Category Archives: Governor

A few weeks into the 2013 legislative session, Special Agent Christopher Destito began making the rounds at the Statehouse.

According to three people with whom he spoke, Destito said he planned to reinvigorate what had been a sleepy public-corruption division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Vermont headquarters in Burlington.

He had informal meetings with several lawmakers, handed out his card, and encouraged anyone with information about shady dealings by government officials to get in touch.

It’s the same Christopher Destito that has allegedly been asking around about Gov. Peter Shumlin’s controversial land deal with Jeremy Dodge last fall. But while reports of FBI involvement have appeared in multiple media outlets over the past week, evidence of any criminal wrongdoing is nonexistent. And save for a non-committal statement from U.S. District Attorney Tristram Coffin, federal authorities have been tight-lipped about what it is they’re after.

Asked last Wednesday whether the FBI was interviewing people in an effort to gain information about a land deal in which Shumlin purchased for $58,000 a 16-acre homestead valued by town listers at $140,000, Coffin offered a terse statement.

“The FBI followed up on a routine lead,” Coffin told the Vermont Press Bureau. “And there’s no active investigation in our office.”

Asked whether that routine lead related to Shumlin’s land deal, Coffin said he wouldn’t comment further.

Three people earlier this month relayed off-the-record accounts to the Press Bureau of being interviewed by Destito about Shumlin. But it wasn’t until Bernie Corliss spoke with the Bureau last Tuesday that someone came forward with an on-the-record story of an FBI interview.

Corliss, a longtime friend of Dodge’s, said Destito had knocked on the front door of his residence at the Weston Mobile Home Park in Berlin last Monday evening.

“He just wanted to know what I knew about the deal, and what I knew about Jeremy,” Corliss told the Press Bureau last Tuesday, a day before news of the land deal broke. “I gave him all the information I had, and he left his card.”

A business card on a table in Corliss’ living room contained Destito’s name and contact number. The Vermont Press Bureau made phone contact with Destito Tuesday evening. Asked whether he was interviewing people about the Shumlin/Dodge land deal, Destito said “I’m sorry, I can’t speak to the press.”

“If I do, I’ll get in a lot of trouble,” Destito said.

Asked if he would speak off-the-record about the matter, he declined.

“I’m sorry, I don’t cut corners,” Destito said.

The FBI traditionally takes the lead on state-level public-corruption investigations and is, according to its government website, “singularly situated to combat this corruption, with the skills and capabilities to run complex undercover operations and surveillance.”

According to Coffin, there is no “investigation.” And Shumlin said Friday that the only thing he knows about the FBI link is what he’s read in the press.

“We have not been contacted by anyone from law enforcement anywhere along the process,” Shumlin said.

A series of one-on-one interviews with media outlets Friday suggests that Shumlin and his legal advisors are supremely confident there’s nothing to the FBI angle. A criminal defense attorney who spoke on background last week said the governor would under no circumstances submit to open-ended questioning from reporters if he believed a formal deposition was in the offing.

Peter Shumlin

In a written statement issued moments ago, Peter Shumlin said he’ll waive the July 15 deadline by which Jeremy Dodge is contractual obligated to move out of the Foster Road homestead the governor purchased from him last November.

“As I have said, I was saddened and disappointed that Jerry Dodge now regrets our agreement. I see and talk with Jerry frequently, and yet first heard about this from the press,” Shumlin said. ”When Jerry asked for my help to avoid the tax sale, I agreed, and I want to see this through to a good resolution. If that means Jerry stays in the house beyond July 15, that’s fine with me.”

Shumlin encountered criticism in recent days after media outlets reported details of a real estate transaction in which the second-term Democrat acquired the property for $58,000. The land is valued by town listers at $140,000.

More on this story later.

As his July 15 moving date nears, Jeremy Dodge’s seller’s remorse has begun to intensify.

Back on Nov. 7, when Dodge finalized the sale of his 16-acre homestead in bucolic East Montpelier, he believed the deal he cut with its buyer, Peter Shumlin, was the only way to avoid imminent ouster from the residence his now-deceased parents built 31 years ago.

He’d accumulated more than $17,000 in back taxes since inheriting the property in 2009, and the looming tax sale, Dodge says he believed at the time, would result in his eviction from the property.

So without a lawyer to represent him, Dodge signed a purchase-and-sale agreement in which Shumlin, the second-term Democratic governor of Vermont, acquired the property for $58,000 — less than a quarter of the $233,700 for which the homestead was then appraised.

“I could not afford a lawyer,” Dodge said. “And (Shumlin) said we’d just use his lawyers.”

The sale price included $9,000 representing the value of the rent Shumlin said he was saving Dodge by allowing him to remain in the home from November through July, and a $9,000 “seller repair credit” — money Dodge won’t get if he hasn’t upgraded the condition of the property by the middle of next month.

“I don’t have nothing bad to say about him, but yeah, I got ripped off, plain and simple,” Dodge said Tuesday. “I wish it had turned out differently. I wish that I had let it go to tax auction.”

An East Montpelier town lister has since lowered the appraised value to $140,000, owing to the decrepit condition of the house in which Dodge has lived since before his parents died.

In an emailed statement late Tuesday, Shumlin said the sale price was fair.

“I believe $58,000 was a fair price, and we both agreed to it,” Shumlin said. “The house is in terrible shape; it will have to be knocked down or totally gutted.”

As for Dodge’s lack of counsel, Shumlin said he urged him last year to remedy that.

“He didn’t have a lawyer on this sale,” Shumlin said. “But I did recommend it.”

But the 53-year-old Dodge, a parolee with a criminal rap sheet that includes convictions for drugs and domestic assault, says that if he knew last year what he knows now, he would have been able to avoid losing the house, or at least sold it more profitably.

Check out the full story, plus pictures of Dodge and his property and links to relevant documents,  at: http://www.timesargus.com/article/20130522/NEWS03/705229893