More trouble has come to Sal Bonaccorso, the mayor of Clark, New Jersey, who was caught using racial slurs on a recording in 2019.

The politician, who once declared he would never hire a woman to serve on his 39-member police force, has been charged by the state attorney general with multiple unrelated criminal charges related to his businesses.

The Office of the Attorney General and the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability (OPIA) opened an investigation into Bonaccorso’s professional and personal life in 2022. It released a 43-page report that detailed their findings.

At the foundation of Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin’s investigation were seven recordings where Bonaccorso and Police Chief Pedro Matos referred to Black people by the N-word. The mayor also called African-Americans “spooks.” Another person, Sgt. Joseph Teston called a Black suspect an “animal” with a big “monkey head.”

The investigation was sparked after he was caught using racial slurs to describe Jewish people and Black people. He said, “They was looking for some —— walking around or something.” The mayor also can be heard saying in other recordings, “f–king hang the (racial slur) up there,” according to NBC News.

Many called for his resignation, but he is still in office.

“Allegations of abhorrent language used to degrade crime victims, suspects, and prospective employees raised the alarm of potentially criminal policing and hiring practices,” the report claims.“To many in the community, the release of this report has been long overdue.”

Surprisingly, the criminal charges came from the civil rights violation probe.

Bonaccorso now faces charges of official misconduct in the second degree, tampering with public records or information in the third degree, witness tampering in the third degree, forgery in the fourth degree, and falsifying or tampering with records in the fourth degree. 

Authorities say Bonaccorso forged an engineer’s signature on permit applications in an effort to have hundreds of underground storage tanks improperly removed between 2017 and 2023.

He and his workers allegedly used the engineer’s license number despite the engineer not supervising or being involved in those projects. They also did not get the legally required tank inspections to operate on those job sites fully.

Platkin’s team said the mayor submitted false and fraudulent paperwork to nearly two dozen municipalities to get paid hundreds and thousands for the tank removals.

The attorney general released a statement about the longtime mayor’s conduct.

“Any elected leader who abuses his power and position and misuses public property and public employees for his own benefit, at taxpayers’ expense, betrays the public’s trust,” Platkin said. “In this instance, the complaint charges that the defendant also abused the trust of officials in other towns, allegedly submitting fraudulent documents with forged signatures to enrich his company while circumventing New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection regulations.”

The mayor’s attorney, Robert G. Stahl, says that his client has denied “each and every allegation,” calling them “faulty and incorrect,” as The New York Times reports.

Platkin has also called for the termination of Matos and Teston.

Two police officers, according to the report, “expressed views that suggested they encouraged bias-based policing and hiring practices.”

The chief and sergeant were two of the 37 white male officers on the force. The other two male officers, who also serve the more than 15,000 people in the predominately white Clark township, are not white.