Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is now pretty obvious that former Speaker of the House Chris Donovan was the intended subject of a political sting operation conducted by the FBI in Connecticut in order to expose a pay-to-play scheme involving roll your own smoke shop owners who wished to kill a bill that would have imposed on them the same crippling taxes levied on cigarette manufacturers. Several associates of Mr. Donovan, most notably his finance chairman, were caught in the net, but the big fish got away. If the prosecution of possibly corrupt lead political actors is the test of a successful sting operation, this one failed.

Republican Senate Minority Leader John McKinney called upon Democratic Speaker of the House Chris Donovan to relinquish his position as Speaker following the arrest of his former finance chairman, Robert Braddock, for having concealed the identity of a donor, likely an FBI plant, who wanted to kill tax legislation on “roll your own” cigarette businesses in Connecticut. Pointing to an affidavit used to secure the arrest of Mr. Braddock, Mr. Kinney said, “The facts and allegations in the affidavit are a grave violation of the public trust and cast a pall on all of the legislative activities Speaker Donovan has participated in since announcing his run for the U.S. Congress in the 5 th District,” a fairly damning assessment. For his part, Mr. Donovan temporarily turned over the usufructs of his office to colleague Brendan Sharkey, who is expected to be appointed Speaker after Mr. Donovan’s term ends, and he has refused a call from one of his Democratic primary opponents, Dan R...

State senators Thomas Gaffey of Meriden and Joseph Crisco of Woodbridge were not present in the chamber when Republican Sen. John McKinney offered a bill, voted down by dominant Democrats, to establish a standing legislative ethics committee. There is some humorous speculation that Sen. Crisco, recently found to have forged documents for which he was fined $4,000 by the State Elections Enforcement Commission, had secluded himself behind the statue representing “The Genius of Connecticut” in the North lobby of the Capitol, while Sen. Gaffey, fined $6,000 by the same committee for having fraudulently charged both the state and his political action committee for the same campaign travel expenses, was canoodling with a lobbyist for Connecticut’s four state colleges in the cramped elevator that connects the building’s first and second floors. The issue of a standing ethics committee was first raised after Republican Sen. Lou DeLuca had failed to resist the blandishments of an FBI plant pre...

It’s always a hazard to make predictions, because future events depend upon current events that change rapidly. The best sort of prediction is a vow: “I pledge in the New Year to be kinder to my friends and more hostile to my enemies.” This sort of prediction depends solely on will power and determination, which always lie in the hand of the vow taker. Predictions about historic events are always iffy. History, as a rule, snatches the better angels of our nature from us and consigns them to Hell. The careful reader will note that I have capitalized “Hell.” This, with apologies to honorable atheists among us, is because it is a place name for a real place, as yet undiscoverable by the spiritually vacuous tools of modern science. The following are safe predictions because, with the exception of #7, they are limited to what will not happen in the coming year. 1) Bloggers -- who are nasty, brutish and short (with just about everybody) – will continue on their private path to Hell (note the...

Because Lou DeLuca complained of maltreatment and suggested that the Gaffey potboiler be handled in a way similar to his own case, both commentators and politicians, among them President Pro Tem of the state senate Don Williams, felt constrained to point out the differences. Williams said, "For Lou DeLuca to have brought this up is an outrage. For somebody who was investigated by the FBI, the chief state's attorney's office, and but for the fact that law enforcement was able to break up the hit that he ordered on a relative, he would be in jail. For him to start talking about Tom Gaffey, who broke no law … we're talking about two different universes." All true. Apples are not oranges. The characters to whom we’ve been introduced during the DeLuca drama are not at all the same as those wandering the stage in the Gaffey drama. There are no FBI agents posing as mobsters under state Sen. Thomas Gaffey’s bed, and Gaffey did not refuse a bribe and then decline to report...

The interest in soon to be former state Sen. Lou DeLuca has flagged, especially among news reporters, at exactly that point at which it should be most intense. DeLuca announced that he was resigning last Wednesday, made a very pretty speech in which he once again admitted wrongdoing, and was as quickly forgotten as yesterday’s hasty pudding. Everyone went back to sleep, hardly noticing that nothing of any note, other than DeLuca’s resignation, had been settled. Predictable people said predictable things. Republican Sen. John Kissel said “It put an unfortunate chapter behind us.” Sen. Andrea Stillman, a Democrat, offered that the conclusion would have been the same had the legislative committee investigating DeLuca completed its work. Sen. Majority Leader Martin Looney, a Democrat, breathed a sign of relief. “Obviously,” he said, “the Committee will be concluding its work today.” But of course. It was never the work of the committee to devise and implement procedural rules to prevent fu...

Democracy, the ability of the people to throw the bums out, runs purest in Connecticut’s town governments, because US congressional districts in this and other states are gerrymandered in such a way as to frustrate the democratic instinct. British author Malcolm Muggeridge used regularly to vote against incumbents because, he reasoned, the challengers, whatever their political orientation, had not yet presumed to rob him of his assets, cluttered the legislative landscape with pointless laws and deprived him of his God given liberties. That impulse is as American as apple pie. Here in the good old USA, the presumption generally lies against incumbents, even as the ability to survive the storm of voter discontent lies in favor of incumbents. For reason other than gerrymandering, the carving up of districts so as to prevent the party out of power from gaining a foothold, some legislators in some districts will forever be secure in their sinecures. It is difficult to imagine what Democrat ...

Attorney Sandra Norman-Eady, testifying before a special legislative committee, said there were no clear rules or language in the cases she had examined that dictate how the committee, poised to decide whether Sen. Lou DeLuca should be expelled from the chamber, should decide the issue. "There's nothing definitive,” Norman-Eady said, “that says it has to be a felony conviction for expulsion.” Having consulted relevant passages from James Madison in the Federalist Papers, Sen. Anthony Guglielmo told the committee that the constitutional founders set a pretty high standard for expulsion; they “were concerned about overturning the elections of duly elected officials." Both Norman-Eady and Guglielmo are right. Very likely, legislators may expel members for cause – any cause. On the other hand, overturning elections is a serious business, and so the cause ought to be denial proof. Expulsion is particularly chancy when legislatures are dominated by a single party. Precedence is...

The special Senate investigating committee inquiring into the DeLuca affair has issued a request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s office, the state police, Waterbury police and the chief state’s attorney, asking for information necessary to discharge its legislative mandate; upon completing its investigation, the committee is empowered to recommend Sen. Lou DeLuca’s expulsion from the senate. It is not known whether any of the agencies that will be contacted by the committee will comply with its requests. Committee co-chair Martin Looney , the Senate Majority Leader, is dubious. Such information, he said, “Is not frequently requested.” Republican co-chair of the committee Sen. Andrew Roraback and others on the committee think it is necessary to acquire the information, which would include an audio tape or a transcript of a conversation DeLuca had with an FBI posing as a confederate of James Galante, the subject of a 93 criminal count racketeering indictment. ...

" The course of action that we take today is not easy, but it is necessary, and we do not embark upon it lightly ," Senate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr. told the Hartford Courant . Indeed. There is a bottom and a top to almost everything said by Williams, and this one is one of the neatest political packages on the planet. On his blog “ To Wit ,” Colin McEnroe notes a superceding consideration: “Let me offer at least one aspect of this case about which more facts are needed. It comes from the announcement, two months ago, from the U.S. Attorney's office, about a superseding indictment in the Galante case: “The Superseding Indictment also contains an additional racketeering act that alleges that members of the enterprise and their associates bundled campaign contributions to politicians, that is orchestrated campaign donations through straw donors who were then reimbursed in cash and, on occasion, provided unlawful favors to politicians so as to establish a corr...

Senator Lou DeLuca has painted himself into a corner from which he cannot escape. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been tapping the phone lines of “trash magnate,” so one newspaper put it, James Galante, who supposedly had ties to the Mob, when they stumbled upon DeLuca. DeLuca was having family problems. He had contacted Galante, who signaled DeLuca that he would dispatch, with DeLuca’s approval, a couple of tough guys to intimidate Mark Collela. DeLuca was fretting that Collela had abused his grand daughter, whom Collela later married. The FBI arranged a decoy to talk to DeLuca. The conversation between DeLuca and the FBI agent, posing as a confederate of Galante’s, has not been disclosed in full, but in the course of their tete a tete, DeLuca was offered a bribe, which he refused but did not report. DeLuca, in an expansive mood, promised he would do anything possible to help Galante. DeLuca may have been signaling Galante, through a third party he thought was a business assoc...

According to investigative reporter Jon Lender , reporting in the magisterial Hartford Courant on the DeLuca mess: “One ethics law says ‘no person shall offer or give to a public official ... anything of value, including ... a gift, loan, political contribution, reward or promise of future employment based on any understanding that the vote, official action or judgment of the public official ... would be ... influenced.’” The law, be it noted, punishes the gift giver, not the recipient, who is likely to be a politician. The ethical law, as written, would punish the FBI agent who, acting in his official capacity, offered a bribe to Lou DeLuca. It does not set a punishment for DeLuca for either accepting a bribe from the FBI agent or refusing the bribe and declining to report it. If there is such a rule, it is probably lying rusting in the tool box of the ethics commission. If there is no such law, perhaps some of the ethical paragons in Connecticut’s ruling Democrat Party might want to ...

Sen. Lou DeLuca has now been “done in” by most commentators and editorial boards. It’s difficult to see how he can survive the drubbing, and it is safe to predict that his days in the state senate soon will be drawing to a close. The Harford Courant has, somewhat tardily , called for DeLuca’s resignation from the senate. DeLuca has stepped down as Minority Leader for Republicans but continues to cling on to his seat by (pun intended) the seat of his pants. “And Mr. DeLuca,” the Courant intoned two days before two of its columnists, Kevine Rennie and Bill Currry opened fire in the Sunday edition of the paper, “ a Woodbury Republican, was wrong again last week in deciding not to resign his seat in the Senate. Resigning would be the honorable thing to do, but Mr. DeLuca is nothing if not consistent.” Rennie , whose jeweler’s eye was trained on prosecutorial inconsistencies, in addition to holding aloft DeLuca’s severed head, also lambasted prosecutors who arrogantly refused to settle wha...

The Chris Healy disaster, following closely upon the heels of the Lou DeLuca disaster, caused one agonized and/or furious Republican to burst forth with a comment on a blog site: “You guys are killing us.” Healy is the Chairman of the state Republican Party arrested the day after a Republican presidential debate at the University of South Carolina for driving while under the influence, and DeLuca is the former Minority Leader in the state senate who recently gave up his position after he had been arrested on a misdemeanor threatening charge. Following DeLuca’s tete a tete with James Galante, who is in the trash hauling business, during which Galante offered to have someone “talk with” DeLuca’s son in law, DeLuca was quickly set upon by political commentators. Republican Party officials closed ranks and went into their omerta mode, but DeLuca probably was encouraged privately to do the right thing. Although he has resigned his leadership position in the senate, DeLuca still can be censu...

On one of his many campaign stops across the country, Senator John Kennedy, then running for president, found himself at the Alamo. It was very hot, very crowded, and Kennedy was anxious to be on time for his next campaign appearance. He was running late. So Kennedy corralled a guide and asked where the back door was. “There are no back doors to the Alamo, Senator Kennedy,” he was told. “Only heroes.” Speaker of the House James Amann beat a most unheroic retreat, one newspaper reported, “rather than have budget negotiations that included Republican leaders Rep. Lawrence Cafero and Sen. Louis DeLuca,” who has a bid of a problem involving his grand daughter’s husband and state prosecutors. DeLuca recently pleaded guilty to a charge of “threatening conspiracy,” a misdemeanor, that arose from a meeting he had with James Galante in which DeLuca was told by Galante that he would help the senator settle a family problem. The problem involved a granddaughter who, DeLuca thought, was being abu...

Senate Republican leader Lou DeLuca should resign, sparing himself and the Republican Party unnecessary grief. Any politician who has been the subject of a bribe attempt and who has not reported the attempt to the proper authorities should resign his or her office. That is true of DeLuca, and it is also true of the Democrat Party's earmark king John Murtha, still parceling out favors years after he had been swept up in the notorious ABSCAM case. Both DeLuca and Murtha were targets of bribe attempts made by agents interested in gathering evidence against them in criminal probes. Both refused the bribes but did not report the bribe attempt. Since DeLuca fessed up to prosecutors, suggestions have been made in some quarters that DeLuca himself is mob connected, and his claim that he brought pictures to police showing his grand daughter had been brutalized by an ex-con boyfriend also has been doubted. The question whether DeLuca's grand daughter was indeed brutalized by an ex-con is...