Yes, most public officials and employees are honest people who don’t steal, U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly told a roomful of reporters at a press conference in New Haven.
Trouble is, dozens of recent investigations have unearthed the bad seeds, which is why a new federal task force will focus on rooting them out in so-called “Corrupt-icut.”
Daly rattled off a laundry list of high-profile corruption scandals statewide during Wednesday’s announcement, such as the arrest of a Plymouth finance director accused of embezzlement, saying the task force’s work has already begun to show results.
Recent history shows the lower Naugatuck Valley is no stranger to public officials behaving badly — but would the new task force make catching and punishing such conduct any easier?
The feds say yes, without getting into details.
The Task Force
Daly, the top federal law enforcement official in the state, was joined by officials from the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the IRS, and federal departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services, all of which will be participating in the “Connecticut Public Corruption Task Force.”
“For the first time in Connecticut, we have brought together in a single investigative unit agents and inspectors from the federal agencies that are most responsible for pursuing public corruption in this state,” Daly said.
Corruption is a problem that’s not going away anytime soon, the feds said.
They handed out details of more than a dozen corruption cases in Connecticut from the last year alone.
“Connecticut’s unfortunate recent history with corruption is well-known,” Daly said. “But so is this office’s history of combating crimes of corruption.”
The most prominent of those cases saw former Gov. John Rowland, already a federal ex-con, convicted of trying to hide payments for his work on a congressional campaign. Rowland has not yet been sentenced.
But the feds aren’t just zeroing in on top officials, and put crooks in public office on notice Wednesday that they’ll be ferreted out.
Daly said FBI agents are staffing a 24-hour hotline to which people can report corrupt activity, 1 – 800-CALL-FBI.
“The task force will be focused on rooting out self-serving public officials, elected and unelected, who use their position for personal gain at the expense of the public good,” Daly said.
For example, last month two brothers were sent to federal prison after one of them, a Waterbury postal employee, was caught stealing packages containing drugs from the mail and giving them to his brother to sell.
Even in sleepy Plymouth, a town of about 12,000 north of the Brass City, federal prosecutors brought charges last year against a former finance official there accused of embezzling more than $800,000 over the course of several years.
Hey, That Sounds Familiar
The Plymouth investigation echoes the case of Sharon Scanlon, a former employee of the city of Shelton’s finance department who was sent to prison for four-and-a-half years after admitting she stole nearly $1 million in taxpayer funds over the course of nearly a decade.
But Scanlon’s thefts weren’t discovered until June 2012, when two clerks in the finance department asked questions about a check they found.
Shelton City Hall wasn’t the only entity who missed Scanlon’s crimes over the years.
While Scanlon was stealing thousands of dollars from city coffers nearly every month, the FBI was conducting a far-reaching corruption probe in Shelton, with Mayor Mark Lauretti, called “Public Official No. 1” in court documents, the chief target.
The probe saw three developers, Robert Scinto, developer James Botti and his father, Peter, and a city building inspector, Eliott Wilson, convicted of crimes, but the feds announced last year that Lauretti, who has consistently and emphatically denied any wrongdoing, was in the clear.
Former Oxford Tax Collector Karen Guillet is currently serving a four-year prison term for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from residents there.
In Derby, a tax clerk avoided criminal prosecution in the possible disappearance of $9,000 by cutting a settlement deal with the city to pay the money back. Derby officials never clearly explained to the public what happened.
In Ansonia, a 2012 Valley Indy investigation revealed the city’s tax collector had improperly given motor vehicle tax clearances to people who had not paid their motor vehicle taxes. She eventually resigned.
The Valley Indy asked Daly, would a task force being in place have made the Shelton probe, which dragged on for years, more effective?
The U.S. Attorney didn’t get into specifics of the investigation, but said the resources the task force can bring to any case would be beneficial.
“This task force will absolutely help in addressing complex and challenging public corruption cases,” she said. “The idea here is that we have a group of people with diverse expertise and resources. We’ve also selected agents from those agencies that are particularly strong, rigorous and talented investigators. So the idea of bringing these folks together and having them work collaboratively on a regular basis on all the cases they work on will be the most impactful.”
Why Now? Why Connecticut?
Patricia Ferrick, Connecticut’s top FBI agent, also lamented the state’s “unfortunate” recent history with prominent corruption cases.
But she said that gives the feds a leg up.
“The FBI as well as the federal agencies involved in the task force are not new to working public corruption matters,” Ferrick said. “Together as well as unilaterally, we have been very successful in combating corruption over the years.”
So, why create such a task force now?
Money’s tight.
Ferrick said that “shrinking federal budgets and resources” made local feds realize that “a combined, focused, and strategic effort” would be the best way to root out corruption going forward.
Wednesday’s announcement — and the bevy of corruption cases statewide in recent years — begged another obvious question: is there something about Connecticut, aka “Corrupticut,” that makes misdeeds by public officials more prevalent?
“I haven’t done a study of that and I don’t think I’ll come to any conclusions,” Daly said. “I think Connecticut is a wonderful state and there are many wonderful people in this state and there are many wonderful public servants.
“But corruption at any level cannot be tolerated, and as you point out there have been a number of high-profile prosecutions over the last decade-plus, and yet corruption persists at various levels in government,” Daly went on. “It is our responsibility and duty to address that.”
