Convicted official pursues Trump pardon while in Greek exile
A federal judge sentenced Konstantinos Diamantis to seven years in prison on Wednesday for 21 counts of extortion, bribery, conspiracy and lying to the FBI — a proceeding that took place without the defendant present. Judge Stefan Underhill and a collection of lawyers gathered in the federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s most populous city, for the sentencing of Diamantis, once the state’s powerful school-construction chief. Diamantis was nearly 5,000 miles away in northern Greece.
“This is the first time I’ve gone to a sentencing with an empty chair,” Norman Pattis, Diamantis’s lawyer, told reporters outside the courthouse. Underhill, a 27-year veteran of the bench, told the court: “I’ve never had to deal with this before.”
Diamantis had been convicted last year. The son of Greek immigrants who settled in Bristol, Connecticut, he went by “Kosta,” became a lawyer and was elected in 1992 as a Democrat to represent Bristol in the statehouse, then parlayed that experience into a full-time state job. By 2015 he had become a power broker after then-Gov. Dannel Malloy put him in charge of the state’s school-construction grant and review office, overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spending; he later became a senior budget official as well. “He had a position of enormous power — but not wealth,” said Pattis, his lawyer. Those who have dealt with Diamantis describe him as an affable man with a toothy grin who can also be domineering.
The case focused on his tenure overseeing Connecticut’s school-construction grant office, and prosecutors highlighted his conduct around the Birch Grove Primary School reconstruction in Tolland, a roughly $45 million project the town needed after workers discovered faulty concrete in 2019 and could not afford on its own. Tammy Nuccio, then head of the Tolland town council and now a Republican state representative, said Diamantis arrived at a town meeting and dictated which contractors the project would hire. “He walked in like he owned the place,” she said. “‘This is what you’re going to do. These are the people you’re going to hire. This is what you’re going to pay them.’” Diamantis, asked in a phone interview about his style, said: “Yes, I may have come across as domineering to keep people focused. It was the reason I was the director.”
One firm he urged Tolland to hire, Construction Advocacy Professionals, received more than $500,000 in Birch Grove contracts soon after hiring Diamantis’s daughter, and prosecutors said its work was “entirely superfluous.” The project’s masonry contractor was Acranom, whose vice president, John Duffy, was Diamantis’s former brother-in-law and called him “Uncle.” Acranom won a Birch Grove contract of more than $2.5 million, despite a general contractor’s complaints that its work on another school was so poor much of it had to be redone, according to prosecutors.
The jury heard text messages in which Diamantis told Duffy: “I always usually work at 5% of total just fyi.” Duffy, in turn, appealed to Diamantis when he feared Tolland’s general contractor was switching from masonry to drywall. “Tell Tony that his 45 mil included at least 3.4 for masonry and that has to stay. They changing it all to f——-g sheetrock… wtf,” Duffy wrote. “I talked to those guys at Tolland,” Diamantis replied. “They got the message.” Duffy and Acranom’s president, Salvatore Monarca, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Diamantis, as did Antonietta Roy, owner of Construction Advocacy Professionals. Roy’s lawyer said she “deeply regrets ever meeting Mr. Diamantis.”
Beyond the bribes and the messy politics of school construction, the trial also exposed a state official in serious financial distress — a bureaucrat juggling five daughters and two ex-wives while straining to pay for a Greek wedding and private-school tuition. “I’m drowning,” Diamantis texted Duffy at one point, saying he had only $318 in the bank and was about to miss a mortgage payment. When Monarca was slow to pay, he fumed: “It’s like he’s pissing on me and making me crawl.”
Diamantis took the stand and described the payments as consulting fees. Jurors took little more than a day to convict him. “What I was thinking about was: How does an innocent person end up in jail? How did I lose this case? How is it that they’re going to put me in jail at the age of 70 years old for, I don’t know, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years?” he said of his reaction to the verdict.
Federal authorities say Diamantis fled ahead of his scheduled mid-September sentencing date, going to Florida, taking a boat to the Bahamas and then flying via London to Athens — likely using a Greek passport he was supposed to have surrendered. Diamantis, cagey about details, called the government’s version “plausible” but not entirely accurate. He insisted he reached Greece without any passport — or his family’s knowledge. Of his journey, he observed darkly: “It’s not something you want to do.”
The decision to run was not straightforward, he said in a phone interview about two weeks after leaving the country. “Of course, it goes back and forth in my head: Is it the right decision?” Diamantis said. He said he was not trying to escape justice but seeking a chance to tell his story. “I’ve lost everything,” he said. “The only thing that’s left is my dignity, right?”
Rather than lying low, Diamantis has called into a Connecticut talk-radio show, spoken with hometown political reporters and circulated an eight-page manifesto asserting his innocence — in hopes, he said, of winning a pardon from President Trump. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) District of Connecticut was used by the Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, to weaponize the DOJ and to engage in legal warfare against me,” Diamantis wrote, in language seemingly tuned to the ear of the president whose favor he is seeking. Cathryn Vaulman, a spokesperson for Gov. Lamont, a Democrat, rebuffed the claim: “The jury that convicted him has already rejected the fiction he is spinning now. He should return to Connecticut.”
Diamantis has said he is staying at a friend’s apartment in Greece, disputing reports that he had been living it up at a hotel bar, and that he passes the time reading the news and taking walks while working on his case and lobbying reporters.
Pattis told the court his client “believes that the president of the United States will come to his assistance.” A White House official said Wednesday that the team reviewing clemency requests there “is not tracking this request at this time or even heard of this individual.”
Diamantis’s flight has compounded his own legal jeopardy. His dual U.S.-Greek citizenship complicates efforts by authorities to extradite him; the state attorney general is trying to revoke his pension, and the federal government could end up owning his house. By skipping the hearing, Diamantis has jeopardized his right to appeal.
Even so, there were signs as recently as the day before the sentencing that Diamantis might return. Prosecutors told the court that Diamantis had bought a plane ticket and that a federal official had arranged to meet him at the Athens airport to smooth his departure. “Apparently, they had a very nice conversation but Mr. Diamantis told him he wasn’t going,” Jonathan Francis, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the court.
In any case, the sentencing went forward with an empty chair at the defense table. “The public has waited long enough,” Francis said. Channeling his client from afar, Pattis read a statement in which Diamantis again professed “my absolute innocence.” In his own remarks, the defense attorney, who once taught a classics course, recounted the story of Antigone, the Greek princess sentenced to death for defying King Creon’s order not to give her brother a respectable burial. By the time Creon reconsiders, she has killed herself. “Hence the tragedy,” Pattis explained. “He believes he’s in the position Antigone was in.” He asked the judge for mercy for a man he had described in a presentencing memo as “70 and effectively impecunious.”
Underhill said Diamantis had lied on the stand and called the evidence of his guilt “overwhelming. Period.” Still, the judge stopped short of the 10-plus years prosecutors said would be appropriate, handing down a seven-year sentence. “As bad as his crimes are,” Underhill said, “he does not deserve to be in prison for the rest of his life.”
From Greece, Diamantis did not sound appreciative. Even seven days would be “a lifetime to a 70-year-old innocent man who has lost everything,” he wrote in a text. “The sentence is a life sentence.” He described his exile in the same terms as the sentence he was avoiding. “It’s a different prison here,” he said. “It’s an emotional prison.”
The conduct documented at trial set the case apart from the Connecticut of hedge-fund wealth and old-money hamlets for which the “Land of Steady Habits” is often known: evidence included cash payoffs at a Dunkin’ Donuts and secretive meetings at the Capital Grille bar in Hartford — and, on one occasion, in its men’s room. “We’re not New Jersey. We’re not Mississippi,” noted Seth Warren, a local-politics expert at the University of Connecticut, referring to other states with at times unsavory reputations for corruption. Still, he said: “There’s a lot of different interests that want to get a hand in the pie.”
Meanwhile, back in Tolland, the Birch Grove school is open. “The school’s great,” said Nuccio. “It’s built. It’s a great little school.”