"We get thousands of checks from thousands of people and we just wouldn't have any way of knowing something like that is happening."

Mayor Boughton's response to his acceptance of James Galante alleged bundled campaign contributions

Since the mayor of DANBURY announced in BETHEL that he's jumping into the gubernatorial race, there's been a HUGE spike in traffic from people looking for information on the city's last honest man. That being said I've been notified by several that my links to Boughton's campaign finance statements are dead.

I'm in the process of fixing the problem with the access to Boughton's past finance statements but until then, here's the latest campaign report from the mayor's 2009 campaign (filed Jan 10 2010).

As the Fairfield County Weekly noted, in posting Boughton's past statements, readers helped find found some rather interesting donations from April 2003 that look oddly a lot like Galante's bundled donations that were given to the mayor's PAC in October 2003.

Sources told the Hartford Courant (the Weekly's papa paper) that Galante gave $8,000 to Boughton's People over Politics PAC in eight separate thousand-dollar donations—a grand being the legal limit for an individual—through friends, family and employees in October 2003, with promises of favors or reimbursement. Boughton told the Courant, "I was absolutely unaware that there was anything wrong with any donations."

People over Politics only received a total of eight donations of $1,000 in that reporting period.

Four checks are from the family of Paul Dinardo, Galante's brother-in-law and a longtime employee of his trash business, who got 21 months in prison in September for conspiracy to inflate hauling prices through extortion and threats. He gave $1,000. So did his father Anthony Dinardo, the father-in-law of James Galante and a resident of Putnam County, N.Y., where Automated Waste's operations stretched. The other Dinardos were Paul's brother Robert, a Danbury police officer, and his wife, Jackie, a teacher and guidance counselor in the city's public schools.

[...]

If People over Politics got $8,000 from Galante, the trash magnate provided about one-third of the $24,287 the PAC raised in 2003 and half of the $15,750 from "individuals," as opposed to business or organizations. The PAC listed $9,750 as its total contributions from individuals from Oct. 24 to Dec. 31, meaning, without that $8,000, People over Politics would have collected $1,750 from actual people. Of the eight $1,000 donations, six arrived on Oct. 26 and the other two on Oct. 23 and Oct. 30.

So no one at People over Politics thought it strange that individuals bolstered their cash stash by $8,000 within eight days, with half of it coming from the heavily Galante-connected Dinardo family in a city like Danbury, where the political and business establishments are small enough that everyone knows everyone? (Boughton certainly knew Galante, who hauled the city's trash and owned its minor-league hockey team.)

[...]

And as HatCityBLOG pointed out, this was not the first time the same group of people stuffed Boughton's piggybank. Within a five-day period in January 2003, Walkovich, Seri, Paul DiNardo and his wife (Galante's sister) all gave $1,000 to his reelection fund, as did Maria Rullo, of New Fairfield, who pled guilty to tax fraud in July in a case related to United States v. Ianniello, aka Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello of the Genovese family, which has alleged ties to...James Galante.

Download the report, follow the money trail, and let me know if you see anything that catches your attention.