Bonfire of the Vanities
Two renegade aldermen clash with the mayor over development while Fair Haven burns.

By Paige Austin

Devil’s Night earned its name in Fair Haven this year. Near midnight on
October 30, an empty barn on Wolcott Street went up in flames. A few
blocks away, an abandoned home on James Street met the same fate.
Across the neighborhood at a house on Lombard Street, a car slammed
into the garage door, reversed, and sped away. The car too was later
found consumed by flames. When the sun rose on Halloween, both
buildings and the car had burned to rubble; no trace of the fires’
origins could be found in the smoking remains.
The destruction was a bitter irony for Fair Haven, where a recent
economic upswing has ushered in a spate of development ventures that
have begun to rejuvenate an area once regarded as New Haven’s immigrant
slum. The fires themselves are likely the result of long-standing
conflict over what course this development should take and, more
importantly, who gets to control it. During the last several years, the
neighborhood’s predominantly Latino residents have pushed back the drug
dealers and gang members who used to rule the streets. Family-owned
businesses and freshly renovated houses have cropped up on almost every
block. On Grand Avenue, El Charro imports the makings for its
traditional tacos all the way from Mexico. A fresh fruit stand crops up
every morning in front of the Dollar King. Local business owners,
residents, and politicians are laying out enthusiastic plans for its
revival. But while their goal is the same, their visions for how best
to achieve it often clash.

The Devil’s Night fires may be just the latest battle in the ongoing
war for control of Fair Haven’s future. It is no coincidence that the
targets of the attacks were two of Fair Haven’s veteran representatives
on New Haven’s Board of Aldermen, Raul Avila and Kevin Diaz. The
torched barn belonged to Avila, whose house stands in front of it; the
vandalized garage was Diaz’s. And just to make clear that the political
connection between the events was no coincidence, the still anonymous
vandals apparently targeted the James Street house because it was owned
by the Fair Haven Development Corporation (fhdc), a nonprofit housing
agency with close ties to the aldermen, who both sit on its governing
board.

The history behind the fires is long and bitter and has split Fair
Haven into two camps, one allied with Avila and Diaz and the other
closely tied to the powerful administration of Mayor John DeStefano.
Avila and Diaz have long used their positions to exercise control over
the neighborhood’s development. Carping that neighborhood improvement
should always originate within the community, they demand that any
outside group that wants to work in Fair Haven defer to their authority
and operate through the network of businesses and nonprofit development
agencies that they control. But lately, DeStefano and his allies have
charged that Avila and Diaz have gone too far in their backroom
manipulation and strong-arm politics. Last summer, DeStefano backed
rival Democrat Johnny Martinez against Avila for state representative—a
slap in the face for a veteran Democrat like Avila. When Martinez died
in a car crash in October, DeStefano switched his support to another of
Avila’s rivals, Juan Candelaria, to make sure that Avila did not get
the job. Candelaria, with the critical backing of the Mayor’s office,
easily prevailed.

The mayor’s office claimed the mantle of good governance and clean
politics against Avila. With plenty of community discontent to marshal
to its purposes, City Hall made a convincing case. But the hands of the
city administration and its allies stopped looking so clean in late
October, when two well-known supporters of the mayor were arrested for
absentee ballot fraud in the elections for Democratic ward
chairmanships last March. That race pitted Menen Osorio-Fuentes, a
staunch Avila-Diaz backer and president of the board of the fhdc,
against the sister of Angelo Reyes, a staunch DeStefano supporter and
one of the men later arrested for tampering with the ballots. Reyes’s
green pick-up truck, which is often blazed with DeStefano For Mayor
signs in campaign seasons, is a common sight on the streets of Fair
Haven, where he is a successful private developer and energetic
community activist. He has made no secret of his opposition to Diaz and
Avila’s politics or to the fhdc.

Just hours after Reyes and Yale senior Michael Montaño were arrested
for tampering with absentee ballots, the properties went up in flames.
So far, police and fire officials have offered no specific answers. But
the Avila-Diaz camp was quick to insinuate a direct connection between
the events. They charged that Reyes, who was once convicted of selling
cocaine on the same streets where he now builds new homes, was behind
the vandalism—retribution Fair Haven style.

Were the fires the result of arson? If so, were the culprits local
thugs seeking revenge for the arrest of Reyes and Montaño? Or could the
attacks have been a sham perpetrated by supporters of Avila and Diaz in
order to gain political sympathy and collect insurance money for the
FHDC, as some others allege? The fires raise uneasy questions for Fair
Haven, where political battles resemble guerilla warfare and margins of
victory are often razor-thin—and often have little to do with outcomes
at the polls.

Rafael Ramos has a drawer full of Polaroids to show how disgusting the
Fair Haven buildings that he visited as a building code inspector used
to be. For Ramos, these photos show how far the neighborhood has come
thanks to the hard work and growing influence of the Mayor, even at the
expense of local leadership. The photos show condemned houses with
sagging roofs, teenage boys brandishing their shotguns, mammoth piles
of trash, a basement spotted with feces. One shows an apartment with a
bar across the door. “That’s a drug house,” Ramos explained, sitting in
his office at the Livable City Initiative (lci), an urban improvement
agency begun by DeStefano in 1996 and housed in City Hall. “They do
that with bars on the door.”

Most of the pictures were taken in 1998 or earlier. Code violations
still abound, said Ramos, but things are not nearly so bad these days.
“Do we still have violence and derelict houses? Yes, but not to the
same magnitude,” he explained, flipping through the photographs
ruefully. He, of course, gives much of the credit to Mayor DeStefano’s
administration. Avila and Diaz, in contrast, scorn outsiders and
intimidate residents into submission—a power play that, according to
Ramos, only isolates a community in great need of help. “They are not
establishing relationships with the community. They’re not leading by
example,” he said. When City Hall began its push for a change of
political leadership in Fair Haven, Ramos was among those to answer the
call. “We haven’t done it until now. We have new grassroots leadership
in Fair Haven who can partner with the city and non-profits. The
momentum is there and it feels good,” he said.

But Ora Lee Dortshe points out exactly where the momentum stops: in
front of her house on Chapel Street, where a repaved sidewalk abruptly
ends. She is among residents who dispute Ramos’s claim that the Mayor’s
leadership has delivered widespread benefit to Fair Haven. Starting
there, the pavement is still filled with weeds and gaping holes. She
thinks she knows why: It is “because of my big mouth,” she says.
Dortshe loudly opposed the Mayor’s River Street development plan and
the opening of a new restaurant across from her house. And she makes no
secret of where her political sympathies lie—with her alderman and
neighbor, Raul Avila. On a drive around her neighborhood, Dortshe
points out other sidewalks that have not been redone and houses
abandoned to the onslaught of winter and age. These disparities, she
believes, are an effort by DeStefano’s allies to punish those who have
continued to support Avila—or, as Dortshe would put it, stand up for
local sovereignty.

People from outside of Fair Haven, according to Dortshe, do not
understand what the neighborhood needs. Development projects originate
in City Hall, among city employees who hail from outside the
neighborhood. Dortshe repeatedly demanded promises that local
contractors would be used in the River Street project, that minority
businesses would be brought in and neighborhood residents employed.
“People want to own their own homes they can be proud of. They want to
do what other people do,” she said, driving up Wolcott Street. “All of
a sudden everyone’s coming into Fair Haven. This one wants it, that one
wants it. Suddenly everyone’s talking about Fair Haven on the news.
What are they talking about? Are they talking about those kids down
there?” she asked, gesturing to a group of kids playing Halloween
pranks down the block. What city hall is doing, she notes, is holding
political grudges against her alderman Raul Avila and making sure he
cannot accomplish anything on behalf of his constituents, preferring to
install outside interests instead.

But increasingly Dortshe feels the futility of her opposition, and
resignation has begun to creep in where vitriol and persistence once
earned her enemies. “After a point you just say the hell with it,” she
said. “They’re going to do it… They’re going to do whatever they want.”

Nowhere has the clash between the Avila-Diaz camp and City Hall been
more vicious than at 152 Lloyd Street, home of the Fair Haven
Development Corporation. The fhdc, under the guidance of Avila, Diaz,
and their allies and with the financial support of City Hall, is
supposed to work on increasing home ownership in the neighborhood.
Recently, it completed the refurbishment of a one-family home down the
street, at 182 Lloyd Street, with the help of a city grant. At the
request of its future occupants, its kitchen was painted bright yellow.
But no one lives here yet. Standing on the living room’s refurbished
wood floor, fhdc executive director John Welter decried the political
infighting, between Fair Haven’s aldermen and City Hall agencies like
lci, that hinders the agency’s work. “The people who lose are the
people who could live in a house like this and don’t,” he said.

According to lci’s paper trail, though, there is no habitable house at
182 Lloyd Street— the fhdc, lci claimed, never actually refurbished the
site, even though it was one of the few real projects they had
undertaken in six years of operation. Welter was livid because a day
before, a notice of “failure to commence construction” had been slapped
on the fhdc by lci. It was, curiously, signed by the acting director of
the city’s Livable City Initiative, Andrew Rizzo—just like the
occupancy agreement that had recently declared the house habitable.
“This is pure harassment,” said Welter angrily. “The city is trying to
starve us to death.”

Just about everyone else in New Haven politics feels that the fhdc is
starving itself. The agency is currently under investigation for misuse
of grant money it received from lci. “It all stems from the fact that
over a six-year period the city gave them money and they built one
house,” said Rizzo, who later said the notice for failure to commence
construction notice at 182 Lloyd Street was a misprint. But his
criticism still stands: Total grant money allocated to the fhdc has
exceeded $600,000 since its establishment in 1994. One of the houses
the corporation rehabilitated was sold to the daughter of Fuentes, the
president of the fhdc’s board and a close ally of Diaz and Avila. A
second house—the one torched in the early hours of October 31—was
donated by another of Fuentes’s daughters with a $4645 tax obligation
that the corporation agreed to take on.

The fhdc, with good reason, is a frequent target of attack by Avila and
Diaz’s detractors. The leader of one rival non-profit explained its
continued existence in the face of gross ineptitude: “The only way
anything could come into Fair Haven was if the Fair Haven Development
Corporation got a piece of the action and some of the money.” In other
words, critics charge that Avila, Diaz, and their allies hold the city
hostage in order to maintain control over the course of development.
When people try to bypass them, Diaz and Avila block funding, deny
management team support, and delay Board of Aldermen votes on new
proposals. Avila and Diaz argue that they promote the fhdc because home
ownership is better for Fair Haven than the increased rental capacity
promised by rival housing agencies. Welter admits that the fhdc failed
to produce during its early years, but points at its successful
completion of three houses in the last year for proof of a rejuvenated
capacity. “The city has never been properly supportive of this
organization,” he said. “At its core this is a political struggle. Raul
has no formal decision-making power with respect to this organization.
But certain members of the mayor’s staff have told us that in their
view this organization is Raul Avila. … They insist on viewing us as
identical to their political opponents. Because they want to oppose and
destruct their political opponents, they are doing the same to us.”

The fhdc relies on the city for the bulk of its funding, as well as for
access to properties on which taxpayers have foreclosed. While its
investigation is on going, lci will not act on fhdc applications for
property or funding. “At this point, I can’t see giving them anymore
money,” said Rizzo.

Because aldermanic elections are often decided by just a few hundred
voters, neighborhood political battles are invariably close-fought,
with neighbor pitted against neighbor and personal jabs circulated
quickly through the community. Fair Haven is no exception: Avila and
Diaz’s supporters accuse their opponents of betraying the Puerto Rican
community to an Italian-American mayor and his henchmen. The aldermen’s
detractors, meanwhile, have spread rumors that the two men threaten to
pull Section 8 housing subsidies from voters who do not support them.
What is clear is that leaders on both sides of the political divide
have tried to harness and redirect the passions that inspire political
disenchantment in many Fair Havenites. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in
people’s lives and that translates into fear,” explained Duffy Acevedo,
Republican challenger for the 95th district state senate seat and a
past aldermanic opponent of Avila’s. “They’re dependent on government
completely. For what purpose would they want to go out and take a
chance at pissing someone off?”

The alleged ballot fraud in the last ward co-chair elections show just
how vulnerable small-scale city elections are to illicit dealing. After
the co-chair election, Avila and the candidates he supported, Menen
Osorio-Fuentes and Elba Franklin, brought in affidavits signed by more
than half a dozen voters who said they had not signed their own
ballots. When the ballots were checked, the charges of tampering
appeared justified. “We are no handwriting experts,” Town Clerk Sally
Brown recalled later, “but a blind person could see they were different
signatures.” The office passed the case along to the State Election and
Enforcement Commission (seec). Around the same time, said seec
Executive Director Jeff Garfield, the office received a complaint from
the United States Postal Service that “individuals were attempting to
intercept absentee ballots.” The seec launched an investigation last
March in conjunction with the Chief State’s Attorney Office and the
Postal Service—yielding charges against DeStefano supporters Reyes and
Montaño.

The ballot fraud and fires, regardless of whether or not they are
actually pinned on the Mayor’s supporters, are only the latest clash in
a convoluted and contentious history. It has been a couple of years
since critics began blaming Avila and Diaz for Fair Haven’s stunted
development. The accusations are manifold: Avila and Diaz have used
their positions on city committees and the management team to block
city funding for any organization they do not control. They threaten
and intimidate Fair Haven residents who oppose them. They work on
behalf of a narrow constituency of family and friends whom they reward
with political favors and promises of work and new houses. They use
ethno-centric politics to demand allegiance from the Puerto Rican
community. The evidence, say the aldermen’s detractors, is all around:
in the blighted houses that could be refurbished homes, the drug deals
still taking place on the corner, the streets filled with holes, the
throngs of kids loitering on the sidewalk for want of any safe place to
spend the afternoon. Last spring, the Spanish-language weekly La Voz
Hispana ran photos of the two men along with Menen Osorio-Fuentes,
chair of the board of the fhdc and Avila’s Wolcott Street neighbor,
over the caption “La Trilogía del Mal”—or, “The Axis of Evil.” “They
are not the Taliban,” the article conceded, “But their type of
political action comes too close to fundamentalism.”

The most important criticism, however, comes in the form of a question
to Fair Haven residents: When was the last time you saw your alderman?
“Raul had an opportunity to really change the neighborhood because he’s
Hispanic, because people believed what he said,” said Angelo Reyes one
afternoon, before his arrest. “They didn’t provide. They did what they
wanted.”

Magda Natal, who ran against Osorio-Fuentes in the ward co-chair
elections last March, sees Avila’s domination of her neighborhood
waning. “I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to what he’s
done and what he hasn’t done,” she said. Opponents say that Avila and
Diaz are all but invisible except at election time. Their absence,
detractors claim, is indicative of their group’s insular nature and
preoccupation with maintaining power, which translates into limiting
access to positions of leadership and curtailing the flow of
information into the community. But there is a problem with this
approach. “Ultimately information cannot be controlled,” said
management team co-chair Lee Cruz. And ultimately, word of other
strong-arm tactics gets out too. “They forget that for every one person
you intimidate that’s six people who are going to know about it—and
that’s exactly what happened,” said Ramos. Certainly, the Devil’s Night
attacks set rumors flying immediately. One political opponent said it
would be impossible to identify suspects by tracking Avila and Diaz’s
enemies because “half the town” fits that description. The aldermen’s
supporters are quick to point out that Reyes has served time in jail
for a drug-dealing conviction, and they claim that he maintains ties
with local street thugs.

Supporters of the aldermen claim that there are indeed signs of
neglect—the neglect of City Hall and its loyalists. Mary Desmond, who
ran state senator Martin Looney’s mayoral campaign against Mayor
DeStefano in Fair Haven last fall, found veins of resentment towards
City Hall ran deeper than Avila and Diaz’s complaints: “A lot of people
felt disenfranchised by the mayor’s administration just because of the
neglect. You had a core group of people who live here knocking on
people’s doors eight to ten hours a day and asking, when was the last
time you saw a sidewalk go in?”

Twice in the last two years, Avila and Diaz have clashed with other
board members over the allocation of Community Development Block Grant
money. In 2000, Avila, Diaz and Fair Haven’s Ward-14 Alderman Robin
Kroogman blocked a grant to a Fair Haven Housing Initiative project
supported by City Hall, instead securing another grant for their own
agency, the fhdc. The battle lines were drawn again last year, when the
Mutual Housing Corporation applied to do a development project at a
site on Ferry Street. Avila twice delayed action on the proposals.

When the issue came to a vote last May, Avila clashed angrily with
Kroogman, leading her to try to have him ejected from the chambers. He
has since sued her over the incident—a first in aldermanic history,
according to board president Jorge Perez. Avila’s actions at the May
ninth meeting were the primary motivation behind 18 aldermen’s July
request for an investigation into his conduct.

Avila and Diaz further angered City Hall by voting against DeStefano’s
most recent budget, his first not to pass the aldermanic board with
unanimous approval. Meanwhile, all three Fair Haven aldermen supported
state representative Martin Looney in his primary campaign against the
Mayor last fall. The Mayor’s office in turn got behind Avila and Diaz’s
opponents in the last aldermanic race, and supported candidates running
against their allies for control of the ward co-chairs and the
management team. The 95th district race provided an ideal opportunity
to crush Avila and install a mayoral ally from across town and lay the
groundwork for unseating Avila in the next aldermanic election.

But regardless of which side has dirtier hands, Avila and Diaz have
sacrificed their capacity for effective leadership by becoming so
adversarial towards City Hall. Community leaders who have worked with
the aldermen say that a productive dialogue is difficult, if not
impossible, in the face of their uncompromising opposition to
integration into citywide development plans.

The Grand Avenue Vendor’s Association (gava) is a prime example of the
need for such a dialogue between City Hall and local leadership. At
their last meeting, some of gava’s 54 members expressed frustration
with the drug dealers loitering on the corner of Poplar and Grand. As a
result, co-founder Norma Franceschi set up a meeting with the chief of
police. Franceschi says gava often gives business owners leverage
against negligent landlords by enlisting lci on their behalf.

The association’s success in improving economic conditions on Grand
Avenue is helping to attract businesses to Fair Haven, underscoring the
benefits that can come from a working relationship with City Hall.
Avila and Diaz say they agree that cooperation is important—but they
want it on their own terms, a condition that gava clearly violates.
Their bargaining position, unfortunately, is not too strong. As Desmond
described the situation: “This is Fair Haven, not a banana republic.
Raul is not the big mob boss he thinks he is.”

The divisiveness of the insiders-only rhetoric used by some of Avila
and Diaz’s supporters was on display at the town council meeting called
to elect Martinez’s successor. Despite the overwhelming support for
Candelaria indicated three days earlier in a straw poll convened by
former 95th District Representative Andrea Jackson-Brooks, Avila’s
supporters sharply rebuked those voting for the mayor’s candidate.
“Someone said you guys have to do what I say,” Fuentes told the group.
“This has to do with a vendetta by a certain elected official. Everyone
should stand for themselves.”

The next night, Jackson-Brooks shook her head at the show of acrimony.
“They basically called everyone there a puppet,” she said. “You don’t
make friends and influence people by calling them names.” Bret Bissell,
executive director of the Fair Haven Housing Initiative, says he and
other developers quickly tired of playing Avila and Diaz’s games. Their
philosophy on nonprofit funding for Fair Haven is clear, he said: “They
would rather have it not come than not be in control of it.”

Yet for all the talk of a spontaneous wave of community opposition to a
corrupt and ineffectual leadership, the role of the mayor’s office in
catalyzing opposition is difficult to ignore. “The vote did not beat
Raul. The machine beat Raul,” Avila’s Republican challenger Acevedo
said before the election. “They chose to isolate Raul not because he’s
doing a bad job but because he won’t work with them.” Isolation in city
politics, where every proposal for funding or a new foundation has to
go through a dozen layers of bureaucracy, is akin to political
impotence. “If he is ineffective, why? Because the city is shutting him
off,” said Ward 14 co-chair Nancy Pascale, who was one of only five
votes in support of Avila for the 95th district nomination. “Why do I
have to be a puppet to get what I want for my neighborhood? That’s not
right.”

In their own defense, Avila and Diaz justify their opposition to the
mayor’s development initiatives in the last four years as the result of
a difference in philosophy, rather than mere obstructionism. They claim
that the mayor’s proposals were drafted without the input of local
officials and without the necessary understanding of Fair Haven’s
needs. As the mayor’s office demands stricter allegiance in exchange
for its support, explained Diaz, aldermen have begun to forsake the
long-standing tradition of deferring to the local politician on issues
affecting his or her ward. Avila, Diaz and, until her recent change of
political heart, Kroogman, have fiercely defended their turf.

“I support government spending that fosters self-sufficiency and allows
people to build wealth within their own communities,” Avila said in an
email shortly before Election Day. “I have used my influence to
negotiate better outcomes on those projects that do not fit that
definition.” A big part of the problem is that some Fair Haven
residents, like Ora Lee Dortshe, are deeply suspicious of outside
efforts to develop their community. They see outside nonprofit
organizations and Yale alumni as fly-by-night reformers, interested in
using Fair Haven as a guinea pig for their social development projects
without truly understanding the community’s complex social and economic
dynamics. “If you are the director of an agency, at 5 o’clock you get
in your car and go back to your nice suburb. We’re the ones here
hearing the gunshots and seeing the traffic and the overcrowding,” said
Diaz. It is easy to direct this distrust towards City Hall, especially
given that three of the top officials in the mayor’s current
administration—Julio Gonzalez, Robert Smuts, and Henry Fernandez—are
young Yale graduates.

Certainly, it is not hard to perceive a double standard in City Hall’s
decisions about when to blow the whistle. New Haven doles out over $7
million in development money annually; with a finite pool of political
players and plenty of red tape to obscure the mechanisms by which
funding is allocated, scandal can be found in almost any corner. “It
all depends who has the power and who they decide to attack,” Diaz
said. He points out that other housing development agencies have been
found guilty of much more egregious mismanagement; key mayoral
supporters such as Johnny Martinez have been rewarded with top
positions in City-run agencies; and many of City Hall’s ground forces
have been composed of people with questionable backgrounds.

It is City Hall’s superior manpower, access to funding, and sway over
local media that make renegade politics so untenable. Without the
support of the mayoral administration and the agencies beneath its
umbrella, development is all but impossible. Instead of assigning blame
for the logjam, however, Fair Havenites would do well to concentrate on
the best way to break through it—before any more of their neighborhood
goes up in flames.

Paige Austin, a freshman in Davenport College, is on the staff of TNJ.