This week Matt Crevin from, Voice of the Box, interviews Jim Mercurio, VP of Stadium Operations and Security for the San Francisco 49ers. Jim is like a mayor of a small city on GameDays and is directly responsible for anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 employees. Jim discusses the numerous jobs that fall under his management as well as tips for breaking in to a job in sports.
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Well I am only a few late in viewing this “puff piece”, but I have to say I have never heard a bigger piece of BS in my life. As someone who knows Mr. Mercurio, this interview makes me sick! When my husband started with the niners there were a total of four people in operations, and things ran like clockwork, there was one woman who was in charge of game day give aways, and employee parties and gameday entertainment. Now they have something like 20 people in operations doing less than what my husband would get done in the week before a game and he handled the in house TV systems to boot. The PR department is again 20 or more people and the niners haven’t had a decent game day give away in years. These people are being paid for doing nothing and when the S___ hits the fan? Never fear, Mercurio will find a scape goat.
Jim Mercurio does not and has never had 12-1400 employees report to him directly or otherwise. They would never go to him unless they absolutely had no other choice. Why you ask? Because he knows nothing about running a stadium. My husband who started working for the forty niners before Mercurio was out of junior high, and the niners made the blunder of hiring him, did most of the work even after Mercurio was hired on becasue of who not what he knows. After the Giants went to their new stadium, my husband rebuilt the players lockerroom at candlestick, by himself. No heip. One of the first duties assigned to him by Mercurio when Eddie’s sister took over the team was to go pick up a top of the line wine cooler at home depot for the owners suite. Also unknowingly paid for by the niners that day was a second cooler that Mercurio made my husband use his own truck and drive it out to Mercurio’s dumpy house behind the Safeway in Pacifica. Mercurio would accuse my husband of being on drugs that he was paid too much and basically got away without paying him a dime of overtime for 5 years. The niners handbook and I believe this is an NFL rule, states that employees are not to work on, remodel, install appliances and build extra bathrooms during working hours. Jim wouldn’t even re-imburse him for gas. It would have been one thing if he treated my husband like a human being, but he couldn’t even be civil. Jim has never showed up before 9:00 am anytime during his tenure with the niners. He would gi ve his brothers and friends “jobs” on game day, make them report to my husband and when they were given a job to do, they would just go watch the game. My husband found marijuana and other drug paraphanalia at Jim’s house once when he was building a complete second bathroom for Jim, and he never said anything because it had nothing to do with him, and he didn’t feel it would be right, but he could have. Now, Jim has literally gotten so FAT off the hard work and sweat of others, that he has to buy two seats when he flies anywhere. I won’t even go into how he obtained his “Business Degree” but it wasn’t by going to classs and passing any final. He knows nothing about how to set a budget for a department, and he didn’t know he had to account for all his spending until they told him that his department, at that time, was going to be audited and he better be able to account for all the money he spent. I’ll never forget it, my came home laughing for the first time in three years and told me Jim was freaking out, and was still at the stadium with his old boss trying to account for all the expenditures. He was caught changing employee time cards after the employees had signed and turned them in. I know for a fact that my husband was the only niner employee at that stadium by 6:00am every day during the season and every work day in the off season. You can verify much of this info with the city engineers who would arrive after my husband. My husband treasured that job, when he left the Giants organization, the niners called him and asked him if he was interested in a full time position. He didn’t ask them for the job, they saw the quality and quantity of work he put out and back then the niners were all about quality employees putting in a full day and most of the time more, and they treated the employees with dignity.
Mercurio is all about lie, cheat, steal, and take credit for a job done by someone else. He still has three people working for him who are constantly using illegal substances during work and during games. Jed York is such an idiot, he will believe anything Mercurio says to him. Oh and when there were employees busted for scalping away game, playoff, and superbowl tickets, Jim Mercurio skated and he was the one in charge of all those tickets. Two lower level employees were fired. And to cover his involvement he would tell employees who were entitled to those tickets that they now had to pay for them in advance and they would not get the tickets until the day of the game. Now nobody gets to go. Thanks Jim. Why didn;t Jed fire him then and there? Don’t most VP level employees have morals clauses in there contracts? Everybody knows he got called on the carpet over it and the NFL had a rep. fly out to Santa Clara when it all came out.
I have faith though that it will all catch up with him. I’m surprised the staff hasn’t started a pool as to when he will drop dead of heart attack. He has gained at least 200lbs since starting with them.
So how about an investigative piece the next time you interview Jim Mercurio? Try starting with the meth heads he hired to replace my husband.
Wow, I feel so much better. I know my little rant will never see the light of day, but I have been waiting for three years to get this off my chest. So thanks. But seriously, if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist try getting all the facts surrounding the interviewee.