Rachael Rollins, forced to resign from her U.S. Attorney post in Boston, cracks the top 40 highest paid workers at Roxbury Community College.
Her annual rate is $96,000 for a part-time gig — making her the highest paid half-time employee on the books, according to state payroll records. A call seeking more to the college president’s office, that’s Jackie Jenkins-Scott who makes $220,000 as interim head of the school, was still pending as of Friday.
But back to Rollins. She last left the public sector last May after two scathing DOJ reports for attending a Democratic fundraiser while being the state’s top prosecutor and for meddling in the Suffolk DA’s race. That’s old news, now she’s back on the taxpayers’ dime at Roxbury CC.
The community college says Rollins was hired “in accordance with section 3.02 F of the BHE MA Community College Non-Unit Professionals Handbook.” We were asking if anybody else applied for the job and that was our answer. – Joe Dwinell
‘Zip’ Connolly’s moment of schadenfreude
John “Zip” Connolly, the 83-year-old disgraced ex-FBI agent and convicted mob hitman, may be enjoying a moment of schadenfreude this St. Patrick’s Day, as one of his prosecutors in Florida just went down in flames.
Michael Von Zamft prosecuted Zip during his 2007 trial for the mob murder of a Boston businessman in South Florida back in 1983. Von Zamft was assisted by Boston Assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Wyshak.
Von Zamft has been involved in multiple high-profile criminal prosecutions in Miami for decades. But last week, he was forced to resign in disgrace after what a state judge described as “severe recklessness.”
A headline from Miami said Von Zamft was accused of having “manipulated witnesses, including possibly providing conjugal visits to jailhouse informants.”
Connolly is still appealing his 2007 second-degree murder conviction in the gangland hit, and the circumstances of Von Zamft’s abrupt departure may figure in his next filing.
Zip was freed from prison in Florida in early 2021 after doctors said he would likely be dead within a year of cancer. Obviously, he isn’t. – Howie Carr
House-Senate feud over committee power simmering
Not-so-subtle barb-throwing between Beacon Hill committee chairs had a mild flare up this week after it had mostly subsided since last summer.
Sen. Marc Pacheco, a 16-term Democrat from Taunton, briefly revived the issue during a Senate session Thursday when he alluded to difficulties pushing a handful of bills through the Emergency Preparedness and Management Committee that he helps run.
“I’ve got a call into the House chair on this because as you know, across the Legislature, sometimes working and getting agreement on some of these things can be a little trying today as opposed to what they were just a few years ago,” Pacheco said.
At issue was an order to give the committee one more day to review seven bills dealing with varying subjects — student and teacher safety to creating a disaster relief fund and diagnostic testing to the threat of nuclear weapons.
Rep. Bill Driscoll, the House chair of the committee, said he has a “good working relationship” with Pacheco and said the comments were likely a reference to a well-publicized feud from last summer between two Democratic chairs of a climate-focused committee.
The frustration might also have stemmed from being “up against a deadline and trying to get everything filed,” Driscoll told the Herald Friday.
Pacheco said there are not a lot of bills that come into the committee so “it shouldn’t be that difficult to resolve but there’s a bit of resistance to move too quickly on some of these bills.”
“With all committees, the joint committees, the senators sitting on those committees have the minority vote and you know very well what it’s like to be on the minority side of voting issues. So we’re trying to resolve that by employing other strategies to get to agreement,” Pacheco told Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr. – Chris Van Buskirk
Lyons looks to new enterprises in pivot away from MassGOP
After their latest defeats in the MassGOP state committee races last week, ex-chairman Jim Lyons and his hapless crew are moving on to new, uh, enterprises.
Lyons has apparently finally realized he’s washed up in GOP politics. He is trying to organize something called “Mass. Freedom Fighters,” which is about “giving ordinary Americans a voice again.”
Oddly, Lyons announced his new plan a mere three days after “ordinary Americans” used an election to voice their opinion that they didn’t want Lyons et al. back in power at the state committee.
Meanwhile, perennial loser Geoff Diehl, a loyal Lyons minion, retained his committee seat. He is now concentrating on his next doomed mission, running for the same state Senate seat he lost in a landslide in 2015.
According to state campaign finance records, Diehl’s campaign has raised $23,000 since December, $21,000 of which came from people at his home address named “Diehl,” including $18,000 in “candidate loans.” Another $2,600 came from members of the Orlando family from Gloucester.
Amanda Orlando was the manager of Diehl’s latest sad race, running for governor in 2022. Another $100 was donated by a friend of Amanda’s named Russell Morris, also of Gloucester. Morris is currently under indictment in Essex County, charged with violent rape of a child. – Howie Carr
