Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. All righty, so I saw the other day
and they were first off was the story, and then
came an editorial both at the Charlotte Observer about our
old friend, Sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden of Mecklenburg County.
And yes, I do recognize that I am here at
a crime stoppers event, lot of law enforcement here, but
I feel comfortable dragging the sheriff of Mecklenburg County once again.
And now I feel like we may be approaching something
that might resemble a preference cascade. A preference cascade, remember
that it's like slowly at first and then very suddenly
it happens in business, It happens with fads, and it
happens with political momentum, and I want to think, but
I don't know, but I would like to think that
there may be some momentum gathering to oust Mecklenburg County
Sheriff Gary McFadden. So first, what's today, the seventeenth, So yeah,
like less than a week ago, the Charlotte Observer did
a very very very lengthy piece by Ryan Orley called
former employees allege years of abuse and dysfunction under Mecklenburg
Sheriff McFadden. And this is not new. These allegations against
McFadden are not new, at least not all of them.
Some of them, I would say, are the first time
I've seen some of these people. I think he did
speak with others that have not heretofore gone public. But
here's how the story starts. Former employees say Meckliberg County
Sheriff Gary McFadden emotionally abused and retaliated against them and
put staff in danger at the jail through poor management.
McFadden's former chief deputy, Kevin Canty, who I interviewed. You'll
recall before the Christmas break, Kevin Canty was in studio
and he had written the resignation letter November first, accusing
the sheriff McFadden of running the agency quote like a
third world dictatorship. Other former employees reached by The Charlotte
Observer shared similar assessments of McFadden, who was re elected
in twenty twenty two for a second term as sheriff
and has been in local law enforcement for more than
forty years. Some of the descriptions that appear in this
very very very lengthy piece. Let's see here, the biggest narcissist,
I believe I called him that at one point two,
a coward. He thinks he's godlike, vindictive, paranoid, ego driven
as well. There are others those are just yeah, those
are just in the first in the first half of
the first page. And this thing is ten pages long,
so you get the idea of where this story is going. Okay,
the people that they that they interviewed, I think they
cited seven former employees. I think four went on the record, Yeah,
four spoke on the record. Three asked not to be identified.
Those three said that they were traumatized, concerned about further retaliation,
or ready to move on from their time working for
Sheriff Gary. Not my fault, McFadden, He blamed the state
inspection process after supervision failures and debts at the county jail.
For years, he has publicly feuded with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement over whether he has to cooperate with their requests
to hold undocumented people in jail. In twenty twenty two,
he opted to close the county's juvenile detention center, citing
lack of staff, despite please from the state to keep
it open. Now, always keep in mind with Gary McFadden,
nothing is ever his fault, right. He deserves all the praise,
he deserves, all of the accolades. Anything good that the
Mecklenburg Sheriff's Office accomplishes, it's because of Gary McFadden. Anything bad,
that's somebody else's fault. A different picture emerges of McFadden
after Kevin Canty's resignation letter, so says the Charlotte Observer,
And on this I would disagree because the picture of
Gary McFadden, to me at least and to a lot
of others, has been very clear. All you have to
do is watch him speak, listen to how he says
what he says, and note how he never accepts responsibility
for the authority that he has for the control that
he has and for his lack of leadership skills. We
have known this stuff for years. This is why he
had two former employees run against him two years ago. Right,
Kevin Canty's resignation letter just put down into a you know,
into a printed form what we have all seen and heard.
So it's not new. This picture of McFadden is not new.
But I welcome everybody to join the preference cascade. So
I applaud the Charlotte Observer for devoting this amount of time, resources,
and effort to write this story and speak to all
of these people and get them on the record. McFadden
fired his new business director in November. We talked about
this a couple months ago. She had been on the
job just eight months. He hired her and then eight
months later fired her. He did not explain his reasoning
in firing Angelia Rigsby. Doctor Riggsby, I should say, and
I say that because she did earn the title, but
also McFadden hates it, so I feel like I want
to keep saying it, Doctor Riggsby. The first sign of
tension came back in June. According to Rigsby, Sorry, doctor Rigsby,
when she spoke to McFadden's wife, Kathy at a sheriff's
office women's conference. Okay, so picture the scene, sheriff's office
doing a women's conference. Rigsby, is there being a woman
in all? Kathy McFadden? Is there being another woman in
all at a women's conference and she's talking with her
boss's wife and McFadden's wife. According to Rigsby, McFadden's wife want. Yeah.
So McFadden's wife is talking to her, and Rigsby tells
Kathy McFadden that she wanted to make her own mark
after filling the shoes of the last business director who
had worked at the sheriff's office for decades. So this
is a completely normal and appropriate thing to say, like, wow,
that person they did you know, twenty thirty, forty years,
whatever it was. They were there for decades, and so
now you know, here I come. And maybe the conversation
probably started something like oh you got big shoes to fill,
Oh she was there forever, and oh you're taken over
and how is that going right? Probably perfectly amicable exchange.
And this is when Rigsby says, yes, you know, big
shoes to fill or something, but I'm looking forward to
making my own mark on this position. I want to
see what I can do in this post. So McFadden's
wife then offers to trade phone numbers and to mentor
her on how to work with her husband. Let me
give you my phone number, and so I'll tell you
how to deal with Gary. No, no, no, I'm sure
that's not what she said. Days later, the sheriff emails Rigsby.
So at some point Gary and his wife obviously talked
about this conversation between doctor Rigsby and McFadden's wife, and
McFadden says, quote, it has come to my attention that
you have some concerns regarding your current responsibilities and the
responsibilities and tasks that were completed by the previous business manager.
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the way in that's mine. Please don't tell me. But
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and I was sitting. It was in the line, and
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so I just pulled over and I walked like half
a mile up here. So you gotta do what you
gotta do to get on the air. You know, the
show never stops, all right. So the Charlotte Observer big
write up on Sheriff Gary, not my fault, McFadden, And
they told this story of doctor Rigsby, who was his
business manager at the Sheriff's office, and she was hired
by McFadden, and then eight months later she gets fired,
and she traces it to this conversation that she had
had with McFadden's wife where she said she was looking
to make her own mark on filling the shoes of
the previous business director. So obviously Gary and his wife
Kathy chat about this conversation, and Gary takes exception to
it for some reason, probably because he's a terrible manager
and a raging narcissist. But he then sends off this email.
Oh and a micromanager as well. He sends off this
email to his new hire and he says, it's come
to my attention that you have some concerns regarding your
current responsibilities and the responsibilities and tasks that were completed
by the previous business manager. He then says, come for
a one on one meeting now her supervisor, Kevin Knty,
who was the chief deputy who resigned and wrote that
scathing letter that he then published for everybody, particularly the
citizens of Mecklenburg County, to see what's been going on
in their sheriff's office. So Knty should not join, said
the sheriff. His chief deputy, her direct supervisor, was not
invited to this one on one with the sheriff. Rigsby said, quote,
I am not a crier, but I was in tears
because he berated me, he belittled me, he insulted me.
And that tracks, Yeah, that tracks from the stories I
have heard, she said. The new the sheriff mused that
she might be interested only in the prestige of her
new job, which is amazing, considering like that's Sheriff McFadden.
That's all him too, that's what he's all about. He
refers to himself in the third person, which is not
a sign of a healthy mind, by the way, or
a self awareness that's healthy. So this is what bad
managers do. Though they tear their employees down. They rule
by fear and intimidation. They do that against their employees.
And I speak from experience. No, not here at WBT
and no, not up in Nashville either. There was a job.
I'm not going to say any more about it, but
there was a job where the employers would berate the
staff and they did that in order to keep the
staff believing that they were terrible, and so they would
never go look for other works someplace else. Because the
employers knew that they were severely underpaying their staff and
abusing them by forcing them to work seventy eighty hours
a week and six days a week minimum, that kind
of stuff, not paying them correctly, getting them in trouble
with the irs, that kind of stuff, And so they
didn't never want these employees to leave. As McFadden might
call it, quote the plantation, that's the word he has used.
And so the plantation mentality. So you keep the employees
scared and thinking that they aren't any good at their job,
and so maybe if they could just get good enough,
maybe then they would leave and Eventually somebody does leave,
and when that one person leaves, then the preference cascade
kicks in and everybody else is like, oh wait a minute,
I can do that too, and they leave. Several and
former employees have told the Observer that they heard the
sheriff make similar comments. He routinely tells people that they
are not special or even competent, and therefore cannot be
trusted to do their jobs properly, to which I would ask,
why are they still working there? Then, Sheriff, why have
you not fired incompetent staff. They shouldn't be on the payroll.
You should fire them and hire competent staff. Kevin Canty,
the now former chief deputy, remembered, sheriff, not my fault.
McFadden becoming angry when employees called doctor Rigsby doctor Rigsby.
Nick Fadden apparently refused to use her honorific, calling her
only Miss Rigsby. Canty says, quote the guy's insecure, and
Riggsby believes that her firing was retaliatory. Once again, I
find it interesting that the man who demands and word,
the man who refers to himself as sheriff all the
time in the third person doesn't want to use the
term doctor to a person who actually earned her doctorate,
but that is what raging, malignant narcissists do, so it tracks.
All right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
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then somebody says, hey, did remember those old VHS tapes?
Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
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create a video dot com. All right, So the Charlotte
Observer does their very lengthy, very very lengthy piece on
Sheriff Gary not my fault McFadden. They talk to seven people,
four on the record, three anonymously, and they kind of
put together in one ten page article here well went
printed with eighteen point font garrimond, but when you print
it out, it's like ten pages, very lengthy piece, all
in one place. And then they follow that up as
they usually do with an editorial. Right when you do
a big piece like this, you put out an editorial
because now the editor's are like, oh my gosh, I
can't believe this story exists. We just read about it
in the paper, so like, what do we think about it?
And then they write their editorial and the headline on
the editorial is that the Mecklenburg sheriff is no longer
fit for the role. Since Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden
took office in twenty eighteen, his office has been the
subject of bad headlines, state investigations and lawsuits that have
raised serious questions about his ability to lead. Answers to
those questions have emerged in a new report from The
Charlotte Observer in which former employees detail years of abuse
and dysfunction at the Sheriff's office, including poor management that
has created unsafe conditions for staff and inmates alike. Among
the allegations, McFadden is verbally cruel and vindictive, he engages
in unfair finger pointing, and he publicly criticizes detention officers
in front of inmates, putting them in danger. The report,
while damning and disturbing, is not shocking. It's an affirmation
of what we already know that the Sheriff's Office and
by extension, the jail, has been plagued by dysfunction during
McFadden's tenure. So I'm glad that calling for his auster.
That's good. He's not fit for the role. And well,
I'll get to that part in a second. The next
part they go over is that the dysfunction is about
more than just working conditions. Deaths at the jail have
doubled under McFadden, and the Observer reported last year. Then
Mecklelberg County jails faced eleven out of fifteen death investigations
or they failed, rather eleven out of fifteen death investigations
that were conducted by the state since twenty nineteen. So
that's under McFadden, eleven out of fifteen death investigations our
jail has failed. That's because the state is racist, by
the way, according to McFadden, that's what that's the reason
why the state is failing him, and the state is
dinging them on all of these infractions and protocols and
failures at the jail. That the state is just cracking
down on him because he's a black sheriff and the
state inspectors, who are employed under Democrat governors are apparently
all racist against him. Anyway, McFadden isn't just responsible for
allowing those problems to fester. He is apparently the source
of at least some of them, a fact he seems
unwilling to admit. Well, of course he's not going to
admit that, McClatchy Editorial Board. Why would he His name
is Gary not my fault, McFadden, Why why would he
admit fault in something. McFadden's response has been to deflect blame.
Oh yeah, that sounds like Gary. Okay. Later on, observer says,
what is clear is that he is an awful manager,
true in a role that's critical to public safety. Also true,
he's inappropriate with employees, and he appears to wield his
internal affairs division as a weapon against them. Morale is low,
staffers feel overworked and denigrated, the consequences top employees resigning,
lawsuits that point fingers directly at him, and a poorly
run jail where too many inmates die. They conclude this
editorial and I'm just giving you the highlights here, but
they conclude by saying that calling on McFadden to resign
is likely a fruitless ask given his habit of deflecting
blame in the face of public scrutiny. Yes, Gary McFadden
is not going to resign. That would indicate that there's
some fault that he bears. And again, Gary, not my fault.
McFadden bears no blame for any of the problems that
have been occurring under his now six years of leadership
at the jail. It's all someone else's fault. It was
the previous shariff, it was the previous deputies. It was
the current deputies. It's the stage, it's the media. It's
always somebody else that's stopping Gary from doing the things
that the people elected him to do. And he is
called by God. Remember this is a man who equated
himself to Jesus in an interview that he gave with
wbt's Bret Jensen a couple months ago. If he has
to be the sacrificial lamb, remember that, like Jesus, that's
what he said about himself. Still, it's become clear, according
to the McClatchy editorial Board, that he is unfit for
the office he holds in a way that has placed
both his employees and inmates at risk. It's a dereliction
of the duty he promised voters he would fulfill. Now,
what the observer does not maybe know, or at the
very least does not communicate, is that there is, in
fact a way to remove a sheriff in the state
of North Carolina. I have gone over this multiple times.
Maybe they don't listen to the program, which is it's
so very hurtful, but that's possible. People have things to do.
I understand they could get the podcast though, but they
probably haven't heard the show where I have gone over
the state law. So if anybody listening knows anybody at
the Charlotte Observer, maybe you could forward this along to them.
It is State Law one twenty eight Dash sixteen. One
twenty eight Dash sixteen. And the title of this article
to law is Officers subject to Removal And it starts thusly,
any sheriff or police officers shall be removed from office
by the Judge of the Superior Court resident in or
holding the courts of the district where said officer is resident,
upon charges made in writing for the following causes. And
then it explains the causes A sheriff can be removed
by the judge of the Superior Court. So I would
take that to me, the chief Judge of the Superior Court.
There is a way to do it for what? All Right,
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