By Josh Resnek
The mayor begging for Wynn Boston Harbor to remain the developer and owner of the casino project again misses the point.
He is begging for a train that has left the station to return.
If you are a woman in charge of your own life, the mayor missing the point about the Wynn Resorts failure to protect the rights of its female employees, is an extraordinary failure to understand what is at stake.
One wonders how this mayor, or any mayor faced with the same situation, could be so blind and unthinking, so absolutely unfazed or concerned about a company that is built upon a depraved culture of leadership tainted by sexual harassment charges that went unheeded and whose leadership from the top to the bottom were disciplined and trained to do as the boss required of them or faced dismissal.
The mayor’s not to be talked about past, and his inability to see himself clearly, enters into the difficulty to see straight about what is facing the city he leads.
Is a rejuvenated ward of the city worth more than the city’s reputation in the eyes of the world?
Do we need to beg for the tainted Wynn Boston Harbor folks to remain because they are passing out so many millions?
Does this make the company more suitable than others?
Does a company’s apparent unsuitability become any different because the mayor wants it that way?
Yes, or so it seems to be the mayor’s driving hope.
Wynn Boston Harbor has become the mayor’s enabler.
He can’t afford to see it go, to let it go or for it to disappear.
Without Wynn Boston Harbor, the mayor is saying, his true partner is irretrievably lost.
******
Steven Wynn stepping down and selling all his stock does nothing to change the culture of this business that was out of control when Wynn headed it.
The current President Matthew Maddox, who served under Wynn for 12 years as they built the company, lied on the Gaming Commission’s license application as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The company lawyer, also reported by the WSJ, was complicit in the lies
filed on its application. Maddox and others in the company knew, according to the WSJ, that the company’s president or his designees paid $7.5 million to a woman Wynn apparently made pregnant in order for her to keep her mouth shut.
The problem – dozens of high up company administrators and dozens more female employees knew about Wynn’s deviant sexual life, knew about the payoffs to a woman he impregnated, knew about the naked manicures, the sex massages inside his corporate office and on and on.
From the top almost to the bottom of the company there was the understanding and a company wide ambivalence to taking action against sexual harassment charges when any of the bosses were involved.
If an employee reported sexual harassment, such reports went nowhere or the employee faced being fired and blackballed in Las Vegas, according to the reports in the WSJ, based upon employees and former employees interviewed on the record.
Is this who we want the mayor begging to keep?
* * * *
What is at stake if the Gaming Commission sides with the mayor in allowing Wynn Resorts to maintain ownership?
The reputation of the city is at stake.
The protection of women’s rights inside our city hall and in our public places and at the casino are in question.
The city’s acceptance of sexual harassment as a corporate way of life and the mayor’s silence and acquiescence about sexual harassment being OK as long as the millions keep pouring in, reveals how he thinks about this important woman’s’ issue.
How official Everett treats women involved in government is in question if the mayor gets his wish from the Gaming Commission.
We have a mayor who has yet to say one word about Steven Wynn’s appalling behavior – as the governor called it.
The Attorney General has asked for the license to be stripped from Wynn Resorts.
The Boston Globe has done the same.
The Gaming Commission in the meanwhile is muddling along with an investigation that might have its results set for the public sometime in the summer.
No need to rush.
With Crosby at the helm, anything is possible – even satisfying the mayor’s beg for Wynn Resorts to stay when nearly everyone thinking straight around here knows it is time for them to go.