One of the many problems with giving state hacks these ridiculously bloated pensions is that they think that not only are their layabout relatives likewise entitled to lifetimes of gainful unemployment, but also their worthless coatholders as well.
Again, the name of Bulger comes to mind – the Corrupt Midget turns 85 next month, a few days after his 182nd or so consecutive monthly kiss in the mail of $17,000 and change.
Granted, Billy Bulger’s male siblings haven’t been as blessed by the hackerama. His beloved serial-killing gangster brother Whitey was stripped of his Lottery “winnings.” And Jackie lost his state pension as a court clerk after being convicted of obstruction of justice in an organized-crime case.
Jackie used to work in a fish store in Roslindale, but he wanted a no-heavy-lifting sinecure like every other Bulger sibling, spalpeen and in-law, up to and including his ex-wife.
And so the Corrupt Midget decreed that Jackie would become clerk of what was then called the Boston Juvenile Court. Only one problem: there already was a clerk by the name of Paul Heffernan.
Whitey would have known how to create a vacancy, but it wasn’t necessary. Paul Heffernan, a hot-tempered moron from way back, was promoted from hack clerk to hack judge. This was almost 40 years ago.
But guess what – Heffernan is still coming down for breakfast. He’s the same age as the Corrupt Midget, and they retired the same year, 2003. And Heffernan is grabbing not one, but two state pensions — $91,437 as judge, and another $23,371 for his “service” as convicted-felon Jackie Bulger’s predecessor as clerk of the juvenile court.
By the way, Jackie’s daughter was on Uncle Billy’s payroll (along with an aunt) at the State House. Her husband was “on the T,” as was her brother and one of her cousins. (The two Bulgers on “Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority” retired in their mid-40’s with full pensions; the in-law had to wait until he turned 50.)
Meanwhile, Heffernan passed the hack virus – an allergy to honest work — on to his daughter Mary Beth. During an extinguished career in “public safety,” her greatest service to the hackerama came in preventing the release of ex-Lt. Gov. Tim “Crash” Murray’s public cell-phone records after his scandalous 108-m.p.h. car crash in 2011.
After that brooming of Crash’s humiliation, Heffernan was rewarded with a $181,329-a-year judgeship in the Newton District Court, where violent illegal alien criminals are repeatedly cut loose before ICE agents can pick up the Third World fiends for deportation.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, the good that a politician does is oft interred with his bones, while his hack minions and their even more hideous offspring go on slurping at the public trough for generations.
Billy Bulger had a band. His tin-whistle player was Franny Joyce. Franny was such a talented musician that Bulger made him boss of the Mass. Convention Center Authority, which soon became a hiring hall for gangsters and their children and their molls’ kids.
Franny Joyce retired in 2003. He’s still grabbing $82,209 a year.
Paul Mahoney was an utterly unqualified hack in Bulger’s office who wanted early retirement as a hack state judge. Alan Dershowitz and Harvey Silverglate tried to stop that miscarriage of justice, and Billy showed up at the hearing and began screaming at the Jewish lawyers, calling them “connivers.”
Imagine someone named Bulger accusing somebody else of being a “conniver.” Takes one to know one.
Anyway, Mahoney got the judgeship, and he remains on the dole, a decade after his retirement, for $84,720 a year.
It’s not just Bulger of course. Remember the Harringtons in Salem? Kevin was the Senate president before Bulger, and Mike Harrington was the Congressman before Nicky Pockets, who went to prison on the testimony of his bagman, who was also his son-in-law.
Anyway, Kevin’s dead, and Michael’s since had some legal problems of his own, but life has been kinder to their first cousin – Nancy Harrington. She’s the former president of Salem State College, er University, whatever. Been grabbing $165,510 a year since 2007.
I’ll leave you with one more tax-fattened hack this snowy morning – Andrea Cabral, the former high sheriff of Suffolk County. Later became famous on youtube for endlessly fanning herself during a winter snowstorm press conference by her boss, Gov. Small Deval Patrick. (She’d succeeded the aforementioned Mary Beth Heffernan as public safety secretary.)
You may have read about the high sheriff this week – she’s the front woman for what will be the city’s first weed emporium, on Friend Street.
The high sheriff wants you to get high too – but no matter how stoned you get, you probably won’t get as high as Andrea’s pension.
She’s now grabbing $95,800 a year – enough to buy a lot of munchies, not to mention Marlboros, which I used to see her smoking with her successor as high sheriff, Steve Tompkins. Maybe there’s some method
