Russell Harding was a do-nothing patronage hire who spent his time at the Housing Development Corporation stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from taxpayers, collecting child pornography, taking luxury trips, and badmouthing the blacks and "white trash" his office was supposed to be aiding:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/giul-m24_prn.shtmlDetails of Russell Harding’s spending spree first appeared in an article by Village Voice columnist Tom Robbins, who obtained expense records after filing freedom of information requests. The records showed that the bulk of the quarter-of-a-million in city money went to pay for trips taken by Harding and Luke Cusack, a close friend whom he hired as the agency’s senior vice president.
During 30 long-distance trips that the two made together, Harding and Cusack stayed at the most luxurious resorts available, bypassing cheaper hotels that hosted the conferences they were supposed to be attending. On one trip to Las Vegas, the pair racked up $17,000 in expenses, folding gambling losses and a helicopter ride into their hotel, restaurant and airfare tabs.
Other trips included city-paid visits to exclusive spas. Barely two weeks before he was to surrender his post to an appointee of the incoming Michael Bloomberg administration, Harding booked one final $10,700 junket that was to have taken him to Singapore, Thailand and Bali. The booking was canceled after being discovered by his replacement, but the city was forced to pay a $500 penalty.
Harding billed the city for single meals costing as much as $1,000. At the same time, he submitted receipts for reimbursement for the $1.25 bagel he bought each morning, 60-cent cans of soda and the two packs of cigarettes he smoked daily. At the time he was drawing a salary of $189,000, having awarded himself multiple pay increases, “overtime” pay and bonuses. During this same period, the Giuliani administration had imposed a two-year wage freeze on all city workers.
Harding repeatedly referred to blacks and working class whites as "trash", and called black college students "stupid monkeys". Harding himself is a college dropout.
His racism seems to have affected his work (if you can call it work) at the housing agency. Apparently, he was in the habit of lavishing special treatment on his favorite whites -- no matter how inexperienced and unqualified they were:
Several current and former HDC employees ... said the quotes confirmed their own long-held suspicions of Harding's attitudes and that he often displayed a bias against blacks in hiring, promotions, and raises.
"I wasn't surprised," said Beverly Ratcliffe, a former administrator at the agency who left in December. "In the normal course of business, you could just tell Russell didn't want blacks around." Ratcliffe, who is African American, said that Harding would pointedly not invite her and other blacks to meetings, even when the subject concerned matters they handled directly.
"There were very few black men at HDC, period," she said. "Russell wanted a white person in charge of every department, even if they weren't qualified. Whites were regularly given higher raises and bonuses than people of color. Quite a few whites who didn't have the experience were put in charge of black people who knew much more and had higher degrees."
(...)
"Of course he wouldn't say anything like that to me personally," said the staffer, an African American. "But it was clear Russell had problems with blacks and with women. He also had a class issue. His biases were obvious to people, and the plan was to keep him away from us and let Luke be the front person. HDC went from a place that had never had a lawsuit and where people enjoyed working to one where people walked on eggshells and in fear." At his sentencing hearing, this snobby richboy spent a good forty minutes boo-hooing to the court that he is a victim of mental illness and therefore deserving of leniency. This ploy seems not to have worked quite as well as he might have hoped.
And now, Russell Harding has got a 63 month prison sentence ahead of him. Good!
Clearly, this is news to be
savored.
I, for one, enjoy imagining what all awaits this thieving, snivelling, kiddiefucking silver-spooner once the prison doors have slammed shut on his loser ass.
:)
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