Stinking to high heaven

OK, breakfast clubbers: Where's the outrage?

If you live in Wayne County and you are not ready to march to Robert Ficano's office with blazing torches and pitchforks, you must have been chugging Thorazine for weeks.

Last week, we learned that a rather striking woman named Turkia Awada Mullin got $200,000 in severance from the cash-strapped county when she left her job as director of development.

Did they lay her off?

Hell, no. Ficano got her an even better job recently — as CEO of Detroit Metropolitan Airport. There, she is making $250,000 a year, doing a job that partly involves laying off one-sixth of the airport employees. Ficano, meanwhile, has imposed a 20 percent pay cut on unionized county workers, something the union (AFSCME) is fighting in the courts. The county, by the way, has a $160 million deficit.

Nevertheless, Ficano thought he ought to give Mullin a year's salary on her way out the door to get a better job. Fortunately, the newspapers found out about it. Mullin, who was once a poor girl growing up in Warren, has clearly left the proletariat behind.

"I'm paid what I'm worth. I've earned everything I got," she arrogantly told reporters, claiming she could have gotten much more elsewhere. Our asking about her double-dipping was a "ridiculous level of scrutiny." Well, self-awareness is rare these days. To be fair, it is true that she doesn't list a conscience on her résumé.

But what in the hell was Ficano thinking when he gave her a year's salary for accepting a better-paying job? Apparently, that's the way the boys do business in Wayne County. Mullin's predecessor on the development job, one Mulu Birru, denied getting such a settlement when he left. That is, till somebody produced the pay stub.

Birru was either a liar, or so corrupt or stupid that he had forgotten that he'd gotten an extra $200,000 of the taxpayers' cash. Just the kind of guy you want as a public servant. 

However, there's probably little joy in Turkiaville these days. Late last week, she talked to her capo, Bobby F, who was off in China. That provoked a sudden attitude adjustment. She overcame her earlier arrogance and said that returning the money was the right thing to do, after she whined a bit that going to the airport actually meant a pay cut for her darling self. Seems that when she was struggling along as the development director, she was getting an extra $75,000 a year from what WXYZ-TV called a "shadowy nonprofit" development corporation, which is funded, in part, from anonymous donations.

> Email Jack Lessenberry