Harp Camp Cries Fraud; Paca Cries Foul

After Marcus Paca stopped paying her to help him become mayor, Priscilla Knox switched sides — and became the central witness in an allegation of fraud.

Knox, an unemployed Edgewood resident with a résumé of campaign work and criminal convictions, signed an affidavit submitted to the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) to support allegations that Paca’s campaign broke the law in collecting signatures of voters to qualify for the Sept. 12 Democratic mayoral primary election ballot.

In the process, she fulfilled a promise she said she delivered to Paca if he ever decided to ​“play with my money”: ​“I’m going to fuck you up the ass with no grease, and it’s gonna hurt.”

The campaign of Mayor Toni Harp, the party-endorsed Democrat who’s seeking a third term, put together and submitted the complaint, including the affidavit Knox signed.

The Harp campaign’s deputy manager, Rick Melita, submitted the complaint to the SEEC on Aug. 31.

It details allegations that signature-gatherers like Knox had members of a household sign the names of other members who weren’t home.

“After reviewing petitions submitted by Marcus Paca,” Melita wrote, ​“the Harp Campaign has discovered numerous discrepancies that require attention from your office. We also believe that, based on sworn affidavits that we have obtained, further investigation into this matter is required. If our understanding of the facts is correct, then there have been very serious violations of Connecticut’s elections laws by the Paca campaign.”

Paca denied all the allegations. He called the Harp campaign’s complaint ​“a laughable, desperate attempt by the Harp campaign to prevent a competitive election that thousands of city voters have demanded.” He also said he is collecting affidavits from ​“city employees, elected officials and citizens” who state that they experienced ​“intimidation and harassment by the the mayor’s office” on connection with the campaign.

“Harp’s campaign is obviously very nervous about the Sept. 12th primary,” Paca stated.

The SEEC complaint lists a number of alleged violations, including an accusation that some Paca supporters collected signatures on petitions that were then submitted and signed by other people who claimed to have circulated the petitions. But the heart of the complaint — the allegation that potentially impacts hundreds of signatures — centers on Priscilla Knox and her paid signature-gathering, a mercenary aspect of political campaigning that rarely emerges into broader view.

2009 Connection

By both Knox’s and Paca’s accounts, Knox first worked for Paca when he ran for alder in 2009 in the Edgewood neighborhood’s Ward 24. He defeated 11-term incumbent Liz McCormack in a primary that year and won the seat, serving a two-year term before losing to a different candidate, Evette Hamilton, in 2011.

Back then, Knox was enamored of the vision Paca articulated, she recounted in an interview Wednesday on the porch of her Elm Street residence. ​“He had big dreams for this ward,” she said. ​“I instantly got on his team. We worked and worked and worked and beat Liz McCormack,” a 22-year fixture in city politics.

Knox said Paca paid her only $50 for working on that campaign, less than she’d expected. ​“I let it go, because that was his first term,” she explained. ​“I figured we’d get him another term, and he’d get everything in order.”

But Knox quickly soured on Paca. She said he stopped coming around her part of Edgewood. ​“He did nothing for the streets,” she said. ​“How can you expect me to be knocking on doors and you’re not visible? It’s not possible. I can’t do all the work by myself.”

Still, Knox said she tried to get out the vote for Paca’s 2011 reelection campaign, as they fended off a tough challenge from Evette Hamilton, part of a slate that won seats citywide with the backing of Yale’s unions.

“I busted my behind for him, because he was not around,” Knox said. Paca lost in the Democratic primary, earning 228 votes against Hamilton’s 312. (He then attempted to win as a write-in candidate in the November general, but the state ruled none of the submissions counted.) Paca paid Knox $100 that year, she said.

2017 Reconnection

When 2017 rolled around, Knox claimed, Paca asked for her help, a claim the Paca campaign rebuts, saying Knox came asking for a job. She recalled feeling that Harp would win the race anyway, but she agreed to do it for some extra cash. ​“I did it for the money, not because I believed in him,” she said. ​“Any bit of money comes in handy.”

Here’s how Knox remembers the conversation, she told the Independent: ​“I said, ​‘Marcus, listen. Don’t play with my money. Because if you play with my money, I’m going to fuck you up the ass with no grease, and it’s gonna hurt. Don’t play with my money.’ He was like, ​‘Priscilla, you know I got your back.’ I said, ​‘OK,’ and he said, ​‘I already got money I’m saving to pay everybody.’ I said, ​‘Fine.’”

Paca said in an interview this week that he hired Knox to give her a chance because she has had personal struggles. He said she is the only petitioner his campaign paid.

“She told me she was in dire need of money. I help people when they ask for help if I can. She was the only person who got paid for signatures. Everyone else was volunteers. The only reason she got paid was because I’m compassionate,” Paca said. ​“I care about people I wanted to help her. It goes to show: You can’t help everybody.”

(It is legal to pay people to collect signatures, though the practice sometimes gets candidates in trouble.)

Unemployed, Knox said she has disability insurance for the lung disease she got from smoking cigarettes. ​“I’ve done drugs, and I’ll be the first to admit it,” she said. ​“But I’ve been clean since 2008. If they want to pull a urine or a hair sample or whatever they want, they can pull it. I don’t got nothing to hide.”

“I have no drug charges on my record, ever,” Knox said. ​“Not one. I have a lot of assaults and breach of peaces, and I was doing prescriptions for people before, but I have no drug charges.” According to state court records, Knox has been convicted for several misdemeanors, including prostitution in 2008 and breach of peace in 2012; she was also found guilty of misdemeanor possession of an illegal drug in 2014 and felony forgery and possession of narcotics in 2015. She received conditional discharges for all the offenses, meaning she didn’t do jail time.

In negotiations over her work for this year’s mayoral petition drive, Knox said, Paca agreed to pay her $500, although he didn’t specify exactly what she needed to do to earn that sum. On the first day of canvassing, Knox remembered Paca ​“making a deal” with her. ​“He said, ​‘Priscilla, if you get me 100 signatures today, I’ll look out for you.’ When I called his wife Mendi [Blue], I had 140 signatures, because I know how to do this and I do it damn well,” she said.

For the next two weeks, canvassing from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Knox collected two dozen pages of petitions. How many were double-signed? ​“A lot of them,” she said. ​“I don’t know how many, but I know it was a lot of them.”

According to Knox’s statement, written and notarized on Aug. 23, Paca instructed her to collect multiple signatures from each individual, by asking them to add their own name to the petition and then forge it for others, so long as they knew the person’s name, date of birth and address.

“He told me it was okay to have people double-sign,” Knox said in Wednesday’s interview with the Independent. What’s that mean? ​“If you already signed the petition for [Paca] to get on the ballot, sign it again,” she explained. ​“You got a sister and a brother and an aunt and an uncle? You can sign their names, too.”

That was illegal, Knox knew, she said in Wednesday’s interview. In fact, the petitions she signed state in a bold all-capital letters: ​“IT IS A CRIME TO SIGN THIS PETITION IN THE NAME OF ANOTHER PERSON WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY TO DO SO.” Knox said she followed her boss’s orders. ​“He said that to me one time, and I did what he said,” Knox noted.

One example: Knox said she asked LaQuita Norris to sign twice, adding an extra line for her mother, Janette Menafee, who lives on the other end of Pendleton Street. On Wednesday afternoon, through a front door she refused to open, Menafee told the Independent that she didn’t sign anything and doesn’t plan to vote this year. In the evening, in a phone conversation with the Independent, Norris admitted that she’d signed for her mother, and she apologized. ​“I didn’t think it was a big thing. I’m thinking like they need time to collect signatures, to help them out,” she explained. Norris questioned whether the law is too strict. In another context, she added, ​“If I was [my mom’s] responsible party, which I am — there’s not something wrong with her or anything — they would have told me to sign.”

“That’s on her. That’s not on me,” Paca said of Knox Thursday when told of that example. ​“I didn’t tell her to do that.”

According to her affidavit, Knox convinced someone to double or triple their signatures on almost every one of the 26 sheets — about 600 names — that she filled out for the Paca campaign, gathered from the Edgewood neighborhood, Bella Vista high-rises and Whalley Avenue commercial corridor.

Didn’t she ever worry about getting in trouble for breaking the law? ​“No. [Paca] can get in trouble, not me,” she answered. ​“I ain’t running for mayor; he is.”

A review of Paca petitions on file at the City Clerk’s office showed that Knox signed and submitted 31 pages of signatures, most of them with all 20 lines for signatures filled out.

On Aug. 9, the Paca campaign submitted its last petitions totaling around 3,200 signatures. Five days later the Registrar of Voters Office certified 1,910 of those signatures as valid. That got him over the top: He needed 1,852 validated signatures to make the Sept. 12 primary ballot.

“You Ain’t Gonna Bullshit Me Out Of My Money”

After she completed her work, Knox and Marcus ended up in a dispute over her payment.

Knox said she was told that paychecks were supposed to be ready at Paca’s Grand Avenue campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, Aug. 9, at 4 p.m. — the filing deadline for all petitions. Instead, a guy met her in a Walgreens parking lot later that evening offering $65, she said. Knox called Paca, and eventually got the guy to hand over $200.

Knox flew into a rage. ​“I worked for it; it’s mine,” she recalled. ​“My damn feet hurt plenty of days walking and knocking, back and forth.” She ripped the Paca sign from her front lawn and ​“flung that shit so far across the street I didn’t care where it landed,” she said. ​“It’s not my fault you and your damn wife got fired from the mayor’s office and you got no damn job. But you ain’t gonna bullshit me out of my money. It ain’t gonna work for me, and it damn sure ain’t gonna work for you.”

She aired the dispute on social media: A Facebook post from that Thursday evening that’s still up reads, “[F]ake ass candidates never WIN as long as I’m around.”

Paca called Knox down to headquarters the next day to write her a check for an additional $120, the last installment to come through, she said.

Paca this week denied Knox’s version of events. He provided the Independent with a ​“contract for services rendered” (pictured below) that has a signature from Knox. It states that she ​“was paid in full” a total of $400, for her work plus $100 for expense reimbursements. The payment is confirmed in the latest campaign finance disclosure statement Paca’s campaign filed this week.

Payback

As promised, Knox sought to make Paca pay for the money dispute.

Knox contacted Harp’s campaign to tell her story. Melita (who is on leave from his job as a Harp administration legislative liaison) paid her a visit. Knox told him about how Paca allegedly told her to have people sign on behalf of family members.

“He said he was going to pay me between 500 and 550, and he didn’t do it. He gypped me,” Knox told Melita. ​“He gave me $320 altogether.”

Melita recorded their conversation. Here’s how part of it went:

Knox: Everybody was doing it. And he knew of it.
Can I get a job with Toni Harp? I need a job.

Melita: Let’s deal with this first. Then we’ll figure it out. I can’t make any promises. Let’s deal with this first and see what we can do.

Just to be honest with you, on the back of that page, where you had to sign it yourself? You saw where it says I did this correctly?

Knox: Yes. Everybody signed the back of their page.

The pair did go to a nearby bank to have a written statement notarized, and it became part of the SEEC complaint.

Click on the above audio file to hear the full recorded conversation.

Meanwhile, Knox has put a Harp sign in front of her home. She said Wednesday that she agreed to the SEEC statement so ​“the world would see that Marcus Paca is full of dog shit.”

What would she do if Paca covered the money she claimed that he still owes her? ​“If he paid me, I’d take it. I would and tell him to go straight to hell right after,” Knox said. ​“I already told everybody in my neighborhood, if you vote for him, you’re gonna turn into a pillar of salt.”

For $10 an hour, Knox works 20 hours a week for the Harp campaign, she said. At this week’s mayoral candidate debate, Knox took a seat close to the stage, so she could be seen ​“clowning” her nemesis, she said. Her latest taunt: ​“He talked, ​‘We’re trying to get new jobs.’ How you gonna get new jobs when you can’t even pay me, when I worked for you to get on the ballot?”

The Harp campaign failed to meet a deadline to this week to file its latest campaign finance disclosure report, which would have included records of payments to Knox.

Melita confirmed that Knox is on the campaign payroll.

“She was hired after the affidavit,” he said. ​“There was no quid pro quo. We are not paying her to testify against Marcus.”

Jefferson Accused

The Harp campaign’s SEEC complaint also alleges that at an event on Aug. 6 at Lincoln-Bassett School, a Hamden man named Edward Jefferson circulated a petition for Paca’s campaign and obtained the signature of Claudine Chambers (a city paraprofessional workers union president). The petition submitted to the Registrar of Voters had the name of a female circulator, not Jefferson’s name. The SEEC complaint includes a signed statement by Chambers that a man obtained her signature. It also includes a statement by Harp campaign supporter (and deputy city community services chief) Sheila Carmon that she observed Jefferson obtaining the signature. The complaint also includes a photo of him collecting signatures. The SEEC complaint includes a third allegation, that a city employee signed a Paca petition circulated by the sister of the person who actually submitted and signed it as the supposed circulator.

In denying the allegations, Paca noted that Carmon donates money to Harp and works for her in City Hall.

Edward Jefferson could not be reached for comment. His wife Nichole, a former city Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO) chief who filed a state labor complaint against Mayor Harp for firing her, released a statement on their behalf.

“This complaint continues a pattern of harassment against my family by the Toni Harp Administration. The State of Connecticut Appeals Referee determined that the Administration engaged in a ​‘witch hunt’ against me,” Nichole Jefferson wrote.

“I am very concerned that a top-ranking official in her Administration and large campaign donor followed my family and I around taking pictures of us in private settings. I will be contacting my lawyer to discuss any violations of our personal privacy rights that the Harp Administration may have violated. Their continued harassment and intimidation is personal and relentless. I continue to pray that this entire ordeal will soon be over. The harassment, the character assassination and the everyday division of our community must stop.”

The Jeffersons did not respond to a question of whether not Edward Jefferson obtained Chambers’ signature on a petition that a different alleged circulator signed.

The SEEC does not comment on complaints it receives until deciding at a board meeting whether to launch an investigation. Its next scheduled meeting is Sept. 20.

Melita said the Harp campaign is not ​“at this time” seeking any injunction or planning to take any further actions on the issue before next Tuesday’s primary.

Paca, for his part, vowed that ​“my campaign will not allow this intentional distraction to keep me from addressing the issues of New Haveners.”