A North Jersey mayor caught on secret recordings using the N-word directed police to keep Black people out of the city, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin alleged Thursday in a lawsuit.
Longtime Clark Township mayor Salvatore Bonaccorso told Clark Police Department leadership to “keep chasing the spooks out of town,” using a racial slur he’d been recorded using previously, the AG’s office said.
Bonaccorso was the mayor of the New York suburb, about 20 miles south of Central Park, from 2000 to 2025. He resigned early last year after pleading guilty in a corruption scandal.
One officer told investigators Bonaccorso praised him after a traffic stop by saying, “Good for you, pulling over that [N-word] — keep them out of town,” according to the suit.
“[Y]ou know why a lot of liberals stay out of Clark, is we’re labeled as a racist town and they want nothing to do with that,” Bonaccorso, a Republican, told police leadership in 2019, the lawsuit claims. “You guys keep doing your job so we don’t have no problems.”
Bonaccorso directed Clark police to focus on traffic stops near the neighboring towns of Rahway and Linden, which have much higher Black and Hispanic populations, the attorney general said.
Between 2015 and 2020, Black people were stopped 3.7 times more often than white people in Clark, and Hispanic people were stopped 2.2 times more often than white people, according to an analysis by the AG’s office.
“Through overt racial animus and discriminatory policing practices, Clark violated New Jersey’s civil rights laws and the New Jersey Constitution,” Platkin said in a press release.
In addition to Bonaccorso and the town of Clark, the lawsuit also names Clark’s former police chief, Pedro Matos, and current police director, Patrick Grady, as defendants.
“It’s bulls–t!!!!” Bonaccorso told NJ.com in response to the lawsuit.
Bonaccorso and Matos have been wrapped up in a racism investigation since 2020, and secret recordings of the duo using racial slurs, including the N-word, were released in 2022. However, that didn’t stop Bonaccorso from comfortably winning reelection in 2024 — though he resigned days after his inauguration due to the corruption scandal, not the racism.
