A vote-buying link in immigration imbroglio?
Given Governor Carcieri's steady emphasis on illegal immigrants, it's interesting, isn't it, that it took a chance event to reveal the extent to which undocumented workers were helping to clean state offices?
Tucked into Kathy Gregg's coverage today is the question of whether politics was also at work:
DOCUMENTS PROVIDED by the judiciary list Anthony DeSimone Jr. as the contact for TriState Enterprises at 1270 Mineral Spring Ave., North Providence, and Vincent D’Elia as the contact for Falcon Maintenance at 160 Winsor Ave., Johnston.
DeSimone’s father practiced law with the late Joseph Bevilacqua, a former chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. His brother is state Rep. John DeSimone, the Providence Democrat who tried to unseat House Speaker William J. Murphy in 2004-05 with the backing of House Republicans.
While denying that Carcieri instructed the House Republicans how to vote, the governor’s then-spokesman Jeff Neal acknowledged the governor urged them to “support whichever candidate is willing to work” with him. On that basis, Neal said: “Governor Carcieri supports the House Republican decision to endorse Representative DeSimone. From all accounts, Representative DeSimone is willing to work with House Republicans on Governor Carcieri’s reform agenda.”
Asked last night if the Republicans’ one-time political allegiance with DeSimone had any bearing on TriState’s successes in the state contract arena, there was no immediate response from the governor’s office.
As of yet, however, there has been no detailed explanation — or documents provided — that explain how TriState and Falcon won contract after contract, when they were first hired by the state to provide cleaning crews, who else bid, and why contracts were yanked away from Falcon and given to TriState in recent years, even when it was not the lowest-price bidder.
In the year that ended June 30, the court system paid TriState a total of $493,325 and Falcon $261,643. The state paid TriState an additional $732,891 and Falcon $579,456 under the non-court cleaning contracts, according to DOA director Williams.