Today we bring back an old Herald tradition, the Hack Family of the Week.
Our first winners of this revived august award are the McCue brothers, Jeff and Phil, lifelong hacks who have become fabulously wealthy over their many decades of non-stop slurping at the public trough.
Both have long had jobs, as opposed to work, in the public sector. They have also enjoyed lengthy spans of retirement, only to be followed by a return to the trough.
In the case of Phil, for a while he was collecting two six-figure annual hauls, both as a retiree and as an employee, which for years made him the richest payroll patriot in the hack-infested state trial court system.
Let’s start, though, with brother Jeff McCue. In addition to becoming a multi-millionaire during his career as a coat holder, Jeff McCue also once won $10 million on a Lottery scratch ticket.
When wildly overpaid hacks finally raise their snouts from the trough, they usually get a “leave buyback.” During his extinguished career, Jeff has pocketed two such buyouts, in addition to his $10 million Lottery winnings.
His first buyout came when he retired from the extremely significant position of assistant vice chancellor of human relations at UMass Boston. That was in 2012. For his arduous duties, the hackademic had been making $112,049.08 a year.
His supposed one-time leave buy-back payment was $52,694.85.
For three years, Jeff relaxed at his fabulous estate at the Indian Pond Country Club in Kingston. His state pension between 2012 and 2015 was $66,662 a year.
But then the new governor, Charlie Baker, brought Jeff McCue out of his Croesus-like retirement to make him boss of the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA).
McCue remained at the welfare department until last September, doing a remarkable job indeed – just ask the state auditor or the US attorney. Or any of the foreign fraudsters grabbing millions out of storefronts down on Blue Hill Ave or strip malls in Leominster.
Despite the utter catastrophe that is the state welfare system, McCue hung in until last September. In 2025, according to the state Comptroller, he pocketed another $193,929.27. However, the DTA says that although he remained on as a “Special Adviser,” he wasn’t paid after last September 18.
Oddly, though, the Comptroller’s records show that even this year Jeff McCue received another $11,341.44 on the regular DTA payroll. Not to mention the second “leave buy back” of his career – this one for $32,710.
Jeff McCue, the $10-million lottery winner with the mansion on the golf course, is now back subsisting on his state pension — $10,407 a month, for a yearly grab of $124,886.
Next, meet brother Phil McCue. His current title is “Deputy Court Administrator for the District Court Department.” Wow. Very, very important job, I’m sure, given his current salary of $195,563.72 a year.
Comrade Phil didn’t hit the Mass Lottery, but he did hit the COVID lottery. You remember The Panic – if you worked for a living, it was the worst of times. If you were a connected hack, it was the best of times.
All the hacks were grabbing the big bucks, “working” from home, collecting “Hero Pay” and humming “Let the Good Times Roll.”
Phil retired, as it were, in 2020, just as the COVID Boom was being revved up. At the end, he was making $162,883.58 a year.
Phil McCue must have been one world-class pencil sharpener and paper shuffler, because his fellow courthouse hacks gave him not one, but two leave/buy backs on his way out the door.
In 2020, he pocketed $43,319.02 in leave/buy-back. In 2021, he hit the leave-buy back jackpot again – this time for $45,484,98. It’s all there in the record books.
But wait, it gets better for Phil McCue. Once you retire, you’re supposed to collect, at most, small amounts of money as you, uh, fill in at your old hackerama.
During COVID, though, all the rules went out the window. If you were in the Dreaded Private Sector, you got fired. If you were a hack, you were suddenly allowed to collect a full pension AND a full salary. Am I right, Phil McCue?
Here are Phil’s payroll numbers during the COVID Gold Rush:
In 2021, Phil got a state pension of $111,477.24 in addition to a salary of $118,205.63. (Plus that second bye-bye payment of $45,484.98.) Total 2021 take: $265,167,85.
In 2022, Phil’s salary went back up to $151,893.51 and his pension amounted to another $112,423.20. Total 2022 take: $264,316.71.
In 2023, the hacks’ COVID Gold Rush ended, sort of, and Phil gave up his pension. He went back on the regular hack payroll, struggling to make ends meet on just a little over 195K per annum.
But according to the Comptroller, Phil McCue was still double-dipping big time in that final year of the Great COVID Swindle. In 2023, he made $163,746.61 in salary and $112,822.70 from his pension. Total annual take: $276,569.31.
To put Phil’s COVID-era hauls into some perspective, Gov. Maura Healey’s scorned Sapphic soulmate, the elderly SJC Justice Gabrielle Wolohojian, has never made more than $226,187 lapping at the public trough.
And behind Phil’s current $195,000-and-change salary eventually comes the pension, again, not to mention another leave buy-back, which in his case will be his third, one more than brother Jeff.
The hackerama – it’s like dying and going to heaven. Just ask the McCue brothers.
You know, sometimes it seems like to make the big bucks in the hackerama nowadays, you have to be either lesbian, transgender, not from Massachusetts or foreign-born or, even better, some combination thereof.
It’s all about checking the boxes now. Am I right, Monica Tibbits-Nutt? Or Pedro Martinez?
But the McCues are indigenous coat holders, old guard you might say. And yet they’ve proven that people like us can still be triple threats to the taxpayers – stuffing their pockets with bloated salaries, pensions and buybacks, sometimes all at the same time.
Forgotten but not gone – that’s the McCues.
Somewhere, the Bulgers are smiling.