More than a decade ago, the State of Connecticut won a three-quarter-million-dollar environmental judgment against a New Haven metal finisher named Bruno F. Suraci, Jr. He never paid most of it. Now the state says he is doing the same kind of work, in the same kind of way, a few miles up the road in North Haven — and it has gone back to court to collect the old penalty and stop the new pollution.

Attorney General William Tong, acting on behalf of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), filed suit in Hartford Superior Court on May 21, 2026, against Suraci, his metal finishing business NikLyn Corporation, and a cluster of related “Source One” companies. The eleven-count complaint alleges repeated violations of Connecticut’s air pollution control laws at 400 Sackett Point Road in North Haven, and it asks the court to force Suraci into compliance, to make him pay the penalties still outstanding from the earlier case, and to impose fresh fines of up to $25,000 per day, per violation.

It is, in essence, a sequel. And to understand why the state is treating Suraci as a repeat offender rather than a first-time violator, you have to go back to the original case — including the version of events Suraci himself told at the time.

The 2014 case: what the state won, and what Suraci said happened

The first chapter began with a 2010 DEEP inspection of Suraci’s metal finishing operations in New Haven, at 90 River Street and 1455 State Street, near the Quinnipiac River. The work was the same family of activities at issue today: sandblasting, spray-painting, and powder-coating metal parts.

The state’s complaint in that case did not allege that Suraci dumped or spilled pollutants into the ground, river, or air. What it alleged were management and permitting failures: that he failed to properly store and label hazardous waste, lacked the required permits, and failed to train employees in handling the waste. In 2013, after Suraci stopped appearing in the case, the court entered a default judgment, and the penalties were fixed: $700,000 for hazardous waste violations, $33,500 for air pollution violations, and $10,000 for failing to obtain an emissions permit — a total of $743,500. Suraci was also permanently enjoined from further environmental violations.

There was an off-ramp built into the final 2014 judgment, and it matters to the current dispute. The court gave Suraci the option to satisfy his personal share of the penalty by paying $175,000 within sixty days. The condition was not met. Under the judgment’s own terms, that failure made him jointly and severally liable for the entire $743,500. According to the new complaint, $733,500 of that sum remains due and owing to this day — meaning, in the state’s telling, that almost none of the original penalty was ever paid.

Suraci’s account of that first case was very different, and he gave it publicly. In a 2014 interview with the New Haven Independent, he cast himself not as a polluter but as an environmentalist who got buried in red tape. He pointed out that he lives on an organic farm, drives an electric car, and had built a roughly $10 million company that, he said, recycled all of its waste. “We never polluted,” he told the paper, arguing that what DEEP characterized as illegal storage of hazardous waste was in fact an in-house recycling system for paint solvent — drums of mineral spirits awaiting reuse, not disposal.

His telling continued: that after following DEEP’s own advice to discard old paint and relabel recyclable materials as hazardous, his operation tipped into a stricter regulatory category — “large quantity generator” status — that triggered additional permits and requirements, and that the cumulative burden, legal bills, and reputational damage destroyed a company that once employed 180 people across New Haven and Plainville. He said he eventually stopped showing up to court because he could no longer afford lawyers, and let the case go to default. He framed the entire episode as “an egregious attack of a small business here in Connecticut,” and floated moving what remained of the company to Virginia.

The Attorney General’s office, at the time, rejected that framing entirely. It said the judgment rested on overwhelming evidence of egregious violations, that the defendants had chosen to avoid the costs of environmental compliance while law-abiding competitors bore them, and that Suraci had every opportunity to present his side in court and declined to do so. The two narratives — regulatory overreach versus willful non-compliance — have never been reconciled. They simply now repeat.

The 2026 complaint: same work, new address, the state says

The current case centers on NikLyn Corporation’s operation at 400 Sackett Point Road in North Haven, which the complaint describes as doing surface preparation and coating of metal — solvent cleaning, sanding, abrasive blasting, powder coating, and wet spray painting. The state’s first and most concrete allegation is the one that generated a citizen complaint: dust.

According to the complaint, a DEEP inspection on April 11, 2023 found fugitive dust pouring from an open bay door of a garage where sandblasting was actively underway, with dust accumulating near the entrance, and no adequate containment system in place. DEEP issued a notice of violation, NOV No. 18417, that June. When inspectors returned on March 21, 2025, the complaint says, they found the same problem worse: fugitive dust crossing the property boundary near ground level for roughly an hour, continuing to drift from the bay door with the wind even after work stopped, fine black particulate consistent with sandblasting media scattered across the parking lot, and large uncovered piles of spent blasting material beside two dumpsters. That inspection produced a second notice, NOV No. 20393.

The dust is only part of it. After reviewing operational records NikLyn supplied in mid-2025, DEEP says it identified a set of permitting and emissions violations that go to the heart of how the facility runs. The complaint alleges that NikLyn never obtained a required New Source Review permit for a coating operation with the potential to emit more than fifteen tons of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) per year; that it failed to obtain a Title V operating permit despite site-wide emissions documented above the relevant hazardous-air-pollutant and VOC thresholds in what the state classifies as a severe ozone nonattainment area; that it failed to pay Title V emission fees; and that it used both coatings and an equipment-cleaning solvent whose VOC content exceeded the applicable limits. Those findings generated two more notices in December 2025, NOV Nos. 20482 and 20483. By the state’s count, that is four notices of violation across roughly two and a half years.

Critically — and this is the line that separates allegation from finding — none of the 2026 claims has been adjudicated. The 2014 penalty is a court judgment. The 2026 complaint is a set of allegations the state must still prove, and Suraci is entitled to contest them.

Why the dust matters: what it is and what it does

It’s worth pausing on why the law cares so much about blasting dust and coating fumes, because the legal filings tend to assume it. The harm is real, and it is specific to this industry.

Start with the dust. When you abrasive-blast metal, you fire media — sand, steel shot, aluminum oxide, slag — at high velocity to strip off old paint, rust, and scale. The airborne dust that comes off is not inert. It is a mixture of pulverized media, particles of the metal itself, and whatever coating is being blasted away. On older metal, those coatings frequently contain lead, chromates, zinc, cadmium, or other heavy metals, which means the dust can carry toxic metals along with it.

The fine fraction is what regulators worry about most. It is classified as PM10 and PM2.5 — particles small enough to stay suspended in the air, drift across property lines, and lodge deep in the lungs. PM2.5 in particular bypasses the body’s natural filtration and is associated with respiratory and cardiovascular harm. That is the whole reason containment is required: the rule is not about tidiness, it is about keeping respirable particulate from leaving the site and reaching the people next door. The complaint’s allegation that dust crossed the property boundary near ground level, settled across the parking lot, and coated nearby cars is the visible edge of that concern.

Silica is the sharpest version of the hazard. When the blasting media is silica sand — which the state says NikLyn used until April 2025 — the process generates respirable crystalline silica, a recognized human carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, a permanent and irreversible scarring of the lungs. This is one reason NikLyn’s reported switch from sand to steel shot and aluminum oxide genuinely matters; it is among the few facts in the record that cut in the operation’s favor.

The volatile organic compounds are a separate problem from the same facility. VOCs evaporate off solvents and coatings during spray painting, and in sunlight they react with nitrogen oxides to form ground-level ozone — smog. That is why the complaint stresses the site sits in a “severe ozone nonattainment area”: greater Connecticut already fails federal ozone standards, so the state regulates VOC sources tightly, and an unpermitted coating operation emitting above the threshold adds to a problem the region is legally bound to fix.

Finally, dust does not only float — it settles. Spent blasting media and the metals it carries land on the ground and in the kind of large, uncovered piles the inspectors described beside the dumpsters, and then wash off with rain into storm drains and waterways. That is the same watershed concern that shadowed Suraci’s original New Haven operation near the Quinnipiac River. In a compliant shop, blasting happens inside an enclosed booth with dust collection — the “Dust Hog” unit NikLyn says it was trying to install — filters trap the particulate, and the spent media is contained and disposed of rather than left in the open. The entire regulatory scheme for this trade is built around not letting the dust become airborne or cross the fence line. The state’s core allegation is that NikLyn skipped exactly that step.

NikLyn’s side, in its own filings

Unlike the first case, the record this time already contains a partial response from Suraci’s camp, and it complicates the “did nothing” narrative. Through a consultant, Industrial Compliance Solutions, NikLyn responded to the March 2025 dust violation with a measure of cooperation. The response states that NikLyn had been trying to install a “Dust Hog” dust-collection unit since 2023 but had been held up obtaining the electrical permits it needed from the Town of North Haven to power the unit and relocate the blasting operation to the back of the building. It says NikLyn stopped blasting with sand on April 4, 2025 and resumed days later using steel shot and aluminum oxide instead — a change it argued would significantly cut the airborne particulate — while still intending to move the operation and install the collector. NikLyn, the filing said, “remains committed to operating the facility in full compliance with all applicable requirements.”

Suraci personally confirmed receipt of the December 2025 notices by email and said he would respond within the 30-day window. So the picture the documents paint is not one of total silence; it is one of contested, incremental, and — in the state’s view — insufficient compliance, against the backdrop of an operator the state already sued once.

The shell-company theory

The most legally aggressive part of the new complaint is its attempt to make sure Suraci cannot, in the state’s words, shift companies to escape accountability. This is where the 2014 history does its heaviest work: the state is openly arguing that Suraci is running the same playbook again, using a web of entities to insulate himself.

The complaint lays out the structure. In October 2023, Suraci acquired the 400 Sackett Point property for $2.5 million — not in his own name, but through Source One Realty Holdings LLC, which the state notes is not registered with the Connecticut Secretary of State. He then leased the property through Source One Holding LLC, another unregistered entity, signing the lease himself as “Landlord.” A separate, registered company, Source One Solutions LLC — nominally an interstate trucking business of which Suraci is the sole listed member — shares the same addresses and, the state alleges, has been used “interchangeably” with the unregistered Source One entities, “either in error or as a mechanism to avoid enforcement.” NikLyn itself, the complaint adds, is likewise not registered with the Secretary of State.

The complaint also surfaces a wrinkle involving a third party: when one of the notices issued, the state received a compliance statement from Commercial Storage LLC — another company operating at the site — denying that it was the property owner and pointing to an affiliated entity, 400 Sackett Point LLC, whose manager is listed as Guy Ferraiolo. That entity, in turn, leases the site from Suraci’s Source One Realty Holdings. The ownership picture, in other words, is exactly the kind of layered arrangement the state says it is trying to cut through.

To reach Suraci personally, the complaint pleads him in multiple capacities at once: as a “responsible corporate officer” with day-to-day control over NikLyn and the Source One companies, as the individual doing business as NikLyn, and — in its eleventh count — as the party who violated the 2014 court order itself. That final count ties the two cases together. It alleges that by committing the new violations, Suraci breached the permanent injunction from 2014, and that he “is attempting to use NikLyn Corporation, Source One Solutions, and Source One Realty Holdings LLC … to circumvent that liability.”

What the state is asking for

The relief the state seeks tracks both halves of the story. It wants permanent injunctions ordering all defendants to immediately stop the noncompliant activity, to cease emitting air pollutants without the proper permits, and to come into full compliance with Connecticut’s air pollution statutes and the regulations under them. It wants new civil penalties of up to $25,000 per day, per violation — a figure that compounds quickly given the state’s allegation that the violations are continuing. And, pulling the old case forward, it asks the court to order Suraci and his companies, jointly and severally, to pay all of the fines still owed under the 2014 judgment and to comply with that judgment’s injunctive terms.

In announcing the suit, Tong accused Suraci of flagrantly ignoring environmental protection laws for over a decade, of shuffling unregistered and unpermitted companies to evade accountability, and of exposing workers and neighbors to hazardous dust and waste. DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes framed the action as part of the agency’s broader commitment to enforcing air quality standards statewide and holding violators to account. Assistant Attorneys General Aza Mosley and Michael Schulz, along with Matthew Levine, who chiefs the office’s Environment Section, are handling the matter.

Why this case is worth watching

For Connecticut business owners, the through-line is the corporate-veil question. The state’s theory is that you cannot dissolve one company, open another under a new name at a new address, and leave an environmental judgment behind — and that when the same individual keeps running the same kind of regulated operation, both the conduct and the unpaid penalties can follow him across the corporate shells. Whether the court accepts that theory, and how far it lets the responsible-corporate-officer and successor-liability arguments reach, will matter well beyond this one metal shop.

There is also a genuine, unresolved tension at the center of the story that a fair reader should sit with. The state sees a serial violator who has spent more than ten years avoiding both compliance and a court judgment. Suraci, at least as of 2014, saw himself as a small operator and self-described environmentalist crushed by regulation that did not fit a company his size — a man who recycled his solvent and still got treated like a dumper. The 2026 record contains evidence pointing in both directions: continued operation without the required permits and recurring fugitive dust on one side; documented attempts to install controls, a switch in blasting media, and permitting delays attributed to the town on the other. A court will now sort out which picture is closer to the truth.

What is not in dispute is that the meter is running. With penalties pleaded at up to $25,000 a day and a decade-old judgment the state says is almost entirely unpaid, the financial stakes for Suraci are considerably higher in the sequel than they were the first time around.

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