This stain sticks in Connecticut

Rips in Gov. John Rowland's reputation might reveal corruption throughout the state's entire political fabric.

WATERBURY, Conn. - In the back of a vacant classroom, Francis Brennan listened uncomfortably to John Rowland, his longtime friend and the governor of Connecticut, fend off questions from a dozen reporters. He wished he were somewhere else.

The news conference had been arranged hastily at the Waterbury campus of the University of Connecticut to address a barrage of newspaper reports about improvements to the governor's lakeside vacation cottage less than 20 miles away in Litchfield.

With experience covering Connecticut's wantonly corrupt politics, the reporters could smell a brewing scandal. They had covered everything from buried gold to a mayor who had sex with children. It wasn't for nothing people were calling their tiny state "Louisiana with foliage."

Who paid for the work? the reporters asked.

"We spent over $30,000 fixing up the cabin," Rowland said.

But he refused to provide proof: "It's none of your business."

The governor looked the same: handsome, though with a tight-eyed glare that conveyed displeasure without much effort. But he didn't sound like himself, thought Brennan, director of the UConn campus.

"His answer was too brief. It was abrupt," Brennan said later. "It was out of character. He's always prepared."

Ten days later, Rowland summoned the media again. Turns out he had more to say.

"In the limited, spontaneous remarks I made about the cottage and repairs, I provided information that was incorrect and incomplete," Rowland said.

Rowland and his wife had not paid for any of the work. In fact, it had been donated by friends and staff members, one of whom had pleaded guilty to bribery. Some of the work had been done by a construction company that was linked to the bribery scandal.

For Brennan, the revelation that Rowland lied has been painful to absorb.

"He's been a good governor," Brennan said. "He's trying very hard to be a good governor."

Opinion around the state is far less forgiving.

During the nine years of Rowland's tenure, the public has endured a cavalcade of scandal, from picayune ethical breaches to massive bid-rigging schemes. Popular and charismatic, Rowland seemed untouchable.

The lie, which confirmed what cynics only suspected was true about politicians, changed everything. Public disgust now seems so implacable that few think he will escape impeachment, indictment or both.

Less clear is whether getting rid of Rowland will cure what ails the state.

A list, by no means exhaustive, of Connecticut's recent scandals would include the following:

In March, Joseph P. Ganim, former mayor of Bridgeport, was convicted of 16 counts of racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, bribery, mail fraud and tax evasion.

In 2002, eavesdropping federal authorities expected to hear Waterbury Mayor Phil Giordano talk about payoffs in city hall. Instead, they caught him arranging for sex with underage girls. "The younger the better," he said.

Those scandals only hint at the tangled web of intermarriages, friendships and business partnerships that make Connecticut politics so incestuous and so corrupt, critics say.

A perfect example is Vincent DeRosa, a former state trooper whom Rowland picked as the state director of homeland security. DeRosa was one of the people who did free work on the cottage.

In 1999, Paul Silvester, Rowland's handpicked choice for state treasurer, pleaded guilty to taking bribes in exchange for investing state pension money with various equity funds.

In March, Lawrence Alibozek, Rowland's deputy chief of staff, pleaded guilty to taking cash and gold in exchange for steering million-dollar contracts to a construction firm widely thought to be the Tomasso Group of New Britain. In a piratical flourish, Alibozek buried the gold in his back yard.

It wasn't always this way in the Constitution State.

"This was about the cleanest state in the nation," said Ed Marcus, former chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee. "What has happened in the last few years is very difficult to explain."

Indeed, what people outside the state were likely to hear were stories about Gov. Ella Grasso, who served in the late '70s, giving back a $7,000 raise to the state's general fund.

They weren't likely to hear about a network of favors and favoritism that one day would make national headlines.

On a bitterly cold morning, Paul Beaulieu stood in the middle of Bantam Lake, hoping one of the six lines he had dropped through the ice would attract a notorious 5-foot-long northern pike.

"I had him on the line this summer," said Beaulieu, 51. "He snapped it. I was glad I didn't get him in the boat."

At the far end of the lake, tucked at the end of a dirt road in a glade of pine trees, sits a modest brown cottage. This is the vacation home that Rowland and his wife, Patricia, bought in 1997 from a local nature conservancy for $110,000.

The sale caused a minor stir, because it had been arranged by Rowland's economic development czar, who also was president of the conservancy's board of directors.

The cottage was all but forgotten until November when the Hartford Courant ran a story saying contractors had been promised state work if they did the work for free.

Some people scoffed at the story. New gutters, a hot tub, cathedral ceilings and kitchen cabinets seemed like petty stuff.

"It's not like nothing no one else's done before," said Beaulieu, a cabinetmaker who knows one of the contractors on the cottage. "I grew up in New Britain. Even as a teenager, you could see it. One hand washes the other. You couldn't call it corruption. Everyone was doing it."

But the controversy has brought unwelcome attention to a finicky corner of the state where locals and well-to-do weekenders tread lightly around one another. Ostentatious displays of wealth don't go over well. The largest homes around Litchfield's green are painted a self-effacing white.

Rowland's swagger didn't endear him.

"He walks into the Xtramart like his royal highness and expects to be recognized. This is the country. Nobody plays that around here," said Mealora Windecker, 33, who runs Litchfield Feed and Grain.

One theory about Rowland's undoing focuses on the gap between his tastes and his income. Until he got a raise recently, he was earning $78,000 a year as governor. His ex-wife gets $33,600 a year in alimony.

"It was obvious he was under financial pressure," said Marcus, the former Democratic chairman.

So Rowland helped himself to camping gear from a state warehouse. He used a Republican Party charge card to pay for meals and trips. He took free vacations in Florida and Vermont at homes belonging to the Tomasso family.

And while he was larding on perks, the Tomassos earned more than $100-million in no-bid contracts.

"It was an ATM machine to which only Rowland and his friends had the code," said Bill Curry, who has lost two gubernatorial races to Rowland.

The first nine times Rowland strode into the carpeted amphitheater of the Connecticut House of Representatives to deliver his annual State of the State speech, the 187 members of the House and Senate greeted him with furious applause. They stamped their feet and whistled.

The 10th time was different.

There was wild cheering on Feb. 4, but it was directed at Lt. Gov. Jodi Rell.

"You embarrass me," she said, blushing.

Then Rowland entered and they tried to embarrass him, too.

Some Democrats refused to stand. Others refused to clap. A couple of senators boycotted the speech altogether.

"I cahn't go," Sen. Edith Prague said before the speech. "He's disgraced the office."

Knowing that his party was bailing on him - all but four of the Senate's Republicans had called for him to resign - and that his approval rating - mid 20s - was in the "Gray Davis zone," Rowland gave a speech that was a marvel of feel-good politicking.

He avoided mention of the "sin taxes" he had proposed to eradicate the state's $85-million deficit. Instead, he peppered his speech with salutes to wounded veterans from Iraq, young minority workers and a legislator's son who had just emerged from a coma. He knew the Democrats would have to applaud him each time.

The question that his critics in the Legislature seem unable or unwilling to answer is why they never held him accountable before now.

"We should have. I don't know why we didn't," Prague said. "Now here we are in this big mess."

But the party also ignored accusations of bid-rigging in Rowland's office made by Curry, its gubernatorial candidate. In September 2002, Curry provided documentation of four no-bid contracts that were awarded to the Tomasso Group.

"I'd like to say the research was as difficult as my senior thesis, but it wasn't," Curry said.

The Democrat-controlled Legislature didn't act. Newspapers, including the Courant, endorsed Rowland, who trounced Curry on his way to an unprecedented third term.

Later, those contracts became the centerpiece of the federal investigation.

It wasn't political feuding that spared Rowland a legislative inquiry. Quite the opposite.

"Bipartisanship," Curry said. "It was built not on principle, but on patronage. He shut down legislative oversight by cutting Democrats in on the action."

Former House Speaker William DiBella was one of several legislators turned lobbyists who received thousands of dollars in finder's fees for guiding Silvester, the treasurer, to firms they represented.

Rowland's speech didn't change what the guys at Domar's restaurant think of the governor. They still love him.

Domar's is a tiny bar with a couple of vinyl-backed booths where men can nurse beers and shots over plates of homemade lasagna and maybe make little side bets on the action at Aqueduct. Rowland has come here often, when he was courting his second wife and when he was chasing campaign dollars.

"He shouldn't resign. He's done nothing wrong," said Bernie Cayer, a transplanted Quebecois builder with his hands, caked in drywall compound, wrapped around a Heineken. "He has friends. If he would run again, I would vote for him three times."

Waterbury politicians have long depended on this level of devotion.

Sen. Joe Lieberman once joked that he wanted to be buried in Waterbury so he could remain active in politics.

"He came out of a political machine that contributed to his willingness to be so dirty," said Tom Swan of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. "They moved him up the food chain awfully fast and with that came a certain arrogance."

Rowland's supporters point, without irony, to his corruption-battling pedigree.

In the late 1930s, Rowland's grandfather Sherwood, a Republican, ran for comptroller, beating the Democratic incumbent.

Rowland funnelled incriminating documents about the outgoing administration to the local Waterbury Republican newspaper, which won a Pulitzer for its coverage.

John Rowland embraced the full-contact style of local politics at an early age. He was elected to the Connecticut House at 23, becoming the youngest state representative ever. At 27, he became the youngest member of the 99th Congress.

In Washington, he was taken under the wing of Vice President George Bush, himself a son of Connecticut, though from more upper-class roots.

In 1990, when Rowland grew tired of the slow pace and anonymity of Congress, he set his sights on the governor's office. He ran against Lowell Weicker, a respected Republican senator, accusing him of corruption, and lost.

Well after midnight, Rowland got a call from the White House. President Bush wanted to tell him to keep his chin up.

Even before the last election, speculation was rampant that Rowland wouldn't finish his third term. It was assumed he would be tapped to serve in the Bush administration.

But in late January, when President Bush came to Greenwich to raise $1.1-million for his re-election, Rowland, the state campaign chairman, was conspicuously absent.

Like the sick relative who doesn't want to infect the rest of the family, he refused to come down for Christmas dinner.

Optimists, and there are a few, think Rowland's scandal offers an unparalleled opportunity to fix a broken political system. Campaign finance reform would be a start.

"The corruption trail starts on the campaign trail," Swan said.

But there is an endemic sloppiness to the way the government has policed itself. Three members of the state's Ethics Commission, all of them appointed by Rowland, donated to his re-election campaigns. The chairwoman gave $1,000.

Little wonder that one of the first bills the Legislature will consider this session is a proposal to make the Ethics Commission more ethical.

- Information from the Hartford Courant was used in this report.

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