David Ellis - Breach of Trust

“Yes.”

“So if we turn a job into an internship, we can hire whomever we want and pay them whatever?”

Gordon leaned forward. “But these jobs aren’t internships, Mr. Kolarich. I mean, here.” He looked at the piece of paper. “Associate supervisor for administration in the Board of Education. That’s not an internship.”

“Maybe it is now,” I answered. “I mean, it is if we say it is, no?”

Gordon looked like he’d swallowed a bug. By the time he left Mac’s office, he’d stained both of his armpits and probably lost about five pounds of water weight.

“What an asshole, that guy,” Mac said to me. “This guy forget who he’s working for?”

“He’s just doing his job,” I said.

“Yeah, well, let’s see how long he has a job.”

“You’re not going to fire Gordon,” I said.

Mac looked at me. I could see him mentally run through his diagram, himself up at the top, me several notches below. “And why aren’t I going to fire him?”

“Because I said so. You fire him, you fire me.” I opened my hands. “You want to fire me, Mac? Be my guest. I’ll figure this out for you, but you’re not going to run this guy Gordon out of the office. You’re not.”

I left the office on that note. Looked like I wasn’t going to be counting Brady MacAleer as someone whose trust I would gain. But there was only so much I could tolerate. I began to wonder how long I could wade in the swamp with these assholes.

I found Gordon in his office an hour later. When he saw me, his posture went rigid. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d peed his pants, too. Fortunately, he was behind his desk.

“Listen, Gordon,” I said. “I understand that you were troubled by our conversation. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to write me a memo explaining that we can’t deliberately avoid the veterans’ preference laws. I want you to put it in writing and give it to me and me only.”

He stared at me, a deer in the headlights. “And Mr. MacAleer fires me.”

“No. That’s not going to happen. He’ll never see the memo. Just me. You need to cover yourself.”

Gordon took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Is he-really going to do that? Move the jobs around and create internships?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It won’t be your decision, and I want you to be able to say that it wasn’t your idea. Because it wasn’t. Okay?”

He was off-balance. He didn’t know me. And this kind of stuff, it clearly wasn’t his game. He was a bureaucrat, an honest one.

“It didn’t used to be like this,” he said.

“I know.” I patted the door and walked back to my office.

I spent the rest of that day and evening reviewing all the state statutes on this stuff, most especially the veterans’ preferences. The next morning, I met with Brady Mac and Madison Koehler in her office.

“Good news and bad news,” I said.

Madison rubbed her eyes. “The good news first,” she said. I’d have gone the other way.

“The good news is that three of the agencies we need-Transportation, Education, and Corrections-have offices in at least one county where there are no veterans applying. So we could hire these people for jobs in those counties and not have to deal with veterans.”

“What counties?” she asked.

“Two in Norfolk County and one in Summit County.”

“Those are downstate,” she said. “Rick Harmoning’s people live up here. That’s no good.”

“So we hire them for jobs down there and then transfer them, almost immediately, up here. They’ll already have the jobs so we don’t have to deal with veterans’ preferences. A job transfer doesn’t count.”

She looked at me, then Mac, and nodded. “Okay, so for three of the five agencies, we get them jobs by moving the jobs to counties without veterans waiting in line.”

“Right. And then move them back, once the job is theirs.”

She rolled her hand for me to continue. “What about the other two?”

“The other two agencies-Commerce and Community Affairs and Public Health-we’re fucked,” I said. “But we can hire those people as interns.”

“ Interns? That’s not going to work. These people don’t want minimum-wage contracts. They want full-time employment with a salary and benefits.”

“It will work,” I said. “We hire them as interns at the full salary they’d receive as full-time state employees. We can do that. There’s nothing stopping us. We can pay them whatever we want. And the law says we can hire an intern into a full-time position if they successfully complete a six-month probation period. The veterans’ preference doesn’t apply to them.”

Madison thought that through. “So they get the job now, with full salary, and after six months they become full-fledged state employees with benefits?”

“Exactly,” I said.

She seemed okay with that. “And the bad news?”

“The bad news,” I said, “is that everything we’ve just discussed is illegal. We aren’t supposed to do any of this. The law says that we must give a veteran’s preference to all of these jobs we’re trying to fill. It says we must take ‘every reasonable measure’ to ensure veterans are given their rightful preference. We’re doing the opposite. We’re taking every measure to consciously avoid the veteran’s preference.”

Madison put down the pen she was twiddling between her fingers and sat back in her chair. “I don’t want to hear that.”

I’m sure she didn’t. But it was essential that I say these things. It had to be clear that I was helping to orchestrate an illegal scheme. Otherwise, the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege didn’t apply, and everything we were discussing might be deemed privileged and unusable to the prosecution in court. Plus it made the case airtight, when the jury listened to the recording of this conversation. Madison couldn’t claim that she was relying on advice of counsel when her counsel was telling her, up front, that their plan was illegal.

It was one of many times when I took a moment for inventory. I was getting pretty good at this. And what a talent: I was opening doors for people who, if they chose to walk through them, would be rewarded with an indictment from a federal grand jury. I was, for all practical purposes, sending people to prison. I was a loaded weapon. I was like a roach motel for criminals.

“Well, my job is to make sure that you hear that,” I answered Madison. “I’m a lawyer. I tell you what the law says. It just so happens I’m also telling you how to circumvent it.”

Madison seemed unhappy now. “So what the hell does this mean?”

“It means,” I said, “that if you’re going to do what I suggest, be careful about it. Because it’s illegal. Paper the file. Make a point of needing these people in those downstate counties. Something convincing. And then paper the file again, explaining that with the budget crunch, you have to consolidate or something, and move these people up here. Same thing with the internships. Just create a few internships and maybe-maybe don’t start them at the full-blown salary, because it will be too obvious. Just make it something decent, and let them know, six months from now, they’ll be getting full pay and benefits.” I looked at each of them. “Bottom line, make sure that if anyone asks, they can’t prove that we were doing this to fuck the veterans.”

Madison made a face. She didn’t like my stark description of what we were doing. Criminals never do. They rarely like to talk about what they’re doing out loud. I mean, what I’d said was spot on. The public policy of this state was to thank people who had risked their lives for this country in armed conflict by giving them a small bump in job preference; it was a mandatory state law, and here we were, doing everything we could to circumvent that policy. It made me sick. My only consolation was that I was nailing these people to the wall, courtesy of a recording device in my coat pocket.