Exactly how thorough a background check does the town conduct on job candidates?

Emmet Hibson, top R, joins his co-conspirators in a group photo at Fairfield Police headquarters

Says here that one Emmet Hibson was placed on (paid) administrative leave by Greenwich last week after he and other former Town of Fairfield employees were arrested for corruption. They were fired by Fairfield in January; Hibson was hired by Greenwich in April. Freddie Camillo insists that Hibson’s vetting was performed in the same lackadaisical manner all such background checks are conducted:

We have conducted a thorough review of Mr. Hibson’s hiring and have confirmed that the town of Greenwich conducted the hiring and interviewing process in the normal course,” Camillo said. “Our Human Resources Department followed the same rigorous and thorough protocols that have been universally applied to all prospective candidates seeking employment with the town of Greenwich and we will continue to do so.

It’s true that employment files can be hard to gain access to, but was there anything about Hibson in the public record before he was hired by Greenwich? Why yes, yes there was.

Being a master investigator of these kinds of matters, I employed an obscure research tool and plugged “Emmet Hibson Fairfield” into the Duckduck search engine and lo, turned up several articles about the corruption scheme involving disposing of toxic waste that caused his original firing. This one, from Fairfield Patch, dated January 16, 2020 is typical:

Excerpt:

Last fall, Hibson came under the scrutiny of selectmen for his handling of a draft police report that was part of the investigation resulting in the arrests of two town employees and a former contractor in connection with the fill pile.

Following the links reveals that Hibson and other Fairfield officials had been the subject of an ongoing three-year criminal investigation involving hiding contaminated waste and secretly using it in various town parks and other properties. Contemporaneous reports of that investigation are readily available on the web, but you have to look, however cursorily.

Hibson and his alleged co-conspirators have not been convicted, yet, but Greenwich probably took the right action in firing him last week after his formal arraignment by the State’s Attorney. The question is, why was he hired in the first place?

I’ll go out on a limb here, and suggest that municipal officials and employees in Fairfield and Greenwich are quite familiar with each other and what’s going on in their respective towns; indeed, there’s been quite a cross-fertilization between the two, with employees of both towns leaving one to take a position with the other. Complaints about the contaminated waste and how the public works department was handling it had been public since 2014, and the first arrests were made in 2019. Hibson was a suspect in the scheme long before he was fired by Fairfield in January, and our Human Resources Department had to have been aware of both the scandal and Hoibson’s involvement, yet he was still hired in April after “a rigorous and thorough” vetting by HR. Uh-huh.

Something stinks here, and it’s not just Fairfield’s waste dump; it would be interesting to learn whether Hibson has (or had) a friend or two in Town Hall.