FAFO of the Year Award. (One of them, anyway.)

Methuen, Massachusetts, pop. 53K, is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It's middle class/upper-middle class. Suburban-y. Low crime. 

I suppose you could attribute the low crime rate to the bang-up job that their former police chief, Joseph Solomon, was doing. But it was more likely it's Methuen's relative affluence.

In any case, Solomon's job was a lot cushier and less-pressured than that of big city police chiefs. At one point, through some shrewd finagling (his part) and some dumb decisions (the part of Methuen city administration), Solomon was, with the exception of the chief in Los Angeles (city pop. 3.86M), making more than any of the 700+ city police chiefs in the country. 

He's been back and forth with Methuen over the years, but somehow Solomon has always managed to prevail all the way to the bank. A few years ago, he retired with a pension of $184K. And if you're worried about how he was going to survive on that paltry amount when he'd been making a lot more, even while he was cop-ping he had a side gig as a principal and founder of Eagle Investigations, a PI, security, and training outfit. (He has lost his PI license, but my guess is he'll figure out to make some money off of Eagle.) 

Some people get away with things for ever, but Joseph Solomon finally ran into something of a FAFO brick wall. (Or to match metaphor with illustration, fell off the cliff.) In September, he pleaded guilty to 17 charges of public corruption, and a week later was stripped of that $184K pension. Oh, and he landed in the hoosegow for 30-days, where he no doubt got to rub shoulders with someone his PD had arrested over the years. Because Methuen may be low crime, but it's not no crime. (Solomon was sentenced to 2 1/2 years, but most of the sentence was suspended. If he keeps his nose clean, the 30 days will be it for him.)

Serves him right, all of it, the greedy, corrupt bastard. 

“There was such a severe breaking of the public trust” under Solomon’s leadership, [Methuen Mayor D.J.]Beauregard said.

It was a “rampant crime spree,” Beauregard said. “To see the city dragged through this nightmare was really terrible.” (Source: The Boston Globe)

That "rampant crime spree" resulted in "17 corruption charges, 11 felonies and six misdemeanors, including perjury, forgery, procurement fraud, and civil service law violations." During his spree:

...Solomon hired six part-time officers, including a former city councilor who had not graduated from the police academy, and unlawfully appointed them to full-time roles, court records show.

Something tells me that's not all. 

Anyway, with his get-out-of-jail-after-30-days plea agreement, Solomon had surrendured rights to future pension payments, but the city need to formalize it. 

The vote reduces the city’s unfunded pension liability by an estimated $3.7 million over the next 20 years, Beauregard said.

Methuen will also be looking to claw back the $1M that Solomon has been paid since he retired in 2021. 

Claw back away, folks!

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples out there, and plenty more where there has been FA without FO, but I'm nominated Joseph Solomon for FAFO of the Year Award. One of them, anyway.

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Image Source: Merriam Webster