A reader of my last post on William McGuire sent me a link to a story that has since disappeared from City Pages' The Blotter, so you can read it below. The item says representatives for UnitedHealth didn't return Jim Walsh's calls, but it's possible soon after he posted that UHG's lawyers did get through.
Bulletproof Throne
Today's Star Tribune gives much dubious love to Minnesota's wealthiest CEOs, but here's a tidbit about SEC-embattled UnitedHeath Group CEO William McGuire they missed, courtesy of a former UHG security guard who prefers to remain anonymous:
"His office is in the top floor of the tallest building in Minnetonka, built on a hill. He made sure of that. The first time I saw it, I said it was a cathedral of capitalism, and my colleagues asked me if I thought it could be a target for foreign terrorists. I said, 'No, domestic ones.' No one likes HMOs; people are dying, (committing) suicide, because of people like him, because they can't get coverage, and he just keeps raising the rates. I made twelve dollars an hour.
"He's got a Kevlar-lined bathroom. It's bulletproof, so at the first sign of trouble he can hide. He doesn't care about anybody else; he can run in there and lock the door. There was an open parking ramp that's not card-accessed or anything, so somebody could sit across the highway at Caribou and blow that building sky-high. But McGuire and all his spendy original artwork would be safe."
Representatives for McGuire and UnitedHealth did not return calls from City Pages.
"It's his 'safe room,'" says the former guard. "It was common knowledge. All the executives have a 'panic button' they can push in case of trouble, and the joke was McGuire would push it and just take his time strolling to his safe room while everything fell."
Posted by Jim Walsh at May 22, 2006 08:36 AM
This is gossip leaking resentment from a disgruntled former employee, so it's not too surprising that someone at City Pages might think it failed to reach the level of news. But it's worthy for consideration here for this reason: We don't report news; we moralize.
I'd encourage the ex-guard and McGuire to look at each other more closely and talk about their lives. Both might learn something.
A man with a penthouse office and a Kevlar biffy close by does not inhabit the world with the rest of us mortals. But he does have to fear for his safety in way we or the anonymous gossip do not. A guard making $12 an hour may have some legitimate gripes which are exacerbated by proximity to wealth, but one of them is not that he will be kidnapped or shot by someone who hates "HMOs."
McGuire may think he is helping humanity and is receiving just rewards. I am sure that the ex-guard is not the only UHG employee who has a different view of what the CEO hath wrought. Or what constitutes security.
One of my clients in a former life was US Bank's CEO Jack Grundhofer, who was kidnapped from a parking garage. He escaped, and after that day, came to work with an armed bodyguard. (I remember picking through the holiday snack trays next to his man, who wore his side arm even in the executive kitchen.)
It's one thing to say a man makes too much money or that his wealth has insulated him from the lives of others. It's quite another to make jokes about violence against his life — especially when it was your job to protect it.
