Manalapan may be infected by a virus

I use a computer every day to write and edit the written word, to go on the Internet, to read and send e-mail — but if you asked me how it works, I could not explain it in great depth. That’s why we have a systems department here, because they can figure it all out. I needed their expertise last week.

I came into the office on the morning of Oct. 18 and checked my e-mail. One e-mail that had come in between the time I left work on Oct. 17 and got back to the office the next morning was from Lucas Capital and the subject line said “A big favor.” I recognized the sender’s name and knew that Republican Township Committeeman Andrew Lucas of Man-alapan had sent me a message.

Lucas has sent me e-mails in the past and they all have that name, Lucas Capital, in the sender’s line, as well as the same e-mail address as the one I found on the inside of the Oct. 17 message. In fact, just the week before I had received an e-mail from Lucas Capital questioning the authenticity of a letter to the editor that was published in the Oct. 12 News Transcript.

That message, which was sent at 5 p.m. Oct. 11 and opened by me on the morning of Oct. 12, said, “Dear Mr. Rosman, I read your recent edition of the News Transcript and I was surprised that you published a letter to the editor by one (woman) who claims she is a resident of Manalapan and who claims [she] is a registered Republican. The problem is that there is no resident in the county voter records by that name and there is no registered Republican by that name. Could you please clarify this for me. Thank you, Andrew.”

I assumed that message came from Lucas.

It was just the night before, Oct. 11, when I ran into Stuart Moskovitz, who is Manalapan’s township attorney. Mosko-vitz questioned the authenticity of the very same letter that, as things turned out, I read about in the e-mail from Lucas Capital the next morning.

After reading the e-mail from Lucas on Oct. 12, I checked with the person who wrote the letter in question and was satisfied she was the author. She signed her name as it appears on her driver’s license, which carries a Manalapan address.

She did state in her letter, as Lucas pointed out, that she is a registered Republican, but she never claimed in her letter that she was registered under the name she used to sign the letter. I informed Lucas of my findings in a return e-mail and did not hear back from him.

Coincidentally, two other people called me on Oct. 12 to question that same letter to the editor. One was Rhoda Chodosh, who is a regular attendee at municipal meetings, and the second was Jeff McKay, who is the campaign manager for Republican Township Committee candidates Peter Hall and Miracle Torre-grossa. I told both of them I was satisfied with the authenticity of the letter.

It’s good to know I have so many co-editors trying to make sure I don’t get scammed by a phony letter to the editor.

That brings me back to the morning of Oct. 18. I thought nothing of opening the e-mail from Lucas Capital when I saw it in my in box, but I was very surprised by what I read.

The body of the e-mail said, “Kirsten: Hope this finds you well. I was hoping you could get one of your parents to read this letter and email it to the News Transcript for publication. Their email submission just needs to have their name and phone number and the editor will call to ask if they wrote it. If you have any questions let me know. Thanks again, Andrew.”

The letter referred to in the e-mail was an attachment that was a scathing letter attacking Dotty Porcaro, who until recently was one of the adult advisers to the Manalapan Teen Advisory Commit-tee.

After the issue of Porcaro’s and Joanne Orr’s removal from their positions blew up at a Township Committee meeting, Porcaro wrote a guest column in the News Transcript in which she explained how, in her opinion, the Teen Advisory Committee has become a political apparatus being used by Republicans.

Coincidentally, during the township meeting when all of this came out, a teenager named Kirsten spoke before the committee about the issue. Now it seemed that someone had penned a letter attacking Porcaro and wanted Kirsten to ask her parents to send it to the paper under their name.

The entire episode surrounding the Teen Advisory Committee and the use of teenagers for political purposes is disgusting, and don’t tell me or the community that these children showed up at a meeting by themselves to talk about the matter.

That would insult the intelligence of any Manalapan resident who heard such a lame explanation. Those responsible for this mess should be ashamed of themselves and should think long and hard about how they have used children for political purposes.

It was only after reading the body of the e-mail from Lucas Capital that I looked at the “To” line in the address and saw that the e-mail had been sent to a person with an AOL e-mail address. My e-mail address here at the office was in the “Cc” line.

I called Andrew Lucas to discuss the e-mail but never had much of a chance to do so. As soon as I mentioned that I wanted to discuss an e-mail, he began yelling at me and asking me if I was accusing him of something.

I tried to tell him that I was not accusing him of anything, but he cut me off and told me the News Transcript prints fiction, not news, has no credibility with him, that I was making things up, and “unless you can verify the I.P. address [from which the e-mail was sent], there’s going to be problems.” He then said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore” and ended the conversation.

I thought that was an odd reaction by a person who would not permit me to clearly state what was in the e-mail.

That’s when our systems department

went to work. They retrieved e-mail messages I had received from Lucas Capital over the past two months. It is my opinion that all of those messages came from Andrew Lucas because they all involved municipal business or were related to the newspaper’s coverage of municipal business.

I found out that the I.P. address of the message that came to my computer at work with the sender’s name Lucas Capital on Oct. 18 was in the same I.P. range as all of the previous messages from Lucas Capital.

I called Lucas back and told him the I.P. address of the Oct. 18 message essentially matched his previous messages to me. This time he wasn’t yelling. He asked me to send him the e-mail I had received with the message to Kirsten and the attachment of the letter attacking Porcaro. He said he would check it out and get back to me.

Several hours later I received an e-mail from Lucas Capital which stated, “Dear Mr. Rosman: Thank you for the ability to respond to your question regarding this email. I have not been able to confirm that this email was sent through either of my computers, but I am familiar with the attachment and was asked to read the attachment to make sure that it is was [sic] free of libel.” He went on to make a statement about the Democratic campaign before signing the e-mail, “Andrew.”

As a public official who deals with reporters, Lucas should know how off-the-record comments (i.e., comments that an official does not want to be reported) work. A person who is being interviewed must ask the reporter before making a specific comment if that comment can be off the record. The reporter, not the interviewee, is the individual who makes the decision about whether he will allow a subject to go off the record.

Therefore, a statement in his e-mail explanation to me, which Lucas prefaces with the phrase “off the record,” is not off the record since he never asked me if he could make an off-the-record statement, and I never consented to allowing him to make an off-the-record comment.

He wrote, “I’d like to thank you for alerting me to this email. I have checked with [his Internet service provider] and they said that passwords are stolen every day by the thousands and that I should be changing my password more often and updating my firewall, but that nothing is foolproof … Thank you again for alerting me to this.”

We publish letters to the editor as a way of letting readers comment on issues of importance. Having to be on guard for fake letters makes it all the more difficult for the people who really do have something to say in their own words. The bottom line is that the person who signs a letter to the editor should be the person who has written it.

Unless it was Kirsten’s parents who asked Lucas to check the letter for libel, Lucas should have told the person who asked him to check it that he should not be writing a letter on behalf of someone else and having the third party submit it to a newspaper as their own.

Lucas says he did not send us the e-mail in question and denies trying to get a bogus letter into the paper. You can never be 100 percent positive, so maybe he didn’t. But someone did, and that will only make it even more difficult for legitimate letter writers to get their work published in the future. That, I believe, is unfortunate.

Mark Rosman is the managing editor of the News Transcript.