicly known to be poor, strikes me as really bad planning. Perhaps part of the accreditation to earn a Biosafety Level 3 label should include a review of the overall organization to which that lab belongs.

Meanwhile:

[John G. Bartlett, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,] said if the mice escaped, they probably were dead by now and should not be the cause of great concern. "What people should worry about is that plague is an agent of bio-terrorism," he suggested.

"Once it starts, it's awful," said Bartlett, recalling a case of bubonic plague three years ago in New York City involving a tourist from New Mexico. Thought to have been infected by fleas while hiking near Santa Fe, where plague is still not uncommon, the 53-year-old man began hemorrhaging and suffered an infection that shut down his kidneys and lungs. Doctors were forced to amputate his legs.