New Haven Independent

This was not surprising. First, James Bruno, the Democratic RTM moderator, who is aligned with the Cheryl Morris Administration, specifically changed the focus of the inquiry to center on the operation of the Stony Creek Quarry. So the 50 citizens who came to the Canoe Brook Center on Wednesday night to witness the committee hearing ( the committee consists of two Democrats and two Republicans and Bruno who acted more like a member than a moderator) left the building feeling deeply discouraged by the process.
With the exception of Police Chief Robert W. Gill, the audience spent most of the evening hearing gobs of information about the quarry: Whether it was a health hazard—it wasn’t; whether it stored dynamite wrongly— it hadn’t; whether it had turned into a junk yard—to a degree, but it was cleaned up in a matter of weeks, according to the town’s chief zoning officer Phil Shook, who appeared at the hearing.
One reason why so few questions were answered was that two key witnesses did not show up and the committee does not have subpoena power. They were Michael Milici, the former Branford Democratic chairman, and Detective Duncan Ayr. It was Ayr’s April 28 police report that led to the disclosure that town counsel Ed Marcus held a meeting in the First Selectwoman’s office late one April afternoon in order to give Ayr enlarged photographs of Unk’s granite. He told Ayr he was concerned about royalties due the town. Mrs. Morris was not present and has said she did not know about it.
The photographs were taken by an as yet unnamed photographer, who is also a private eye, and given to Milici, who in turn, gave them to Marcus, who gave them to Ayr. This sequence of events set in motion a criminal inquiry by the police department into the DaRos granite. It ended quickly after Unk produced receipts.
But the consequences of these acts have led to charges that the police department was used for a political purpose, (DaRos has become an outspoken critic of the Morris administration even though all are members of the same Democratic party), that Marcus overstepped his bounds and that Morris was not in charge of her own ship. Once Bruno rerouted the Granite-gate inquiry, citizens were justifiably infuriated.
Tom Sudac, a resident, who spoke in the public portion of the meeting, called the hearing “a smokescreen.” Chief Gill did not have answers to key questions and the absence of Milici and Detective Ayr raised the ante.
“We are not interested in what happened at the quarry .We want to know how this happened with Michael Milici and where the pictures came from. Did the photographer get paid off or what?” Sudac asked. “We need to have another meeting so we can say how we feel about this Administration. What we are living under is fear in this town. This is the word: FEAR. We don’t want to have any police officer come to any of our houses and say how much did you pay for that dog house in your back yard? Do you have a receipt for it?” He was applauded.
Out the outset, Scott Thayer, the chairman, announced he had received a letter from Milici’s lawyer saying Milici would not attend. Milici has remained silent about his role and the facts surrounding it, though at one point he publicly apologized to Unk.
Despite his absence, Milici went on the offensive. His lawyer, Alfred Zullo, of East Haven, sent a letter to the committee, threatening possible libel actions. The lawyer’s letter had the desired effect: it kept Milici from having to face the people in the town he knows so well. Zullo said Milici “is entertaining” libel actions against various parties who have made public statements. Milici has served as a part-time contract assessor for the town. The letter is dated July 31.
“My client neither hired nor paid for the services of a private detective,” Zullo wrote, correcting the record for his client who has not done so himself. Zullo added that he did not want his client to come before the committee to make any comments that could impair the libel actions which may be instituted.
Absent Milici, we turn to Marcus.
Milici is not a lawyer. Marcus, however, has spent more than a half century in the legal and political arenas, once serving as this state’s democratic chairman. He, too, threatened the public he serves in this town with possible lawsuits.
In his opening statement on July 26, Marcus said he and his family and his law firm had been subjected to half-truths, distortion of facts, and in some cases both vituperous and libelous statements. Then he added, in a statement several residents felt was clearly out of line for a town counsel:” I reserve judgment as to how or if to proceed at some further time.”
Moshe Gai, an outspoken critic of the current democrats in office, picked it up right away.
“When a lawyer tells me he is going to proceed, he is threatening a lawsuit, “Gai told the audience. “The lawyer,” he said, referring to Marcus, “has infinite time and an infinite amount of money.” He asked if Marcus “was going to file suit against one of these people who is brave enough to stand up and speak the truth. This town is run by bullies. And that is what people are worried about in this town…”
In Marcus’s opening statement last week he explained that Milici previously dropped off the photographs before Marcus went to Town Hall.
“Milici had told me that he had a friend who also happened to be a PI (private investigator) who at Mike’s request was going to photograph the granite. My belief is that the photos were provided as an accommodation and were taken from a public thoroughfare.”
Marcus maintains there was nothing improper in taking the photos, that they were supplied by a private citizen, and that there was nothing improper with turning them over to the police officer to do whatever that officer chose to do with them.
However, Marcus neglects to say that public thoroughfare or not these were, in fact, covert photos taken without DaRos’s knowledge or permission and were turned over to Detective Ayr by the town counsel, no less, whose wife, Jill, happens to sit on the Branford Police Commission.
Chief Gill spoke for about 30 minutes. He told the committee that once Ayr received the photos from Marcus, he felt he had to investigate. If he did not, he could be accused himself of playing favorites. “Whether we liked it or not we had to look at it.”
John Prete, a Republican member, observed: “The day after, you had to think you were being used as a political pawn…. And how do you prevent that in the future?”
The chief sidestepped the question, saying “We had to make a query and that is what we did”. Chief Gill told the Eagle in May that absent the photos there would have been no inquiry. In his eight years as police chief he said he has never been put in the position he found himself in with a town attorney. “It hasn’t happened,” he said.
. Detective Ayr was invited to the hearing. He did not attend because the chief advised him not to. “I thought it was my responsibility to defend the department’s position,” the chief said. He kept repeating he did not want Ayr or himself to get involved in anything political.
Marcus says he did not direct Ayr to investigate DaRos. At the hearing, Chief Gill said he alone was in charge of the overall inquiry. Marcus now insists that he did not direct any member of the police department to take any action. “And the fact is I did not.”
But the chain of evidence from the photographer to Milici to Marcus to Ayr, suggests that Marcus, hardly an unsophisticated advocate, knew full well that the photographs provided the police with a minimum probable cause standard necessary to inquire.
What Marcus wanted, he said, was to provide Ayr with “a beginning point,” but apparently the chief was acutely aware of the politics involved, and when he ended the inquiry, having found nothing to the DaRos complaint, he ended it permanently and did so in his own name. After the DaRos fiasco if Marcus wanted to know about others who had not paid royalties on their granite, he wasn’t going to get any help from the police. As Marcus put it, there was no further “input” from the police. So as it turned out, no other person was investigated by the police in the same way as was DaRos.
Detective Ayr had been in charge of the over all police inquiry Marcus and Morris initiated into the operation of the quarry. The chief said he had attended a meeting with top town officials. His men would investigate safety issues. Frank Twohill, the other Republican member, asked that Ayr be invited to discuss his overall role at the next hearing scheduled for August 23.
But Marcus, who has been invited back, has erected a legal blockade. He claims that since he represents the town and the police department, Ayr is a client and therefore what he and Ayr discussed is a privileged communication and cannot be disclosed.
But Ayr did not consider the communication privileged and wrote up the general outlines in an April police report.
Peter Black, a Republican RTM member from Short Beach and an attorney, urged the committee to call Ayr and Marcus to the next meeting.
“The key thing is what happened in that meeting between Ed Marcus and Duncan Ayr. Unfortunately one party, attorney Ed Marcus, has inappropriately claimed attorney client privilege. Marcus describes the meeting with Detective Ayr as if he were meeting with a client” On the other hand, Black said, “according to Chief Gill, Ayr was meeting Marcus as if he were receiving a criminal complaint from any citizen, a complaint of possible stolen property. Those two people have to be heard from directly on that matter…”
Clearly Marcus didn’t think there would be a police report. He thought his conversation with Ayr was confidential. “In this regard I was, for one of the few times in my legal career, naïve and assumed our meeting was on a lawyer-client basis” Marcus said. But he assumed wrong. Now the question is how long Marcus can hide behind his version of the privilege.
Black said “the privilege belongs to the client and the client is the town. Ayr was not Marcus’s client. Marcus’s invocation of privilege is wrong,” he said in a subsequent interview. “And the board of Selectman or the RTM could waive it.”
Now there’s a thought.
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