Contractor pleads guilty in fraud case

BALTIMORE (AP) — The president of a mechanical contracting firm who is a key figure in the public corruption case against former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell pleaded guilty yesterday to federal charges of racketeering, mail fraud and filing a false tax return.

W. David Stoffregen, president of Poole and Kent Co., is the sixth person to plead guilty in the case.

Stoffregen, 53, was charged last year in a sweeping 30-count federal indictment, along with Mr. Bromwell and Mr. Bromwell’s wife, Mary Patricia.

Mr. Bromwell, a Baltimore County Democrat who was once one of the most powerful lawmakers in Annapolis, and his wife are charged in a racketeering scheme involving minority contracting fraud while he was in office. They have pleaded not guilty.

Both are scheduled to go on trial in federal court in February.

The Bromwells and Stoffregen were indicted in October 2005 after a probe lasting more than two years into the former senator’s relationship with Stoffregen while he was employed by Poole and Kent during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The mechanical contracting firm won millions of dollars in state contracts while Mr. Bromwell was in office.

Federal prosecutors have said that the arrangement made so much money that Stoffregen offered Mr. Bromwell $80,000 a year in 2000 to stay in office rather than retire.

Mr. Bromwell received more than $85,000 in construction work on a new house in 2000 and 2001 that Stoffregen provided free of charge, prosecutors have said.

Stoffregen also gave Mrs. Bromwell more than $192,000 from 2001 to 2003 for a no-show job at Namco Services Corp., prosecutors said.

Also, prosecutors said, Mr. Bromwell agreed to remain in the Senate in exchange for the payments that were disguised as Namco salary payments to his wife.

Mr. Bromwell, 57, spent four years as a member of the House of Delegates before serving in the Senate for 19 years.

He was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee until he left the General Assembly in 2002.

He then was appointed president and chief executive officer of the Injured Workers’ Insurance Fund, Maryland’s largest provider of workers’ compensation insurance.

Mr. Bromwell’s trial could last several months.