PA big faces ax over ‘diploma mill’ résumé

By PHILIP MESSING

nypost

He’s the dumbest smart guy in law enforcement.

Jay Alpert — a Mensa member and politically connected ex-New Jersey cop who was once Bergen County’s sheriff — is about to be fired from his top Port Authority post for allegedly padding his résumé with shady college degrees from an infamous diploma mill, PA insiders told The Post.

“He’ll be fired, but he won’t be prosecuted,” predicted one knowledgeable source.

diploma fraud

Alpert has already been suspended without pay from his position as an acting PA police captain and senior manager with the agency’s Office of Emergency Management after he was found to have listed the mail-order college degrees on his original job application and résumé. The agency requires degrees from accredited institutions.

Alpert also wrote on the forms that he was a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society. PA investigators have since verified his claim.

“It’s the one thing about him we know to be true,” one official joked.

Alpert was originally hired in August 2010 — with a referral from the administration of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

His questionable degrees were discovered when the PA Inspector General’s Office began looking more into his background last month, after he was named acting captain at an annual salary of $110,000.

The IG soon zeroed in on the bachelor’s and master’s degrees that Alpert said he earned from LaSalle University and found out that they weren’t from the prestigious Catholic institution in Philadelphia.

Instead, the degrees came from a LaSalle University in Mandeville, La., a now-defunct “diploma mill’’ correspondence school that was shut down after a July 1996 FBI raid.

The school’s former president and several other officials wound up being sent to prison for fraud.

Investigators also determined that his bachelor’s degree from the diploma mill had been awarded in April 1996 and his “master of science in criminal justice management” was given in July 1996.

“You don’t get a master’s degree three months after you’re given your bachelor’s degree,” a source noted.

Alpert’s lawyer, Sam Davis, insisted his client has had an “unblemished record in law enforcement for 25 years” and was not guilty of misrepresenting anything.

“As far as my client is concerned, [LaSalle] was not a diploma mill. He read the books that were assigned, he wrote the papers for each course, and he had interaction with faculty over his course work,” Davis said.

He charged that “these malicious attacks on [Alpert’s] character and reputation are part of a vendetta” based on “the need of certain individuals to engage in an attempt at character assassination.”

Davis also refuted a law-enforcement source’s claim that Alpert, while running for sheriff nearly 14 years ago, had been accused of wearing police medals in public to boost his election chances, even though he hadn’t earned them.