UPDATED: Meet the new neighbors, Part 4

Trying to understand the Copar Quarry

And why they make Charlestown and Westerly town officials look like idiots
By Will Collette

Connecticut-based Copar Quarries is Charlestown’s newest business, granted a business license to run a the former Morrone sand and gravel site on Route 91 without paying a fine for operating for three months without a license. 

Granted a license even though their Bradford quarry has been so obnoxious that our Town Council passed a resolution condemning Copar and posted it on the town website.

Granted a license even though, with great flourish and political drama, Town Council boss Tom Gentz declared just last Monday that the Council will send a letter to Attorney General Peter Kilmartin asking the AG to investigate - and I'm not making this up - why Westerly hasn't cracked down on Copar.

Copar's Rhode Island operations have been cited by federal, state and local agencies several dozen times for violating environmental, zoning and safety laws. It appeals every government sanction and fine and apparently thinks it can get away with ignoring not just the law, but any reasonable standard for ethical business behavior.

In this “Meet the New Neighbors” series, I hope I have helped readers to understand why Copar seems to have such a casual attitude toward the law by revealing the backgrounds of Copar’s key players. It also helps explain why both Charlestown and Westerly town governments have been such helpless doofuses in trying to deal with them.

In this episode, we’ll take a look at Copar’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Cocopard who is currently on probation after being convicted earlier this year for the latest in over two dozen cases of financial crimes. His record makes him just the kind of guy to lead his team which includes:

Phil Armetta (photo courtesy of Stephen
Devoto and the Middletown Eye News)

Phil Armetta, profiled in Part One, who runs a waste disposal empire in Connecticut, who served federal prison time and whose office in Middletown CT serves as Copar’s headquarters. Armetta specializes in taking old quarry sites and converting them into waste disposal or “recycling” sites, such as the Kleen Energy site in Middletown, CT that blew up in 2010 and killed six workers.

Randy Roberge, profiled in Part Two. Roberge is listed as Copar’s “resident agent” for its Rhode Island businesses, except Roberge doesn’t reside in Rhode Island. Roberge is also Copar’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Roberge was also CFO of the Mortgage Lenders Network (MLN), one of the sub-prime mortgage wheeler-dealer companies whose demise helped drag down the US economy. Because of his role as CFO for MLN, the Connecticut Banking Commissioner deemed him as lacking the character and integrity to hold a mortgage broker’s license.

Daniel Thibodeau, profiled in Part Three. Thibodeau is Copar’s company Controller. Thibodeau ran three companies that built and managed condominium complexes until the Connecticut Attorney General prosecuted him for defrauding his clients. His companies went belly up. He declared bankruptcy. He has had four federal and state tax liens placed against him. He is responsible for handling Copar’s financial and accounting matters.

You might wonder who would want to put people like these into top executive positions in any company.

The answer is Sam Cocopard, a guy who has been busted for thirty different financial crimes, has been frequently convicted and has served jail time himself.

Would you buy a used vacuum
cleaner from this guy?

I found a short reference to one of his crimes in the Hartford Courant, described as a “phony stock scam” where Cocopard, who at the time was running a vacuum cleaner store, sold bogus securities to a local woman, robbing her of $5,000. He was sentenced to one year and two years’ probation.

I asked the Clinton Police Department for the police record which they sent me. Click here to read it. It’s very colorful reading, as the arresting officer describes how Cocopard perpetrated the scam. Note that the police whited-out the names of innocent parties. Even with those redactions, it’s pretty easy to get the gist.

But it was this passage from the Clinton PD arrest report that really caught my eye:

So I went back into the Westlaw database (subscription required) and found that yes indeed Cocopard was arrested for larceny, check-kiting, failure to appear and probation violations. He was found guilty in all but one case.

I also went into the Connecticut court systems free database for recent cases and discovered yet another listing:

Since this is a fresh case, with a verdict rendered only last January and a conditional discharge (i.e. probation that extends into 2014), I wanted to see the entire case file.

My thanks to Stephen Devoto who blogs for Middletown Eye News, a micro-local website similar to Progressive Charlestown. Stephen has been following the activities of Copar principal Phil Armetta for years and has graciously shared information and photos with Progressive Charlestown.

I asked him to pull the court records on this case, and he did (again, thank you, Stephen). Click here to read them.

According to these court records, Cocopard scammed $20,000 from Joseph Vinagro, one of Rhode Island’s top waste haulers, Patriot Haulers. You've probably seen their trucks in the area.

In 2009, Sam Cocopard offered to sell Joe Vinagro several tons of gravel at between $2 and $3 a yard from a farm in Sterling CT. Vinagro gave Cocopard two $10,000 checks which Cocopard promptly cashed.

However, he didn’t deliver the gravel. According to the report by Connecticut State Trooper Adam Brown (again, here’s the link to the court records which include Trooper Brown’s sworn affidavit), Vinagro went to the site Cocopard identified as the site for his gravel pit. Vinagro found the farm entrance chained and padlocked. He attempted to write to Cocopard at the address in Chester CT given to him by Cocopard as his business address and the letter was returned stamped “box closed.”

Vinago caught Cocopard at his home. They had words and Cocopard promised to pay Vinagro back in $5,000 increments, but didn’t. Each time Vinagro would call to ask where his money was, according to Trooper Adams, Cocopard would answer “the check is in the mail.” I'm not making this up - it's in the affidavit.

Cocopard admitted to Trooper Adams that he did take the $20,000 in checks and cashed them. He claimed that Vinagro knew that Cocopard didn’t actually own the site where the gravel was supposed to come from when he wrote the checks. Cocopard said that he had obtained a lease on the property, but needed to pay the farmer. Also, according to Cocopard, he wasn’t aware that the town of Sterling had placed a “cease-and-desist” order on the site. 

If you read through Trooper Adams’ affidavit, Cocopard’s retelling of events was quite an ever-evolving story.

Cocopard claimed that everything had all been straightened out and that he would like to continue to do business with Joe Vinagro. According to Trooper Adams, Vinagro thought about it for a few days, but then said he didn’t trust Cocopard so he wanted to go ahead with the criminal complaint.

Cocopard said he felt he committed no crime and that if he was charged, he “could easily win this case in court.”

Trooper Adams filed his report and asked for an arrest warrant which he got and executed. As the short blurb from the Connecticut court database says, Cocopard was convicted on January 24 after Cocopard pleaded no contest. You can see his signed plea in the court records.

Before Cocopard leased the Bradford quarry site from the Comolli Family’s Westerly Granite in September 2010, and before he took over the Morrone sand and gravel site in Charlestown in March 2013, Cocopard and his associates were Connecticut’s problem.

Now they are our problem. Town officials in Westerly and Charlestown, and the state DEM, have found themselves ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the likes of Copar, which seems to brush away all attempts by state and local agencies to enforce the law.

But if you look at the histories of Copar’s main players, you can begin to understand why.

Neither Charlestown nor Westerly have provisions in their town ordinances that require business license applicants or town contractors to demonstrate good character (called “bad actor” laws in many jurisdictions). While you can’t retroactively apply such a law to an existing business (like Copar), it seems to be a good idea for the towns to enact bad actor ordinances to keep out future Copars.

However, Charlestown really dropped the ball when Copar moved into Charlestown. Our town officials knew they were bad actors, knew they had taken over Morrone's even before I was able to publicly confirm it and knew they didn't have a business license. And did NOTHING except post a worthless resolution on the town's website and this new decision to send a letter to Attorney General Kilmartin complaining about Westerly.

SHAME on Charlestown town government and especially Council Boss Gentz for failing to protect Charlestown citizens from a company they themselves have condemned.

The best way to deal with the Copars of the world is to not let them into the community in the first place. Once in, they dig in like ticks so the best approach is to apply lots of corporate DEET to keep them away.