Hope for a White-Collar Criminal

After a great hike today at Mt. Tom in Litchfield, we were famished and needed to eat. Since all we had were Twizzlers and kid fruit snacks, we stopped in the village and ate at a very good, very unpretentious little Italian joint, DiFranco's, on West Street.

(I do have to admit that I salivated while passing by the West Street Grill, one of Connecticut's finest and most critically acclaimed restaurants. I've had some of my best meals - although worst service - there.)

So we're set to leave, get the kids packed in the car and I notice a guy who looks familiar. Dressed in a blue Polo sweater, wearing sunglasses, the man had a recognizable profile. I turned to my wife and said, "Look, John Rowland."

He was going into the West Street Grill, for a late lunch.

He looked sharp. Well groomed. Cool as the days when he was governor.

Rowland resigned from office in 2004 in the midst of a corruption investigation and he later served 10 months in federal prison.

He has, however, returned to the public arena. In 2008, he was hired by Waterbury's mayor as the city's economic development coordinator. The position pays him $95,000.

I don't think about criminals much, and white-collar criminals obviously are different than violent criminals. They are more suave and savvy, more connected, and better educated. They're also generally nonviolent.

So it shouldn't have surprised me to see Rowland in Litchfield center, in front of a posh restaurant (while I was at the cheap place down the street!). But to see the man who had been through the ringer, prison time, and an intense media storm, resurface and succeed is pretty remarkable.

I mean, he served his time, and he's allegedly trying to counsel others and speak publicly of his failures in order to help others. There has been a mild uproar about the fact that he's a public employee again, and earning a generous salary, too.

But as much as I wanted to say, "Hey! This isn't right! Rowland's a criminal!", he doesn't deserve that. Although he was definitely shady in the way he conducted business as governor, awarding state contracts to friends, receiving free home improvements, including the infamous hot tub on Bantam Lake, which is in Litchfield, he's human. He seems to have realized and learned from his mistakes.

I would imagine that Rowland will one day rise up through the ranks again, and he at some point will earn more than $95,000. He will one day be bigger than Waterbury's economic development director.

But in the meantime, he seemed pretty content eating lunch on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Litchfield, earning a decent living, and perhaps pondering his next step.