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It's hard to miss that bright red billboard in Derby about alleged government corruption.
The name of Derby's Town Clerk appears right in the website URL.
While the website is about Marc Garofalo, it's clearly not his handiwork.
The website was privately registered on October 6th, 2025, just in time to impact the municipal election. It starts off with Garofalo's Patch Candidate Profile, and references his quote that "integrity guides everything" he does. The website aims to challenge that assertion with a collection of documents, most of which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
It starts off with a "union grievance filed on behalf of the two Assistant Town Clerks (Margaret Martins and Terri Kuskowski) regarding Garofalo staffing the TC's office with his "life partner" Sarah Widomski."
The Connecticut State Board of Labor Relations determined that the Town violated the Municipal Employee Relations Act.
Then there's an email from Kuskowski accusing Garofalo of intimidation.
She and Martins left the Town Clerk's office after the incident. The women felt they weren't treated respectfully, and lacked support in the office.
There's an accusation that Garofalo allegedly falsified a marriage certificate.
Then there's an excerpt from a complaint filed by Salvatore Coppola about collective bargaining agreements.
That's when we reached out to Coppola.
He indicated the website is not his doing, but he does know all about it since it includes information that he received via FOIA requests. He noted that some of those documents took a long time to obtain, and even required filing complaints with the FOI Commission before City of Derby officials produced the requested documents.
Coppola says everything on the website is credible information, the allegations of "double-dipping" and "triple-dipping" and "wiping a hard drive" and more.
He said the most shocking thing on the website is the $750,000 of no-bid contracts for painting done in the Region 15 School District by CertaPro, a business owned by Garofalo. He described that as "jaw-dropping" and expressed disappointment that a government entity would have such loose standards so as to allow that to happen.
You can even read the letter that Coppola sent to then Board of Aldermen President and current Derby Mayor Joe DiMartino on the scandal.
A post about the marcjgarofalo.com website in a local Facebook group, Derby, CT, Community Forum, generated more than a hundred comments.
Some people tried to hijack the conversation and at one point falsely accused Coppola, who is on the November 4 ballot for the Board of Alderman, of not even living in Derby.
The comment has since been deleted, and with good reason.
Yes, Coppola did live in Orange for 27 years, but after his wife passed away and a brief stay with his son, he moved back to his 40-year Derby home where he has been emotionally invested for his whole life. He even wrote a book about Derby, The Palace of Sweets -- a historical novel based on actual events that took place in the area.
But getting back to those Facebook comments...
Someone thought Garofalo should drop out of the election.
Another anonymous commenter felt the website was defamatory and suggested that Garofalo should sue for defamation.
One guy was more concerned that the republican candidate for Town Clerk is Gino DiGiovanni, a J-6'er who got pardoned by President Donald Trump.
"I am more concerned about a convicted insurrectionist being in any position in town government than any slander being pushed by someone desperate," wrote the man.
An anonymous poster piled onto the conversation about DiGiovanni by citing his "many court dates" stemming from the J6 charge.
DiGiovanni told the Centinal that all of those allegations are in public records, and it stems from the J6 charge which led to the seizure of all of his assets, ruined him financially, cost him over a $1 million, earned him prison time (which he served), and forced him to have to rebuild his entire life.
By the way, it's worth adding that DiGiovanni's election signs were removed earlier in campaign season in what was described as an act of "intimidation" by the Derby GOP.
At the time we contacted the Department of Public Works to find out who had removed the signs, and Derby Mayor Joe Di Martino's office to find out who, if anyone, had ordered the signs to be removed.
The story went quickly from "we didn't do it" to "maybe we did it" to "yeah, we did it but it was because DiGiovanni broke the rules and he can just come pick up the signs."
We subsequently filed Freedom of Information requests with the Department of Public Works and the Mayor's office to learn more about the sign removal. Stay tuned.
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