Award of $568,000 Upheld in Attack on Teamster Dissidents

Rejecting claims that the verdict would exact too harsh a financial penalty on the union, a judge on Tuesday upheld a jury’s $568,000 award to Teamster dissidents, including an Orange County man, who were attacked and beaten outside an election hall.

U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts also ordered Teamsters Local 63 to pay $200,000 in legal costs for the dissidents.

In a lengthy, written ruling, Letts said the damages--the equivalent of $50 a head imposed on the 16,000-member Southern California union--will be “a cheap price to pay” if it encourages free union elections in the future.

Fountain Valley Man

The decision was a major victory for the dissidents, led by James Bender of Fountain Valley, who in 1985 mounted a short-lived challenge to the incumbent secretary-treasurer, Robert E. Marciel.

That effort died after Bender and a group of supporters were attacked by a mob of men wearing Marciel reelection T-shirts as the dissidents attempted to enter a Montebello hall to participate in a nomination meeting.

Bender, 54, was beaten unconscious. Colleague Jack Douglass, 56, who planned to run for office, sustained permanent hearing loss after he was knocked down and repeatedly kicked in the head.

A supporter of the dissident slate, Harry F. Rodriguez, a 22-year Teamster member, was stabbed in the back with an ice pick, and a number of other dissidents were hospitalized.

At about the same time inside the hall, the nominations were closed and Marciel, with no opposition, was declared to have been reelected.

After presiding over a five-week trial, Letts wrote that the jury’s conclusions were consistent with his own--that the mob attack represented “a blatant attempt by union officials to interfere with the right of the proposed opposition candidates to wage their campaign free from coercion or intimidation. . . . “

Letts rejected the union’s request that the verdict be overturned, a new trial ordered, and that the $500,000 in punitive damages, designed to punish the union for wrongdoing, be reduced. Actual damages in the award amount to $68,000 of the $568,000.

Local 63 has annual revenues of about $4.5 million.

“If the enforced payment by the members of this amount will discourage the elected officials of Local 63 from further acts of interference with future union elections, the money will have been well spent from the standpoint of each and every member,” Letts wrote.

Union lawyers contended that the verdict was in conflict with the testimony in the trial. But Letts pointed to the fact that jurors had exonerated Marciel personally, along with Teamsters Joint Council 42, a regional organization of Teamsters locals. Letts said this showed that jurors had carefully considered the evidence.

Point to Second Meeting

The union’s lawyers argued that a second nominating meeting was held several months later because of the violence at the first session. Bender said he did not attend because there were no safeguards.

In his ruling, Letts observed that it was the national Teamsters Union that ordered the second meeting after complaints from the dissidents. Marciel and local officials did not investigate the attack nor denounce the violence.

Letts concluded that by its actions after the mob attack, local management acted in “a manner calculated to reinforce suspicions that it might have been responsible.”