IAFF: L.A. Does Schaitberger Proud
$800,000 in dodgy spending
If my last name was Escobar I’d be crossing my Ts but apparently not Freddy of the same name, lately president of the Los Angeles City fire fighters union, a.k.a UFLAC.
Escobar and other union officers and officials stand accused of significant financial malfeasance and chicanery after various audits apparently revealed that hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in credit card charges were undocumented and right now is not a good time to be undocumented in any way.
Who should ride to fiduciary rescue but our own Ed Kelly, president of the parent union, the International Association of Fire Fighters, located in Washington, D.C.; he as a quasi-Elon Musk in our own DOGE moment.
The L.A. Times reports Kelly as saying, “The leadership of UFLAC has abdicated its fiduciary responsibilities and placed Local 112 in ill repute. The financial malpractice by the leadership of UFLAC has dealt serious harm to the membership.”
The current chief financial officer of the IAFF is Frank Lima, a very long time UFLAC member and leader, who may be feeling a bit sheepish as his replacements in L.A. have either made a mess of things or carried on the family tradition — time will tell.
This is all a bit like having the Mafia Capo dei capi or boss of bosses coming down hard on a lowly mob lieutenant as the guys in D.C. long ago perfected the art of reckless spending and shady finances.
If a lack of documentation in L.A. seems untoward, successive IAFF executive boards and officers in D.C. showed how it’s really done: millions in fancy dinners, hotels and limos coupled with inflated per diems and sweetheart deals, all of it documented — and nobody batted an eye!
(Oh, and how many of those UFLAC officials attended an all expenses paid trip to D.C. including an expensive dinner to “learn” about their union and did they receive duplicate funding from any other source? Asking for a friend.)
This all suggests that the IAFF fiduciary standard isn’t the absence of malfeasance but rather the need to document it for all to see.
Such is the house that Schaitberger built and that Edzo now inhabits.
Cheers.
File under: Irony
