“MSA Security fired him under false pretenses and then took the 8-year-old yellow Lab, leaving his family “devastated.”
“It was horrible,” Tallini told The Post.” – from the NY Post article on PWP / MSA Security tearing away K9 Valiant from the Tallini family, out of spite.
(A note about our fundraiser on GoFundMe and PayPal to Bring K9 Mattie Home: We are now at 63% of our goal – thank you for getting us going faster than we envisioned! More below)
From Séamus: As I mentioned on Tuesday, I knew Joe Tallini and his yellow lab Valiant. A great dog/handler team. Valiant was taken in mid-2018, only a few months before I left work at the company myself. I wondered if they would pull something like that with Mattie and me. They did, in January, 2019.
As of now, March 2020, PWP / MSA Security still has not returned Valiant to the Tallini family, or Mattie to my family.
Joe’s case is particularly tragic because his developmentally disabled son, Timothy, formed an especially strong connection with Valiant. This is as a result of the company’s own policy – PWP / MSA deliberately sets up a situation in which the dog is strongly bonded emotionally to not only to the handler, but the handler’s family.
This is great for everyone involved, as long as the dog stays with its family. But the company’s practice of arbitrarily removing long-serving K9s from their loved ones, with no sensitivity or natural human concern for the well being of family members… well, I think most people would agree that it’s immoral.
I have mentioned in previous updates how PWP / MSA have habitually mistreated their professional dog handlers, who are trapped into the company because of their bonds to their dogs, who the company legally owns. So the handlers formed a union to protect their legitimate interests. Joe Tallini was instrumental in the founding of the union, the United Federation of K9 Handlers. The taking of Valiant from his family smacks strongly of retaliation, and numerous handlers have told me their first-hand accounts of dogs being taken from them in suspected retaliatory action.
But PWP / MSA Security is quite slick about how they carry all this out, because they know that retaliating against workers for collectively organizing is illegal. Very illegal. What my investigation into the matter reveals is a striking pattern: Basically, if they have it out for you, they concoct a reason to take your dog or fire you. This is apparently what happened in Joe and K9 Valiant’s case, and in other cases that handlers have given me their first-hand accounts of.
This is what the Union had to say on Joe’s situation, in a post titled “Family Values”:
On September 3rd, MSA bosses appeared on television and proclaimed "The dog is family, that’s how we treat them here. It’s really not a working tool for us here at MSA, they’re part of our family." and "It’s very important to us, we want well-adjusted dogs. We don’t just say that as a marketing line. They are family to us. If the dogs aren’t well adjusted and happy, they don’t provide a good service."
Below is an example of MSA treating our partners like "family". How long until MSA decides to give you the "family" treatment? (This passage was followed by a link to the article)
Exactly.
MSA Chairman Mike O’Neil gave me the "family" treatment face-to-face, and behind closed doors, during a meeting I had with him and the CEO in my first attempt to bring Mattie home last year. I had expressed to them my concerns for my wife’s health and the effect that separating Mattie from us would have: “We’re not in the business of taking care of spouses or other family members with the $20,000 asset that we invested all this money in.”
I believe Mike O’Neil’s assertion clearly displays the disparity between PWP / MSA’s crafty public marketing and what they really think of "family".
My summary opinion of PWP / MSA’s current corporate culture: Predatory wolves in cute Labrador Retriever clothing.
The following further explains my thinking on the matter, from a letter I wrote last year to the Chairman and CEO:
“I am not alone in believing it is inherently immoral and unethical for MSA to have it both ways – having the dog become part of a human family for much of her life, then ignoring the handler’s long years of solid service and ripping the K9 away at a whim, leaving devastation at home in its wake. If you really want to be able to take away dogs and assign them to whoever, I suggest kenneling the dogs. The company and I are both against this because the dogs are happier, healthier, and work better when they live with the handler’s family. But at least it’s impersonal.”
Of course, part of the reason that PWP / MSA wants to retain the ability to rip K9s away at a whim is to have that weapon as a tool in their arsenal for retaliatory action, as what they did to Joe and K9 Valiant seems to show.
Both in Joe Tallini’s case with Valiant and our own with Mattie, we’re not talking about young K9s fresh out of training that the company did not yet get their money out of. We are talking about dogs that have fully bonded with our families after many years of faithful service. We invested years with the company with the singular purpose of legally adopting the dogs that were already ours in reality. And there is no shortage of younger K9’s ready to take their place, so the company does not actually need Valiant or Mattie. Yet what little we had, our dogs, is what PWP / MSA took from us.
My case and Joe Tallini’s case made the news. But most other handlers and dogs who have suffered from the company’s cruelty are completely unknown to people at large. They and their families suffer in private, but they suffer no less than us. The company must stop doing this to the humans and dogs who earn them their millions and billions; they must clean up their act if they wish to salvage any shred credibility.
Despite PWP / MSA being so vindictive, we have no desire to be vindictive ourselves. WE JUST WANT OUR DOG BACK. This is simple matter of right and wrong, good and evil. And we will continue on until Mattie comes home and we can move on with our lives.
WAYS TO HELP
1) THE FUNDRAISER (links below). Make a donation to Bring K9 Mattie Home through GoFundMe or PayPal. We are more than three-fifths of the way to our goal! Every penny goes to Mattie. We are offering to buy her back from the company for their stated price of what it cost to train Mattie, along with any associated costs. In addition, MSA has a habit of legally turning over the dogs to their handlers when the dogs are physically broken down. All medical expenses have to be borne by the handler’s family. Maybe it’s not right, but that’s how they work.
Before we go on, I want to express my family’s deep gratitude for the huge boost we got this past weekend. In our update last Saturday, March 7, we thanked everyone who donated so far to get us to just shy of the halfway mark to our goal. Within two days, we shot past the halfway point to reach 61%, and today we stand at 63%!! We are getting close faster than we imagined xoxoxo
2) CONTACTING THE PWP / MSA BOSSES. Send an email or give a call or text to the corporate bosses through the means of contact listed below.
They hear you, and it is truly having an effect.
*NOTE* These guys listed here are the head honchos, but the list is not exhaustive – many other PWP and MSA contacts can be found through your favorite search engine (Google, Bing, etc.). We don’t list them all here because our email updates would end up being too long, but please feel free to contact anyone else at the company you can find!
3) SPREAD THE WORD! If share what you think of MSA and PWP on Google Reviews, or simply tell your friends and family, I believe the positive effect would end up being exponential.
And since MSA-trained K9s being sent overseas to terrible fates (read: PWP / MSA Security sends dogs to torture and death in Jordan) is a matter of national public interest and your tax dollars, contact your Congress members – Representatives and Senators – about the fraud that PWP / MSA Security is pulling on the American people.
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Relevant links and contact info are contained here below. THANK YOU ALL, GOD BLESS AMERICA XOXO
We would be so deeply thankful if you would consider making a donation to our fundraiser to Bring K9 Mattie Home: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bring-k9-mattie-home
If you prefer to donate through PayPal, here's our link: https://www.paypal.me/seamusk9
And please let MSA & PWP know how you feel about this! Direct contact has a positive impact. CONTACT INFO (These 4 phone numbers can be texted too):
CEO Glen Kucera (the man who made the decision to take Mattie away), 973-981-1275; gkucera@msasecurity.net
Chairman Mike O’Neil (the company’s public face), 516-491-9721; moneil@msasecurity.net
VP of Global Operations Justin Kelley (the guy in charge of all MSA K9s in the world), 860-559-9208; jkelley@msasecurity.net
K9 Training Director Mike Wynn (the person who moved Mattie across the country, out of spite, to keep her from her family), 917-923-5508; mwynn@msasecurity.net or msak9@msasecurity.net
The Perella Weinberg people who own MSA keep themselves relatively insulated; they are billionaires after all. So while we don't have their direct numbers, here are the emails of the fellas who oversee MSA:
Chip Baird, cbaird@pwpartners.com
David Ferguson, dferguson@pwpartners.com
John McKee, jmckee@pwpartners.com
Perella Weinberg Partners (PWP) main number, 212-287-3341 (Heads up: PWP falsely claims that Mattie is an MSA internal issue, that they have nothing to do with it. This is false - they are intimately involved with MSA's operations!).
MSA Security main number, 212-509-1336
And of course, we welcome your feedback. Our email is: k9mattie@yahoo.com