CLARK, N.J. (AP) — The former mayor of a New Jersey town who slandered black people in a secret recording made by a whistleblower is facing a state lawsuit claiming he and local police officials directed officers to exclude minorities from the community.
The indictment, filed by state Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the office’s civil rights division, names former Clark Mayor Sal Bonacorso, suspended town police chief Pedro Matos and current police chief Patrick Grady as defendants. It claimed the town’s leaders “systematically discriminated against and harassed black and other non-white motorists”.
Bonacorso, a Republican who served as the town’s mayor for about 25 years, resigned in January 2025, just days before the start of his seventh term. Despite corruption charges, he was easily re-elected in November 2024. He left his job after admitting to using township resources to benefit his private landscaping business and forging signatures on permit applications for work his company performed in the area.
Bonacorso did not respond to a voicemail left Friday. When NJ.com asked questions about the lawsuit, he sent them a two-word response and used profanity to describe the lawsuit.
In 2020, a police officer told officials he secretly recorded Bonacorso, Matos and another officer using racial slurs in reference to Black people. The town agreed to pay $400,000 to settle out of court, but the charges later became public.
Clark Mayor Angel Albanese, the Republican who succeeded Bonacorso, called the state’s lawsuit “frivolous” and accused Platkin of “playing politics” as his term as attorney general comes to an end. Matos’ attorney, Charles Sciarra, echoed similar sentiments while noting the timing of the lawsuit.
Matos has been on paid leave since the Union County Prosecutor’s Office took control of the police department in July 2020. He has sued Clark in an attempt to stop the town from firing him, and those disciplinary proceedings are still ongoing. The prosecutor’s oversight ended last March.
The lawsuit alleges that the town and its police leadership engaged in a variety of discriminatory policing practices at Bonacorso’s behest. Clark is a New York suburb located approximately 27 miles (43 kilometers) south of Manhattan.
According to an analysis cited by the attorney general’s office, between 2015 and 2020, black people in Clark were stopped 3.7 times more often than white people, and Hispanics were stopped 2.2 times more often than white people.
The attorney general’s office said that while some of these racial disparities persisted to some extent even after prosecutors began monitoring, data from 2020 to 2024 showed some significant changes and improvements in policing practices that coincided with a reduction in some of the racial disparities.