The 13 Most Horrible Bosses of All Time

Beau Iverson Power
Ranker 114,854 views 13 items

We've all had a bad boss or two, one that makes us stay later than we want to, doesn't pay us enough or makes us do demeaning things for her/him like take out their trash when it's full. Bad bosses get a lot worse than that, though. From firing a woman who just donated a kidney to her boss, to a boss that made employees tattoo his birthday on their necks, to a boss who installed sniper towers and canons when workers asked for a raise, these are the worst, most horrible, bad bosses of all time.

If you think you've got it bad, just read a few of these and come into work tomorrow morning at peace with the fact that your bad boss isn't going to fire you over bringing him/her a flat Coke or liking a Facebook page. All of the bad bosses you've ever had ain't got nothin on the worst bosses of all time. And if they do, maybe it's time you looked for a better place to work (i.e. the streets).

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1

Woman Donates Kidney to Boss, Gets Fired

Debbie Stevens, a Long Island mother who sources could only describe as "kind and generous", donated a kidney to save her boss's life. The woman was then fired soon after, by the very same boss to whom she donated the kidney.

"I decided to become a kidney donor to my boss, and she took my heart," she said.

After temporarily moving away and taking another job elsewhere, Stevens decided to visit her old town in Long Island and meet up with her former employer, Jackie Brucia. Brucia had told her all about her health problems and that she had a kidney donor all lined up. Stevens, the kind-hearted, wonderful woman she is, then offered to donate her own kidney nonetheless, should she ever need it.

A few months go by and Stevens moves back to Long Island indefinitely, asking her old boss for her old job back. A few weeks later, she has a job. The boss, Jackie Brucia, let Stevens work for a while before calling her into the office and telling her that her kidney fell through.

Stevens quickly donated her kidney, which actually wasn't a perfect match, but it did help Brucia get up higher on the donor list. So Stevens donated her kidney to someone else so that Brucia could have a quicker transplant. This woman is a saint.

Soon afterward Brucia kept asking the woman who'd just donated a kidney (which is a very painful process for the donors and includes all kinds of digestive problems and body pain) "What are you doing? Why aren't you at work? You can't just come and go as you please. People are going to think you're getting special treatment."

If you're a co-worker of a person who just donated a kidney to the boss, not only are you going to have compassion for them already (I have a hard time giving a day of my weekend to my boss), but you're going to understand if invasive surgery keeps them out of the office for a few days.

Stevens was then moved to another dealership (these are all car dealers, by the way) 50 miles away from her home in a high-crime neighborhood that her co-workers jokingly called "Siberia". She was being punished for the medical implications of saving her boss's life. She was then fired. Lawyers were involved and the woman still does not work there anymore.

Source
2

Boss Uses Employee Credit Cards to Pay for Fuel for His Private Jet

Lenny "Nails" Dykstra was a center-fielder for the New York Mets in the late-1980s and the Philadelphia Phillies throughout most of the '90s. Some years later, in 2008, he started a magazine called Player's Club about professional athletes and their expensive lifestyles. He even offered them financial advice.

The problem was that Dykstra was still living one of those expensive lifestyles even though he was no longer an athlete. In 2008, his net worth was estimated at $58 million. In 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing less than $50,000 in assets. He claimed to be a victim of mortgage fraud, lost a house to foreclosure, and was the subject of at least two dozen legal actions since 2007. He has also been accused of sexual assault (Jan. 2011), arrested for sexual harassment (1999), and charged with indecent exposure (Aug. 2011) - note that those are three separate incidents. And he's been charged with grand theft auto, identity theft, bankruptcy fraud, vandalism, and possession of cocaine, ecstasy, and some other stuff he shouldn't have.

"But that just makes him a horrible guy," you say. "It doesn't necessarily make him a horrible boss."

Au contraire. Dykstra was known to pester employees at all hours of the night - and even to invite prospective employees to dinner and stick them with the bill. But those were still small potatoes:
The unluckiest employees were pressured into providing him credit card access with the promise they would be paid back with interest.

"One of the dumbest decisions I ever made, giving him my American Express card information," said Kevin Coughlin, who left another job to become photo director for The Players Club.

Coughlin said that Dykstra ran up tens of thousands of dollars on his card, including one $32,000 charge for a leased jet from Atlanta to Helena, Mont., where Dykstra’s son, Cutter, was playing minor league ball. Coughlin worked only 67 days for Dykstra, but it took months to recover the money.

Kevin Dykstra said Lenny used the same credit card ruse on their mother, Marilyn, and alleged that his brother invested, and lost, the $700,000 bonus his son Cutter received when he signed his first professional contract with the Milwaukee Brewers organization.
Stealing from his own mother? That's some cold sh-t.

In April 2012, Dykstra was sentenced to nine months in jail after pleading no contest of assault with a deadly weapon on a woman he met on Craigslist. The month before that, he was sentenced to three years in prison for grand theft auto. He is still awaiting trial for charges of federal bankruptcy.
3

Boss Counteracts Union's Plea with Paycuts, Sniper Towers, Cannons

Henry Clay Frick was an insanely rich man. Being the chairman of Carnegie Steel will do that for you. He was the exact kind of "fat cat" that's inspired cartoons for generations, living extravagantly with little to no regard for those around him.

An example of his "greatness", apart from the insane reaction he had to a union approaching him for higher pay, is that he once owned an entire town with his rich friends, just so they could fish there. They altered the dam in the town in a few different ways to make their fishing a bit more luxurious/easy. These alterations not only made is so that the dam got weaker, but also so that it broke, killing over 1500 people in neighboring towns. (From this article).

When the price of steel products started to drop in 1892, Frick anticipated a strike by members of the craft union in his Pittsburgh plant. First, he had them produce as much as possible before their contract expired so that he could stand a few weeks without them. When they asked for an increase in wages, Frick slashed them by 22%. Then he closed the mills, locked out 1,100 men, and announced that he would no longer negotiate with the union. Here's what happened next:
Although only 750 of the 3,800 workers at Homestead belonged to the union, 3,000 of them met and voted overwhelmingly to strike. Frick responded by building a fence three miles long and 12 feet high around the steelworks plant, adding peepholes for rifles and topping it with barbed wire. Workers named the fence "Fort Frick."

Eventually, a force of Pinkerton enforcers were brought in, and on July 6, a violent kerfuffle erupted on the Monongahela River. By the time the state militia was called in, 12 were dead; by the end of the ordeal, the total was 16. It really got out of hand. Fast.
4

Boss Kills Workers for Asking for Salaries

Maybe you've dreamed of killing your boss (#dark), but in Soviet Russia, boss kills you. In March 2009, a group of minibus drivers working in the central Russian city Nizhny Novgorod went on strike following a salary cut. The men - all Uzbek nationals - were especially upset because their boss not only cut their wages, but also took their passports. That meant they couldn't even leave the country.

The strikers confronted their boss to demand payment, but things got heated when he took out a pump-action gun and fired at the crowd. He wounded 47 year-old worker Aktam Khuzhamuratov and fled the scene. Khuzhamuratov died later that day.

This wasn't the first time a boss turned on his employees. In 2007 in Atlanta, Lithuanian car dealership owner Rolandas Milinavicius shot and killed his only two workers, Inga Contrearas (25) and Martynas Simokaitis (28), who had been asking for more money. Turns out the only thing Milinavicius had to unload on them was stress. Well, and bullets.
5

Employees Forced to Tattoo Boss's Birthday on Neck

What would you do if someone demanded that you get his birthday tattooed on your neck? Even if that person was your boss? Are you sure? Yeah, OK, me too. (Wait, you answered, "Get it for shiggles," right?)

In 2010, an employee at Day and Night Spa in Mount Prospect, IL, told police that her boss Alex "Daddy" Campbell forced her to get three tattoos. One was a horseshoe - a "brand" he made all his female employees get - and another was the date of his own birthday (Sept. 17th - "917") on the back of her neck.

But that was just the beginning. Turned out all the women working out the "massage parlor" were illegal immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine, and Campbell held on to their passports and visas. He forced a few to have sex with him, and some to have sex with each other, and he taped the sex to use as blackmail in case any of them got mouthy.

In some places, these practices are called forced labor, sex trafficking, and extortion. Luckily, one of those places is America. At his arrest, Campbell was quoted as saying:
You all hating on my pimp game. My lawyer gonna get you good for f--king with me and my hos.
Campbell's first trial was dismissed after his defense attorney was exposed as a parlor client, but Campbell was eventually convicted on 11 counts and faces life in prison. What a pimp.