Ex-Convict’s Union Role at Issue in Teamsters Race : Election: A challenger says a former leader who served time for a felony runs the local through a ‘puppet.’

The former head of the Teamsters Union local for Ventura County truckers, Martin W. Fry, is an ex-convict who now holds a clerk’s job with the union in Oxnard but is accused of running it from behind the scenes.

Fry’s successor as head of Teamsters Local 186 is Greg Boverson, a large, bearded man in leather jacket and snakeskin boots who says he rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle to periodically escape the pressures of his job.

Dennis Shaw is the leader of a union reform movement and claims that Fry still controls the Teamsters in Ventura County. He wants to oust both Fry and Boverson, whom he denounces as “the ex-con and his puppet.”

These are three of the main characters slugging it out in a tangled union election this month in Ventura County--a classic union power struggle unfolding in the colorful tradition that has marked national Teamsters politics since the days of Jimmy Hoffa.

The charges and countercharges in the election have grown more complicated as the Department of Labor has launched an investigation into the Teamsters local.

Labor Department investigators will not discuss the matter. But a subpoena issued last month for the local’s financial records, telephone logs and other records follows allegations made to the department in a formal complaint filed Dec. 30, 1988.

In that complaint, dissident Teamsters members accused Fry of negotiating contracts, making managerial decisions and electioneering since his release from prison two years ago.

As a felon convicted of embezzlement, Fry is prohibited by federal law from conducting any union business other than strictly clerical or janitorial work. He will be free from these constraints in 1992, five years after his release from prison.

Fry, who earns $36,000 a year and drives a union car, denies that he has helped negotiate contracts or performed any duties other than those of a clerk. “Each employer has different standards of what a clerk should do,” Fry said in an interview. For the most part, he said, he has been helping union members with their pension benefits.

He also denies that he told fellow Teamsters members that he plans to reclaim the top job when his five-year parole is up in 1992.

“I’m happy doing things from where I am,” he said. “You can be more creative behind the scenes than being out front. I’m talking about doing things for the members, not manipulating things.”

Much of the political controversy can be traced to 1978 when Fry, then secretary-treasurer of the Local 186, and other Teamsters organized employees at Redman Moving and Storage Co. in Thousand Oaks.

The company refused to recognize the union and fell victim to a campaign of fear, threats and violence designed to put Redman out of business, court documents show. Vandals slashed more than 100 tires, shot out windows and burned two trucks.

The Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force indicted Fry and others for conspiring to burn the trucks. Ultimately, a jury convicted Fry of embezzling union funds by paying for the gasoline in a car used to follow a Redman truck across state lines for the purpose of setting it ablaze.

Before his trial, Fry visited Raymond A. Gonzales, a former member of Fry’s staff who had turned federal witness against him. In a scuffle next to a workbench, Fry hit Gonzales in the head at least twice with a ballpeen hammer, Gonzales said in police reports.

Gonzales tried to press charges, but the district attorney’s office could find no one to corroborate his story.

“It was our conclusion that it probably happened the way Gonzales said it did, but it was impossible to prove,” said Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, after reviewing the 10-year-old file. “It came down to one man’s word against another’s.”

In addition to a reform slate led by Shaw, Gonzales is now running a Latino reformist slate against Boverson and the entire union board of trustees. In his view, the board has, tacitly or otherwise, approved Boverson’s actions and failed to remove Fry from the payroll.

Board members protest that they have done everything they could to rid the union of Fry--and Boverson for that matter. They passed a resolution calling for Fry’s dismissal. They brought internal charges against Boverson in an effort to force him to resign or remove him from office.

But their attempt to oust Boverson was overruled by higher Teamsters authorities in Los Angeles after Fry prepared an elaborate defense for Boverson. And the resolution to oust Fry was thwarted by the union’s bylaws, which give Boverson, as secretary-treasurer, exclusive power to hire and fire Fry or other employees.

“We wanted to clean our own house, but it seemed like the harder we worked the harder it got,” said Pat Mansfield, a Wonder Bread truck driver and president of the local Teamsters board of trustees, defending the board’s own reform efforts against its current critics.

At every turn, Mansfield said, Fry was there to tie the board in legal knots. “He is no dummy in the way he does things,” Mansfield said. “We got outfoxed, all right.”

Mansfield said the board’s unsuccessful efforts to dump Boverson and Fry led a majority of board members to become actively involved in the current election as supporters of Shaw, a union business agent and trustee who is the leading reform candidate challenging Boverson for secretary-treasurer.

Mansfield and five other union officials have joined Shaw’s slate, running a campaign that is summed up in the headline of one campaign flyer: “Your Local Is Being Run by an Ex-Con.”

To hear Mansfield and other board members tell it, Boverson may be the head of the local Teamsters, but Martin Fry holds the reins. “Marty runs the show, there’s no doubt about it,” Mansfield said.

Even during the 21 months that Fry spent in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, Fry’s critics say, he was in constant communication with union officials. “He’d call the local 10 times a day,” said Aurora (Junior) Ramirez, office manager of the local, who is also a member of Shaw’s slate. “He’d want to know about this contract or that deal.”

When Fry returned from prison to become a union clerk, he was a changed man, Ramirez said. The man who had been her boss, who had taught her 17 years earlier that the needs of the union membership always came first, was now renouncing his altruistic code.

“He told me, ‘Last time I was a fool thinking it was all for the members. This next time, when I’m secretary-treasurer, we’ll drive the best cars, make big money and send Greg down the road to ride his Harley and pick up his check once a week.’ ”

Fry denies saying this. “That is an outright lie.”

About this time, Ramirez said, she grew weary of “baby-sitting” Boverson. She said he has been a largely absentee executive with sloppy business practices such as leaving signed, blank checks on her desk when she wasn’t there.

These two factors persuaded Ramirez to endorse Shaw’s campaign and sign onto his slate as a candidate for recording secretary, the person who takes minutes at board meetings. The rival union leaders agree that she is a very influential and trusted Teamster who is popular among union members.

In recognition of her political pull, Fry took Ramirez to lunch in February to persuade her to run for the top job of secretary-treasurer. “He said he would drop Greg and support me and I would win,” Ramirez said. She declined the offer.

“It was just nonsense talk,” Fry said of the conversation. “I never said I would drop Greg.”

Boverson alternates between anger and hurt feelings over how the board has turned against him and his mentor Fry. Even though he said he understands Fry is a political liability as an ex-convict, he said he has not considered releasing Fry from his payroll.

“How many times does this man have to pay for something?” Boverson said. “He has already lost his family, three years of his life. He wasn’t stealing for himself--he wasn’t stealing. He wasn’t doing anything for himself; he was doing it for the union,” he said.

“If the union can’t stick up for those who are downtrodden, then what are we here for?” Boverson said. “If I went down there and threw out everybody who had a jail record, we wouldn’t have very many people left.”

Shaw praises Boverson as an affable but not particularly effective leader. As the campaign has moved into full swing, the focus has shifted primarily to Fry.

“Greg is really not a factor,” Shaw said. “He is a pitiful bystander. He has little to do with what’s going on other than being Marty’s puppet and a tool in Marty Fry’s game plan to regain power of the union.”

Boverson denies that he follows Fry’s orders. “I am my own guy,” he said. “The only thing I might be guilty of is asking advice from a lot of people.”

In attacking Boverson, Shaw’s campaign literature accuses Boverson of incompetence and mismanagement in many decisions, including selling a Teamsters office building in Carpinteria below value. Shaw says the building was sold partly because of declining membership dues and partly to pay Fry $100,000 he was owed in a union savings plan.

The Boverson campaign has countered with charges that Shaw was unable to hold down a job before Fry hired him five years ago. The campaign’s most recent flyer accuses Shaw of secretly plotting to merge the Local 186 with another Teamsters local in Los Angeles.

“Some members would lose seniority,” the flyer says. “How would a merger affect you?”

Shaw said he once briefly discussed the issue with another Teamsters official, but has no interest in merging with another local. “The people supporting me would flip if they thought that was true,” Shaw said. “Of course, it’s not true.”

On Friday, an independent firm mailed ballots to the 2,857 full-time and seasonal members of Teamsters Local 186. About 80% of the members work in Ventura County, the remainder in Santa Barbara County. The ballots are due back for counting April 20.