Turkia Mullin
Turkia Mullin has been knocked around more than an NHL hockey player in the playoffs ever since she was fired as the Detroit airport CEO in 2011.
Last week, arbitrator Paul Teranes, a former judge, ordered the airport board to pay her $712,000 in back salary because of the firing, finding it was unjust. She was fired in wake of a controversy over her taking $200,000 in severance from her job
News columnist Laura Berman interviewed Mullin after the arbitration award.
Berman writes:
As an executive who openly thrived on getting things done, Turkia Mullin lived a warp-speed life. Other executives saw her as dynamic, aggressive, smart, effective, outgoing.
Then came the crash. For the last 18 months — ever since the Wayne County Airport Authority board fired her in a closed-door meeting on Halloween — Mullin's life has been reduced to slow motion: work out, spend time with her two children, volunteer, pray that her lawsuit against the airport board would vindicate her.
So abrupt was the change that she compares it to parachute jumps from her days in the U.S. Army: The roar of engines and people yelling, followed by a whoosh, the yank of the cord and the shock of absolute silence.
"I went from 100 calls by noon and a dead cellphone to three calls, all of them from family," Mullin says, in the airy breakfast room of her elegant Birmingham home, which includes an expansive, high-domed cage for two floppy-eared rabbits.
