Knox Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis broke his long silence this week, after he had stopped talking to Enterprise reporters over the phone several years ago.

Since then, he has instead required that questions be sent to him by email, a reflection of his distrust of the newspaper — a distrust that’s remarkably in line with the broader national distrust of media that nourished and was nurtured by former President Donald Trump, who stormed into national office the same year Lefkaditis stormed onto the Knox Town Board, ousting longtime Democratic Supervisor Michael Hammond.

 While he acceded to an interview with the Enterprise editor before the last election — which he won by 60 votes — Lefkaditis declined a video interview unless it was a debate.

He and his slate had won in 2019 despite Lefkaditis voting with the rest of the town board to censure himself for handing in annual financial reports years late, and despite the 2017 slate’s firing of transfer-station workers that violated Civil Service Law, causing public outcry at the time.

“Most people don’t care how the sausage was made; they care how it tastes,” Lefkadits told the editor on Election Night.

During that voice-to-voice embargo with reporters, this journalist has nevertheless spoken with Lefkaditis on the phone three times over the last two years: once, very briefly, when he answered in an apparently unwitting state and, immediately upon the reporter’s self-introduction, said, “Put it in an email,” and hung up; once more, when the reporter called him from an unusual number, having just seconds before tried unsuccessfully to reach him through the Enterprise phone line (this quasi-deceit pulled a laugh out of Lefkaditis, but the call ended much the same way as the first one). 

This week, in a twist, Lefkaditis was the one who dialed the Hilltown reporter, and what should have been a brief tet-a-tet about the particulars of a recent budget story turned into a 45-minute-long conversation, during which the supervisor reflected on his time in office and spoke freely on a number of topics — from why he didn’t seek re-election this year despite his relative youth and popularity, to why he thinks his preferred replacement, Republican endorsee Kregg Grippo, likely lost to Democrat Russ Pokorny, and why he was so bad about filing the town’s annual update documents year after year after year. 

End of an era

On his decision not to run again — something he had previously declined to discuss — Lefkaditis, who manages his own bridge loan company, Shaw Funding, said, “I’m in the process of moving my fund from New York to Florida. We’re divesting ourselves of all our New York positions,” citing what he believes to be over-taxation and government overreach. 

“I need to focus all of my time and energy on growing my fund, which has done extremely well in the last year,” Lefkaditis said. “I would have loved to have stayed in this game. I’m good at it. I just don’t have the time.”

Lefkaditis, a Democrat, first ran for office in 2015, when he was 43, on the Conservative line. He had attempted to thwart Hammond at the Democratic caucus earlier that year but failed to secure the endorsement, and he’s run each campaign since on the Republican and Conservative lines.  

The Knox Republican Party’s effort to replace him was hobbled when the original candidate, Michelle Viola-Straight, who chaired the party, had to withdraw because she learned that her campaign put her in violation of the Hatch Act, which bars certain federal employees from seeking partisan office. Viola-Straight works for a not-for-profit that handles federal money.

When Viola-Straight pulled out of the race, she also stepped down as party chair, and it’s unclear who was leading the party from that point on. Somehow, political unknown Kregg Grippo, a contractor whose primary address appeared to be in Schenectady, came to the fore as Viola-Straight’s substitute (she told The Enterprise before the election she didn’t know him very well and didn’t have a role in his selection). 

Soon after his candidacy was unveiled, though, The Enterprise reported on the vast number of Schenectady County court records that bore his name as a defendant, as well as tax delinquency lists, which altogether indicated serious instances of financial mismanagement that he refused to answer for, despite seeking an office that comes with considerable financial responsibility.

Just before the story was published, Grippo called the Albany County Sheriff’s Office to file a harassment complaint against the reporter who was running down that story. No charges were filed. 

Unofficial election results — which don’t include absentee ballots — show that Pokorny received 474 votes to Grippo’s 447, a difference of 27.

Lefkaditis said he doesn’t expect the absentee ballots to break in Grippo’s favor, because he didn’t have time to go around collecting absentee ballots on Grippo’s behalf the way Albany County Republican Party Chairman and Berne Highway Superintendent Randy Bashwinger had in that town’s election, which Republicans dominated.

“We could have won the election by 100 votes with our eyes closed, easily, if we had more time,” Lefkaditis said. On top of Lefkaditis’s own professional obligations, Grippo’s job as a building contractor had apparently occupied him from 4 a.m. until nightfall, and so the two delayed in mailing a letter that Grippo had addressed to town residents — the same strategy Lefkaditis used when he first ran for supervisor.

“He thanked Russell for pointing out the lawsuits and the bankruptcy,” Lefkaditis said, who summarized Grippo’s financial woes as a consequence of bad contracts that left him vulnerable when clients pulled out of a job. 

“According to Kregg, and I agree with him 1,000 percent, that was the best-defining moment of his career,” Lefkaditis said. “... Two of his biggest clients, when he was first starting out, reneged to the tune of $400,000, and it sent him into a tailspin.”

The Enterprise is unable to verify this second-hand account at this time, but it’s not hard to see why Lefkaditis, who had similar early-career setbacks when he was a young investment banker in New York City and says he inadvertently sold junk stock, leading to three arbitrations, would lodge his sympathies with Grippo. 

Settling

Lefkaditis’s “indiscretions” were brought up in 2017 by a former Knox board member as Lefkaditis was being challenged for supervisor by then-Councilwoman Amy Pokorny, who is married to Russell Pokorny.

Describing what went wrong, Lefkaditis told The Enterprise in 2017, “If a company wants to go public, the underwriters put together investment banking packages and put it out to the brokerage firms. It turned out, the investment bankers lied. I was merely an agent.”

This week, he reiterated his story on why he had settled.

Lefkaditis’ attorney at the time had negotiated settlement payments totaling $19,999 — a dollar less than what would have left a demerit on his license, Lefkaditis said. The attorney had done that, however, without consulting his client, he said.

 Lefkaditis recalled that he was livid at first — “a little hot-headed 21-year-old” — and he demanded that his attorney take up arms not just to defend against the angry clients, but to go after the investment bank and the clearing house. “They’re the ones with billions of dollars, not me,” Lefkaditis said he told his attorney at the time. “I’m a 21-year-old kid.”

“He said, ‘Listen to me carefully, Vas,” Lefkaditis went on. “‘You’re going to pay me $750 for every hour I’m away from my family [if we fight this]. We’re not talking 9-to-5. Even when I’m sleeping. You’re going to pay for my hotel and my airfare.’ … Then he hung up on me. I was pissed because he hung up on me, and I called him 10 times in a row. He refused to take the call.”

Eventually, Lefkaditis came around and went through with the settlements, acknowledging that his lawyer was “the nicest guy ever, a smart attorney.”

 “You know how much of a learning experience that was at 21 years old? My father was making 30 grand a year and I had to write a check for 20,” Lefkaditis said “ … That makes you stronger, faster, smarter.”

Lefkaditis credits that early failure and his put-’em-up attitude (not much tempered since those “hot-headed” days, it would seem) for his achievements as supervisor. 

“Every single invoice that comes through here gets torn up,” Lefkaditis said this week. “Every single one … I get emails from insurance companies and they say, ‘Your premium’s going to go up $1,000 this year.’ My response is, ‘No f-cking way.’ That’s what I put in my email. You think I’m kidding.”

When reminded that he had just recently sent The Enterprise a more-than-sternly worded email complaining about what turned out to be a legitimate error in a story, he laughed, betraying the fact that his aggression might be nothing more than a tactic, thunder without lightning, rolling off once it’s made its noise.

Fast and loose

But it’s that ceaseless bravado, the freewheeling, combative style — not to mention a loose handling of facts — which has earned Lefkaditis some passionate critics over the years, who accuse him of bullying and intimidation.

When Lefkaditis first took office, he was the only non-Democrat-backed member of the town board, and it didn’t take long for communication to break down between him and his colleagues.

After just five months of the newly minted supervisor’s thunderings, the Democrats met in a secret caucus, which then-Town Attorney John Dorfman said he should not have allowed, and which then-Executive Director of the New York State Committee on Open Government Robert Freeman said Lefkaditis should have been invited to because he was, after all, a Democrat.

“We were having trouble communicating with him,” said then-Deputy Supervisor Amy Pokorny, as she explained the reason for the illegal caucus at the time. “It’s difficult because he flies into rages sometimes. We were trying to understand what this is about. It’s hard to have a reasonable and temperate conversation….The meeting was helpful to us. We were able to sort through and prepare for the public meeting. It was like committee work.”

Lefkaditis, irate, threatened to sue the four offending board members, but never went through with it. “Am I aggressive? Sure,” he said at the time. “They need to be more vocal. I can’t read their minds. They need to stop hiding behind the attorney.”

What had triggered the episode was Lefkaditis’s attempt to change insurance brokers, which he said would save the town money on workers’ compensation costs. But, after Lefkaditis introduced a motion to change, which was passed unanimously by the board, it was discovered that the company that was just fired was not responsible for insuring workers’ comp, but for insuring vehicles and buildings. 

At a subsequent meeting, Lefkaditis was accused of springing the vote on the other board members, who then rescinded that original motion, saying the figures Lefkaditis had provided weren’t accurate.

“If you think something is wrong, you don’t write a resolution that makes someone look like a liar,” Lefkaditis told The Enterprise shortly after that meeting.

It was not the last time Lefkaditis would be accused by the Democratic board members of lying. Notably, in April 2019, he voted with the rest of the board to censure himself for lying about the completion of past years’ annual reports, financial records that towns are required to submit to the New York State Comptroller each year.

He said at the time that he had been under the impression that the 2016 report had been submitted by the town’s bookkeeper.

By bookkeeper Cathy Bates’s own telling, Lefkaditis erred when he spoke on impulse instead of double-checking with her about the status of the reports, but she said he had not lied.

This week, Lefkaditis told The Enterprise that the problem started because of a legal misstep the previous administration had taken, which essentially precluded timely filing of the first report he was responsible for. 

Later reports have been filed late or not at all, which Lefkaditis indicated is half-intentional: “I don’t particularly care about them, and I don’t have a lot of time,” he said this week.

He added, though, that they’re not shoved aside; they just “aren’t a top priority.” He said a state official told him that the consequence of not filing the reports would be “angry emails” from the state and nothing more.

This week, as he’s expressed before, Lefkaditis said that he only voted in favor of the censure because it was a “good reminder to keep his mouth shut” at public meetings, where he says he’s learned that people “hang on my every word” and turn what he thinks are minor errors, or at least understandable ones, “into a mass murder.”

Language

That nihilism is important to understanding the way Lefkaditis operates. For better or worse, Lefkaditis deploys language not as one of the sole means by which humans can express their own, personal truths, the kind that leave no factual evidence for people to pick over, but as a way to achieve outcomes, which, for him, are what hold real weight.

So, it makes one wonder what the purpose of the sudden free exchange of ideas with this reporter was: whether it was, as Lefkaditis indicated, related to some new, small degree of trust that was earned, or if it was merely a play, brought on by a desire to secure a legacy more glowing than what would be gleaned from a review of media reports heretofore.

 Whether his laugh in uncomfortable moments is an acknowledgment that someone met him at his level — where victory is the only measure — and performed admirably, or if it’s just a tool he developed in his quest to become “stronger, faster, smarter” at the expense of everything else.

Whether he believes that the board of 2016 and The Enterprise and members of the public are the billion-dollar corporations he has to fight against, this time without the wise counselor who will tell him when to raise his fists and when to cooperate.

What can be frustrating about someone like Lefkaditis, who is, it has to be presumed, brutally honest about his disdain for legally obligated financial filings and willingness to overlook them, but then turns around and shows how little words mean to him, is that no assemblage of facts will ever answer these questions, which answers are so critical to the way people interpret his motives, and therefore his character. 

And it would hardly matter in his absence from the board, except that residents will once again be asked to cast judgment on a new supervisor who, like Lefkaditis, will be leading a board whose members are all of another party — in this case, Lefkaditis’s slate.

As always, this paper will report the facts — which are not the truth themselves but merely box it in — and residents will read and do their own digging, attempting to shrink the area of uncertainty where each person’s humanity lies.