Recommending a long term behind bars, federal prosecutors described Connecticut's former top school construction official Konstantinos "Kosta" Diamantis as a calculating betrayer of the public trust.
However, Diamantis himself is requesting a much lighter sentence that includes no prison time.
Convicted of taking bribes and other crimes after a trial last year, Diamantis bullied school contractors into handing him bundles of cash and hiring his daughter for "a low-show job at inflated rates," prosecutors wrote in a memo seeking to lock up the disgraced former state legislator for up to 12 years and 7 months.
"For his greed, corruption and abject lack of integrity, Diamantis is deserving of a sentence with the advisory guidelines range of 121 to 151 months of imprisonment," prosecutors wrote.
Diamantis, 70, a lawyer who resigned from the state bar in February, is to be sentenced on Thursday. A jury last October found him guilty of 21 counts of bribery, extortion, conspiracy and making false statements to federal investigators.
Free on a $500,000 bond, Diamantis is asking the court for home detention and maximum probation.
"Mr. Diamantis does not minimize the seriousness of the jury's verdict or his breach of the public trust," his attorney, Norm Pattis, wrote in a motion to U.S. Judge Stefon Underhill at U.S. District Court in Bridgeport.
Although the sentence would not carry prison time, Pattis said, it would include restrictions against future government employment or contracting, financial disclosure and monitoring, payment of restitution when appropriate and a prohibition against profiting from his crimes.
"His request rests on the combined force of his age, lack of physical dangerousness, loss of the position that enabled the conduct, financial ruin, loss of professional status, diminished earning capacity, family circumstances, and the limited additional sentencing value of a decade or more in prison," Pattis said.
In his trial testimony, Diamantis said that in his spare time, he acted as a lawyer and consultant for a masonry company and a construction administration firm that worked on multimillion-dollar school projects in Hartford and Tolland. In the end, the jury believed executives from the two companies who already had pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the scheme that spanned 2018-21.
Antonietta Roy, owner of Construction Advocacy Professionals, said she feared she might not keep contracts, so she hired Diamantis' daughter for an administrative job at $45 per hour and gave Kosta Diamantis $4,500 in checks and cash.
The nine-day trial also included testimony from John Duffy, Diamantis' former brother-in-law and vice president of Acranom Masonry of Middlefield, who said the company's successful bid on a project was budgeted to include a $70,000 payoff for Diamantis.
In their sentencing memo, Assistant U.S. Attorneys David E. Novick and Jonathan N. Francis bulleted reasons Diamantis should serve prison time. Those points included:
The "persistence and sheer duration" of his corruption. "This was not a one-off error in judgment - which, in any event, would have been very serious for a senior state official exploiting his office for personal gain," prosecutors wrote.
The memo further stated that "Diamantis's crime was a fundamental betrayal of trust placed in him by the State of Connecticut."
Diamantis used his power to dictate the award of critical contracts. Connecticut's school construction funding system "left less-affluent districts and those otherwise in urgent need vulnerable to Diamantis's corrupt schemes," prosecutors wrote.
Diamantis's exploitation of vulnerable school districts meant those communities were subjected to contractors who were hired not for the quality of their work, but because they were paying bribes. For example, Diamantis forced Hartford officials to hire Acranom for the fourth phase of a Weaver High School project, even though the company's previous work was "so shoddy" that much of it had to be redone, prosecutors wrote.
Diamantis faces a second trial scheduled for early next year on additional public corruption charges. Federal prosecutors claim Diamantis quashed a state audit of a Bristol eye care practice that was engaged in healthcare fraud when he worked in the state Office of Policy and Management.
Diamantis allegedly took $100,000 payments to try to persuade state officials to cancel the probe of Family Eye Care, federal officials said.
Ahead of his sentencing on Thursday, Diamantis also has sought a pardon from President Donald Trump, which could allow him to keep his $75,000 annual state pension.
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This article originally published at CT prosecutors seek 12 years for ex-school construction chief as he asks for no prison time.