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The governor married well. His wife, Ann Lamont, is a very clever financier; some even suppose she is the brains behind the Lamont Juggernaut. Mrs. Lamont is a co-founder and managing partner of Oak/HT/FC.
Gracing the front piece page of Mario Puzo’s Mafia epic “The
Godfather” is a quote indirectly derived from Balzac – “Behind every great
fortune lies a crime.” It is no less true that behind every great fortune lies
a marriage. A 2006 New York Times story disclosed that
Lamont's financial filings “show that $54
million to $193 million of the family’s wealth stems from Ms. Lamont’s work at
Oak Investment Partners in Westport, Conn., while $1 million to $5 million is
traced to Mr. Lamont’s stake in his Greenwich-based cable television company,
Lamont Digital Systems.”
By the by, Lamont is not the only Connecticut politician who
has married well. Two politicians in the
state clothed in millions, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and US Representative
Rosa DeLauro, have moneybag spouses. Blumenthal is married to the daughter of
real estate magnate Peter Malkin&Son who owns, among other valuable New York
properties, the Empire State Building. And DeLauro’s husband is Stan Greenberg,
pollster and advisor to the national and international Democrat Juggernaut.
A few years ago, a surly critic thought he spied a loop
between DeLauro’s political activities and her
husband’s business activities. DeLauro was shipping large gobs of her
excess campaign money to the Democrat National Committee, and the political nexus
provided Greenberg with enumerative work. Because journalism is largely 10
percent thought and 90 percent repetition, the story went nowhere in
Connecticut.
In 2013, an Associated Press story, “Empire
State Building owner raises $754M in IPO”, an Initial Public stock Offering, noted
in passing, “Real estate investor Peter Malkin bought the Empire State Building
from Donald Trump and a business partner for $57.5 million in 2002. Malkin
Holdings, which is run by Peter Malkin and his son Anthony, spearheaded a plan
to take Empire State Realty public.” The tousle between Trump and the Malkins –
at one point Trump claimed the Empire State property under Malkin had been poorly
managed; rats had infested the
building; the elevators didn’t work – helps explain the animosity between Trump
and Blumenthal, Peter Malkin’s son-in-law. Not only is all politics local; all
politics is personal as well.
The Courant gives us a rather vivid depiction of the Lamont
tightrope. Mrs. Lamont’s business “as it happens, has its investments divided
between the health care industry during a viral pandemic and financial
technology while married to a governor pledging to drag a Luddite state
government into the digital age.”
“Luddite state government” is a reportorial poetic touch
indicating Connecticut aversion to modernization. We are, after all, “the land
of steady habits,” and it is the business of those who worship at the altar of
progress to drag the state, kicking and screaming, into a utopian future
bubbling over with milk, honey and technological improvements.
But – there is the tightrope! Coronavirus has transformed the
governor into a petit Caligula out-rigged with extraordinary powers that would
bring a blush to the cheeks of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars. Not even Augustus
Caesar, a demi-god clothed with the sun and fairly worshiped by progressive, non-Luddite
Romans, disposed of the emergency powers available to Lamont, a wealthy businessman.
The Lamonts, according to the Courant story, attempted to
surround themselves with an ethical buffer to shield the governor from an
appearance of self-dealing: Early in the new administration, the two “drafted
an ethics plan that they believed insulates them from a variety of personal and
state business decisions that could otherwise create an appearance of
self-dealing.” The Lamont plan received a nod of approval from Connecticut’s
Office of State Ethics.
The arrival of the Coronavirus infestation in the state,
and the subsequent need for genomic testing, presented the Lamont’s with a new
ethical wrinkle. Ann Lamont’s company is invested in Sema4, “one of the largest
clinical geonomics laboratories in the
world, located in Branford and Stamford, and Sema4 has been chosen by the Lamont
administration as one of four companies designated to “run 100,000 [Coronavirus] tests a day
on everyone in Connecticut.” And, as the fortunes of Sema4 increase, so will
the fortunes of its investors – the Lamont’s.
But never mind the rub. “Upon finding out that the State Comptroller had awarded a contract to Sema4” – what a surprise! – “the governor and first lady wish to donate any benefits that they may derive to charity,” said one of the governor’s state lawyers. And the executive director of the state ethics staff said “ while the governor and First Lady are under no legal obligation to donate to charity the financial benefits” they may accrue from the deal , their decision “will address any appearance concerns, which, as you know, are beyond the scope of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials.”
Apparently, the principal operative doctrine of the Office
of State Ethics is that appearances inconvenient to politicians who have
established the office – why don’t we just abolish the office? – are benign and
beyond the scope of ethical inquiry.
Here is the real rub: The ways of earning money, according
to ethicist Henry David Thoreau, “usually lead downward.” But political power,
not money, is the coin of the realm among professional political authoritarians,
about whom Abe Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if
you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
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