FBI Prolonged Presser’s Role, Sources Confirm

Key FBI officials continued to meet with Teamsters Union President Jackie Presser for months after FBI Director William H. Webster ordered agents to stop using Presser as a confidential informant, The Times has learned.

In the secret meetings in Washington hotel rooms in 1983 and 1984, Presser regularly checked with FBI officials on whether to appoint mob-connected figures as his top lieutenants, according to sources close to the case.

A Teamsters spokesman said that Presser would have no comment, and an FBI spokesman said the bureau does not comment on pending criminal matters.

A government source familiar with the matter, however, confirmed the FBI’s post-1983 meetings with Presser and said they were not in defiance of Webster’s orders because the bureau did not solicit information from Presser as it had before the cutoff.

Nevertheless, the FBI’s continued contact with Presser seems certain to complicate the government’s prosecution of the labor leader in a trial expected to begin this winter on federal charges that he siphoned $700,000 in a payroll-padding scheme involving his Cleveland local.

The complication arises because Presser’s lawyers, sources close to the case said, are likely to cite his FBI meetings at the coming trial to support claims that he could not have done anything criminal with the bureau looking over his shoulder so closely.

Bid to ‘Clean Up’ Union

Presser is expected to claim that he was authorized by FBI agents to hire mob-related figures--who remained on the local’s payroll as so-called ghost employees but did no work--to maintain channels of information with organized crime elements.

In its dealings with Presser, the FBI was hoping to “clean up” the nation’s largest union, which has been identified repeatedly as dominated by organized crime, according to government officials familiar with the matter.

However, after Presser was named Teamsters president in mid-1983, Webster ordered that he be taken off the official informant rolls on grounds that the FBI should not be regularly obtaining information from the head of a major American institution, sources familiar with the matter have said.

It could not be learned whether Webster was aware of the specific meetings after 1983, but sources familiar with the matter said he did know that Presser was continuing to provide the FBI voluntarily with information.

Sensitive Contacts

Presser was so concerned about confidentiality in his sensitive contacts that he became an FBI informant in the early 1970s only after winning assurances that no official file would be kept on his role, the sources said. “He never wanted to be seen entering FBI headquarters,” said one source who, like the others, asked for anonymity.

The newly disclosed FBI meetings with Presser in Washington came after Labor Department investigators had launched their racketeering and embezzlement inquiry that resulted in Presser’s federal indictment last May.

One FBI agent--Cleveland supervisor Robert S. Friedrick--has been indicted on charges that he made false statements to the Justice Department about his relationship with Presser in an alleged effort to keep the Teamsters chief from being indicted. Friedrick has been accused of lying for stating that he and others authorized Presser to hire at least two ghost workers, and he was fired two weeks ago by Webster.

It was learned that Friedrick attended most of the meetings with Presser in Washington along with some headquarters officials, including James Moody, who heads the office of labor racketeering.

One attorney close to the case said Presser “cleared his top appointments” with Moody before making final decisions as union president. But another attorney put it this way:

“Presser never gave the bureau total control over his appointments. It was more like he would say, ‘I’m being pressed by the New York (Mafia) family or the Chicago family to put so-and-so in this position. What should I do?’ ”

It could not be learned which appointments Presser consulted the FBI about or whether the bureau sought to veto any choices.

The President’s Organized Crime Commission concluded last March that the leaders of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters “have been firmly under the influence of organized crime since the 1950s.”