On May 16, former Connecticut deputy budget director Konstantinos “Kosta” Diamantis was arrested by federal agents. Later that day, he pleaded not guilty to 22 counts — including bribery and extortion.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Dave Altimari to discuss his article written with Andrew Brown, “Behind Kosta Diamantis’ arrest: Money woes, unfettered power,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read their story here.
WSHU: Hello, Dave. So what happened with Kosta? Why did you decide to give us a little bit more of the background on what happened with Diamantis?
DA: So the feds have been investigating this for more than two years now and finally moved on, at least, a portion of their case last week when they went to his house and arrested him. Three people that he dealt with have already pled guilty and two are going to testify against him. One is the head of the construction management company that hired his daughter that was at the same time, getting a no bid contract to work at the Tolland school, the Birch Grove School. And the other two are the owners of this masonry company out of Middletown that got several school contracts, that seems Kosta helped them get in exchange for payments that they made to him.
WSHU: Now, what surprised you in the indictment? Because the indictment pretty much lays out what the feds have on Kosta, or at least a lot of it. What jumped out at you as you went through the documentation?
DA: A couple of things. One, for someone who was making not quite $200,000 a year, Diamantis seems fairly desperate, frankly, for money.
WSHU: There was a time that he even mentioned that he was overdrawn on his checking.
DA: He’s literally begging these guys to pay him. It’s hard to figure out exactly what they paid him, but I believe he expected roughly $62,000 from them. I don’t know if he got that much. But he did get a significant amount of money. The other thing that surprised me was that some of that was sent to him directly. I mean, he literally accepted checks to him from this masonry company, you know, within days of them getting contracts. So that seems kind of a foolish way to do things, he certainly was not trying to hide anything.
WSHU: Yeah. He even held a public fundraiser for his daughter’s tuition and school fees and basically openly solicited money. How did that happen?
DA: I think the overriding thing it just shows is we had a financially desperate person who was in charge of billions of dollars in state contracts and, in effect, had no oversight. I think Mayor Stewart put it pretty well: You dealt with Kosta and no one else, and if he didn’t want to give you the money, you didn’t get the money. You had to do things his way or you weren’t going to get the funding. And if you’re a town like Toland, for example, that had a school that the foundation was crumbling that they needed to build a new school right away, if he tells you you’re gonna hire a certain construction company, you’re going to hire them. And so he basically controlled the purse strings and ran who got hired where there was no one else over him paying attention to what he was doing.
WSHU: What was the structure before the Lamont administration came in? The school construction program was under the Department of Administrative Services, and then it was moved to OPM. Did that play a role in this lack of oversight?
DA: So originally, what is called the OSCAR, the Office of School of Construction Grants and Review, was under DHS when Costa was put in charge of that unit. It was not when Lamont was the governor, it was when Dan Malloy was the governor. It’s unclear to me what led to this, but an agreement was reached between then DHS Commissioner Josh Duvall and OPM Director Melissa McCaw, to move Kosta to OPM, promote him to be deputy secretary of OPM and bring the entire OSCAR program with him. So roughly 1all 5 people who worked for OSCAR and who worked for Kosta went from DHS to OPM. And so at that point, they were kind of in between two agencies. And it seems no one was really paying attention to how Kosta was running things.
WSHU: Three of the contractors have pleaded guilty, cooperating with the prosecutors. What does that mean for this case?
DA: It shows that the feds clearly lined up their ducks, so to speak. So the two people who have agreed to testify, Antonietta Roy and Salvatore Monarca, have said that they have agreements with the government, and the government knows what they’re going to testify to. And if they testify to that, there’s probably something on the other end for them. It’s unclear why the third member, who actually was Kosta’s brother-in-law at one point, also had pleaded guilty but did not agree to cooperate.
So what it does is it means that they can put these people on the stand and have them testify to their interactions with Kosta, and they can use bank records and text messages to back up their story. I mean, if you think about the school construction grant program, and all the documents they subpoenaed and all the money that went out, what they’re really focused on is very specific cases that they have this one company and this one construction management woman that can pretty much just testify to what we already see in the document.
WSHU: I was listening to Governor Lamont’s news conference today, and this issue came up. He didn’t say much about what had changed regarding oversight. When you talk to some legislators, what are they saying?
DA: I think you’ll see the legislature look at this again next year, a little more now that he has been arrested and there is some official public body that has held him accountable, I would suspect that they will, we’ll take a look at the whole thing. You know, DHS did an audit. But I mean, it was not a full scale audit. They never interviewed any of the town officials. They never interviewed anybody from Tolland. They didn’t interview Mayor Stewart, some of the people that we interviewed in this story. So they got, you know, not even a half of the picture, frankly, and that audit was not an insignificant amount of money that we paid for. And so I don’t think it’s ever happened, they haven’t really taken a hard look at how this all happened and how to keep it from happening again. And I think the legislature will probably do that next session. No, this will come up.
WSHU: In the meantime, what’s happening with the case?
DA: So he actually does not have a court date scheduled as of right now. Jury selection is theoretically supposed to start in July, in Bridgeport federal court. That seems unlikely. He’s out on bond. He posted a $500,000 bond on Friday using his house in Farmington as collateral. So he’s out. And obviously, there’s a voluminous amount of material that the government has to turn over to his defense. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this moves forward that quickly, but his next big court date is, I believe it’s July 23, or somewhere in July, when he’ll appear. There’s a federal judge in Bridgeport who will handle the case.