The Political Whore

Holy crap, just when you thought the Buddy Johnson saga couldn’t get any worse, Jeff Testerman over at the Times’ Tampa office digs up a new low: Johnson hired an ex-con as special assistant to the woman who was responsible his office’s budget. A man convicted of arson, cocaine possession and violating his probation. A man who was a “person of interest” in a series of Brandon arsons that stopped after his arrest. A man who refused to talk with the St. Petersburg Times about what he did for his $21,000 salary over 3.5 months of work.

[William Gaskin] worked briefly as a telephone solicitor before [Johnson's chief of staff and general counsel Kathy] Harris hired him as her special assistant. He had been out of prison eight months.

Gaskin accompanied the elections general counsel to court, handled troubleshooting at early voting sites and acted as a gatekeeper for outsiders who wanted access to Harris, according to the elections staff.

“I knew nothing about his background, but I saw him during early voting at the College Hill voting site, and after early voting started, he was like a buffer between me and Kathy Harris whenever I wanted to reach her,” recalled Sharon Samek, a Tampa lawyer with the Florida Democratic Lawyers Council, a voting rights organization.

Gaskin’s employment ended Nov. 8, two days after a manual vote count determined that Johnson had lost the supervisor of elections job to Phyllis Busansky.

Neither Harris nor Gaskin would discuss his job duties, but the Times points out that Gaskin had been a CPA and had worked for Ernst & Young, the auditing firm that was checking on the office’s finances when Gaskin was hired.

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