Puerto Rico Governor Misread Anger Brewing Against Him - The New York Times

SAN JUAN, P.R. — The people of Puerto Rico knew him first as Ricky, the handsome boy who moved into the governor’s residence when he was just 13. His father was the governor, and Ricardo A. Rosselló grew up as a child of privilege in historic La Fortaleza, a palatial 16th-century mansion with heavy drapes and thick wooden doors just steps from the Caribbean Sea.

Now the governor himself, Mr. Rosselló lives in the same colonial fortress of his youth, with a family of his own. But the estate has turned into a cage, guarded by police officers in riot gear and ringed by protesters who want him gone.

Mr. Rosselló announced Wednesday that he was resigning from office, an unprecedented step in Puerto Rico’s history that brings a promising political career, for now, to a disgraceful end.

It took just two weeks for his administration to reach the point of collapse, undermined by a popular uprising that the governor initially thought he could withstand. Yet Mr. Rosselló misread the anger brewing among his people after years of economic stagnation and broken promises.

[Gov. Ricardo Rosselló conceded he could not stay in power.]

After spending much of his political career dogged by accusations of being a golden boy whose success came through the network of political influence he inherited from his father, Mr. Rosselló wound up the victim of a crisis of his own making. Shunning party elders, he surrounded himself with a tight-knit cluster of young, influential friends, and the arrogant, frat-style bantering they shared at the expense of those outside their circle became his undoing.

The governor’s troubles came after the publication of hundreds of pages of a leaked private group chat on the messaging app Telegram, an embarrassing development that under different conditions might have been survivable in modern politics.

But the cliquish chat mirrored Mr. Rosselló’s style of governing, depending on an insular group of associates who rejected the advice of outsiders, many of whom said they watched from afar as the administration got deeper and deeper into trouble. He caught flak for having a $245,000 Chevrolet Suburban and spending the brutal days after Hurricane Maria in 2017 at the air-conditioned emergency operations center.

Governor Rosselló celebrating a statehood referendum victory in 2017 with Jenniffer González-Colón, the island’s resident commissioner in Congress, in San Juan. — CreditErika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times

“Ricky loved the limelight,” recalled Yosem E. Companys, a former business partner and mentor to Mr. Rosselló. “And he especially loved that people would ingratiate themselves with him. He loved being surrounded by yes men.”

With crisis enveloping his administration, the governor found himself increasingly isolated, having lost support from the public, the leaders of his political party and many of his own aides, who tendered their resignations and left Mr. Rosselló, 40, almost completely alone.

“You had an isolated governor, whose cabinet is resigning, with the mayors of his party asking him to resign, and with the people on the street asking him to resign,” said Antonio Sagardía, Puerto Rico’s former justice secretary. “It was impossible to govern like that.”

Mr. Sagardía said he spoke to Mr. Rosselló on Tuesday and told him that he had no choice but to step down as governor after Puerto Rico’s Justice Department issued search warrants for cellphones belonging to Mr. Rosselló and 11 of his current and former aides as part of a criminal investigation into the private group chat.

The leaked messages, in addition to being rude and profane, suggested the administration was inappropriately favoring its politically connected friends, just days after federal authorities had arrested two former top officials and four other people in a corruption investigation.

For people who thought they knew Mr. Rosselló, reading his crude comments introduced them to a side of him that he appeared to have shown only to his male buddies.

“He was very respectful, always very kind, very much a gentleman,” said Representative Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting resident commissioner in Congress, who publicly demanded Mr. Rosselló’s resignation last Friday. “It was two completely different personalities.”

When he ran in 2016, Mr. Rosselló’s résumé seemed sterling for a first-time candidate with far-reaching family connections in politics: Tennis player at M.I.T. Doctorate in biomedical engineering at Michigan. Postdoctorate research at Duke.

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CreditBrendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. González-Colón and Mr. Sagardía described Mr. Rosselló as a methodical and tireless worker once he was elected. He slept little and liked to draw his own graphs and charts — sometimes with pens in various colors that he carried in his pocket.

“He is very organized, the way doctors and scientists are,” said Mr. Sagardía, who has known Mr. Rosselló since he was a teenager. “We are not talking about just anybody.”

But Mr. Rosselló packed his team with trusted friends who in many cases had as little experience in government as he did. Elders from his New Progressive Party, which supports Puerto Rican statehood, felt that Mr. Rosselló gave some of them a cold shoulder, refusing to ask or take their advice.

“I think this is an unfortunate combination of a group of people that may have been hard-working and well-intentioned but were inexperienced, and there was a lot of arrogance around,” said Luis G. Fortuño, a former New Progressive governor who was not friendly with Mr. Rosselló.

Mr. Rosselló acted like his own chief of staff, concentrating power in his office and walling himself off with his close advisers and no one else, Mr. Fortuño said. “There seemed to be a bunkerization of that inner circle: You were either with them or against them.”

Mr. Fortuño said that he met last year with the governor’s former chief of staff, Raúl Maldonado, and told him that rumors were circulating that some of the people in the governor’s inner orbit “were not necessarily acting according to the law.”

Mr. Maldonado, who was among those in the Telegram chat, later became the treasury secretary and publicly denounced what he said was corruption within the administration. He was fired, it seemed, for his disloyalty.

Mr. Companys, Mr. Rosselló’s former mentor, recalled Mr. Rosselló’s wedding in 2008, seven years before he ran for governor. He had invited his closest friends to suburban Detroit for the wedding to his first wife. It was a festive affair that drew from the emerging top ranks of Puerto Rican politics — and the groom and his friends joked about which positions they would someday assume in Mr. Rosselló’s administration.

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CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Among the guests was Elías Sánchez, who became a powerful lobbyist during Mr. Rosselló’s administration and was one of the chat participants. At the Michigan wedding, according to Mr. Companys, Mr. Sánchez held court under a gazebo and, re-enacting a scene from “The Godfather,” symbolically gave Mr. Rosselló and his bride his blessing. (The couple divorced a year later.)

Mr. Companys gave Mr. Rosselló his first job in politics at the behest of Pedro J. Rosselló, Ricardo’s father and the former governor, who had himself been a mentor to Mr. Companys. In 2004, Mr. Companys ran the Latino campaign for Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential hopeful, and brought on an eager Mr. Rosselló to help in Arizona.

The elder Mr. Rosselló did not want his son to follow in his footsteps, Mr. Companys said.

“Pedro told me, ‘Listen, I don’t want my son in politics — I just think it’s dirty business and I don’t want my family to be hurt any further — but he’s very persistent,’” Mr. Companys recalled.

A few years after the campaign, Mr. Rosselló approached Mr. Companys, who was then a doctoral student at Stanford, to join forces on a Silicon Valley start-up.

Mr. Rosselló and Mr. Companys settled on an idea to develop real-time political polling software under a firm they named Bullitics. When Mr. Companys mentioned that they would need a significant amount of money to get started, Mr. Rosselló told him not to worry, he had sufficient resources.

The start-up went nowhere, and people Mr. Companys had brought into the venture didn’t get paid, he said. Cameron Brown, who had hired developers to write Mr. Rosselló’s software code, said Mr. Rosselló sent some initial payments, “but he basically stiffed me.”

Almost 10 years later, Mr. Brown said he received some payments from Mr. Rosselló in 2017 and 2018, after Mr. Rosselló had become governor.

Mr. Companys said he covered some of Mr. Rosselló’s debt with money of his own, and then declared bankruptcy.

“He lives in a bubble,” Mr. Companys said of Mr. Rosselló. “That’s just the way that his entire life has been.”

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