Courant Protecting Advertiser By Not Publishing $35,000 State Fine Against Aiello?

One should not jump to conclusions on why a newspaper decides to publish or not publish a particular story.

However, some of you might find it interesting that after all that happened with Aiello Plumbing of Windsor Locks, The Courant would have been smart enough to run at least two graphs about its key plumbing, heating, and cooling advertiser agreeing to pay $35,000 in fines for violating state consumer laws.

The agreement between state Consumer Protection officials and the owner and general manager of Aiello took place on Monday, when I wrote a column on it. Aiello Wednesday denied it had paid a fine or a civil penalty, despite.

Aiello General Manager Steve Birch claimed: “Primarily, Aiello did not pay any “fine.” Your reporting that we paid a “civil penalty” is incorrect,” Birch wrote to me in an email.

Birch makes that claim while the press release from Farrell says: “Michael R. Jezouit signed an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance and paid a civil penalty of $30,000; Stephen G. Birch signed a separate Assurance of Voluntary Compliance and paid a civil penalty of $5,000.”

A press release was sent out to all the media Tuesday morning. A check of The Courant Tuesday and Wednesday morning, as well as its website, has not stories about Aiello, other than for a football player named Aiello. Several hours after I published this column The Courant posted a short story on its Internet site saying Aiello executives had paid civil penalties.

Maybe it just fell through the cracks? Maybe no one thought readers would be interested that the largest plumbing company in central Connecticut – and probably the most expensive – that has advertised extensively in The Courant – had agreed that it used unlicensed professionals to do work requiring a different license, as well as other issues. The main issue was that some of Aiello’s electricians may have been doing plumbing work and visa versa.

Now for a little history. Aiello was one of three advertisers that complained about me to Courant/Fox61 publisher Richard Graziano in 2009 accusing me of picking on them while I was the newspaper’s first and probably last, investigative consumer columnist.

They wrote him a five page letter with all kinds of accusations – some true, some not . The upshot was that Jeff Levine, who was then the editor of the Courant and television station, ordered me to go to Aiello’s headquarters and be nice to the executives because lots of advertising dollars were on the line. I refused, telling Levine, who was fired this year, that it would be unethical of me to stroke an advertiser under state investigation about whom I had a number of complaints of ripping off or attempting to rip off elderly people and doing shoddy work.

I was instructed that from then on I could not write any negative columns about any major advertiser without prior approval. Not soon after that I submitted my column on the state Attorney General investigating complaints that Sleepy’s, a huge Courant advertiser, had been selling used mattresses as new, including one infested with bedbugs. Instead of immediately running a word about that investigation, my position was eliminated and I was out the door after 40 years.

I then launched CtWatchdog.com on Aug. 14, 2009 – my last day at The Courant, with the column the Courant refused to publish. A short version was published later by the newspapers.

And now, despite efforts to kill my suit, jury selection on my wrongful termination complaint is now scheduled to start in October with a trial in November.