City fires superintendent of cemeteries

The city's superintendent of cemeteries has been fired for failing to properly supervise his employees, misreporting his work hours, and taking long lunches, city officials said yesterday.

Donald J. Griffis, who has worked for the city for 31 years and last year earned $101,332 with overtime, was fired Friday after a city investigation revealed that one of his former employees, Paul J. Hamm, spent months siphoning gas from a city pump at the cemetery where they worked. The two also spent long lunches drinking alcohol, and on several occasions skipped work afterward, city investigators said.

Hamm, a 22-year city employee who last year earned $79,778 with overtime, resigned Oct. 28 after city officials accused him of stealing hundreds of gallons of fuel since last spring.

"There's clearly no room for stealing, and Hamm had to be held accountable for that," said Jeff Conley, executive director of the Boston Finance Commission, a city watchdog that investigated the case. "But he was able to do that because of the inadequate supervision of his immediate boss, who[m] he went out to lunch with every day."

Neither Griffis nor Hamm returned calls. Their boss, Antonia Pollak, commissioner of Boston's Parks and Recreation Department, declined to comment.

The city's cemetery division oversees more than 250,000 gravesites on about 200 acres of land at Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan, Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park, and Evergreen Cemetery in Brighton. Griffis and Hamm were based at Mount Hope Cemetery.

Conley said his office learned of the alleged gas thefts several months ago from an anonymous complaint. Since then, investigators from his office videotaped Hamm stealing gas. They also caught Hamm and Griffis on camera swigging beers at the Galway House pub in Jamaica Plain during work hours.

A video provided by Conley's office shows the two drinking beer together on Sept. 30 after noon. It also shows Hamm driving his large Dodge van into a secluded area of the cemetery, but it wasn't clear from the video whether he was filling up his van with gas.

Conley said Hamm had filled his van's 20-plus gallon tank at least once a week since April. He said Hamm charged the unleaded gas in the fuel log books to one of the cemetery's diesel trucks, which raised flags when Conley's office reviewed the books. Hamm had overseen the distribution of fuel at the cemetery since the beginning of the year.

Conley said part of the problem was that the cemetery had few controls over the pump. Unlike other city pumps, which are monitored by video cameras and use a card system to log who takes fuel, the only control on the cemetery's pump was a padlock.

"Anytime you don't have adequate controls, you take a risk of someone stealing," Conley said. "Unfortunately, the lack of controls contributed to it."

Donovan Slack of the Globe staff contributed to this report. David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.