New Haven Independent

Operating without subpoena power, the RTM’s granite-gate committee, as it came to be called, learned a lot, but the absence of testimony from the main players like Detective Duncan Ayr, who met with Town Counsel Ed Marcus (who did testify,) Michael Milici, former Democratic Town Chairman, who delivered photos of Unk DaRos’s granite to Marcus, and the still unnamed photographer, meant that many questions remained.

Overall, the RTM applauded the work of the committee’s four members—-Democrats Jan Doyle and Scott Thayer, who served as chair, and Republicans Frank Twohill and John Prete. The unanimous report, bi-partisan in scope, found, for example, that Cheryl Morris, the First Selectwoman, and Town Attorney Marcus did not make a “good choice” when they decided to use the Branford Police Department to gather financial information on royalties owed the town for granite purchased from the Stony Creek quarry. The report also suggested that “Mr. Marcus would have done better to recognize the downside potential, thank Mr. Milici for the photos and put them aside.”

At the final granite-gate committee meeting earlier this month, when it appeared the committee could not reach consensus, DaRos suggested letting the full RTM decide whether to take the investigation further. At the same time, he said that for sake of the town, it had gone far enough.

Democratic RTM member Lisa Avitable, a Morris loyalist, asked if he still felt “enough was enough. What is your feeling about it now? “

DaRos came to the front of the room to speak. “I still say enough is enough.” He said he was concerned about the town paying more legal fees. And while he was not specific, the Eagle later learned that some DaRos democrats wanted to send the case to the Statewide Grievance Committee which reviews, investigates and adjudicates attorney ethics matters. That would have meant paying an attorney to present the Town’s case and might even have required paying legal costs for town witnesses, including Marcus himself. But this idea never materialized into a motion on the floor.

DaRos drew a distinction between what was best for the town and what was best for himself. “As far as I am concerned personally, I will do what I have to do to defend Unk DaRos. But I don’t want to see the town going through this again.” With that announcement, the Democrats supporting him fell in behind him, leading to an extraordinary number of Democratic abstentions—-six in all.

It wasn’t that the Republicans didn’t try. Twohill and Prete led the way and did so with passion.

Twohill, an attorney, made the motion to send the report to the Attorney General’s office, saying the committee lacked the ability to “compel witnesses to appear before us and answer our questions.” Prete added: “We need to do this because we received a lot of circumstantial evidence but we never got to the truth. We would like to refer this to a higher level.”

But it was not to be.

Twohill’s motion went down to defeat by one vote with eight Republicans voting for it, nine Democrats and one Republican voting against it and six Democrats and one Republican abstaining. A number of members were absent.

The Republicans and former First Selectman John Opie, who is running for his former office this year, wanted to send the inquiry to State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. But whether Blumenthal would step into this quagmire is far from certain and if he did not, that, too, would become an issue during an election campaign.

In an interview after the meeting, Opie took issue with DaRos’s views. “I don’t think it would cost the town of Branford anything to send it to Blumenthal’s office. Blumenthal has attorneys who investigate this sort of thing. Frankly it is not the town that needs defending; it is the town’s attorney that needs defending. And how can he bill the town for that? “

Ed Marcus is still Branford’s town attorney. True he has not been seen much in public lately, but his disembodied voice filled the RTM as Moderator James Bruno read a letter from Marcus dated July 11, the day of the meeting.

Marcus criticized one sentence in the final ad-hoc report that read: “Sending a police detective to the premises of someone who could be perceived as a political rival was an act that could easily and very naturally be perceived as an abuse of power.”

Marcus’s concern is that this sentence makes him the decision- maker in police matters where he has no authority. Marcus wrote that as Police Chief Robert Gill testified he was in charge of the inquiry and only he gave orders. “…It is disingenuous for anyone to make a statement that anyone other than the chief sent a police detective anywhere relating to the matter of the quarry including that portion of it that related to DaRos.”

Marcus has tried to distance himself from his meeting with Ayr since Ayr’s police report, which he believed was protected by lawyer-client privilege, became public. (Police reports are public documents)

But what Fast Eddie left out of his letter to Bruno was that he alone provided Ayr with key evidence—-the photos—without which Police Chief Gill has told the Eagle there would have been no police interview with Unk DaRos. Once the chief saw the photos he had to send Ayr out because he did not want to be accused of favoritism in failing to investigate a former first selectman. Marcus also knew that the photos presented the chief with sufficient probable cause to investigate.

When it became clear that DaRos had done nothing wrong, the chief closed down the entire inquiry, taking the unusual step of writing the final police report himself. It is dated May 17, 2006. At the RTM meeting DaRos referred to Marcus’s current letter and observed that town attorney Marcus was dragging the police into this once again. “Leave the police department alone. The reason I am saying that is they got shanghaied the first time. Let’s not do it again. Leave ‘em alone.”

Indeed the chief told the Eagle last year he had changed the conditions under which he would interact with Marcus. “Mr. Marcus and I have agreed that in the future if there is any reason for us to work together on any kind of issue, I would make the determination of whether the department has any interest in the matter.”

The implication of that statement is clear. Moreover, the chief told us in May, 2006 that in his eight- year tenure as police chief he had never been put in this position with a town attorney. “It hasn’t happened.”

Republican RTM member James Walker said he wanted it noted that Detective Ayr, who was in charge of the March 7, 2006 murder investigation of Kathy Hardy in Short Beach, was pulled off the case in order to work on Unk DaRos’s royalty payments, what Ayr described to DaRos as a possible criminal charge of “theft of town services” for failing to pay royalties amounting to $4. 20.

Walker also wanted it noted that the average income throughout the history of the Stony Creek quarry is under $3,500 annually. (These funds are sent to an Open Space fund and are not part of the town’s income, a mistake Mrs. Morris continues to make publicly.) “Something is out of whack here as to what is important in this town,” Walker concluded.

In his letter to the RTM, Marcus conjectured that perhaps the ad-hoc committee “picked up” on what he claimed were “inaccurate media reports” and had not thoroughly reviewed the Chief’s statements.

But the report is clear on Marcus’s role. Indeed when State’s Attorney Michael Dearington was asked to comment on the conduct of the Branford police with regard to the DaRos inquiry, Dearington applauded the way the police department had conducted itself.

Dearington also described how he viewed the case in a June 22, 2006 letter to Police Commision chair JoAnn McGuigian. It was, he said, “a complaint filed by the Town Counsel as to the ownership of granite tablets located on the Thimble Island Road property of a former First Selectman.” From Dearington’s point of view there was no doubt who launched the complaint against DaRos.

From the outset Mrs. Morris and the Marcus Law Firm have insisted the original reason for calling the police into the quarry was for health and safety reasons. But no health and safety issues were ever mentioned in the police reports. True, the scale was not working and a section of the quarry looked like a dump. But that was cleaned up by zoning officials.

Before the RTM voted, Mrs. Morris addressed the group, suggesting she might align herself with the Republicans in seeking an outside inquiry. She said that was probably the only way to get to the bottom of it. She was still convinced, she said, “that there was theft of stone going on,” once again seeming to focus on DaRos.

She observed that when DaRos was First Selectman, and he had responsibility and oversight of the quarry, he was also getting products from the quarry. “So maybe you should have a description of that; maybe that is a conflict of interest.”

Now DaRos approached the front of the room for the second time that night. He was seething.

“I think you just heard tonight what really happened. There’s stone missing up there and one place to go was to me. I want you to know that I used to pay one dollar surcharge on every ton of stone. To the town. But I was the only one .There are at least 25 contractors hauling stone out of that quarry. … How do you know there were royalties missing? How do you know how many tons of stone were taken out of there? You don’t know. You would not know until you did an audit. You are not going to find $3,500 worth of royalties on my property. You would have found $4.20 cents worth of stone. And that was paid a hundred times over to Cheryl. So don’t tell me about stealing stone,” DaRos declared.

The vote was taken. The case was over. The campaign for First Selectman had begun.

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