Fact-free Diamantis media tour continues to cast journalists as scriveners. Most reporters decline to pose challenging questions about felon’s preposterous conspiracy claims or long trail of bribery evidence.

Konstantinos Diamantis is at it again. The felonious fugitive fantasist has been promoting his nutty conspiracy claims from an undisclosed location in Greece since Friday. The disgraced former deputy state budget director has had no trouble finding journalists to give him a platform where challenges to the Diamantis mythmaking are absent.

Compare the Diamantis claims of victimhood to evidence at the 2025 criminal trial that ended with his conviction on all 21 counts of the government’s May 2024 indictment of him for bribery, extortion, and making false statements. The former Democratic state representative from Bristol once claimed that a school construction contractor who was slow in paying a bribe Diamantis believed he was owed, “has no clue who I am with my back to the wall.” We do know. The trial revealed it and so has his flight to Greece before his sentencing scheduled for September 17th in federal court in Bridgeport.

Diamantis claims he was not given an opportunity to make his case. He has, however, been floating various theories on the many imagined wrongs he has suffered for five years–since he lost his job as the deputy budget director. All of his travails, he repeats, arise from a vast conspiracy with Governor Ned Lamont at its center.

What Diamantis never acknowledges is that his bribery and extortion schemes began in 2018, before Lamont became governor. As the head of the state’s school construction finance program under the Malloy administration, Diamantis had been receiving illegal payments from the principals of Acranom Masonry for work they received on the construction of Hartford’s Weaver High School. When Hartford officials complained about the quality of Acranom’s work, Diamantis intervened, resolved a city payment to the company and made sure Acranom was included in another phase of the construction.

Diamantis made his bribery rates clear and, he believed, justified. “I’m very good at what I do and always do what I say. And I always work at 5% of total. Just FYI.” At his trial, Diamantis testified that these payments were consulting fees. He did not ask for an ethics agency opinion, execute a written consulting agreement, or declare those cash payments on his income tax returns. That’s what he testified to at his trial.

Why didn’t he take any of those legally required steps? That would be an appropriate question for a reporter to ask the fugitive felon who blames Lamont and a host of others for setting him up for prosecution. Diamantis testified that he would amend his income tax returns to reflect those cash payments. Has he?

Messages Diamantis sent from his state email account revealed him seeking more financial aid than had been offered by an elite private school where he hoped his daughter would be a student. Did he submit accurate financial statements to the school? That wasn’t all. Diamantis held an event at a Southington restaurant to raise money for tuition. He squeezed more money out of Acranom for that, too.

By 2021, Diamantis was making more than $190,000 as a high-ranking state employee–plus thousands in unreported bribes. When payments he was extorting from Acranom did not arrive in paper bags in the amount or on the schedule Diamantis demanded, he wrote that the masonry company’s owner, Salvatore Monarca, “has singlehandedly ruined my life and my daughter’s wedding because I trusted him.” Monarca relayed to John Duffy, his business associate and Diamantis’s ex-brother-in-law, “We paid him 35k.” It was never enough. Diamantis wanted an “annual fee,” Duffy told his boss.

Diamantis, Duffy reported to Monarca, demanded payments be made quickly. “He has to pay bills. All this BS every other day for two weeks.”

Diamantis claimed in a voicemail to Duffy that he had $318 in his bank account and demanded $40,000. In one message, the deputy budget director said he had to “cash in change” to pay for gasoline.

In early 2019, Diamantis continued his heavy-handed management of the construction of Birch Grove Primary School in Tolland. In 2018, the school was discovered to have been built with unstable concrete that had begun to crumble. Diamantis was overseeing the project as it took shape. Testimony at the trial revealed he sought payments from Monarca and Duffy a year before they would begin their work on the new school building without having had to bid on the job. In a 2019 text to Duffy regarding Birch Grove, Diamantis wrote, “50 is fair zero is an insult to my character for you I do 44 not a penny less and tomorrow as agreed other than that tell him I am out.”

An insult to his character? Diamantis, the evidence at trial and his public statements when Lamont fired him from his job, is perpetually aggrieved. He portrayed himself as a victim when his extortion scheme did not produce cash on his schedule or in amounts he demanded. The thin-skinned thug has not stopped. His widely publicized interviews ought to include questions on the crimes he committed. When he is not blaming Lamont, judges, and lawyers, he is casting aspersions at the jury. Diamantis, a lawyer by training, scoffs that the day and a half jurors deliberated was insufficient to give a proper review to the evidence. Another insult to his character.

Diamantis faces another bribery trial later this year id federal authorities can locate and extradite him, which legal experts say may be difficult and time-consuming. The text messages in that appear to be as damning as the ones in evidence at his trial last year. His co-defendants in the second trial have entered guilty pleas in that Medicaid-related scandal. Diamantis has yet to reveal how law enforcement conspired with others to weaponize their authority to make that $95,000 bribe he allegedly received from a Bristol optometrist to stop a state audit of her Medicaid payments.

In the second trial, Judge Stefan Underhill noted that Diamantis is in a relationship with a witness and should not discuss the case with that person. Who is that witness and what is the relationship? The school construction investigation and the Medicaid audit probe began several years apart. Does Diamantis maintain that his elusive tormentors were monitoring his illicit activities all that time and somehow managed to trick him into demanding, accepting, and never reporting more bribes?

These are not complicated questions. Anyone who has watched this sorry scandal unfurl over the past four years sought to be curious about the startling details. Diamantis’s calamitous testimony at his criminal trial did not convince jurors of anything other than his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His defense was so thing that his lawyer delayed the customary opening statement until after the prosecution rested its case in chief. At no time did Diamantis or his lawyer offer evidence or an argument that he had not made false statements to federal investigators.

When the bribe money was not flowing to Diamantis as he demanded, he wrote to Duffy–who along with two others pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to the corruption scheme in 2024–that Monarca “has no clue who I am with my back to the wall.” We do know who Diamantis is with his back against the wall. He is a criminal who will commit more crimes in the crunch. You would not know that by some of the softball, even sympathetic, interviews he has been offering to journalists.

September 23, 2026.