By JOE D’AQUILA
Staff Writer
Trentonian.com
TRENTON — He’s best known for doing little to get millions of dollars from the state, and publicly changing his name and religion.
But former Baptist Shahid Watson, now a Jew calling himself Emmanuel Avraham, is considering a run for mayor of Trenton.
Yesterday, Avraham said he has created an “exploratory committee” to look into a run for the city’s top spot. He said he tweaked his name a bit again, now going by Emmanuel Shahid Watson ben Avraham, to get recognition from those who knew him under each monicker.
Avraham has been all but invisible to the public eye since 2006, when the state threw out his company’s $1.5 million-per-year contract to teach “life skills” to the state’s inmate population.
He has resurfaced, sensing opportunity and saying there’s a building “buzz” behind his candidacy — while claiming he and his Life Skills Academy did nothing wrong.
“If I had done something as a black man in America and it was wrong or illegal, we would not be having this conversation,” Avraham said yesterday. “It doesn’t take this long for it to be uncovered.”
“If I had done something wrong, I would not be able to run for public office.”
His company’s contract was booted after it came under the scrutiny of a state audit that found it operated with little oversight and showed no evidence of actually helping inmates. The contract was not renewed after the audit, following 13 consecutive years of collecting the $1.5 million sum as the result of a no-bid contract. The yearly payment to his company, for some reason, was counted as its own line item in the state budget, instead of falling under the Department of Corrections total. It was the only contract found to have such a structure in any state department.
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