At massport since sept. 11?
Dukakis wrote a letter after the 9/11 attacks bemoaning how Massport “has been turned into a convenient dumping ground for unemployed Republicans.”
If anyone would know, it would have been the Duke, right?
But he did have a point. On 9/11, the acting governor was Jane Swift. After she lost a race for Congress in 1996, and before being elected lieutenant governor, she was given her own Massport job. Swift had an office at Hanscom Field – with no telephone.
It doesn’t get much more Massport than that — a hack with an (off-site) office but no phone.
Cellucci and his cronies once took a long liquid junket to Ireland, where he bonded with multiple bartenders. A few weeks later a Dublin barmaid appeared at Massport headquarters and was nicknamed “Where’s me job?”
In other words, Massport didn’t just have nationwide searches. They had worldwide searches. Speaking of which, Massport had an office in London – a very convenient place to send political hacks’ young exgirlfriends when they broke up with their Beacon Hill sugar daddies.
After the Gidget booze cruise, ex-Rep. Peter Blute promptly resigned as Massport boss. He was replaced by Weld’s former campaign flack, a woman named Ginny Buckingham.
Earlier this week, I heard from a national reporter working on her own 9/11 story. She asked me if I thought Buckingham had been scapegoated after the attacks when she lost her job.
My quote for the reporter was, “If you live by patronage, you die by patronage.”
In the weeks after 9/11, the Logan Airport security director was reassigned to a lesser position. Of course the hacks couldn’t get rid of him — he was a state trooper who’d been Weld’s driver during the 1990 campaign.
It was also discovered that the overnight shift of electricians had set themselves up a sort of dormitory, where they sometimes slept through their highly paid union shifts.
Buckingham was eventually replaced by one Tom Kinton. You may recall that payroll patriot — he retired a few years later with a pension of at least $195,000 a year, plus a $459,000 buyout for unused sick time and a $17,000 payout for unused vacation time.
How Massport is that? As for Buckingham, I pointed out to the national reporter that she’d received a nice consolation prize for losing her hack sinecure post-9/11.
While she was working as a coat holder for Weld, the governor appointed her husband, a UMass grad named David Lowy, to a district court judgeship.
Four years later Cellucci promoted Mr. Ginny Buckingham to the Superior Court.
And in 2016, yet a third GOP governor, Charlie Baker, put the UMass grad on the Supreme Judicial Court. He now makes $200,984 a year, and you know how hard all judges have been “working” these last 18 months.
Has anything really changed at Massport in the last 20 years? Only the names. It’s still a dumping ground for the unemployed — of both parties.
It was only recently revealed, for example, that when Suffolk District Attorney (and future U.S. attorney) Rachael Rollins left her Massport job in 2015, she was handed a $175,000 severance payment as well as another $45,000 to pay for a program at Harvard Business School.
Like Kinton, Rollins got paid for unused vacation time — $18,334. It’s a Massport thing.
Elections have consequences. So do hacked-up, incompetent government agencies. One of the consequences was 9/11.
Listen to Howie’s radio show from 3-7 p.m. on WRKO-AM 680.