The former budget director for a disgraced ex Waterbury mayor will spend four months on home confinement and the rest of his five-year sentence on probation.
Thomas Ariola Jr. was sentenced Monday for taking a bribe from a street-sweeping company that wanted a city contract. He admitted to taking $500 from Martins Landscaping Inc., which was involved in a dispute over the $100,000 contract to sweep Waterbury’s streets.
The other part of his punishment is to pay a $15,000 fine, 450 hours of community service and to pay his outstanding tax debt.
In April 2001, Martins got the contract to provide street-sweeping services to the city during the Spring and early Summer of 2001, according to the Department of Justice. The company was supposed to sweep more than 306 miles of city streets for $109,395.
Then the disputes began. The city felt the contractor did not clear the street adequately and quickly enough.
On July 25, 2001, Stephen Martin, of Martins Landscaping, went to City Hall and met with Ariola, who was not involved in that area of city business, according to the DOJ. By While he was not involved in that part of city government, he did accounting and tax prep work for Martin’s Landscaping, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
During the meeting, Stephen Martin gave Ariola two checks, each for $250, payable to Philip Giordano’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign, against Joe Lieberman in 2000, according to the DOJ.
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Ariola happened to be deputy treasurer of Giordano's Senate campaign at the time, the New York Times reported. And city budget director from 1996 to 2001 and the chief fiscal officer of the city's Board of Education until 2005, the Times reported.
The problem, according to the DOJ, was captured on incriminating wiretaps that indicate that the checks were given to influence and reward Giordano in connection with giving preferential treatment to Martin’s Landscaping in connection with disputes related to the 2001 street-sweeping contract, according to the DOJ.
Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence for sexually assaulting two pre-teen girls. He was convicted of using his power to have oral sex on more than one occasion with girls who were then 8 and 10, the Times reported. He was nabbed after federal investigators tapped his phones, looking for information about city contracts given for campaign contributions, the Times reported in 2005.
The feds’ evidence that Giordano was seeking sex with kids was enough to urge him to covertly record conversations with two city contractors, along with a city official, the Times reported.
In the three days before he was arrested in 2001, Giordano handed over enough material for the feds to obtain 13 search warrants in their public corruption investigation, the Times reported.
Martin pleaded guilty in October 2008 to bribery and filing a false federal income tax return. He was sentenced earlier in the month to two years' probation and ordered to pay a $4,000 fine, according to the DOJ0.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation Division are investigating.
