FBI Director May Discipline Some Agents Over Presser Case

FBI Director William H. Webster said Thursday that he might take disciplinary action against one or more agents in the government’s collapsed labor racketeering case against Teamsters Union President Jackie Presser.

But Webster, in his fullest remarks to date on the abortive Presser investigation, said he is not confident that he yet knows the full story of FBI agents’ dealings with Presser over the years. He noted that those dealings are the subject of a continuing federal grand jury inquiry in Cleveland.

Political Motives Denied

He denied that politics figured in the collapse of the case against Presser, who was the only major labor leader to support President Reagan in both 1980 and 1984.

“There was absolutely no political involvement at all” in the decision to abandon the prosecution of Presser, “either on the part of anyone in law enforcement to curry favor or on the part of anyone in authority in the Administration to influence that matter,” Webster said.

Government officials disclosed last July that they were abandoning a three-year investigation of Presser that centered on allegations that he had allowed payment of more than $250,000 in local union funds to five “ghost employees”--friends or relatives who were on the Teamsters payroll but performed no work.

Although Justice Department officials would say only that the case lacked “prosecutive merit,” other federal sources said there is solid evidence that the “ghost employee” payments had been secretly condoned or encouraged by FBI agents in Cleveland to allow Presser, a longtime FBI informant, to maintain his underworld contacts.

Soon after the case was dropped, an angry U.S. District Judge Sam H. Bell of Akron ordered a new federal grand jury to find out why Presser’s apparent cooperation with the FBI had been kept secret from federal strike force prosecutors in Cleveland for three years, causing them to waste thousands of hours of investigative effort and leading to the reversals of the convictions of two of Presser’s “ghost employees.”

The term of that grand jury, scheduled to expire this month, has been extended without announcement, government sources said.