Clark Township Mayor Pleads Guilty for Using Town Employees to Run His Private Business and Submitting Forged Documents
TRENTON – Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability (OPIA) announced that Salvatore Bonaccorso, the longtime mayor of Clark Township, pleaded guilty today in connection with his use of Clark employees for his private business, a landscaping and underground oil storage tank removal company.
As part of his agreement with OPIA to plead guilty, Bonaccorso, at the time of his guilty plea, entered a consent order immediately forfeiting his office as mayor of Clark and agreeing to be permanently barred from holding any future public office or employment.
Bonaccorso, 64, of Clark, who has been the township’s mayor since 2001, pleaded guilty to a two-count accusation charging him with conspiring to commit official misconduct (3rd degree) and forgery (3rd degree). The second count stems from his submission of false and fraudulent permit applications to municipalities, which enabled his landscaping company to improperly and unlawfully obtain permits to remove hundreds of underground tanks.
Bonaccorso entered the plea during a hearing on January 10, 2025, before New Jersey Superior Court Judge Lisa Miralles Walsh, presiding in Union County.
“Today’s guilty plea secured by OPIA ends a long and sad betrayal of the community by someone who had been in a position of power and trust for a long time,” said Attorney General Platkin. “Anyone who betrays the public’s trust by placing their own interests ahead of their duty as a public servant to New Jersey residents will be held accountable. Let me be clear: I will never stop rooting out corruption in New Jersey, no matter how powerful the offenders may be.”
“Bonaccorso used taxpayer-funded workers for personal gain. He abused his power over municipal personnel, finances, and operations, and he submitted false documents to keep the scheme going,” said Drew Skinner, Executive Director of OPIA. “My office will investigate and prosecute anyone who illegally abuses the public’s trust.”
The mayor and his company, Bonaccorso & Son LLC, also agreed to be ineligible from bidding for any public contracts, entering into any public contracts, or conducting any business with the State or its political subdivisions for five years. Furthermore, they are barred for three years from conducting, or contracting to conduct, any storage tank removals for any private commercial or residential property owners.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, the State will recommend that the court sentence the defendant to three years of probation and impose a fine of $15,000, the maximum allowable fine for conviction of a third-degree crime.
OPIA charged Bonaccorso by complaint on November 20, 2023 after an investigation by the Corruption Bureau found that, while acting in his official capacity as the mayor, Bonaccorso operated his oil tank-removal business out of his township office utilizing municipal resources. He stored and maintained the records for the business at the mayor’s office, using township equipment including computers and fax machines, and directing or using township employees to perform duties while those employees were working for and being paid by the township, solely for the purpose of running his business.
During the course of the investigation, OPIA also discovered that the defendant and his landscaping and underground storage tank company, Bonaccorso & Son, fraudulently used an engineer’s name, license number, as well as, in many cases, forging the engineer’s signature on permit applications submitted to municipalities for tank removals – knowing the engineer was neither supervising nor in any way involved in those projects, and without any legally required tank inspections actually taking place at the job sites. Neither Bonaccorso nor his company have the necessary underground-storage-tank-removal license required to do such work.
A review of permit applications submitted by Bonaccorso and his company revealed that Bonaccorso misrepresented to municipalities that the engineer was the on-site supervisor of the removal work, as required by New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) regulations, for all of the tank removals done by Bonaccorso & Son.
New Jersey law prohibits any individual from doing work on unregulated heating-oil tank systems unless the individual is certified or working under the immediate, on-site supervision of a person who is certified. NJDEP rules state that whether a tank is removed or abandoned-in-place, the job must be conducted by a contractor certified for underground storage tank closure, who is working for a closure-certified firm.
The investigation revealed Bonaccorso arranged to have the engineer obtain a storage-tank license and insurance, and Bonaccorso directly paid to maintain both. The value of the removal jobs associated with the fraudulent permits submitted by Bonaccorso between 2017 and 2023 amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The plea was handled by OPIA Corruption Bureau Co-Director Jeffrey J. Manis and Corruption Bureau Deputy Chief Frank L. Valdinoto, under the supervision of OPIA Executive Director Skinner. Attorney General Platkin also thanked the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, Division of Taxation, Office of Criminal Investigation, and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for their assistance and valuable contributions to the investigation.
