Connecticut's
General Assembly certainly has its own unsavoury history of sleazeballs, liars,
underhanded crooks, ruthless powerbrokers and idiot screwups.
But if it will make you feel any better, our legislature doesn’t seem to be in
the same league as our neighbor to the north.
Massachusetts
has just seen its third consecutive state House
speaker convicted on corruption charges. Salvatore F. DiMasi’s crime was taking kickbacks for steering
multi-million contracts to a software company.
The outright
corruption in Connecticut’s
legislature thankfully appears to be a little more rare,
and when it occurs tends to be a bit on the cheesy, two-bit side of the ledger.
Who can forget the immortal words of state Rep. Donnie Sellers, D-Norwalk, that
were recorded by an undercover agent who had offered Sellers a $200 bribe to
help him get a gun permit: “Let’s put it this way,” Sellers said, “I’m a
politician, I ain’t turning nothing down.”
That was back in 1996, the same year a Democratic state lawmaker and policeman
from Hartford
named Edwin E. Garcia got nailed in an absentee ballot fraud scandal.
More recently, Ernest Newton III resigned as a Democratic state senator from Bridgeport and ended up
in jail because he was caught taking several
thousand dollars in bribes for steering a state grant to a non-profit agency.
That’s the same guy who declared himself to be “a
Moses to my people” during an early guilt-denying news conference.
Then there was the state Senate’s top Republican leader, Louis DeLuca of Woodbridge,
who pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence for attempting to enlist a
mobbed-up garbage hauling kingpin to apply a little muscle in a DeLuca family matter. DeLuca
resigned his leadership position and his Senate seat.
Our latest example was that of state Sen. Thomas Gaffey,
D-Meriden. Gaffey’s little problem was he double
billed the state and his own campaign committee $2,800 for junkets around the
country with his girlfriend. Gaffey plead guilty, got
his own suspended sentence and some community service time, and resigned his
Senate seat.
Of course, Connecticut has one corruption
distinction in recent years that Massachusetts
lacks: a governor (named John G. Rowland) who resigned to avoid impeachment and
later spent 10 months in federal prison.