AS BAD AS your job may be, are you subjected to a barrage of ethnic or religious insults from a supervisor who also threatens to kill you? And backs his threats with tales of how, as an Iranian army officer, he knows explosives and was in a death unit?

That is alleged by Thomas Carl in a discrimination suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against his former employer, Western & Southern Life Insurance Co., where Carl's boss was a district sales manager. Western & Southern, according to its Web site, has more than 180 offices in 23 states and more than 2,100 licensed agents.

The complaint makes the W&S Narberth office seem like a toxic version of "The Office," with Osama bin Laden playing the part of Michael Scott. Supervisor Abdullah Parviz Pezeshkian, an Iranian emigre, was a nonstop verbal abuser of his staff, threatening some with death, said Carl.

Vincent Roskovensky, W&S's attorney, declined to comment. Messages left on Pezeshkian's voice mail were not returned.

According to legal documents, and personal interviews I conducted with other former W&S staffers, Carl was called, among other things, "pigsh-- Irish" and a "mother-f------ Irish rat," while other salesmen were called "dago," "wop," "Jew boy," "lardass," "a--hole," and "n----r."

The insults were not occasional, they were "daily, hourly," said Carl, 59, a resident of Andorra who now runs a bail-bond agency with his wife, Deborah.

Reading the insults in testimony in a prior unemployment-compensation case almost made me laugh, the sheer nuttiness of it. But any laughter subsided when I read that the boss allegedly depicted himself as a murderer.

"He told me he was in a squad that shot people in the back of the head and threw them in holes," testified Randolph Dezii, 59, of Drexel Hill.

Dezii testified that if Parviz, as he liked to be called, said that if he failed at his W&S job, he would "strap explosives to himself and blow up the whole building with everyone in it."

" 'There is a day care on the first floor,' " Dezii said that he told Parviz and that he shrugged.

"A number of African-American agents left because of the problems they were having with him," I was told by Ron Dixon, 58, of Upper Chichester. "They felt him belittling them, him making it difficult for them," said Dixon, an African-American who eventually quit, as did many of the agents in the office. Dixon said the "N-word" was never used to his face; other agents told me it had been used behind his back by Parviz.

I asked Dezii if he ever heard Parviz insult Carl. "Many times," he replied. "You f----- harp, pigsh-- Irish - he loved that one. [He said] that Italians are greaseballs or wops or communists or criminals."

"He had a lot of problems with any but his own," and pined for an all-Iranian staff, Dezii told me. "He considered us the enemy."

If he wasn't ragging on ethnicity, it was religion.

"He said Christendom is stupid because you worship a man who was a beggar, he was poor, he went from door to door, he rode a mule," I was told by Eduardo Lado, 50, of Gloucester City, N.J.

When I asked if he had heard Parviz make disparaging comments about Carl, Lado snorted, "He made disparaging remarks toward everybody."

Parviz especially hated Jews, because he was from the Middle East, Carl said, and hated the Irish because " 'You people go into battle without underwear,' " Carl quoted him as saying.

He also hated the Irish because President Ronald Reagan had sided with Iraq against Iran.

The boss was "such an aggressive personality, an alpha personality, it overwhelmed everything else he had inside him," said Philadelphian Ron Frederico, 50, adding that Parviz had tried to persuade him to tell Carl that Frederico was going to kill him.

"He was always playing mind games," Frederico said.

Although a naturalized American citizen, Parviz used the office to gleefully show videos of roadside bombs blowing up American military vehicles.

You may be thinking, with all the nonstop abuse, why someone hadn't blown the whistle and notified the higher-ups?

Carl said that he and others did, "hundreds" of times, as often as two or three times a week.

A VP came around, but nothing changed, Carl and others told me.

Why did W&S do nothing? W&S isn't telling me. Maybe it'll tell the court.

Why didn't employees quit? Many did, others hung on because they needed a job. Some sued, such as Carl, and Steve Modell, who declined comment. Carl's attorney, John McAuliffe, said Modell received a settlement, which includes a nondisclosure clause.

The W&S victims in the Narberth office eventually triumphed when Parviz was transferred to the Detroit office. In a parting shot, Parviz bragged that he would be among "my people" (the Detroit area has a large Muslim population), and darkly warned, " 'The jihad will continue from there,' " Carl said.

Carl believes that Parviz - who bragged that an uncle had had a hand in the murder of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics and that another is working on the nuclear bomb that Iran denies it is making - is an actual terrorist.

Carl's former colleagues aren't so sure.

With Fort Hood still in shock, someone ought to be.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.