HARTFORD, Conn. _ Paul Manafort, the influential lobbyist who was charged Monday with multiple federal crimes in a 12-count indictment, remained largely unknown to the general public until taking over in mid-2016 as Republican Donald Trump's campaign chairman.
But in New Britain, Conn., where the powerful operative learned the game of politics in his youth as the son of the city's popular, three-term mayor, there was dismay and anger Monday morning as word of his indictment spread.
At the Miss Washington Diner in New Britain, where many of the city's longtime residents gather for coffee and breakfast to talk sports and politics, Butch Dzwonkowski shook his head sadly when a reporter told him about Manafort's indictment.
"I'm disappointed in him," Dzwonkowski said. "I knew his father well _ I was an alderman for 18 years, and I knew the father, a good man."
"Anybody from New Britain does something good, I'm usually proud. But I'm disappointed Paul Manafort got involved in this," Dzwonkowski said. "Every time something gets done wrong, it's done in the name of money."
Some residents worry that Manafort's troubles will harm the city's reputation. At the New Britain Downtown District offices, executive director Gerry Amodio said he fears some in the public will think of New Britain in connection with the indictment.
"No resident of any town likes to hear when someone from their town is caught up in this kind of stuff," Amodio said.
As she stopped at Amodio's office on an errand, library director Pat Rutkowski agreed.
"Unfortunately, it all falls back on New Britain," she said. "It shouldn't. He's been out of the city for a very long time."
Former Connecticut Republican chairman Richard Foley, a longtime colleague of Manafort, said he believes that the indictment is the first step in the process for special prosecutor Robert Mueller and is being used as leverage to convince Manafort to provide information on others.
As friends from their college days, Foley has known Manafort for four decades and expects him to fight the charges.
"He's a man of personal strength," Foley said of Manafort, now 68. "He's a man of great intelligence. He's not a guy to cut and run. He's a guy to stick it out. I expect a strong, full-throated defense."
The 31-page, 12-count grand jury indictment does not mention Trump or the presidential campaign. Instead, it focuses on charges of tax evasion and money laundering from Manafort's extensive lobbying work, saying that Manafort failed to register as a foreign agent when that is required by federal law. Prosecutors say that Manafort and his longtime associate, Rick Gates, both failed to report on their federal tax forms that they had money in foreign banks.
Both Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty Monday afternoon in federal court.
The White House attempted to distance itself from the indictments and a guilty plea announced Monday by another former campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Manafort's indictment "has nothing to do with the president, nothing to do with the president's campaign."
With 40 years of high-level political experience stretching back to President Gerald Ford's White House, Manafort tapped into his army of Republican contacts around the nation in 2016 to help build the infrastructure for the Trump campaign. His friends described him as the rare strategist who not only sees the big picture but also understands the nuts-and-bolts of a political campaign. Having known Trump since the 1980s during his days with the groundbreaking lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, Manafort also had the trust of the candidate and the experience to push forward on the strategy.
Manafort learned politics starting at the age of 10 when his father joined the New Britain Board of Aldermen.
"It certainly was a galvanizing experience," Manafort recalled of his first days in Connecticut politics. "Some of the skills that I learned there I still use today. I was about 15, 16 years old when my father first ran for mayor, and that's where I cut my teeth."
His father was a proven vote-getter from both political parties and a beloved figure in New Britain, where there is a street named after him. The elder Manafort died in 2013 at the age of 89.
Although some other family members also entered the world of politics, the Manaforts are best known for their construction business. Starting in 1919 as a demolition operation and a lumber yard, the company grew in the second generation after four brothers renamed it in 1947 as Manafort Brothers Inc. The extended family of Italian immigrants is now a fourth-generation powerhouse in construction.
Young Paul Manafort, however, was not destined for the family business. After graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in New Britain, he headed to Washington, D.C., to attend Georgetown University, graduating in 1971, and then studied at its law school three years later. Soon after, he went to work in the White House personnel office and then went to his first Republican National Convention as a delegate counter for Ford.
Friends say that Manafort learned much from his father's career in New Britain, a city of immigrants where Democrats far outnumbered Republicans.
Manafort's father "understood the Reagan Democrats before Reagan," said another Trump adviser, Roger Stone, a Connecticut native and longtime confidant of both Manafort and Trump.
Manafort said that Trump had tapped into the emotions of the American people in a way that other politicians did not.
"Like my father, Trump also understands working-class Americans," Manafort told the Hartford Courant last year. "The magic of his campaign, on his own vision and skills, was to connect with the frustrations that exist in America today. Even though he's never been involved in politics, he had a better read on the angst that Americans are feeling than any of the other 16 Republicans and four Democrats that were running for President _ and that's why he was successful."
In the interview with The Courant in June of 2016, Manafort spoke confidently about defeating Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton at a time when others were highly skeptical that Trump had a serious chance at winning. Manafort talked in detail about the biggest opportunity of his long political life: delivering the White House to Donald Trump.
"We have to execute the campaign correctly, and the candidate has got to perform. I have no doubt he will," Manafort said at the time.
"Trump is in the position to be the next president of the United States, given the mood in America today."
During the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July 2016, Manafort traveled to the hotel where the Connecticut delegates were staying to deliver a pep talk one morning before the day's convention festivities began. Many delegates gathered around to have their pictures taken with Manafort _ a political celebrity who was often the face of the Trump campaign with appearances on major networks like CNN.
Even before working for Trump, Manafort was known among a small group of lobbyists and insiders for working in Ukraine. Manafort had been criticized for being a political consultant for former Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, who has had close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has consistently complimented Putin, a former KGB officer who has clashed on major issues with the United States at times during two terms as prime minister and two terms as president.
"The role that I played in Ukraine ended up resulting in Ukraine becoming part of the European community," Manafort told The Courant. "The kind of work I did when Yanukovych was president was to get the IMF deal to put the financial solvency of the country in balance, and then for the rest of that term I worked really as a back channel with the European negotiators on the terms of the agreement that ultimately was signed that got Ukraine into Europe. It was a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of situation. There weren't too many people who could have gotten that agreement done, and Yanukovych was one of them. I was the point guy in getting it done."
Manafort maintained that he has never represented clients against American interests.
"There are a lot of campaigns in Western democracies that I've done that you don't read about," he said. "They were always in concert with U.S. foreign policy, never contrary to it. That's what gets lost in the media messaging."
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a former U.S. attorney in Connecticut who has criticized Manafort in the past, continued to blast the New Britain native.
"This indictment is a sober, shattering moment and a major step toward answers and accountability for the American people," Blumenthal said. "The President now owes the American people a serious explanation of his decision to hire Manafort and his own knowledge of this conspiracy. As this investigation moves forward into its next critical stage, Special Counsel Mueller must be protected against any political interference. The Senate Judiciary Committee must move forward with public hearings, and witnesses under oath to examine the full extent of Russian interference in our elections and how the Trump Administration may have thwarted the work of the FBI."
Blumenthal added, "This historic step is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end."
