When Barbara Bullock was president of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), she and her colleagues helped themselves to around $4.6 million from the till from the mid 90s until the latter part of 2002. Since her guilty plea to conspiracy and mail fraud in the fall of 2003, however, she’s been helpful to federal prosecutors in nailing her WTU partners in crime. The feds now want to return the favor by reducing her sentence. Bullock currently is serving a nine-year term in federal prison in Alderson, W.V. Under the new sentencing recommendation, detailed in an August 4 memo, she would be released after seven years, to be followed by one year at a halfway house.
Bullock’s testimony on the witness stand was vital to securing the convictions of Gwendolyn Hemphill and James O. Baxter II, respectively, the union’s office manager and treasurer. Hemphill got 11 years in prison; Baxter got 10. Bullock’s lavish spending habits, which included $100,000 in season tickets to Washington Redskins and Washington Wizards home games, was rightly skewered by pundits across the political spectrum. Now in her late 60s, her encounter with the reality principle seems as real as it was overdue. (Washington Post, 8/8/06).