Konstantinos Diamantis, the former head of Connecticut’s Office of School Construction Grants and Review, has been under investigation by a federal grand jury since the beginning of 2022. Newly obtained emails and meeting minutes reveal more about the case.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Dave Altimari to discuss his article written with Andrew Brown, “Emails show extent of influence on school construction projects,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Hello, Dave, why did you and fellow Connecticut Mirror investigative reporter Andrew Brown decide to seek these emails, especially after state construction manager Konstantinos Diamantis was fired by the Lamont administration?
DA: Mike Sanders was the guy who ran what was known as the state's emergency hazardous hazmat contract for years. And we had written a story that showed how all those contracts, 98% of them, went to these two companies. AAIS Corp. of West Haven or Bestech Inc. of Ellington. And so, we already knew that he was heavily involved in that kind of thing, and that he was on Kosta’s school construction grant team, and that these two companies had shown up on a couple of projects that we had written about in Bristol and Groton. So we decided to FOI Sanders's emails going back five years, which was a little bit before he joined Kosta’s team, until December of 2021, when he died.
WSHU: Mike Sanders was the asbestos expert in the state. And he was in charge of all state asbestos removal from all state buildings.
DA: Yes.
WSHU: But he wasn't he wasn't in charge of school construction.
DA: He was on Kosta’s team. And what they did is they took the hazmat, the asbestos abatement program, and they basically transferred it to municipal projects. So you had, in effect, a state employee, Michael Sanders, overseeing the bidding, or lack of bidding, on asbestos abatement on municipal school projects. And they called this their new initiative.
They wanted all school building committees to basically not put these contracts out to bid, but to hire one of those two companies. And several school building committees did just that. There were over $12 million, at least in asbestos abatement contracts, that were handed out to these two companies without any bids. Some fought back and questioned the policy and ultimately did not hire either of those two, but went with someone who was the lowest bidder for their project.
WSHU: Now, let's talk a little bit about Sanders, because he was a controversial figure. However, shortly after the scandal broke, he died. What happened?
DA: Sanders died less than two months after the feds issued a subpoena to the Department of Administrative Services seeking a bunch of records involving school contracts as well as records involving AAIS or Bestech. He died of an apparent drug overdose, literally in the driveway of a home in Old Saybrook where a friend of his lived. We don't know that he was ever interviewed by the federal authorities. He was a longtime state employee, and by all accounts, as Kosta himself called him, a brainiac when it came to asbestos abatement and pretty much ran that program for 20 years until he joined Kosta’s team, and then it transferred over.
WSHU: What did those emails show you as far as what Sanders was doing?
DA: A couple things. One, it showed that, as Kosta referred to it, this initiative that the school municipal school contracts that all these municipalities were getting money from the state for were getting a significant amount of funding from the state. So they were beholden to Kosta because they needed Kosta to sign off on their projects. So if they were told, you're gonna hire someone to do the asbestos abatement, and you're not going to go out to bid. That's what they did.
Now, the interesting thing is, the state's take on this whole thing has been in effect to blame the dead guy. DHS, and the audits that they've done, they've basically said, this was Mike Sanders. What the emails show is that it's clear that Kosta himself was obviously aware of what Sanders was doing, but that if higher-ups at DHS had wanted to know what he was doing, they clearly could have been aware of it.
And that as Kostas said in the story, this was not a secret, this initiative where they were going to try to push the state contract onto the municipal schools, it was not something that people should not have been aware of, if they so chose to be. So the idea that, you know, the dead guy did it all did not sit well with his family, and emails showed that that wasn't the case, that there were people higher up at DHS, and at the state level, who clearly, if they wanted to, could have known exactly what was going on here.
WSHU: Diamantis is still being investigated. He hasn't been charged with anything yet. What's going on there?
DA: Good question. I don't know. You're correct, he has not been charged with anything. We do know that the grand jury has been sitting since at least October 2021. DHS has been issuing subpoenas. The last subpoena they issued was October 4. So it's clearly still an investigation that's ongoing. It's not over with, and they clearly are also focused on Kosta to some extent because in the subpoenas that we've gotten since then, they have redacted everybody's name but Kosta’s. They aren't hiding the fact that they're investigating him and this program, amongst other things.
WSHU: So, more to come.
DA: I believe. I would think, if nothing else, that this story lays out how widespread this “initiative” was. And there were a significant number of municipal asbestos abatement contracts that were never put out to bid.
WSHU: And that is against state regulations
DA: That, and that a state employee was in effect telling municipalities what to do. So there's a couple of different issues that I think still need to be investigated. I guess I'll leave it at that.
