Division of Criminal Justice investigative reports obtained by The Inquirer detail Hampton's account of how pay-to-play practices allegedly worked at the politically connected engineering company.
His allegations touched on issues ranging from federal tax evasion to campaign contributions to powerful politicians, including Susan Bass Levin, who is now New Jersey's commissioner of community affairs.
But rather than putting Hampton on the witness stand, where his statements could be tested, high-ranking officials within the New Jersey Attorney General's Office opted to put him in jail.
A spokesman for the Division of Criminal Justice said that the embezzlement could not go unpunished.
The reports, based on so-called raw intelligence gathered during a series of debriefing sessions attended by Hampton, his lawyer, and state investigators and prosecutors, offer only Hampton's account of what was going on at JCA.
That information, until now, has never been made public. It remains the subject of investigation, according to John Hagerty, the spokesman for the Division of Criminal Justice.
The decision to jail Hampton, however, derailed his cooperation and cut off a source of information that could have been valuable in the overall JCA investigation, according to several law enforcement officials.
Hampton "was a critical first step in layering an investigation and working your way up the chain," said one law enforcement source familiar with the investigation, adding that he considered Hampton crucial to the then-ongoing probe into JCA. What's more, said the source, much of what Hampton said could have been checked against documents because of a paper trail that the accountant was intimately familiar with.
That "paper trail" could be extensive. JCA has engineering contracts throughout New Jersey, and campaign records show that the company has given more than $750,000 in political contributions in the last five years.
