Teamsters Convene Under Gaze of Justice Department : Labor: The union plagued by an image of violence and mob ties is grappling with its first free election.

By BOB BAKER

June 23, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES LABOR WRITER

ORLANDO, Fla. —

The first out-in-the open, democratic struggle for the soul of the legendary autocratic and corrupt Teamsters Union begins here Monday, as the nation’s largest labor union holds its first national convention under unprecedented government supervision.

More than 1,900 delegates--elected for the first time by the rank-and-file members--are expected to spend the week confronting questions that cut to the core of the union’s reputation for lavishing wealth on its leaders at the expense of its 1.6 million members.

For starters:

Should salaries be limited for union executives--150 of whom make more than $100,000 a year, thanks to a policy that lets them draw up to four salaries for multiple job titles?

* Should the union’s fleet of private jets be sold and the money used for nobler purposes, like organizing new members?

* Should strike benefits--now only $45 a week, particularly stingy in a union that raised $10.5 million in political contributions during the last congressional campaign--be raised?

* Should the union create an independent commission to weed out members who are guilty of unethical conduct?

Teamsters conventions used to be the place where delegates affirmed back-room selection of union presidents and executive board members. Now, thanks to government rules, the convention can only nominate; the membership will vote in December. Both reform and Establishment factions of the union are preparing constitutional amendments that may be the subject of unprecedented floor fights.

These changes make the convention of interest not only to Teamsters, whose membership ranges from truck drivers and law enforcement officers to teachers and flight attendants, but to the entire organized labor movement. A high-profile convention that reinforced union democracy would help labor leaders fight off a widespread public suspicion that unions are as unresponsive as most institutions, or worse.

“I think the sort of ‘screw you’ attitude toward the government is going to be put aside, with everybody talking a lot more about giving the union back to the membership,” said Tom Geoghedan, a Chicago labor lawyer and author.

“We’re in a period where labor can’t do anything about federal laws on organizing. It can’t do anything about the country’s economic policy. It can’t do much about anything that has been responsible for its slow decline. But one thing it can do for itself is to make itself more democratic,” Geoghedan said.

It’s not certain that will happen here. Justice Department distrust of the Teamsters is still so high that last month the government sought and won a federal court injunction holding that no matter what the elected delegates want to do, the convention must adopt the terms of a 1989 consent decree that established democratic elections and government oversight of the union through 1996.

“This is going to be a free election. It is not going to be dominated by hooligans,” said U.S. District Judge David Edelstein, who signed the consent decree and issued the injunction.

Those misgivings notwithstanding, the 88-year-old union has undergone an astonishing amount of change in a short time.

Organized crime’s historic influence on the union--which ranged as far as the selection of some union presidents, according to federal prosecutors--has been reduced by retired federal judge Frederick Lacey, the union’s court-appointed administrator, who has ousted many members in the last two years. Teamsters leaders must answer to Lacey as the result of the 1989 deal the union’s executive board made with the Justice Department, trading internal democracy for the settlement of a massive racketeering lawsuit.

The new rules have triggered unprecedented infighting, shattering old political alliances. Teamsters President William McCarthy is stepping down at the age of 71 after just three years in office because of poor health, and two factions of the union’s Establishment are locked in bitter, public combat to succeed him--along with a reform sect that wants to throw all vestiges of the Establishment out the door.

The last time the Teamsters held a convention was 1986. The union holds its conventions at five-year intervals, as infrequently as permitted by federal labor law. At the last convention, Jackie Presser, the son of one of the union’s old power brokers, was reelected by delegates, 1,729 to 24, despite having been indicted days earlier by a federal grand jury on charges of racketeering and embezzlement.

After the roll call, Presser gleefully taunted the small Teamsters for a Democratic Union reform movement, calling it “dead” in remarks from the podium. Later, he assured reporters, “You’ve seen democracy in action.”

Today, Presser is dead. (He died in 1988 after surgery for a brain tumor; the union’s executive board replaced him with McCarthy.) Teamsters for a Democratic Union, by contrast, is very much alive. It has sent about 250 elected delegates to this convention, all of them pledged to support reform candidate Ron Carey, the squeaky-clean head of a New York Teamsters local. An April telephone poll of 600 rank-and-file members taken by one of Carey’s presidential opponents, union Vice President Walter Shea, found that Carey and Teamsters for a Democratic Union had higher “favorable” ratings than either Shea or the other Teamsters Establishment candidate, R.V. Durham of North Carolina.

“I’ve seen the good times and I’ve seen the bad times,” said Jack Cox, an international union vice president and the head of a Carson-based Teamsters local who is supporting Shea. “But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Neither has anybody else in organized labor. Until now, the largest union election overseen by the government was held in 1972 by the United Mine Workers, when about 300,000 members voted.

The government is watching so closely that Judge Edelstein plans to fly here from his New York courtroom, ready to rule in case government overseers charge that the convention is departing from the consent decree.

What is happening on the grounds of Walt Disney World stems from a 1988 Justice Department lawsuit that sought a government takeover of the Teamsters, contending that leaders of the union had “made a devil’s pact” with the Mafia.

In accepting federal oversight, the union’s executive board agreed to let the government set up a special investigator to purge the union of members who were “mobbed up.” The Teamsters also agreed to a three-step process of electing new national officers: Delegate elections in all 662 locals, a nominating convention and a December secret-ballot election for a president, secretary-treasurer and 16 vice presidents.

Most of the convention delegates are the same kind of people who usually go to Teamsters conventions--officers of Teamsters locals, who were automatically delegates in the past, or business agents appointed by those officers.

However, the election process shook up a number of locals. In McCarthy’s own home Local 25 in Boston, which McCarthy has run for 35 years, two reform slates won eight out of nine delegate slots--including one Teamster, George Cashman, who’d had his leg broken in a brawl 15 years ago when he was backing convention delegates who opposed McCarthy.

Presidential politicking will probably color much of what the convention does. Most delegates appear to have already chosen sides. The vast majority have gone either to Durham, a union vice president who serves as director of the Teamsters freight division, or Shea, who is best known for having been administrative assistant to every union president since the late Jimmy Hoffa.

Durham and Shea say they are building slates of vice presidential candidates with geographic balance necessary to attract rank-and-file members. Shea’s campaign belittles Durham as a man unknown beyond the South. Durham’s campaign portrays Shea as a tool of one of McCarthy’s rivals, 84-year-old Joseph (Joe T) Treretola, the most powerful figure in the union’s 500,000-member Eastern Conference.

Treretola--described in various published histories of the Teamsters as a man who has coexisted with mobsters to maintain his power in the union--is one of more than 100 Teamsters leaders who have been accused by government overseers of tolerating or encouraging corruption. He is appealing the accusation in court.

Of those Teamsters accused by the court-appointed investigations officer, Charles Carberry, about 41 have left the union. Many did so rather than appeal so they could maintain their pension benefits.

Two key members of the Durham campaign--the union’s secretary-treasurer, Weldon Mathis of Georgia, and Vice President Arnie Weinmeister of Seattle--voluntarily left Durham’s slate of candidates in recent months, saying that they intend to retire. Neither had been charged by Carberry, but both had political weaknesses: Weinmeister makes more than $600,000 a year through multiple salaries, and Mathis’s Atlanta local was accused of election fraud.

The Teamsters’ relationship with organized crime and their reputation for violence is not unique to organized labor. Government investigations have found smaller-scale problems in some longshoreman, restaurant and laborers union locals. It was not unusual for unions to seek out organized crime figures in the 1930s for defensive muscle against employer-sanctioned violence.

The difference in the Teamsters, according to labor historians and crime experts, is that this symbiotic relationship became institutionalized under Hoffa: The mob enjoyed access to pension fund loans and jobs, and the Teamsters enjoyed access to the muscle needed to win a strike or force a contract on an unwilling employer.

“What most other unions don’t have is the stark fear that has controlled many (Teamsters) locals--where to run as an opposition candidate was to literally put yourself in physical danger,” said Nick Salvatore, an associate professor of history at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Hoffa popularized the Teamsters as a tough union whose members excused the blemishes of the leadership because they were winning unparalleled wage increases in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. His name remains so powerful to the rank-and-file members that his son, James P. Hoffa, attracted serious consideration as a presidential candidate this year. Hoffa was ruled ineligible because he is a labor lawyer who has not worked “in the craft,” as required by the Teamsters convention.

However, the advent of deregulation in the trucking industry, the stagnation of the American economy and tougher anti-union tactics by employers in the 1980s put an end to the union’s ability to win contracts that raised wages above the pace of inflation. Like almost all unions, the Teamsters were often forced to grant contract concessions in the last decade. As a result, the gap between the privileged existence of the union’s leadership and the rank-and-file members grew wider.

Despite the purge of so many tainted figures, scandal is often close by. Consider the past month:

* In late May, a convicted New York racketeer, John Cody, once one of the most powerful Teamsters leaders in New York, was arrested for allegedly plotting to murder Robert Sasso--his successor as president of a New York Teamsters local. The FBI said Cody wanted to kill Sasso to regain control of the 4,000-member local. The news came as Sasso was preparing to host a reception for Durham.

* In early June, rival factions of Teamsters in Hawaii blamed each other for two fires that destroyed $240,000 in movie production equipment. Both factions accused the other of torching the equipment in an effort to control the state’s lucrative movie equipment rental business.

* Last week, union administrator Lacey kicked six of the seven officers of another Teamsters New York local out of the union for participating in “a virtual avalanche of criminal activity rooted in organized crime.” Among those expelled was purported organized crime family member Anthony Calagna Sr. Calagna’s Local 295 represents truck drivers and warehouse workers who handle the bulk of the New York area’s $50-billion-a-year air freight business. In April, Calagna was sentenced to seven years in prison for extorting $280,000 from an air freight company at Kennedy Airport.

Union leaders say that these kinds of litanies give undue attention to an unsavory minority.

“We’ve had some Tammy Bakkers and Jim Bakkers, but we don’t have them all,” said John Morris, president of the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters and a longtime critic of excesses among the union’s top leadership.

“Do we monopolize all the bad guys? No. But are we an effective organization? There’s not an employer in the U.S., if we put our strength together, could get a grape in his plant if we wanted to stop it. We’re a big, powerful organization. We’re wealthy. We’re strong. We still organize more people than anybody else.”

Indicted Teamster Leaders

Central to the corruption-riddled history of the Teamsters Union is the fact that four of the past six union presidents have been indicted on charges of federal crimes and three have been convicted.

Dave Beck: Became president of the Teamsters in 1952. After being investigated by the Senate Rackets Committee in 1957, he was forced out of union office. In 1958, he was convicted of filing a fraudulent tax return and served 30 months in prison.

Jimmy Hoffa: Became president in 1957, succeeding Beck. Hoffa was sent to federal prison in 1967 for eight years for jury tampering and mail fraud. He disappeared in 1975--reportedly while trying to win back power in the union. His body has never been found.

Roy Lee Williams: Became president in 1981. Williams was convicted of attempting to bribe a U.S. senator in 1982. He resigned as union president in 1983 after being sentenced to 55 years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to 10 years. He died in 1989.

Jackie Presser: Became president in 1983, succeeding Williams. He was indicted in 1986 on racketeering and embezzlement charges but died after brain-tumor surgery in 1988 before going to trial.

International Brotherhood of Teamsters Facts and figures about the Teamsters:

* Founded: 1903

* Membership: 1.6 million

* Peak membership in 1978.: 2.2 million

* Annual budget: $81 million

Executive Board

* President

* Secretary-treasurer

* 16 vice presidents

* 3 trustees

Where the Membership Works

* Misc. industries**: 25%