Politics

New Haven – In a secretly videotaped encounter in 2012, then-House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden, seemed to cheerfully take credit for killing a tobacco tax bill, then recoiled from the idea seconds later.

“I took care of ya, didn’t I?” a smiling Donovan told Harry Raymond Soucy, a union friend acting on behalf of smoke-shop owners trying to keep their roll-your-own cigarette business free of state tobacco taxes.

New Haven – His name was Harry Raymond Soucy, a brash and egotistical union leader and correction officer who portrayed himself in the backroom of a Waterbury smoke shop as a political fixer able to get things done at the Connecticut State Capitol.

His solution: Bribes disguised as contributions to the top Democrat and Republican in the state House of Representatives in 2011 and 2012, including $5,000 cash he says he left in one legislator’s refrigerator at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

The state paid $1,193.07 for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to make a last-minute, overnight trip to New Orleans last month to see the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team win its eighth national championship.

Four nights later, Malloy, a hockey fan, paid his own way for an overnight trip to Pittsburgh to see the Yale University men’s hockey team crowned national champions after beating an intrastate rival, Quinnipiac University.