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DANCING FOR GAMBLER: The Nick Bissell Story

A Man on a Mission

Somerset County Prosecutor's Office seal

"A Somerset County Prosecutor for 13 years, Nicholas L.Bissell Jr. was known to give no ground to criminal suspects. He was brash, some say arrogant, and he was just as likely to seize the assets of someone who bought $200 worth of marijuana as he was the leader of a multi-million-dollar cocaine ring."

That's the way journalist Chris Hann, writing in the Bridgewater Courier News described the fugitive prosecutor in a 1996 article. Jim Wronko, a former prosecutor who had worked under Bissell during the heyday of his office and now a defense attorney who often appears on Court TV put it this way, "He was very hard-nosed."

But above all, Nick Bissell was a skilled and savvy lawyer, a man who knew how to put a criminal case together, and knew how to bring it home to a jury. Bissell had learned his craft working in the trenches, spending part of his career as an assistant in the public defender's office, and a bit more as an assistant prosecutor. There was, say some who knew him, a touch of the control freak about him. Others describe him as a driven, competitive man who had dreamed as a child of becoming a professional athlete. When it became clear that it would never happen, he turned instead to law, where his personal drive and flair for drama served him well.

Gov. Thomas Kean

In 1982, he caught the attention of then New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, the man who now heads a bipartisan probe into the events that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Perhaps it was Bissell's reputation for hard work, or maybe it was a reputation for having a certain relentlessness of character. Maybe it was just politics, but Kean appointed the 35-year-old lawyer to serve as prosecutor for Somerset County.

It was hardly the kind of post that one usually expects to catapult a prosecutor into the national spotlight. Nestled in the low hills about 20 miles southwest of New York City, Somerset County, one of the smallest counties in New Jersey, had its share of drug problems and petty crime. But it also had more than its share of wealthy residents, people like Malcolm Forbes and Christine Todd Whitman, who later went on to be governor of New Jersey and Secretary for the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush. Jackie Onassis used to hunt fox in the hills of Somerset County, and for the most part , it was the kind of place where residents were far more likely to turn up on the society pages of the newspaper than in the crime blotter.

All the same, Bissell attacked his new post with gusto. Among his first acts as prosecutor was to launch an "Internal Affairs and Employee Integrity Unit," to make sure that, as Bissell told the Courier News at the time, "there will not be detectives and assistant prosecutors involved in criminal behavior." As a token of how seriously Bissell seemed to take the issue of ethics and integrity, he appointed his old friend, Richard Thornburg, to serve as the head of the unit.

With the ethics panel in place, Bissell turned his attention to the street and soon started racking up headlines. Some of them were impressive.

In 1987, for example, his office launched a probe into allegation of sexual misconduct with children by some members of the Somerset County Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Four people were convicted, and according to published reports at the time, Bissell's probe led to an overhaul of the organization. Years later, not long before his fall from grace, Bissell made national headlines again when he publicly accused television star Kelsey Grammer of seducing a teenaged girl during a visit to Somerset County, an allegation vehemently denied by Grammer. Bissell was later forced to back away from the allegations when a Somerset Grand Jury, after hearing reams of evidence in the case, refused to indict the star.

In between, Bissell notched victory after victory in the courtroom and, to some degree in the public arena. Among the most famous cases he handled was the prosecution of Matthew Heikkila, a 21-year-old from the well-to-do neighborhood of Basking Ridge who, on January 29, 1991, murdered his adoptive parents by shooting them at point blank range with a shotgun containing shells which he had taken the time to label "Mom" and "Dad." In the end, despite Bissell's best efforts to convince jurors that the young man deserved to die for the crimes, Heikkila was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.

To some observers, Bissell's willingness on putting himself at the center of so many high profile cases was testament to his boundless ego. The way they saw it, Bissell had calculated that his appointment to the $70,000-a-year post as prosecutor in a place where old money ruled was his ticket to the good life.

Younger Nick Bissell

Nick Bissell was, they noted, a man who liked to indulge his appetites, and who had a taste for the trappings of wealth and power. As proof, they cite his periodic trips to the casinos of Atlantic City, where, it was well known, Bissell would often drop thousands of dollars on the tables in a weekend.

But there were others who to this day believe that Nick Bissell was far more complex than that. To them, he was a man who took his job seriously. He could be venal, he could be abrasive, and he could be egocentric. But he also did his job as well as any prosecutor in the state, and by some measures, they say, he did it better.

Part of the reason for his success may have been that he lacked the instincts of a bureaucrat, skills that many prosecutors and district attorneys around the country cultivate as a kind of natural defense against political predators. He was, for the most part, unwilling to sit back and let others take the risks.

That was one of the things Wronko first noticed about Bissell. Even before Wronko joined Bissell's office, back when he was an assistant state Attorney General called on from time to time to handle cases in many of the state's 21 counties, he noted that Bissell seemed an unusually ubiquitous presence in the courthouse. While most prosecutors were content to let their underlings do the grunt work, Bissell was different. "He seemed to be around more than the others," Wronko said.

Later, when Wronko became an assistant prosecutor working under Bissell, rising within a year to head the county's Narcotics Task Force, he was struck by how knowledgeable Bissell was. "He was a good trial attorney," Wronko recalled. "A lot of prosecutors wouldn't know what to do with a jury, but when he talked about your case with you, it wasn't like he had no clue."

Though Bissell may have well understood the dynamics of courtroom and clearly knew how to marshal them to his benefit, he was far less adept when it came to politics, at least when it came to politics with a small "p". While many prosecutors opt to let their subordinates handle the dirty work and deal with the fallout that comes from making enemies, Bissell seemed to almost relish confrontation.

Twice during his tenure, Bissell aggressively pursued elected officials accused of wrongdoing, and in both cases, he forced them to resign. Nor was he any more tolerant when he encountered what he believed to be interference from other agencies, even those higher up on the law enforcement food chain.

Wronko recalled one particular incident that occurred while he was prosecuting a particularly gruesome homicide. "I was trying a death penalty case, and this was back in the days when DNA was brand new, and in this case, the DNA expert was being used by the defense," Wronko said. The expert in question was also a favorite among prosecutors and, among other things, the state had used his services to boost their case against the killers of a New Jersey state trooper, a case then under appeal, Wronko said.

Part of Wronko's strategy in his homicide case was to undermine the credibility of the expert, and that, Wronko said, did not sit well with the state Attorney General's office. "Partway into the case, members of the attorney general's office actually came and met with Nick Bissell," he said. They pleaded with the prosecutor to "tell Jim Wronko to leave this expert alone," Wronko said. "He's attacking this guy, raising issues about his competency, and we're afraid it's going to hurt the appeal on (the trooper slaying) case."

Bissell was unmoved. "Nick Bissell basically told them to kiss his backside," Wronko said. "He said to me; 'You do whatever you need to do to get the guy if you gotta destroy this expert to convict a killer, go ahead and do it.'"