I dunno if officers of a police union could be considered anti-woke, but sure sounds like a little grifting might have been on tap: in New York State, the state troopers' Police Benevolent Association president and legal counsel both stepped down last fall after an extraordinary six-hour executive session.
Apparently some members of that group had launched an inquiry into some financial record keeping and then things eventually went south for the leadership. Who could be surprised at that, when among other things it's now been disclosed that the now former president and now former legal counsel were associated with a tiny insurance agency tucked into some little town in southeastern NYS, called Epic Risk Solutions, which purported to "provide augmented coverage plans for various state trooper unions…” about which the documentation of said coverage was perhaps a little murky.
[ Epic Risk Solutions... ?! I can't stop laughing, although it's not funny. But it sounds like a good title for a sequel to
Bonfire of the Vanities... or one of those gigs that made a lot of money for those who had signed up to work on the reconstruction of Iraq, especially in the Green Zone during the early days after the invasion, when that all still looked pretty rosy to contractors. Republican White House aides and campaign donors. What could be a more epic risk solution than setting campaign dollar bundlers to work on reopening universities and an Iraqi stock market after a regime change?]
But back to the PBA: the insurance gig is not all of the problem, as the below-cited piece notes... there's a raft of possibly dubious practices related to little spinoff programs of the PBA that collect donations and award stipends or special funds or scholarships... and then there's the one that sells "PBA State Police Surgeon" ID cards and gold badges... but the insurance gig might have been enough on its own to get those resignations. Now there will also be a state investigation, once the state can round up some people who haven't landed in the papers recently over their own conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile there are those who insist that the whole brouhaha in October was political and was engineered by some dissident members in the state's western region. The cited piece wraps with a note that the day before the PBA officers stepped down, the NYS Superintendent of the state police resigned as a result of an unrelated investigation by the governor's office. Always something in the Empire State, eh?
The recent leadership shakeup at the labor union representing several thousand state...
www.timesunion.com