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A Quiet Warrior For Your Right To Know

By KENTON ROBINSON
Day Staff Columnist, Enterprise Reporter/Columnist
Published on 3/7/2005

‘Whatever you do,” I told Dennie, “don't get the interview on the
reservation.”

I didn't need to explain.

The Schaghticoke Indians' sunless mountain in Kent was a battleground where
the tribe's two warring factions had been known to shoot and club each
other over the head with shovels.

One of those factions had come to The Courant with evidence the other had
squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal grants:
Copies of ledger pages and receipts suggested that money meant to grow
hydroponic lettuce had grown certain pockets instead.

This being taxpayers' money, Dennie Williams and I were left with the job
of confronting the tribal treasurer to ask her where it went.

And when Dennie told me she would meet with us only at her house on the
reservation, I could foresee our corpses stuffed in shallow graves.

Still, we went.

We were met by the treasurer, her 8-foot husband and her two 9-foot,
muscle-bound sons. As we sat at her kitchen table and produced our
evidence, they loomed over us, swigging Old Mr. Boston rum from the bottle
and growling and swearing.

“#&@%! Where'd you get that?”

Yes, I thought, we are definitely going to die.

But we persisted until it was clear she had no good answers for our
questions. Somehow, we were allowed to leave alive.

No sooner had our story run than we were sued for libel. The Schaghticokes
wanted The Courant to retract the story and to cough up a chunk of money to
make them go away.

Enter Ralph Elliot, our longtime attorney and a lifelong champion of the
First Amendment. Ralph's consuming mission was to defend people's right to
know what their government is doing. He bristled when anyone, Schaghticokes
included, tried to sue the truth out of the newspaper.

There was no way, as far as he was concerned, we were going to pay them a
dime. The case dragged on for four years before we had our day in court:
trial by jury in the Litchfield County courthouse.

Ralph was never the fire-breathing, table-pounding lawyer you see in the
television shows. He was a tall, thin, balding man of quiet gravity. He was
methodical, his logic inexorable, and he was gifted with dry wit.

He deftly sketched the contradictions in the tribal leaders' testimony. And
in cross-examination, he teased out the fact that they kept not one, but
two sets of books.

That, however, was not the coup de grace. The killing blow came when the
tribal treasurer inadvertently admitted that, well, uh, actually, there
were three.

“Three sets of books?” Ralph asked, his dark eyebrows arching over the
frames of his glasses.

“Three sets of books!” one of the jurors laughed moments later as they
filed out of the courtroom to begin their deliberations.

In minutes, they were back. The Schaghticokes, they found, had no case.

Ralph Gregory Elliott died last week at the age of 68. He had vetted dozens
of our stories at The Courant and fought for our right to print them. He
was the man behind the scenes who made our work possible. Connecticut
citizens owe him a debt they know not of.

This is the opinion of Kenton Robinson.