This past March 8, New Bedford police detectives watched as onetime detective Stephen Greany carried what they say was a stolen city dartboard and a Nintendo Wii system into his city home.
Later, during a search of the Francis Street residence at which Police Chief Paul Oliveira himself was present, they discovered, among other things: 30 pre-packaged suboxone strips; a prescription bottle with 121½ Xanax tablets; three plastic bags of marijuana (1,152 grams), a working digital scale, 49 rounds of .22LR ammunition and $6,420 in cash.
The detective’s affidavit in the police report said the seized material was “consistent with distribution,” and Greany is now awaiting a July 20 pretrial hearing on drug possession and distribution charges, theft from the city, and possession of ammunition without a license.
Greany served time for a 1999 case in which he pled guilty to taking a bribe from a drug dealer in return for outing a fellow detective to the dealer. Nonetheless, in 2019, he was hired as a city parks maintenance worker by Mark Champagne, then the city’s director of the Department of Facilities and Fleet Management.
According to Mayor Jon Mitchell’s office, Champagne, who now works as a facilities coordinator for the School Department, did not alert either the mayor’s office or the mayor himself of the Greany hire.
Champagne knew about Greany’s background at the time of the hire, though a CORI (Criminal Offender Record Information) check had come back negative, perhaps because the charges against the former detective were federal ones, according to Mitchell’s office.
After he was hired to do parks maintenance work, Greany later applied for and obtained city jobs as a code enforcement inspector and temporary custodian. But he left them both after a brief time, deciding he liked parks maintenance work better.
The mayor’s office says Mitchell learned of Greany’s background at the time the police department began investigating him for a series of thefts of city property, which Greany has told detectives he merely took because the city was going to throw the items away.
Since Greany’s arrest, Mitchell’s office says the city has implemented a new policy under which “the personnel director must request, on behalf of the relevant department head who wishes to hire a candidate with a criminal record, written approval from the mayor.”
In addition, in the wake of the Greany case, “all new city employees are now subject to a new comprehensive background check using an outside service (Checkr.com) which identifies all criminal offenses, including those in other states and at the federal level,” again according to the mayor’s office.
Over in the School Department, Interim Superintendent Andrew O’Leary said background checks go beyond the limitations of the CORI system by requiring that all new employees be fingerprinted, which in turn gives the department access to federal and out-of-state criminal convictions.
State and federal laws prohibit discrimination in hiring against people suffering from drug and alcohol addiction, but the protections do not apply if a person is using.
The city of New Bedford was not alone this year in struggling over an employee with a criminal background and apparent substance abuse disorder.
The Whaling Museum made headlines in January when Robert Burchell, essentially a custodian at the facility, was charged with stealing valuable historic artifacts, said to be valued in excess of $150,000.
Like Greany, Burchell had served time — in his case in the county facilities for shoplifting and drug charges. Also like Greany, Burchell’s case has all the earmarks of an individual in the throes of a lifestyle marked by substance abuse.
The City Council has shown little interest in the Greany case but longtime Councilor-at-large Brian Gomes tried to haul Amanda McMullen, the president and CEO of the Whaling Museum, before the body to explain who was responsible for CORI checks at the museum, who hired Burchell, and just what the private, nonprofit museum’s hiring policies are.
Odd. There’s no record of Gomes showing a similar interest in a public hearing about the city of New Bedford’s hiring policies and the background checks of Greany in the city’s own Facilities and Fleet Management department.
I was not able to reach Mark Champagne for comments for this column.
I do not know what his thinking was in hiring Greany. I know Champagne is respected for his abilities in managing city buildings and that the School Department was happy to have him take on the oversight of its extensive building projects.
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I do worry about the potential for political pressure from well-connected people in the hiring of someone like Greany. I don’t have any evidence that was the case here, but I definitely know that someone struggling with this kind of background who is politically connected will always have a better chance at a job than someone struggling with the same problems who is not connected.
In the Whaling Museum case, Councilor Gomes said it was a matter of public interest that such valuable items related to the city’s history were endangered. That’s a fair point but it doesn’t explain why he called in the Whaling Museum for a public session but not Mr. Champagne.
McMullen’s letter back to Gomes pointed out that the museum is a private, nonprofit institution, not subject to the City Council’s oversight. That’s true enough, but the museum has a responsibility to explain more of what happened in the Burchell case to the community at large, which has supported it both financially and personally over the decades.
McMullen did inform Gomes that her institution had done a CORI check before hiring Burchell. She did not explain what it found and did not find, but she wrote, “As I am sure you are aware, state background checks are not failsafe nor immune to human error.”
The Greany and Burchell cases, it seems to me, outline the perils that institutions of all sorts have in hiring people with criminal records or drug and alcohol addictions.
A forward-looking institution may well want to give a person a second chance.
As Carl Alves, the chief executive officer of PAACA told me, it’s a challenging situation, where the employer has to balance two interests. On the one hand, institutions have to protect themselves from theft or non-performance and other matters related to people in recovery. On the other hand, people in recovery need to become functioning members of society.
“We’re not locking people up forever,” he said. “People need to support themselves.”
Some workplaces — restaurants, fishing boats, delivery companies, construction and the recovery industry itself — have been open and successful in employing folks beset by addictions. But there are clearly a lot of folks who do not succeed in living sober and straight lives, and the more corporatized a setting, it seems the more difficult it would be to find that secure job.
We know a lot more about drug addiction than we used to. And a lot more about the social and psychological forces that can drive people to criminal activity.
It seems accurate to say that most everyone, either in their own family or extended family or circle of friends, knows someone who has suffered from substance abuse and the related criminal lifestyle that often accompanies it.
There was a time, not too long ago, when a history of drug abuse or criminal convictions would make it virtually impossible to obtain a job in many walks of life. And if you talk to folks who work in the field of substance abuse, they will tell you it’s still an uphill battle to place someone with criminal convictions and substance abuse issues into jobs. Never mind housing.
But in an era when much more is known about the medical nature of addiction and the social constructs that drive much crime, a criminal record is not always an outright prohibition against obtaining gainful employment.
Progressive organizations are willing to give people a chance. But it’s a chance that can blow up in their face.
The question is this: If we think of substance abuse and related crime as another illness and societal problem, what level of risk are we willing to accept in giving people a chance?
When people break the law, there is justice. It absolutely must be exercised. But when people don’t break the law, and spend many productive years in recovery, we don’t hear about them.
We don’t hear about the success stories.
Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
You should write about success stories instead of putting people out there who have tried to rehabilitate themselves. I remember when you and your boy John Dougherty used to write sneaky shit then slither around and hide . Man up and stop writing negative things about people who have stumbled
Spillame maybe your problem is you’ve never had an awakening or a come to Jesus moment. Maybe you need a jolt to really set your thinking straight 😧
I think we may not often hear about success stories because people who succeed at beating an addiction don’t want to talk publicly about their history for fear of still being judged. If that is the case, it is not Mr. Spillane’s fault, Mr. Medeiros.
Greany’s case is more serious than just giving someone with an addiction problem another chance. A cop accepting a bribe to help a drug dealer is a character issue that goes way beyond that. Whether or not to rehire him needs to be framed in a whole separate way.
Gotta love new Bedford! like a bunch of crabs pulling each other down. Character issue? This guy could’ve given up half of the new Bedford police when his case originally dropped but shut his mouth and did his time like a man. This second case are merely allegations at this point so let’s see the outcome before you start judging people. You wanna write about something look at all these dirty cops in new Bedford to this date. What a shameful rogues gallery to say The least