Like most cities in the United States, San Francisco is up to its neck in public "servants", all of them vastly overpaid, underworked, and fiercely protected by public employee unions. For every 20 people in San Francisco, there is 1 employee of the City of San Francisco, which is a stunning ratio. Rest assured, these thousands of not-so-hard-working employees are deep into the six figures with respect to their salaries and benefits, but there's one chap in particular I'd like to highlight: one Mr. Stanley Ellicott, who it was discovered in January had been charged with stealing expensive gear from San Francisco and selling them on eBay.
Following his arrest, he was put on "paid leave", meaning he kept drawing his nearly quarter-million dollar compensation as he did whatever needed to be done to defend himself.
Well, perhaps his defense wasn't the only thing on his mind in the ensuing weeks, because he knew there was something much larger to hide, and that was the fact he had set up a fake company with a "friend" in the Chicago area with whom, over a period of years, he allegedly disbursed about two-thirds of a million dollars in completely bogus worker's comp claims. So on top of his January shenanigans, he's got an additional 62 felony counts to contend with.
I was curious if this industrious young entrepreneur had any social media presence, and yep, he sure does, followed all of thirty-one people. He joined Twitter in March 2009, and almost all of his posts - - every one of which is banal and vapid - - were from 2009 through 2012, prior to the creation of the aforementioned bogus company. "Captivated by finance", indeed!
I was curious if his tweets could give us any insight into the mind of a person who does this kind of thing. Let's thumb through them a moment, shall we?
Hmmm. Not much to go on there. I will say, however, one tweet stands out as a magnificent coda for this entire saga and provides a peek into his mental makeup that goes a long way to explaining what happened next. I shall leave you with this:
