Shark bait

For weeks now, there's been the smell of blood in the waters surrounding Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano, and the media sharks have been dutifully circling, churning up one incriminating story after another.

The ongoing scandal resulted in Ficano doing a little bloodletting of his own on Friday, when he suspended two high-ranking members of his administration for one month without pay and canceled a six-figure contract with a third person neck-deep in the scandal.

Big Bob has to be hoping at this point that the furor will die down now that some punishment has been meted out to those he says were responsible for the $200,000 "severance" handed Turkia Mullin a few months back when she left her job as Wayne County's economic development director to become CEO of the Wayne County Airport Authority.

What remains to be seen is whether the actions announced by Ficano at a news conference Friday, along with Mullin's promise to return the money, will prompt the area's reporters to swim off in search of new prey.

Our guess is that there's been enough dishonesty, evasiveness and shady dealing exposed in recent weeks to convince anyone with even half a nose for news that more scandal could well be found lurking not far from the surface of this administration.

These troubled waters are new territory for a county administration that, until now, hasn't been subjected to much media scrutiny. For most of his time at the helm of Wayne County, the former sheriff benefited from the fact that so much media attention has been aimed at the felonious former mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick. 

But that started to change on Sept. 27, when Channel 7's Heather Catallo (working in conjunction with her investigative producer Ross Jones) first broke the news that Mullin received a $200,000 going-away gift when she voluntarily gave up her job with the county to go run the airport authority.

The following day, Wayne County commissioners began calling for an investigation. Two days later, Detroit's daily papers and other area media were all over the story. (As far as we can tell, though, neither the Detroit News nor the Free Press had the good graces to credit WXYZ for landing this blockbuster of a scoop.)

From that point on, things have gotten increasingly bizarre.

On Sept. 29, Ficano, on radio station WJR, claimed that the payout was a "standard-type contract." Mullin — who, as it turns out, also received an additional $24,000 in compensation for unused sick leave and vacation time — also claimed that the $200,000 "severance" payment was guaranteed in a contract.

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