6 days Ago By Jim Flynn
Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket. The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.
S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker. Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.
How much she has charged for these services is not known. The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to the Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and Jamaica.
Geter-Pataky told the Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When the Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no. If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country.
And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care? After all, New Haven is a “sanctuary city,” Connecticut a “sanctuary state,” and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city’s “sanctuary” ordinance. (So much for “If you see something, say something.”) The clerk retired rather than be fired.
After the Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with the latter racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee. As the Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump’s election as president.
“Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just,” the mayor said. “We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive.” By “all” the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law.
How “right and just”! Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter.
Journalists at the state Capitol should press Gov. Ned Lamont about it too. But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.
People not on government’s payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y..
As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have. Their martyrdom has given the country a metaphor for its government – assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, like immigration and public safety. Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.
Chris Powell (cpowell @ cox.net) has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years..
