Lou Venezia, Bloomfield Fire Chief, Must Resign
Satenik Margaryan, Ph.D.
It has been more than two years since Bloomfield residents first learned about racial injustice allegations inside the Bloomfield Fire Department. Now a new federal lawsuit by firefighter Patrick Thomas lays out in stark detail what many of us suspected: this is not a “bad apple” story. It is a story about a department and a town that has tolerated racism, protected insiders, and failed to protect Black workers. And at the center of that failure sits Fire Chief Louis “Lou” Venezia.
What the lawsuit says
The federal lawsuit, filed November 16, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, names the Township of Bloomfield, the Bloomfield Fire Department, Fire Chief Lou Venezia, firefighter Walter Coffey, and several John Doe defendants.
According to the complaint, firefighter Walter Coffey has worked for BFD since around 2000. Over those decades, he allegedly used the “n” word in front of Black firefighters on numerous occasions to harass and intimidate them — and was never disciplined. That tolerance, the suit argues, amounted to a de facto policy: racism inside the firehouse was acceptable.
That alleged pattern culminated in two noose incidents in November 2023.
On November 8, during a rope-and-knot training, Coffey allegedly told Patrick Thomas there was a noose upstairs and asked if he’d seen it, smirking when Thomas questioned why he would find that funny.
Eight days later, at another training in a firehouse equipped with CCTV, Coffey allegedly tied a hangman’s noose, threw it at Thomas while laughing, and said, “I want you to figure out what kind of knot this is.”
Thomas responded that he knew exactly what it was — a noose used to hang his ancestors — and asked Coffey if he thought that was funny. According to the suit, Coffey kept laughing. Multiple firefighters and supervisors allegedly witnessed this, the incident was captured on video, and Thomas was left shocked, enraged, and deeply traumatized.
The complaint notes that Coffey was eventually charged with fourth-degree Bias Intimidation, indicted, and then allowed into Pre-Trial Intervention. While Coffey stayed on the payroll for months as the Township’s internal investigation dragged on, Thomas says he was pushed onto sick time, denied workers’ compensation, threatened with unpaid leave and four-figure monthly insurance premiums, and ultimately found “unlikely to be restored to duty” by the Township’s own psychological evaluator — because of trauma caused by a coworker’s racist “joke.”
In other words: the person who threw the noose stayed; the person it was thrown at was effectively pushed out.
The video they didn’t want to talk about
NBC 4’s I-TEAM reporter Sarah Wallace has now reported on this case twice. Her most recent story, on November 18, aired surveillance footage of the noose incident — footage that the Township and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office somehow never managed to mention in public.
Think about that. A Black firefighter says a colleague tied and threw a noose at him. There is video. There are witnesses. There is an indictment. Yet the public is left with carefully worded statements and half-truths, while the clearest piece of evidence surfaces not from the Township, but from a TV investigative reporter.
That is not transparency. That is damage control. And a complete lack of empathy from the mayor and the council. Even Patrick Thomas said that no one reached out or apologized in these years of ordeal for him and his family.
Why the noose matters
The complaint devotes an entire section to the history and meaning of the noose — because it needs to. Patrick Thomas is a Black man whose ancestors lived through slavery, Jim Crow, and a long history of racial terror in this country. Lynching was not an abstract concept. It was a public spectacle, often carried out with a noose.
For African Americans, a noose is not “just a knot.” It is a weapon. It is a threat. It is a reminder that violence can be carried out with impunity, and that the system is not built for your protection.
The lawsuit is very clear: Coffey’s alleged actions were meant to invoke that history and that fear. And the system in Bloomfield worked exactly the way noose-wielders expect it to work: the white firefighter gets diversion; the Black firefighter gets pushed out of his job.
Bloomfield’s racial reckoning, postponed
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Bloomfield has a long, documented history with civil-rights violations, racial bias, and costly settlements such as high-profile cases like Crespo v. Township of Bloomfield and Jeter v. Township of Bloomfield, involving allegations of brutal police force, false arrest, and later criminal convictions of officers for falsifying reports. More recently, the Sutton case is part of the same pattern: a Black man shot and maimed by a white Bloomfield officer, then left to fight for years just to have his story believed. When a Black person is permanently injured and the white officers walk away without indictment, it’s hard to read that as anything other than a system steeped in racial bias.
The Thomas complaint also cites a Seton Hall Law School report concluding that Bloomfield’s policing patterns are racially disproportionate and that Black and Latino residents are the department’s “target group.” A Black person in Bloomfield is 252 percent more likely than a white person to have force used on them, and 83 percent more likely per arrest. A 2020 analysis found that Bloomfield had not taken “overt action” on anti-racist reforms around policing and use of force. The pattern is simple: harm, denial, expensive settlements borne by the residents of Bloomfield, and no structural change.
The PR spin versus the record
When the federal lawsuit hit, the current administration scrambled to produce a statement. The mayor’s press release focuses on what the Township claims it did after the second noose incident was caught on video: internal affairs, discipline, and pious language about “zero tolerance.”
But the complaint tells a very different story:
years of unchecked slurs and racist harassment,
a first noose incident with no consequences,
a two-year slog to complete internal discipline,
a victim pushed out on sick leave and denied workers’ comp.
Technically, Walter Coffey can be “on unpaid suspension” and still “remain employed,” but that is a far cry from “swift accountability.” A culture that truly has “zero tolerance” for racism does not wait for an investigative TV reporter to bring the story to light.
And let’s be clear: this didn’t just happen under Mayor Mundell. When the first complaint surfaced in late 2023, then-Mayor Michael Venezia and his political circle controlled Town Hall. According to multiple accounts, Venezia failed to fully brief the entire council about the noose complaint. Some council members only learned the details from Sarah Wallace’s first report, not from their own mayor. That is a cover-up by omission.
Council member Ted Gamble, who later was voted in as a mayor despite open resistance from then-Councilwoman Jenny Mundell — was not part of that inner circle and was not privy to how this case was buried. Residents weren’t either.
The Venezia machine behind the firehouse
All of this unfolded while Michael Venezia’s brother, Louis “Lou” Venezia, was serving as Fire Chief.
Lou joined the Bloomfield Fire Department in 1999 and became Fire Chief in 2018. He is not just any department head. He is:
the brother of former Mayor and current Assemblyman Mike Venezia,
a cog in the Essex County Democratic machine,
and a man whose tenure has already been marked by scandal.
In 2018, while serving as deputy chief, Venezia was suspended after a lawsuit filed by the president of the Bloomfield Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association alleged that he trained firefighters to the point of vomiting and discriminated against them with derogatory comments. The Township eventually reinstated him, sending him to “demeanor training.”
Since then, BFD has cycled through trainings on “implicit bias,” professionalism, and workplace conduct. The press releases were full of the right language. “As first responders, our Firefighters work with residents on a day to day basis. It is crucial that we recognize the unconscious potential for biased behavior in the community as well as in our own workplace,” Venezia once said. “This workshop further demonstrates our commitment to constantly evolving in order to best serve the residents of Bloomfield.”
Those words now sit in brutal contrast to the allegations in Thomas’s complaint. If your department’s “evolution” includes years of unchecked slurs and a noose thrown at a Black firefighter — and you still fail to act decisively — then your training is theater, not transformation.
Power, patronage, and a fiefdom
Lou Venezia’s power doesn’t end at the firehouse door. He is deeply embedded in the local power structure:
Member of the Essex County Planning Board
Member of the Executive Committee of the 200 Club of Essex
Member of the Community Advisory Board at Carewell Health Medical Center
Treasurer and Manager of the Bloomfield Fire and Police Credit Union, overseeing roughly $10 million in assets
Supervisor for the Township’s Building and Zoning Departments
Owner of the TapIntoBloomfield franchise — a site that dresses itself up as neutral community news while churning out what can fairly be called political pink slime.
Put plainly: the man who runs the fire department also sits in judgment on land use, touches municipal finances, oversees zoning, and owns a “news” outlet in town. That is not healthy civic infrastructure. That is a consolidated fiefdom.
And his judgment has been on display. Under his leadership, BFD hired a Nutley firefighter who had been put on unpaid leave in his own department over domestic violence charges. Despite significant public outcry, the Town Council approved the hire. It was a textbook example of how the system protects insiders, not residents.
Why this lands on Lou Venezia — and why he has to go
Fire chiefs are not just operational managers. They set the culture. They decide which complaints are taken seriously, who is protected, and who is expendable. If a noose incident can occur in a firehouse under your watch — not once, but twice — and the person who threw it is still technically employed while the person it was thrown at is effectively pushed out, you have failed at the most basic part of your job.
Add to that:
his prior suspension and lawsuit over abusive training and discriminatory comments,
the revolving door of “implicit bias” workshops that change nothing,
his deep entanglement in the local political machine,
his ownership of a local news franchise that covers the very government in which he is a powerful player and named defendant.
He is also one of the highest-paid public employees in Bloomfield, drawing a six-figure salary to preside over this mess.
At some point, this stops being a story about one firefighter’s overt racism and becomes a story about the man who built and ran the house where that noose could be tied, thrown, laughed about, and then buried.
When the mayor pushed out yet another PR-spin statement about the latest developments, Lou Venezia didn’t just stay quiet, he slapped a heart on it.
He also republished the mayor’s press release in TapInto and slapped a curios disclaimer:
If Bloomfield is serious about racial justice, workplace safety, and basic public integrity, then the conclusion is not complicated:
Lou Venezia needs to go.
He should resign or be removed as Fire Chief. His sprawling roles across Township agencies and boards should be unwound. An independent investigation, and not another internal review managed by the same political network, should examine how this case was handled, who knew what and when, and why the victim paid the price while the system protected itself.
Bloomfield residents deserve a fire department that protects every worker and every resident — not a fiefdom run by a politically connected chief who presides over nooses, cover-ups, and PR spin.
Perfectly said. Keep up the great work exposing Bloomfield's dark side.
Thanks, Satenik, for this comprehensive expose. It is very important for Bloomfield residents to know what is going on behind the scenes, which is not easily found out. You are an excellent researcher, and Bloomfield is lucky to have you in our midst. The information you provide can help us become more effective in taking effective actions against racism and other negative situations in our town.