Unions: A Cop Cops
Sounds like the IAFF
Ed Mullins, longtime NYPD officer and president of their 13,000 member Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) evidently thought that crime pays.
But Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District proved otherwise, saying Mullins scammed the union out of $600,000 with “a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars . . . through the submission of fraudulent expense reports.”
Mullins said “that his charges were legitimate SBA expenditures when in fact they were not.”
He pled guilty before United States District Judge John G. Koeltl.
We can be collectively awed by the NYPD ethos which produces a supervisory officer who not only steals lavishly, but does so from his brother and sister cops.
(Why take a bribe when you can pick your partner’s pocket?)
Mullins’ union leadership position plays a crucial role in his criminal behavior by supplying ready access to cash with a low probability of being held accountable.
It’s a page out of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union playbook where fat-cats plundered their treasury six ways to Sunday.
And so too at our union, the IAFF, where for decades, members of the Executive Board took hundreds of thousands of dollars in phony per diems, improperly awarded themselves severance pay and otherwise gamed the system under the approving eye of former IAFF president Harold Schaitberger who lived like a king on the backs of the rank and file.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Mullins was funding his lavish lifestyle. If funding a lavish lifestyle (limousines, first-class air travel, fancy hotel rooms, five-figure meals) is a crime, Harold Schaitberger and his felonious cronies should be busting rocks for life.
The IAFF Executive Board either signed off on or looked the other way in every slimy deal Schaitberger cooked up.
Do fact cat union types learn anything when a scoundrel like Mullins slinks off to the slammer?
No, they do not and the best evidence at the IAFF is that after spending over a million dollars tracking down the various ethical and financial lapses of the Schaitberger years, they effectively buried the report — you’ll have a better shot at finding Jimmy Hoffa.
