Six-figure Massachusetts pensioners a town-sized population

Forgotten, but not gone.

That is the recurring theme of today’s column, as we peruse a few of the most bloated pensions in the state hackerama. Every year, the state’s billion-dollar kiss-in-the-mail scandal spirals more and more out of control.

Take a guess how many hacki emeriti are now collecting six-figure pensions.

The over-under is 2,758.

If you took the under, YOU LOSE!

Where is DOGE when we really need it, here in Massachusetts?

Billy Bulger, the Corrupt Midget, used to be the king of hack pensions. Now at age 91, after 23 years on the dole, he’s almost slid out of the Top 10, at $274,148 a year.

At this point, I would advise suspended crooked state trooper Michael Proctor to stop reading. He has another hearing tomorrow in Framingham, and it could be the end of the line. He might finally be fired. Proctor might have to go out and get… a real job.

Just to illustrate for “Proctor Trooper” the golden future that he tossed away, like a handful of broken taillight fragments on a snowy Canton lawn, consider the case of Kerry Gilpin, the millionaire former MSP colonel. She retired in 2019 — at age 49!

Since then she’s been pocketing $179,720 a year.

Of course Gilpin’s gotten a new gig as well. She’s a partner in Comprehensive Investigations and Consulting, a “diverse” firm.

The diversity is represented by John Benzan. He’s the black lawyer most recently in the news representing the Dominican illegal alien who was lugged living on welfare in a Healey hotel in Revere with 4,995 grams of fentanyl and an AR-15.

The third principal is Dan Bennett, another greedy payroll patriot who was forced out as MA public safety secretary in 2017 after an early series of appalling scandals involving the State Police. (His pension is a mere $54,779 a year.)

That round of MSP corruption was what propelled Gilpin into her brief stint as colonel. She succeeded Richard McKeon, who was implicated in a brazen attempt to change a police report for the daughter of a hack judge both he and Bennett had “worked” with at the Worcester DA’s office.

McKeon retired in disgrace, if you can describe an annual pension of $172,377 as humiliation.

As that scandal was breaking, the MSP had to deal with a second black eye. After a nationwide search, the brass had hired a hot young mobster’s moll who was on record admitting to drug dealing, money laundering and perjury before a federal grand jury.

The State Police deemed her eminently qualified to be on the road with a car, a badge, a gun and a K-9 named Kujo.

After her thug boyfriend went to prison, the future hottie female trooper had hooked up with an MSP lieutenant colonel named Dan Risteen.

Like McKeon, Risteen quickly “retired.” Risteen’s kiss in the mail is now $163,028 a year, supplemented by another $226,052 as “field services director” for his thug buddy, Teamsters capo Sean O’Brien.

Risteen’s MSP running mate (who appeared with him in “The Departed,” a movie oddly enough about crooked cops) was Francis Hughes. He checked out at the same time as Risteen, McKeon, Bennett and other parties known and unknown to the grand jury.

Hughes, an MSP deputy superintendent, now grabs a pension of $177,078 a year. Hughes too has lately been working for the International Brotherhood, collecting $208,138 as “chief investigator” for Sean O’Brien.

Teamster thugs. It’s a Townie thing.

Remember Gerry Leone? Used to be DA of Middlesex County, until he decided to make the big bucks in private practice. That didn’t seem to work out so well, so he was quickly back slurping at the public trough – at ZooMass, working for his fellow Democrat hack Marty Meehan.

At age 62, Leone is now retired and pocketing $199,812 a year.

Another erstwhile county prosecutor cracked the top 200, at number 192. Mike O’Keefe, who I wish was still the Barnstable County district attorney, may very well be the top Republican on the list. He gets $153,190.

Does the name Binienda ring a bell? There used to be a hack state rep from Worcester named John “Spuds” Binienda.

Spuds ingested a bad ice cube one evening and staggered home, where he got into a crapulous dispute with his lovely bride over what to watch on late-night TV. Mrs. Spuds ended up with the cord of the TV set wrapped around her neck and Chairman Spuds ended up in the Worcester County House of Correction.

It was the highlight of his lackluster career. Forever afterwards, Spuds was reverentially referred to as the “dean” of the Worcester County delegation.

Binienda is long gone, but who should I spot at number 67 but one Maureen Binienda, ex-superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools, at $175,293 a year. She was Spuds’ sister-in-law. In addition, I found a clip saying she’s been grabbing another $141,000 a year as “interim superintendent” of a school system out west.

It’s not enough to feed at the trough. These hacks all feel they must lick the plate.

I noticed the former son-in-law of a House speaker — $158,000 a year. I googled him and discovered that he’d been in a dispute with the State Retirement Board over… well, do you care to guess whether the hack son-in-law thought that he was entitled to more, or less, in his kiss in the mail?

You want even more obscure hackerama? How about Mary Anne Orfanello, retired judge, for $155,891 a year. She’s a second-generation hack. Her daddy, Francis X. Orfanello, was a career coat holder in the Pemberton Square courthouse.

As an aide, he was mixed up, in a small way, in the Justice Robert Bonin scandal in the mid-1970’s. Orfanello took some messages or something before the pablum-puking liberal judge stupidly attended a fundraiser for an alleged gang of pederasts at which Gore Vidal was the main speaker.

In other words, it happened a very long time ago. And yet Frank’s darling daughter is still cashing a kiss in the mail of $12,990.94 every month.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Old hacks don’t even fade away, they just keep laughing all the way to the bank every month.

Getting back to Trooper Proctor, good luck at your disciplinary hearing tomorrow. Tough break how you screwed up so bad.

The lesson here, I think, is that if a trooper tries to fix a case to get a fellow hack off, everybody shrugs and you get to keep your obscenely bloated pension. (See examples above.)

But trying to frame someone for a murder they didn’t commit turns out to be a firing offense, as unbelievable as that may seem. Especially in Norfolk County.

Proctor, if you’d just minded your own (monkey) business and settled for driving drunk and stealing OT, maybe down the road you too could have been promoted to major. Someday you might have been grabbing a pension of $160,336 a year.

You know, like a guy named Adam Crook. For that is indeed the name of a retired major in the State Police with a $160,336 pension — Crook.

You can’t make this stuff up.