Allen Friedman; Teamsters Embezzler

Allen Friedman, who was convicted of embezzling $165,000 from a Teamsters local in a scheme that involved his nephew, the late Teamsters boss Jackie Presser, has died of heart failure at 71.

Friedman died Tuesday at Cleveland Clinic Hospital. He had a history of heart problems.

In 1983, Friedman was convicted of embezzling $165,000 as a “ghost employee” of Teamsters Local 507.

Friedman claimed that Presser and another union official had agreed to pay him $1,000 a week in union funds for life in exchange for merging Local 507 with Local 752, of which Friedman was president.

The conviction was overturned in 1985 after defense attorneys alleged the Justice Department concealed information that Presser was a government informant and that he may have been authorized to hire ghost employees. Friedman’s attorneys said that had they known, they would have changed their defense strategies.

Presser secretly provided information about organized crime to the FBI while receiving help from mobsters in his rise to Teamsters president in 1983.

In 1983 Friedman had testified secretly that Presser helped arrange “sweetheart contracts” with businessmen and fired “troublesome” unionists who were at odds with their employers. However, his often bitter testimony before a federal grand jury was adjudged too general to prosecute Presser.

Presser died in 1988 while under indictment on charges of paying $700,000 in union funds to his cronies from 1972 to 1982.

Friedman’s 1989 book “Power and Greed” offered an inside look at the growth of the mob and what he called the Teamsters’ “empire of corruption” in Cleveland.