The bad news for crooked ex-state cop Dana Pullman is that he got a 30-month sentence in federal court this week for his sordid career of corruption and rampant thievery.
The good news is, it’s not going to immediately affect the $65,439.12-a-year state pension that he’s been collecting since 2018, when he was losing a photo finish with the grand jury.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Yanking the career criminal’s pension is now up to the State Retirement Board, and I was told on Friday that Pullman’s high crimes will likely be discussed at the next open meeting May 25.
But that doesn’t mean anything is going to happen right away to this hideous 61-year-old thug, who looks like an old-style Dick Tracy cartoon villain, a cross between Pruneface and The Mole.
Pullman was indicted in 2019 and convicted last November, yet he’s never missed a single kiss in the mail. And now he’s appealing. Of course he is!
As long as he’s appealing, there’s a chance – maybe one in a million – that his conviction will be overturned. So let the good times keep rolling.
Then, when Pullman’s appeal is denied, his public-defender mouthpiece will appeal again – how’s the US Supreme Court sound? — to keep that $5453.26 monthly kiss in the mail coming for a bit longer.
I’m not blaming the State Retirement Board here. They’re just following the rules, and the rules were created for… professional courtesy.
Pullman had been a state cop since he was 25. What did anyone think he was going to do when he got the opportunity? He touched everything but the third rail. He’d steal a hot stove and then come back for the smoke.
Pullman lived by the motto of the MSP: To protect and steal.
All these corruption cases follow the same pattern. Just like Monica Cannon Grant, the BLM racial arsonist and grifter, Pullman started out with high-priced private counsel. Hey, he’d pilfered plenty.
But eventually the perps all realize the hopelessness of their cases. That’s when they claim destitution, and their new public defenders demand more time to study the mountain of evidence against their clients.
The perps just keep dragging their cases out from continuance to continuance. And in the meantime, on the first of every month the crook gets another automatic $5453.26 bank deposit.
When the hoodlum is inevitably convicted, he claims he needs house arrest because he’s… ailing. See Charles “Professor Pumpkin” Lieber, the Harvard egghead spy for the Red Chinese.
Pullman pulled the exact same stunt in court. He’s sick. Kleptomania would be my guess.
If the feds ever let Pullman serve “home confinement” like Lieber got last week, Pullman will miraculously recover, much like his fellow crooked cop Zip Connolly, or his State House pal, Sal DiMasi.
Pullman was running the State Police Association of Massachusetts (SPAM) – a public union – as a racketeering enterprise. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Pullman was lavishing union funds on his young galpal, jetting off to romantic weekend getaways to Miami and New York. At one dinner in Manhattan, the lovebirds dropped $150 on caviar alone.
At the same time Pullman was livin’ here, lovin’ there and lyin’ in between, he was having his lobbyist co-conspirator, Anne M. Lynch, funnel payoffs to the scorned wife back home in Worcester, Mrs. Pullman.
At one point, the feds say, the crooked lobbyist recorded “a $50,000 payment to PULLMAN’s spouse as a ‘consulting fee’ even though neither PULLMAN nor his spouse ever did any consulting work for the Lobbying Firm and the check payable to PULLMAN’s spouse was for $20,000 and not $50,000.”
Pullman’s spouse, by the way, is also the recipient of a pension from the Commonwealth. Melissa Pullman retired from the State Police in 2005 at the age of 43 and according to the state comptroller has since been collecting what is now a yearly dole of $59,868.48.
Pullman was known as a bon vivant among the hacks on Beacon Hill. Maybe it was the beer tap at SPAM headquarters on Beacon Street.
As a registered lobbyist, he could only give $200 a year to his hack pals, but he always maxed out.
And if there was somebody particularly odious – say, unindicted co-conspirator House Speaker Bob DeLeo or disgraced ex-Senate president Stanley Rosenberg – his wife Melissa could always come in behind hubby with a few hundred extra bucks for the extinguished, er distinguished statesman.
One of Pullman’s dearest pals at the State House was Rep. Dave Nangle of Lowell, who is better known now by his Bureau of Prisons number 01227-509.
Nangle did most of his federal bit at the G-men’s medical lock-up in Ayer, where I’m sure Pullman would also like to do his time, whenever he finally exhausts his “appeals.” Maybe the screws will set aside the Nangle Suite at Devens for Trooper Pullman.
The next step in halting the bent cop’s ill-gotten gains will be the appointment of a hearing officer – usually a private attorney – to investigate the circumstances of his multiple felonies. That should take about 10 minutes.
Then a recommendation will be made the full Retirement Board. A motion will be publicly voted upon to terminate his pension, but his taxpayer-funded lawyer will appeal the decision pending the decision on the other pending appeal….
I’d like to tell you I’m going to keep you informed about every (very predictable) twist and turn in the Pullman pension heist, but you know how it goes. In the hackerama, there’s a new scandal every day to distract us all.
Let’s face it, Massachusetts politics is to law and order what the gastro-intestinal system is to the human body.
There’s always some new you-know-what working its way down towards, well, the State House, and then, inevitably, the federal courthouse.