One thing clear about Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Foley, who surprisingly chastised Dan Malloy in the first debate of the race for living in the state-owned governor's mansion, is that he is a mansion kind of guy.

We don't know how much money Tom Foley has, but it's a lot. Indeed, his lakefront mansion in Greenwich would shame the one Malloy is squatting in.

After all, Foley wrote $11 million in checks for his last race against Malloy, one he financed himself. He famously owns a $5 million crewed yacht named for a female sex slave.

According to The New York Times, he spent $500,000 remodeling the official ambassador's residence in Ireland when he was posted there, an appointment that was a partial repayment for all the campaign dough he raised for President George W. Bush.

But where exactly does all the money come from?

We are used to rich politicians in Connecticut, but we usually have a sense of how they came by their fortunes.

Of course we all know that Linda McMahon earned hers turning sex and violence lite into television entertainment. She made it herself, God bless her.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal is the seventh richest member of Congress, largely because his wife's family owns a lot of New York City real estate. Our last patrician governor, Lowell P. Weicker, was on the receiving end of the Squibb pharmaceutical fortune.

Surely Tom Foley, whose father was a Chicago investment banker, grew up on the sunny side of capitalism, expensive prep school and all.

But we don't know how much of the money candidate Foley brandishes about is money he made himself.

A principal tenet of his current campaign appears to be that he doesn't have to be too specific about anything he plans to do. Trust me, seems to be the Foley campaign zeitgeist, I'm a rich guy and I know what I'm doing.

Foley told one New Haven journalist, who in an interview kept finding the candidate short on details and knowledge of all kinds of state programs, that as governor he would be captain of the ship, not down cleaning the propellers.

We know anyway that he's accustomed to getting his way on a 166-foot yacht. The question may be whether the rest of us expect to be down cleaning his new set of propellers.

Foley's principal business entry on his resume is the investment firm he ran from Greenwich, with its three principal businesses.

One of those, the subject of so many television ads this campaign and last, was a southern textile business, the Bibb Co., that ended badly, a bankruptcy that became a plant closing. That was not much of a success story.

Another of the three businesses in the Foley tool bag is one he still owns, a national company servicing and brokering the sale of private airplanes. It appears to be stable and well run, though hardly the kind of big money maker that Linda McMahon created in World Wrestling Entertainment.

The third big Foley investment, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of transmission equipment, was sold in 2007. Foley, the largest shareholder, agreed to tender to the new buyer his 1.6 million shares, at $24.80 a share.

Foley's share of the sale was a lot of money, though we don't know how much profit he made on the company, which he first bought as a young man, still in his early 30s. His brother also was an investor.

What I did learn, after researching T.B. Wood's Sons Co., a 19th century manufacturing company that had remained in the same family until Foley came along, was that it became a hotbed of labor troubles after the young Greenwich investor bought a controlling share.

A simmering two-and-a-half year old strike at the main plant in Chambersburg, Pa., even attracted the interest of the Baltimore Sun, which wrote a lengthy piece in September 1992 about the strike and the Foley haters in the union.

The union, which failed to survive the three-year conflict, eventually losing a confidence vote by workers, accused Foley of union busting, essentially hiring replacement workers and refusing to bring back union employees.

The strike lasted so long, some workers died while it was underway, according to The Sun. Others lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or separated from their wives in cases where the husband wanted to stick with the strike and the wife wanted to cross the picket line, the newspaper said.

Foley took a family-owned company and changed a friendly atmosphere in which workers and management played on the same softball and bowling leagues, workers told The Sun. He got rid of experienced managers and brought in college-educated managers from out of town, they complained.

Once the strike started, there were clashes on the picket line, even violence caused by workers in town, slashed tires and shot-out windows, according to management, the Sun reported.

Foley "made it impossible for the guys as a union to go back. Once that strike vote was taken, he had it in his mind to break the union," one resident of Chambersburg was quoted as saying.

It wasn't long ago that Foley was criticized here for suggesting that Connecticut was waiting for its "Wisconsin moment" in what many took to be a reference to attacks on unions underway in that state.

It looks like Foley, whether or not he made his fortune in Chambersburg, Pa., had his first Wisconsin moment there.

This is the opinion of David Collins

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct