State lawsuit claims New Jersey town's former mayor directed police to
keep minorities out
[January 17, 2026]
CLARK, N.J. (AP) — A New Jersey town whose former mayor was once heard
denigrating Black people on secret recordings made by a whistleblower is
now facing a state lawsuit that claims he and local police officials
directed officers to keep minorities out of the community.
The complaint, filed by state Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the
office's Division on Civil Rights, names former Clark Mayor Sal
Bonaccorso, suspended town police chief Pedro Matos and the current
police director Patrick Grady as defendants. It claims the town's
leaders “systematically discriminated against and harassed Black and
other non-white motorists.”
Bonaccorso, a Republican, was the town's mayor for about 25 years before
he resigned in January 2025, just days after starting his seventh term
in office. He had been easily reelected in November 2024 despite
allegations of corruption. He left office after pleading guilty to using
township resources to benefit his private landscaping business and
forging signatures on permit applications for work his company performed
in the area.
Bonaccorso did not respond to a voicemail message left Friday. When
asked about the suit by NJ.com, he texted them back a two-word response,
using an expletive to describe the suit.
In 2020, a police officer told officials he had secretly recorded
Bonaccorso, Matos and another police official using racial slurs while
referring to Blacks. The town agreed to pay $400,000 to settle the
matter out of court, but the allegations later became public.
Clark Mayor Angel Albanese, a Republican who succeeded Bonaccorso,
called the state's lawsuit “frivolous” and accused Platkin of “playing
politics” as his term as attorney general comes to an end. Charles
Sciarra, an attorney for Matos, voiced similar views while noting the
timing of the suit.
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New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin speaks at a news
conference regarding a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald
Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for
anyone born in the U.S. to someone in the U.S. illegally in Boston,
on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Casey, File)
Matos has been on paid leave since the Union County Prosecutor's
Office seized control of the police department in July 2020. He has
sued Clark to try to block the town from firing him, and those
disciplinary proceedings remain active. The prosecutor's oversight
ended last March.
The lawsuit claims the town and its police leadership instituted a
variety of discriminatory policing practices at the behest of
Bonaccorso. Clark is a New York suburb, about 27 miles (43
kilometers) south of Manhattan.
According to an analysis cited by the attorney general's office,
Black people were stopped 3.7 times more often than white people in
Clark between 2015 and 2020, and Hispanic people were stopped 2.2
times more often than white people.
While some of these racial disparities persisted to some extent even
after the prosecutor's oversight began, the data from 2020 to 2024
revealed some notable changes and improvements in policing practices
that coincided with the reduction of some of these racial
disparities, the attorney general's office said.
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