Edge Of Darkness,Dance again by John Rowland

When I write about John Rowland, I know I'm out on a creaky limb and that some people will say: "You just hate the guy because he has your old radio time slot." I can say two things. The first is that what I feel about Rowland today is what I felt circa 1994 when I playfully started calling him "the Prince of Darkness" on the radio. I've been told on good authority that this started to get on his nerves when a little kid at a country fair tugged his mother's sleeve and said, "Look, Mom! It's the Prince of Darkness." The second is that I need things to write about in order to stay employed and Rowland has been a figure of Rooseveltian amplitude. He has kept me working over the years, and I am not an ingrate. Last week he was the gift that keeps on giving as news slowly trickled out — as it so often does from Castle Rowland — about how he had once again done those these things which he ought not to have done. Specifically, he had been doing work for the Republican congressional campaign of Lisa Wilson-Foley. But then the campaign assured us he received no pay. His radio employer, WTIC-AM, assured us that they had been assured that he received no pay and that he would not discuss that congressional race on the air. But then it turned out that Rowland had received pay until quite recently from a company Wilson-Foley's husband presides over. But then it turned out that, two years ago, Rowland had approached a different candidate in the same district and offered to work for him and suggested being paid through a nonprofit animal shelter founded by that candidate. I know! It's like a LeCarre novel, right? Clearly, they let him out too early. Sending John Rowland to prison for 10 months is like sending Lindsay Lohan to rehab for an afternoon. They didn't really give him enough time to reform himself. On Wednesday, after the threat of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, the Wilson-Foley campaign released Rowland's contract with Foley's company, which paid him $30,000 over six months. To believe that this was not a surreptitious way of paying him for campaign work, you have to believe that a) he knows something running a short-term nursing home company that it does not know about itself and b) that the resemblance between this and the pay-me-through-your-animal-shelter scheme he proposed to Mark Greenberg in 2010 is purely a coincidence. Now consider the claim that Rowland, while under this contract that nobody knew about, did not talk about the campaign on the air. Wilson-Foley's strongest rival for the nomination is state Sen. Andrew Roraback. During this period, on his radio show, Rowland beat Roraback like a rented mule. On one occasion, he invited Roraback on as a guest and then berated him. When you book a radio guest, you usually get his cellphone number. Rowland in ensuing weeks took to flogging Roraback for his stance on the death penalty and then — wait for it — gave out Roraback's cellphone number on the air so that especially angry people could call him. In recent days, it has dawned on Roraback that he was attacked simultaneously by Wilson-Foley and Rowland in pretty much identical ways while Rowland was being paid by Wilson-Foley's husband. "There was no disclosure," he told me. "Had I known that the governor was in the employ of my opponent's husband, I might have been better prepared for what was in the offing." Way back in 1994, some fine reporters discovered some contracts Rowland got right after leaving the very congressional seat Wilson-Foley is now seeking. The contracts were from defense companies, and it was very hard to figure out whether they were paying Rowland to lobby (which was illegal) or, really, what he was doing for them. It has happened again and again since that time, often providing government investigators and journalists with the sense that they are in the hall of mirrors shoot-out at the end of "Lady from Shanghai." I write this with a smile. Welcome back, sweet prince. It's as if you were never gone.

 http://articles.courant.com/2012-04-27/news/hc-op-mcenroe-rowland-contract-wilson-foley-suspic-20120427_1_john-rowland-rowland-today-wilson-foley-campaign