A board member of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport authority who voted to appoint Turkia Mullin as its CEO made $420,000 just weeks earlier from a land sale she helped engineer, records obtained by The Detroit News show.
Charlie J. Williams, a former Wayne County deputy executive, worked as facilitator and mediator in a $14 million sale of a parking lot for a new county jail downtown. The deal -- which Mullin signed off on as the county's chief development officer -- paid him a 3 percent commission.
Two weeks after the sale was completed on July 14, Williams voted to hire Mullin for the airport job that pays $250,000 a year. He also was one of three members of a search committee that recommended her for the job above four finalists with airport management experience.
"If you were in on the interview process, you would've hired her too if you saw how dynamic she was," said Williams, a former appointee of county Executive Robert Ficano, who named him to the airport board in 2006.
