Caruso: Don’t Muzzle City Council Voices

I must say that I find it interesting on how long the FBI has had their eyes on Mario Testa, Joe Ganim and Bridgeport, CT.

SCENES FROM A SCANDAL
THE HARTFORD COURANT
6)From Barnum to Ganim

A question asked in Bridgeport is why, if the corruption was so pervasive, more people haven’t been charged? Aside from Ganim, Patrick Coyne, who ran the Office of Mayoral Initiatives, is the only other city official named in the scandal. The speculation is that there will be more, from a second grand jury investigation that began last year. People also wonder how much Bridgeport’s powerful Democratic town chairman, Mario Testa, knew about the corruption.

The fortunes of Testa and the mayor have been linked since Ganim’s original election. The former owner of the Madison Avenue restaurant, at right, Testa once said that he would remain town chairman, “as long as it takes to get Joe Ganim elected governor. Then I could retire.” His comment appeared in a Connecticut Post profile in August 2001, before the mayor’s arrest. At the time, Testa knew that he’d been recorded on FBI wiretaps and was under pressure to explain whether he really lived above his restaurant or at a nine-room house he owns on Lake Zoar in Monroe.

In Bridgeport, Democrats are sometimes called Testacrats. They outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 and completely dominate city government. Just one Republican sits on the 20-member city council and before his razor-thin election last year there were none. Reformers like state Rep. Christopher Caruso say too many council members hold municipal jobs, in apparent violation of the city charter. He said three-quarters of town committee members work for the city in one way or another.

“The mayor and the town chairman have thought out a system to have [political] positions held by city employees,” Caruso said. “It’s a corrupt, lawless city with corrupt leaders.” Last spring, Caruso tried to compel the town committee to debate whether it should ask Ganim to resign. He got nowhere, he said. Caruso has been mentioned as a possible Democratic replacement for Ganim in this year’s election.

Kim McLaughlin, another reformer on the Democratic town committee, said Bridgeport reminds her of an old-fashioned company town, except the city is the company. “If you don’t work for the city, your father-in-law does. The tentacles are long and they tend to be all-knowing,” she said. A consultant for community groups, McLaughlin said she thought it telling that a party member automatically invited her to seek a city contract when they first met.

The other side of the coin is fear of retribution. A woman who worked in Coyne’s office has filed a civil suit claiming she was fired for cooperating with the FBI. Robert Walsh, a Democratic councilman, said he was fired from his state-funded job with school health clinics after he opposed the mayor on the sewer contract awarded to the Professional Services Group.

“I really felt he expected me to pick up the phone and beg for my job back. Then he could feel he owned me like he owned so many other people,” Walsh said.

Joseph Grabarz, who became director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union after twice beating Testa in contests for state representative, said the way to understand the Ganim scandal is that it is about family political ambition. His lawyer father George once aspired to be mayor, and his lawyer brother Paul was recently returned as city probate judge after a primary election marred by accusations of absentee ballot fraud that are still being investigated. Joe Ganim, the eldest son who entered politics as a Republican, became Bridgeport’s favorite son hope for governor.

Whether Ganim did what he is accused of doing for profit or campaign funds, “it’s one and the same thing,” Grabarz said. “Now we know how he was reaping it in … I don’t think that kind of blatant corruption could have existed unless the mayor felt there was complicity deep into the political system, if everyone wasn’t nodding and winking.”

Of all the ironic contrasts between Bridgeport’s supposed renaissance under Ganim and the federal case against him the greatest is contained in a history of the city written by Lennie Grimaldi, the mayor’s now disgraced campaign manager.

Titled “Only in Bridgeport” and first published in 1986, the booster-ish history predictably contains a chapter on P.T. Barnum, the city’s legendary showman, whose museum is downtown and whose statue, shown below, sits in Seaside Park. Barnum, who briefly served as mayor and donated the land for the park, may never have actually said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but he was, according to Grimaldi’s history, known as “the Prince of Humbug” and “the Shakespeare of Advertising.”

In 2000, Grimaldi updated “Only in Bridgeport,” adding a chapter on the Ganim years. It celebrates developer Alex Conroy for pushing ahead with his Steel Point project, and Bluefish owner Jack McGregor for spearheading plans for the Harbor Yard sports arena. There are numerous photos of the mayor, including one in which he looms over an architect’s model of Harbor Yard.

In the introduction to that chapter, titled “The Comeback,” Grimaldi wrote that, “the city Ganim inherited in November of 1991 had hit bottom — financially, psychologically, emotionally.” Grimaldi probably was under investigation when he wrote those words and it now appears he was mistaken about the date Bridgeport hit bottom.