He’s loaded trucks in the 100-degree heat in Jersey City…delivered the New York Daily News in his native Brooklyn…and sold beer at Islanders games to work his way through law school.
  He was also a 13-year old eyewitness to the bank robbery and hostage incident that inspired the hit Al Pacino movie “Dog Day Afternoon”…and saw his collegiate hockey career end after just one minute on the ice—thanks to a broken collarbone.
  A 51-year old father of two grown children, Jeff Nash started working at the age of 13 and hasn’t stopped. And along the way, he’s helped lead two of the region’s most powerful public sector organizations—the Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders, as Freeholder Director for more than a decade, and the Delaware River Port Authority, as Vice Chair and its top New Jersey appointee.
  A 1980 graduate of Gorge Washington University and 1983 graduate of Hofstra Law School, Nash spent three and a half years as a criminal defense attorney in New York with the New York Legal Aid Society before coming to Cherry Hill and joining the law firm of Cozen & O’Connor—where he’s been ever since.
  Nash talks with palpable affection of the two men he calls his mentors—Steve Cozen in law and Gorge Norcross in politics. “Both are brilliant, both are loyal, and both are family people,” says Nash, who is now a senior litigator, government relations practitioner, and shareholder in Cozen O’Connor’s Cherry Hill office.
  The firm has grown from 60 attorneys when Nash signed on 22 years ago to more than 600 spread across 23 offices on two continents today. “And that’s because of Steve,” says Nash, who regards Cozen as “even more than a mentor, he’s a father figure.”
  He recalls an occasion when his law firm had to send an attorney to Tel Aviv to handle a business matter and Cozen chose him to go “because he knew it was a place I really wanted to visit and had never had the chance. That’s just the way he is.”
  Nash has four sisters and one brother who are now spread across the country, but he was the one who, at the age of 13, ended up spending six hours on an August afternoon in a Brooklyn barbershop because it was locked down by police.
  “The barbershop was across the street from the scene of a bank robbery on Avenue P that ended up as a hostage situation and we weren’t allowed to leave. When I finally got home—with no haircut—my mom didn’t believe it when I told her what had happend and why I was late.”
  That robbery was the inspiration for Sidney Lumet’s 1975 crime drama, Dog Day Afternoon, which tells the story of John "Sonny" Wortzik, who, with his partner Salvatore Naturile, held the employees of a Brooklyn bank hostage.
  Nash, who was just reelected to his umpteenth term as a Freeholder, was “always politically involved” and public service minded. By the time he was nineteen years old, he had created a senior citizen’s help service. He started college at Brockport State University in New York where he earned the honor of being the only sophomore accepted into the prestigious Political Studies Semester program in Washington, DC.
  He remained in Washington as a transfer student at George Washington University where he completed his degree in Political Science before going on to Hofstra, where he served as the Managing Editor of the School’s Labor Law Journal.
  Nash was first elected to public office in 1989 as a member of the Cherry Hill Council, where he served from 1990 to 1993, and, in November 1991, he was elected to the seven-member Camden County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
  In 1995, Nash was selected by his colleagues to serve as Camden County Freeholder Director, and under his leadership the County received two bond-rating upgrades by Wall Street rating agencies. He also led the effort to support the expansion of Camden County College, which he proudly notes is “now viewed as the best two-year college in the State.”
  Among his other accomplishments, he led the initiative to secure and preserve nearly a thousand acres of open space and farmland and worked to see his plan for the demolition of Camden’s Riverfront prison realized just this year. He also led the efforts to create the County Human Relations Commission and the Asian American Advisory Board.
  In 2002, Nash was appointed Vice Chairman of the Delaware River Port Authority of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the bi-state regional transportation and economic development agency that is headquartered in Camden.
  Under Nash’s guidance, DRPA revitalized and modernized all PATCO stations, implemented a new Smart Card fare collection system, and started replacing old rail cars using $54 million of secured federal funds.
  Jeff is also a member of the “Governor’s Commission on the Horse Racing Industry,” which was created to assist in identifying and recommending long-term funding solutions for maintaining the economic viability of the horse racing industry in the State of New Jersey.
  Which fits perfectly into one of Nash’s favorite pastimes, horse racing. Along with going to Yankee games, going to the races with his father is one of Nash’s most vivid and fond remembrances of his childhood. He stresses that his passion is “handicapping not betting,” but he was part of political team that once owned three race horses (which, he notes proudly, “won six races!”)
  If Nash could have any job in the world it would be playing shortstop for the Yankees, so it’s not surprising that his favorite movie is Field of Dreams. Family Guy tops his list for must-watch TV, and there are several books on his list of favorites, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. And, since we’re on the subject of favorites, the elected official Nash most admires (“among many”) is President Obama.
  He admits to having both a fear of heights and a secret crush on his college roommate’s girl friend—which is no big deal unless you know that his college roommate was Alec Baldwin.
  Self-described as “a workaholic who is passionate about Camden County and Camden City, compassionate, sincere…and chubby—make that working to get in shape,” Nash says that if he has a motto, it’s “try to do the right thing.”
  The winner of a host of awards—from the Camden County Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal to this year’s New Jersey Alliance For Action Walter Rand Award For Public Service, Nash adds, “If you work hard and you’re honest, good things will happen to you.”
  Nash does not anticipate an epitaph, since he wants to be cremated and have his ashes spread over seven pre-selected locations: his backyard in Brooklyn, the front steps of his frat house at GW, the backyard of his home in Cherry Hill, in the (new) Yankee Stadium, on the finish line at Belmont Park, on the beach in Brigantine, and on the site of soon-to-be-demolished Riverfront Prison on the Camden waterfront.