Dirty Hands

There is a man in Hartford whose name appears on both sides of the ledger — as counsel for the accused and, if the sworn allegations of the accused are to be believed, as the instrument of his conviction — and this man, Andrew Crumbie, has been given the authority, by a city that did not check, and amplified by a press that did not ask, to pronounce upon the moral fitness of a former mayor of New Britain, and I want to say plainly what no one in Connecticut seems willing to say, which is that Andrew Crumbie is a liar, that his lies are documented, that I have been calling him a liar in public and by name for years, and that he has never sued me, never demanded a retraction, never sent so much as a letter — because a defamation suit would mean discovery, and discovery would mean opening the files he has spent a decade hoping no one reads.

The Crumbie Law Group released, on June 4, 2026, a ninety-one-page report — ninety-one pages, the same number, as it happens, as the filing I swore against him in federal court, though I doubt anyone in New Britain noticed the symmetry — on Erin Stewart, the former mayor of New Britain, alleging she claimed $205,479.25 in severance when she was owed $16,006.20, that she billed Christmas Day as a working day, that she pursued a pension she had been told in writing she did not qualify for, that a subordinate signed authorization forms out of what the report itself describes as fear — and the report uses the words fraud, larceny, embezzlement, false statements, official misconduct, and the state police are investigating, and the FBI is investigating, and the Attorney General is investigating the Mayor’s Trophy Charitable Fund, and Mayor Danielle Sanchez halted the payments after ten of twenty installments, and maybe every word of it is true, I do not know and I am not here to defend Erin Stewart, but I know — because I lived it, because I filed it, because I swore to it under penalty of perjury in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut — that the man who wrote those ninety-one pages is a man who lied about whether he represented his own client, to a grievance board, to appellate counsel, while the plea agreement bearing the name Crumbie Law Group sat in the federal court file like a body that refuses to stay buried.

My mother came from Kingston and my father from St. Croix and between them I learned that a man is what his record says he is, not what his letterhead claims, and Crumbie’s record says this: he was my attorney in a federal wire and mail fraud case, he negotiated plea terms with AUSA Christopher Mattei, Mattei asked him to “at least get O’Garro through the plea,” and in my 2255 motion — Case 3:18-cv-01275-AWT, ninety-one pages, August 1, 2018, sitting in PACER for anyone who gives a damn — I allege that while he represented me he was himself a criminal defendant in the same courthouse, that he identified me to the government, that he fed them my confidences on a constant basis, that he steered me into meetings with prosecutors without protection, that he built the case against me from inside the privilege that was supposed to shield me from exactly that. His record also says he was arrested on April 9, 2013, by West Hartford police — strangulation, third-degree assault, disorderly conduct, interfering — his wife the complainant, ten thousand dollars bond. His record says he was demoted from the state police forensic laboratory and accused the Rell and Moody administrations of discrimination and settled in 2008. And from this, from all of this, Chief Justice Chase Rogers appointed him to the Client Security Fund Committee, which adjudicates claims against lawyers who steal from their clients, and he chairs the Citizenship Fund, and he sits on the Saint Francis Foundation board, and every appointment is a lie told in the language of respectability to a public that has been trained not to check.

CT Mirror printed his findings. NBC Connecticut broadcast them. The Daily Voice circulated them as though the words Crumbie Law Group were a seal of authority rather than a warning label. Not one of these outlets typed his name into PACER. Not one of them found my blog, where I have been writing about this man for years. Not one of them pulled the West Hartford arrest. Five minutes — that is all it would have cost them, and they did not spend it, because checking the source would have killed the story and not checking killed only the truth, and in Connecticut the truth has always been the cheaper casualty.

Crumbie is a cuck — and I use the word deliberately, because it is precise, because it describes exactly what he is: a man used by the system to deliver verdicts dressed as investigations, a man who submits to the arrangement because the arrangement feeds him, a man who will write whatever needs to be written about whoever needs to be written about, regardless of the presumption of innocence, regardless of due process, regardless of the fact that Erin Stewart has not been convicted of anything. His report reads like a sentence, not an inquiry. That is what the system hired him to produce, and that is what he produced, because that is what cucks do — they perform on command, and the commander never has to sign his name. Connecticut does not need Andrew Crumbie to find the truth. Connecticut needs Andrew Crumbie to provide the conclusion, and a liar is the perfect man for that job, because a liar has already made his peace with the distance between what is said and what is so.

The record is public. It has always been public. And the silence of every institution that has refused to read it is itself a kind of testimony — not about Erin Stewart, and not about me, but about a state that has decided, with the calm of long practice, that the performance of accountability is all the accountability it needs.