Butt-Dial Broadcasts NHFD Frustrations

A recording of a private fire department phone call has gone mini-viral, leading to federal agents being called in to ask questions.

Call it Butt-Dial-Gate.

The episode began in late April, when Assistant Chief Orlando ​“Woody” Marcano was inadvertently recorded conducting a one-sided phone call, complaining about all the administrative paperwork that Chief John Alston had assigned him.

Months later, that minute-and-a-half recording was blasted out in an email to dozens of city employees. Alston called local cops to look at how the recording transpired, and soon the feds were on the case.

The firestorm of controversy, it turns out, has all been over a butt-dial.

“He’s Messing With Me”

A 25-year veteran of the force, Marcano became New Haven’s first Latino assistant fire chief in August 2017. He serves as assistant chief of administration. At his swearing in, Alston said he was glad to see Marcano promoted. When Alston became fire chief, several leadership positions were unfilled, forcing him to shoulder the work that’s usually handled by others like the assistant chief.

At the time, Marcano said he knew the job would be largely administrative, overseeing finances, communications and employee discipline.

By this spring, on the recorded phone call, he was grumbling about all the tedious work.

“There’s a necessity here for a quartermaster, there’s no question. Now I have to do the bills, which is going take me probably like two days of my week,” he said. ​“This chief didn’t think about the impact; he didn’t care. That’s the way he’s messing with me and keeping me busy.”

In the recording (listen to it at the top of the story), Marcano speaks mostly in Spanish. It’s unclear to whom he’s talking. At one point, the recording picks up a background noise from the television, where a reporter is ​“live” on the scene.

On the call, Marcano discusses who should be responsible for issuing the department’s uniforms. That task had previously been handled by the union itself, but the department had taken back responsibility after Alston said he noticed ​“five different people wearing five different things, some of it not OSHA-approved,” a reference to federal workplace safety standards.

(The matter is unrelated to a separate incident in the news lately about City Hall purchasing uniforms through a fire department account, which took place a month later.)

That meant someone needed to distribute all the protective clothing — helmets, turn-out coats and pants, knee-length boots and gloves — and vouchers for every member to buy additional dress uniforms to wear around the firehouse.

Marcano largely took on the job — except for the purchases from one vendor, which were handled by an assistant, Cherlyn Poindexter. But she complained to the city that the task of buying clothes wasn’t in her job description, and she wanted extra compensation.

On the phone, Marcano admitted Poindexter was probably correct, but he added that he didn’t want the responsibilities coming back to him.

“So, I’m a bit upset, because I see how she did it, how she took advantage of me,” Marcano said on the call. ​“At the same time, she said it and I agree with her. It’s not against me. It’s against the man, because the man gives the union everything they want, and now they’re going to make me work differently or do more. It’s not just.”

“In reality, she’s right, no?” Marcano continued. ​“So, I take the job, and I tell him, ​‘Don’t worry,’ which means I have to do it. And I can’t do it. I can’t be here all day. If she doesn’t do it, who’s going to do it?”

Marcano pondered another option: The chief could take on the task. But that might come back to bite him.

“Or I let it continue, and she goes through the process and the chief takes care of it,” he said. ​“But that affects me, because the chief can use that to say, ​‘Ah, Marcano gave [me] the job that belongs to him.’”

“Do you understand me?” Marcano said, before the recording ended. ​“So in that, I’m a bit conflicted.”

Marcano declined to comment for this article, saying he was ​“waiting for it to be over.”

Fire union President Frank Ricci said the recording showed Marcano being willing to bend the truth even though he recognized Poindexter was in the right. ​“It is disheartening that Assistant Chief Marcano would undermine the fire chief and labor relations,” he said.

Alston said that, shortly after the phone call, he patched things up with Marcano. He said he understood the assistant chief was expressing ​“frustration at an arduous moment.”

Now the two remaining staffers in the chief’s office work with an automated system. One employee said that she’d been able to learn the system in five minutes.

Put On Blast

So the matter stood — until months later, when the recording ended up in the inboxes of nearly 50 city employees last week, including Mayor Toni Harp and acting Chief Administrative Officer Sean Matteson. It was attached to a grievance from Poindexter, who complained about hostile working conditions in the fire department.

Alston said that he first found out about the recording when his phone started buzzing with calls. Everyone wanted to know if he’d heard the tape.

“It’s under investigation,” he said. With assistance from law enforcement, ​“we’re looking into how it happened and why it was sent all over the city.”

Alston said someone eventually forwarded him the email. He said he ​“can’t speculate” on why it was distributed so widely.

Police Chief Anthony Campbell said the complaint came from the fire department in as a potential electronic eavesdropping incident. ​”We referred it to the FBI,” he said, adding, ​“It looks like it was simply a butt-dial. It doesn’t seem to be any nefarious behavior.”

This week, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed up at Poindexter’s front door to ask her about the recording. She explained how Marcano could have inadvertently left a message on her work phone and computer.

Poindexter’s lawyer, Steven Jacobs, said the recording sounded like a classic butt-dial.

“Clearly, what happened was that, using the city’s phone, he left the message on Cherlyn’s phone. At the same time, he either gets or makes a call on cell phone,” Jacobs said. ​“He forgot to hang the phone up, disconnecting the call with Cherlyn, so the call is recorded on Cherlyn’s voicemail.”

After the meeting, the FBI agents ​“seemed to have a better understanding of how this phone recording could have come about without a wiretap,” Jacobs said.

The local FBI field office could ​“not confirm nor deny the status of an inquiry or investigation, unless and until it was deemed appropriate for the FBI to do so,” said spokesman Charles Grady.

“To be clear,” Grady added, ​“the FBI questioning or speaking to an individual does not constitute an FBI investigation.”

Poindexter retired this week. She said she’d been preparing to call it quits for a while, because she wants to spend more time with her teenage son.

She declined to comment about the recording.

In her 33 years on the job, Poindexter was known as a fighter, unafraid of taking on City Hall’s leadership. As president of AFSCME Local 3144 for eight years, she insisted that management follow rules rather than cut corners, from rules about who belongs in the union down to rules about whether offices need bottled water. In one case from 2016, the state labor board agreed that city officials had been ​“harassing and retaliating” against Poindexter and her union membership.

“This is a lady who committed to serving the city for decades,” said attorney Jacobs. ​“She has been a very forceful and aggressive advocate as a member of her union. Is this somehow payback? I don’t know. I can only say that she was really good at what she did.”