New Haven Independent

We found Wellner at the firm one day last month. It is common practice for law firms to use employees as witnesses for document signings. For example, Wellner served as a witness when Ed Marcus took out a mortgage on his Stony Creek house in May, 2006 and when daughter Shelley, town counsel #2, signed a mortgage in October, 2005 for her Short Beach home.

A receptionist said Wellner had stepped away from her desk and gave the Eagle her voice mail. We left a message. When she returned our call, we asked her about the Milici complaint against Lonnie Reed that she witnessed on Jan 26th. We wanted to know why she put the time —-what looks like 1:15 p.m on the document Milici swore to in her presence. She said “I will have to pull out a copy of that. I am not sure I remember that particular incident.”

She asked us to hold on. But she did not return to the phone. Instead we were informed by Ed Marcus’s assistant that Wellner was now on a conference call and that she could not speak with the Eagle. We were told she would call back. So far, she hasn’t.

The complaint shows that Milici printed his name, his address in Branford and his phone number by hand. After Wellner asked him if his statements were truthful, he would sign the complaint and she would affix her seal. She noted the time as 1:15 p.m. and the date, Jan 26.

This was an important day in his life because on this day Milici and his now ex-wife, Eleanor, closed on the sale of their house on Sybil Creek Place in Branford. The deed transferring the property to the new owner was stamped into the Branford Town Hall at 3:38 p.m, according to public records.

Whether Milici lived in Branford when he signed the complaint was raised at the February RTM meeting. But James Bruno, the RTM Moderator, assured everyone how meticulous Milici had been. “I don’t know when he moved but I know he was still living in Branford at the time,” he said.

The core of Milici’s complaint against RTM Rep Lonnie Reed is his belief that she did not physically reside in the Fifth District on Election Day, 2005, seventeen months ago.

In his two-page formal complaint, Milici says that prior to the November 7th election and after she sold her home on Nov 1, Reed ran as a candidate in the 5th District but actually lived in the 2nd district. Had Ms. Reed lived in the Fifth district and then moved after the election, “there would be no issue,” Milici says, arguing as the lawyer he is not. That is because the town charter permits an RTM member to move from one district to another and still finish out her term.

We have read the Charter and nowhere does it say that an incumbent RTM member, as Ms. Reed was in 2005, is required to spend every day of election week in town. At the time she was staying with different friends. Moreover, she said she informed the RTM, Republicans and Democrats alike, of her proposed move, including Bruce Morris, the head of the 5th District Democrats. Morris also serves as a representative to the state’s Central Democratic Committee. Bruce Morris is also Cheryl Morris’s husband.

“The people who are targeting me now are the very people who counseled me to stay on the RTM despite my move in November, 2005,”she said. In fact, Bruce and Cheryl Morris offered their address as her mail drop, which she accepted until she could find a rental.

Reed says she was in the Fifth District in Branford on the day of the election and even chatted with Milici outside the polls. One thing is certain: she lives in Branford.

What happened to the Reed complaint after Milici left the Marcus Law Firm in New Haven is another intriguing development. Rather than send it out himself, he or someone else sent the sworn complaint, plus a DVD of the January RTM meeting, plus the original Milici-Baughman letter, plus a copy of a Branford Eagle column, to Bruno.Then Bruno added a cover letter for the packet.

Bruno’s controversial cover letter, never discussed or approved by the RTM, asks among other things, if he should remove Reed during “the investigation,” and whether her prior RTM votes still counted. He apparently did not check Section 3g of the Charter which says the RTM, not the Moderator or the Board of Selectman or the State Election Enforcement Commission “shall be the judge of the election and qualification of its members.”

Bruno signed off on his Jan 31st cover letter to the SEEC as RTM moderator, and that action infuriated many RTM members who viewed the letter as coming from the RTM as an entity. After a turbulent set of exchanges at the February RTM meeting, Bruno promised to correct the record the next day, saying he would tell the SEEC he wrote as a private citizen, not as the RTM moderator. In fact it took him weeks to send his correction.

We called Milici. We had several questions to ask him. “I have nothing to say to you, Ms. Chambers. ” Are you sure?” we asked as he hung up. Here are the questions we would have asked:

Why did you go to the Marcus Law Firm to have the complaint notarized? Was it perhaps because the complaint had been typed up there? And why was the time of day included? Was someone at the Marcus law Firm helping you with the specific election law statutes?

We were curious about that because Milici is not an attorney and election law is nothing if not arcane. Moreover, the complaint specifically raises Marcus’s role in advising Reed on her residency issue when the two were on friendly terms. The two statutes Milici asserts Reed violated center on voting fraud.

Did an attorney at the Marcus Law Firm help you to write the complaint against Reed? Or was it written for you? Reed believes that happened because the language of the complaint as well as the original MIlici—Baughman letter reflects a legally trained mind.

By the time Bruno sent the packet to the SEEC on Jan 31, Milici no longer lived in Branford. Why would the RTM moderator, the person who oversees the town meeting, send a formal complaint to a state agency if the person signing the complaint no longer lived in his town? “It does not look right,” said Democratic RTM member Anthony Giardiello, who obtained the Milici packet from the Secretary of State’s office because he knew the RTM had not approved a state inquiry and he wanted to uncover the truth.

A recent editorial in the New Haven Register has called for Bruno’s resignation because he is not “up to the task.” A letter supporting Bruno, and signed by Lisa Avitable’s husband, Jay, was published a few days later. Bruno’s own letter was published last week.

Letters spawn letters. In the last month, Democratic and Republican RTM members have circulated a letter explaining their position.

Giardiello and Kurt Schwanfelder, the Republican Minority Leader, have asked RTM members to sign their letter because they believe the charges against their much admired colleague are utterly bogus and aimed at removing her from elected office. Their letter says the RTM does not endorse Bruno’s cover letter and it asks the SEEC to return the case to the RTM. They plan to send the letter after the April 11 RTM meeting.

As Democratic RTM member Dorothy Maynard said one night when Former First Selectman John Opie chided the RTM for not getting on with the people’s work: ” I just want to remind Mr. Opie that he wasn’t dealing with the Mike Milici’s of this world and that we are. And that as such, we do have certain concerns regarding him and people like him.”

Reed has now had to hire an attorney. The statutes Milici selected as appropriate for investigation hold prison terms and fines.

Whether the RTM knew it or not , its good name and reputation were hijacked when Bruno sent out a packet of material under the RTM’s imprimatur that included Milici’s sworn complaint, and asked the state to investigate and possibly remove Reed from elected office.

Bruno now says, sorry, I made a mistake. He has told the SEEC he should have sent his cover letter as a private citizen, not as the RTM moderator. The problem is that the substance of the letter shows he was writing in his official capacity, even going so far as to ask for advice as RTM moderator. Yet he is now seems to think he can sign the letter as a private citizen.

The broader question was raised by the target, Lonnie Reed: “Who is really instigating and writing these letters?” she asked. “The people signing these letters are not lawyers and they don’t express themselves the way these letters read. I am convinced the signers are only surrogates. ”

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