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14

PUSH BACK

Rich Voyles lived two doors up from Susette. He had moved into the neighborhood eleven years earlier and remodeled his home, and he had just eight years remaining on his mortgage. For him, East Street offered a dream location: a quiet, dead-end road with great neighbors and an unobstructed view of the Thames River. He kept a telescope on his porch and spent lazy afternoons looking at boats coming into and going out of Long Island Sound.

Middle-aged and balding, Voyles had recently been laid off from nearby General Dynamics, where he had helped build submarines. The loss of income had forced him to invite his brother to move in to help him keep up with the mortgage payments.

Voyles spotted Susette working in her flower bed one afternoon.

“Did you get a letter in the mail?” he asked her.

She laughed. “I have a bunch of letters.” She took him inside and showed him. None of them resembled the one he had just gotten.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. Moments later, he returned and handed her a letter addressed to him.

“The time is rapidly approaching when those fort area properties not already optioned will be moved into the governmental process,” the letter began. “The implications of this are considerable and I believe not in your best interest.

“We are empowered by the New London Development Corporation to offer you the City’s Appraised value of $67,300.” The letter outlined two conditions for getting the appraisal price raised. It continued:

We anticipate demolition and construction to begin in April with the removal of the powerhouse in Fort Trumbull, removal of unneeded buildings at the NUWC site, repairs to the City Waste Water plant, removal and remediation of the salvage yard, and ground breaking for the Pfizer building at the New London Mills property.

Rich, I am very concerned that your best opportunity will slip by for lack of action. If there is any question you might have, or any assistance I might provide, please do not hesitate to call. I want to make the inevitable dislocation as easy and stress free as possible.

The letter had come from Hamilton (Tony) Lee, a broker working for Steve Percy at the New England Real Estate Group.

“This guy can’t say this to us,” Susette said.

“Are they going to evict me?” Voyles asked, fearing he’d end up homeless if he got forced out. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, I know what I’m going to do,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m going to bring this letter to the newspaper, and everyone will see what’s going on down here. And then we’ll get help.”

Voyles let her keep the letter.

“They think they’re going to push us around,” she said. “Well, we’re going to push right back.”

Later that evening, Susette showed Voyles’s letter to Von Winkle and told him her plan. “Once this becomes public, they’ll have to stop because this is illegal,” Susette said. “They can’t do this to us.”

Von Winkle liked Voyles; he didn’t like the letter. He agreed that the public needed to know about the NLDC’s tactics. But he really didn’t think public exposure would stop it.

The next morning, Voyles’s letter ended up on the desk of a reporter covering Pfizer and the NLDC.

April 2, 1998

With a shiny silver pen in his shirt pocket and wire-rimmed glasses to go with his perfectly groomed, graying black hair, fifty-five-year-old John Markowicz could easily have passed for a chief financial officer at a Wall Street bank. With corporate experience and military training, Markowicz had been tapped to serve with Tony Basilica on the LRA. Basilica had the political and business connections in the city, while Markowicz was an expert on the defense-industry and navy regulations.

Selling off a navy installation is not easy. Over a two-year period, Markowicz had worked with Basilica to form a plan. The northern and southern tips of the base property had environmental problems that made the entire parcel unmarketable. As a result, the committee had decided to partition the thirty-two-acre base into three parcels.

The southern tip