Federal authorities have issued a subpoena to the city of Bristol seeking all records affiliated with the Bristol Memorial Boulevard Arts Magnet School project, making it at least the second project to draw the interest of a federal grand jury investigating Konstantinos Diamantis and the state’s school construction grant program.
Bristol Corporation Counsel Edward Krawiecki Jr. said Friday that the city had received the subpoena electronically and was in the process of accumulating the documents and emails that the grand jury is seeking.
Krawiecki said he was awaiting guidance from the FBI before releasing the actual subpoena but acknowledged it was identical to one that Tolland officials received regarding a school building project in that town. Bristol has the same mid-March time frame to produce the evidence, he said.
[The Kosta Diamantis timeline]
Tolland officials acknowledged Thursday that they had received a subpoena from federal authorities seeking records from 2015 to the present “identifying all Office of School Construction Grants & Review (OSCG&R) projects in Tolland; all communications with or related to Konstantinos Diamantis or any other employee of OSCG&R; all documents related to any OSCG&R project at Birch Grove Primary School.”
The Bristol and Tolland school projects are the only two school construction projects that the Bristol-based D’Amato Construction has been involved in over the past four years.
D’Amato is partnering with Downes Construction as the general contractor on the $63 million Bristol school project. They were the general contractor on the $46 million Birch Grove School project.
In Bristol, city officials sparred with Diamantis over whom to hire to do hazardous waste removal from the Memorial Boulevard school site.
Dale Clift, Bristol’s corporation counsel before Krawiecki, wrote a letter to Diamantis in May 2020 that described the back-and-forth that took place between the city and the state. It laid out a detailed timeline of what the state had communicated to the city.
The letter shows that the city received numerous bids for the demolition and abatement work for Bristol’s Memorial Boulevard Arts Magnet School on April 21, 2020.
Select Demo Services, which is headquartered in New Hampshire, was the lowest bidder, offering to do the work for $4.73 million.
But before the contract could be finalized, Clift wrote, officials in the city were approached by Michael Sanders, a former employee at the state Department of Administrative Services. He advised the city to reject the other bids and hire Bestech, an Ellington-based company, instead.
According to Clift’s letter, that “directive” was delivered by Sanders but was issued by Diamantis.
But Diamantis never responded to the letter, Clift said.
The city eventually gave the contract to Select Demo after the company hired an attorney to protest the bid.
The Tolland elementary school was built after the state Department of Administrative Services granted the project emergency status because of a report that its foundation was crumbling. The school was eventually built by D’Amato Construction.
The construction manager on the project was Construction Advocacy Professionals (CAP) which had hired Anastasia Diamantis, Kosta’s daughter, in the midst of receiving two contracts worth $530,000 to oversee the Birch Grove project.
The grand jury issued a subpoena to the state in October seeking emails and texts by Diamantis from January 2018 until he left state service. Among the search words that they asked state officials to find were Construction Advocacy Services, D’Amato Construction and Birch Grove.