Candidate Krayeske Meets The Neighbors

He talked about electric cargo bikes, being new neighbors in Fair Haven Heights, and how people in positions of power must be more compassionate and be held accountable.

All of that — delivered on a cool, sunny Tuesday morning on Lexington Avenue — got Green Party attorney general hopeful and recent New Haven transplant Ken Krayeske Larry Ardigliano’s vote on Election Day.

The successful exchange occurred at Krayeske’s polling place, the Benjamin Jepson School at 15 Lexington Ave., where the candidate had ridden on his spiffy yellow electric cargo bike to meet the folks and to solicit votes.

Krayeske and his wife recently moved into a condo on Lexington Avenue to comply with his wife Wildaliz Bermudez’s residency requirement as the new executive director of the city’s Fair Rent Commission.

Krayeske said he plans in the near future to move his now Hartford-based law practice to the Elm City. He’s there in part because the majority of Krayeske’s clients are state prisoners.

His aim outside of the Fair Haven Heights polling place Tuesday morning was as much to meet his neighbors as to garner votes in his long-shot attempt as the Green Party’s candidate to replace Democratic Party incumbent William Tong as the state’s attorney general.

Casually but effectively mixing the neighbor and policy messages, Krayeske made his case to Jose Maysonet. ​“I’m Ken Krayeske, running for attorney general on the Green Party. More importantly, I’m your neighbor.”

Then switching into fluent Spanish, he added (in the candidate’s translation): ​“The reason I’m running is I don’t like the way the current attorney general does business.”

Then Krayeske reprised for Maysonet a representative case in which the ultimate ruling compelled the state of Connecticut to test 20,000 inmates for hepatitis. (Click here to read more about that and other of his cases in Krayeske’s interview with the Independent). ​“The corollary benefit is that it helped to close the Northern Correctional Institution, which was a brutal place.”

Krayeske’s Spanish comes from a year spent in Spain as a Syracuse University undergraduate and also through his wife, who is Puerto Rican. Krayeske and Maysonet chatted, in more Spanish, about where his wife’s family hails from and where Maysonet’s family lives on the island.

Still, when Maysonet excused himself to vote, he wouldn’t tell a nosy reporter if the candidate had convinced him to vote the Green line for attorney general.

“It helps I speak Spanish,” said Krayeske, ​“And I know Puertoricanisms” through his wife.

A few minutes later, when he noticed Larry Ardigliano approaching wearing a bright lemon-colored bicycle helmet, Krayeske introduced himself and added, ​“I rode that awesome electric cargo bike. We just moved here. I’m running for attorney general and I do civil rights law.”

After a few words on the pleasure of riding bikes along the Quinnipiac and the Mill rivers and when Ardigliano expressed interest in the type of law Krayeske practices, the candidate went to the heart of his pitch: ​“I’m running because I don’t like the job William Tong is doing in holding his lawyers to account. We can exert state power with compassion. And the state can admit when it makes mistakes.

“But why doesn’t the state admit wrongdoing?” Ardigliano pressed Krayeske.

“Because if the state admits wrongdoing” instead of fighting each such allegation, he argued, ​“then it has to approach change. Women should not be raped in the state’s prisons. They shouldn’t have to give birth on a toilet. The attorneys I fought against were mean. This is the 21^st century in America. That’s why I’m running, but I’m also here to meet my neighbors.”

Moments later when Ardigliano emerged from the Jepson lobby voting area, he said, ​“Holding people in positions of power accountable. That’s one of our biggest problems. He got my vote.”

He also got Maysonet’s vote.

Krayeske didn’t spend any money on his own campaign, he said. Instead, he gave what was available in his budget, he said, to the local diaper bank. 

“Why should I spend money on what amounts to info warfare! Why make the media companies rich! Why are Lamont and Stefanowski spending millions when so many babies have diaper rash. This is why William Tong didn’t want to debate me. I’d have spanked him.”

As Krayeske mounted his bike, this reporter asked him what, on this election day, his next campaign stop would be. 

It turns out this was his only one. 

“I’m a lawyer, I’m going home. I’ve got briefs to write.”