Teamsters, Justice Dept. Plan Final Effort to Settle Suit

Lawyers for the Teamsters and the Justice Department will hold last-ditch negotiations this weekend aimed at settling the government’s massive racketeering case against the 1.6-million-member union, according to knowledgeable sources.

On Friday, a substantial majority of the Teamsters executive board condemned a separate settlement made by three board members earlier this week.

The board resolution, passed in Washington, states that the three members’ settlement “interfered with and impeded” the Teamsters in the union’s defense against a racketeering suit filed by the Justice Department seeking to impose a federal trusteeship over the union.

Censures 3 Members

The resolution, in effect, censures Teamster Secretary-Treasurer Weldon L. Mathis, the second-highest official in the union, and Vice Presidents Edward Lawson of Vancouver, B.C., and Donald L. West of Birmingham, Ala., for “self-serving actions.” They were the only three members of the 19-member board who voted against the resolution, according to sources who attended the meeting.

No member of the executive board was available for comment. However, Barry Feinstein, president of a large New York City Teamster local and director of the union’s public employee division, decried the actions of Mathis and the others.

“The union is in a fight for its life,” Feinstein said in a telephone interview. “We expect that the executive board will be together, rally ‘round the flag, like Democrats and Republicans would do if we had an invasion from a foreign country.”

Feinstein, a 32-year veteran of the union, said he could remember no prior occasion where the union’s executive board had publicly chastised some of its members in this way.

Nonetheless, the executive board declined to take any disciplinary action against the three men for fear of being held in contempt by U.S. District Judge David N. Edelstein. On Wednesday, Edelstein had ordered the board to call him by 1 p.m. Friday and inform him whether it had taken any action against the three men, prior to his granting formal approval to the settlement the three men arranged with the Justice Department. He approved the agreement later Friday.

Another source close to the board said “the mood in the board meeting was that they (Mathis, West and Lawson) had undercut the other defendants and weakened them in their negotiations (with the government) by not staying together.”

The agreements the three men signed call for reforms in the union’s election procedures and, if the government prevails in its case, the creation of an ethical practices committee to combat corruption in the union. The three union officials also agreed not to knowingly associate with the Mafia or any other criminal group.

None of the three men had to give up their union posts as a condition of settlement. Nor did they agree to testify for the government at trial. In fact, Mathis said he would testify for the union if union lawyers asked him.

In late January, three elderly Teamster vice presidents--Robert H. Holmes of Detroit, Maurice R. Schurr of Philadelphia and John Cleveland of Washington--settled with the Justice Department and agreed to resign from the union. They were not criticized by their fellow board members. A source close to the board said the difference in reaction to the two groups of men was accounted for by the fact that Mathis, West and Lawson plan to stay active in the union.

Unless agreement is reached this weekend, a bevy of lawyers for the union and the Justice Department will meet at the courthouse in New York’s Foley Square on Monday.

The Justice Department suit, filed last June under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, asserts that the Teamsters are dominated by organized criminal elements and seeks court supervision of the union until new officers can be chosen in a “free and fair election.”