Jurors listened to a third construction contractor testify on Tuesday about how he paid multiple bribes to Konstantinos Diamantis, a former state deputy budget director, in order to secure work on Connecticut school construction projects.
Sal Monarca, the former president of Acranom Masonry, was one of the first people on the witness stand during the second week of Diamantis’ ongoing criminal trial.
He explained to the jury in detail how he paid cash bribes to Diamantis in order to gain the former public official’s help in securing several school building contracts in Hartford and Tolland.
Federal prosecutors had Monarca explain to the jury how he wrote checks to himself out of his company’s bank account and how he would immediately cash those checks in order to secretly give tens of thousands of dollars to Diamantis.
Prosecutors also pushed Monarca to describe the various meeting locations where the two men would exchange the money.
Monarca told the jurors that he slipped Diamantis some of the bribes in a newspaper at a Dunkin’ Donuts. He said he handed over other envelopes of cash at Diamantis’ home in Farmington. And, as prosecutors alluded in their opening arguments, he described one exchange that took place in the bathroom of the Capital Grille in Hartford.
Prosecutors also showed Monarca several texts in which he, Diamantis and Acranom’s Vice President John Duffy discussed some of the encounters in Hartford. And they asked what it meant when the messages said that Diamantis wanted to meet up.
“You had to pay,” Monarca said.
“John would tell me where to meet him, and I’d go pay him,” he added.
Norm Pattis, Diamantis’ attorney, attempted to pick apart pieces of Monarca’s testimony, as he did with the other witnesses in the trial last week.
Pattis suggested during questioning that the payments Monarca made to Diamantis might be for legal work, since Diamantis is an attorney. He also asked whether the payments were compensation for Diamantis introducing Monarca to D’Amato Construction, which is one of the largest construction firms in the state.
Meanwhile, prosecutors leaned heavily on the mountain of direct evidence that has been introduced during the trial to show that Monarca paid Diamantis so that Acranom would win multimillion-dollar construction contracts.
On one such project in Tolland, Monarca said, he and Duffy added $70,000 to their offer to build part of the Birch Grove Elementary school in order to factor in the expected payments for Diamantis.
And he explained how a feud broke out when he didn’t immediately pay that amount to Diamantis, who oversaw the budgets for school construction projects all over the state.
To drive home the point, prosecutors replayed a voicemail in which Diamantis referenced the Birch Grove project and complained Monarca had not held up his end of the deal.
Diamantis sat motionless at the defense table as the voicemail was played for the second time during the trial.
Pattis questioned Monarca about why he lied to federal investigators about the payments to Diamantis when he was first questioned. He also asked Monarca about about whether he could recall the exact dates that he delivered money to Diamantis.
All of it was meant to raise jurors’ doubts about Monarca’s testimony.
But Monarca repeatedly told Pattis and the prosecutors that he paid Diamantis in cash.
“I don’t know the dates, but if the texts said that, I paid him,” Monarca said. “I know I went to the bank multiple times and delivered it myself.”
Prosecutors used the next witness to shore up Monarca’s testimony.
Eric Wethje, a federal agent with the Internal Revenue Service, testified about the alleged lies that Diamantis told to federal investigators when he was interviewed in 2023.
He also walked the jury through the bank records that prosecutors say trace the money that flowed from Acranom to Diamantis.
During the investigation, Wethje created a list of occasions in which Monarca took cash out of Acranom’s account, and he detailed the times that Diamantis deposited cash into his private checking account shortly afterward.
Pattis pointed out issues with the summary of those transactions, however.
In several instances, Pattis noted, Diamantis actually deposited more cash into his account than Monarca allegedly paid him.
Wethje agreed and said that Pattis’ math was correct. But he said that is because Diamantis’ frequently deposited large sums of cash into his bank account between 2018 and 2021 when he was running the school construction program.
He said those types of transactions were “voluminous.” And he told Pattis that Diamantis was depositing that type of money despite only claiming his salary from the state of Connecticut on his taxes.