TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/122192/12219936.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 9.8 KB | 204 lines

                                                                                LABOR, Page 60

How Hoffa Haunts the Teamsters


Ron Carey promised to clean up the union. So why is he sounding
as defiant as the old boss?

By RICHARD BEHAR


    Will the Teamsters ever go straight? Not with the
attitude problem they've got. America's largest and most corrupt
labor union remains in love with its sordid past, which is
making it nearly impossible for it to forge an honest future.
The attitude is reflected vividly in Hoffa, the new $40 million
movie starring Jack Nicholson. The film tends to romanticize the
life of the union's most infamous leader, Jimmy Hoffa,
portraying him as a folk hero, a "friend of labor" who may have
done deals with the Mob but only to help his Teamsters brothers
and never to line his own pockets. Why does the movie represent
the view of Hoffa disciples rather than that of reformers?
Interestingly, the film's executive producer,
entertainment-industry roughneck Joseph Isgro, has reputed ties
to the Gambino crime family.

    Ron Carey, the union's first democratically elected
leader, publicly disdains Hollywood's portrayal of Hoffa's
legacy. "He clearly was no Robin Hood, and he shouldn't be
painted that way," declares Carey. Although the film doesn't say
so, the real Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, mail fraud
and taking kickbacks. Two weeks before he disappeared, in 1975,
investigators discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars
had been stolen from the Teamsters' largest pension fund. "Hoffa
was a dishonest person," says Carey. "You just have to look at
all the pensioners around the country who lost money as a result
of his actions."

    It's too early in the new president's tenure to predict
how a film called Carey would play. But the current boss has at
least one trait in common with Hoffa: a ferocious and
relentless tendency to attack the government for trying to clean
up the union. When Carey was elected a year ago on a promise to
rid the union of organized crime, federal agents and
prosecutors were overjoyed by the underdog's surprise victory.
Now they wonder if their confidence was misplaced. "He
definitely has not been a corruption fighter so far," says
Edward Ferguson, who recently served as the lead prosecutor
against the Teamsters. "Nobody is suggesting that Carey is a bad
guy, but his whole pitch was `Elect me so we can get rid of the
government and fight the enemy ourselves.' "

    The feds got involved in supervising the Teamsters
following a 1989 settlement of a racketeering suit that charged
the union's leadership with having a "devil's pact" with the
Mob. The record spoke for itself. Four of the union's past seven
presidents had been indicted on criminal charges; three of them
(including Hoffa) went to prison. To avoid a government-imposed
trusteeship, the Teamsters agreed to allow the 1.6 million
members to freely elect their president. In the past, the boss
had always been handpicked by a coterie of top brass.

    In settling the suit, Teamsters leaders agreed to a
consent decree under which Frederick Lacey, the former federal
judge who last week completed the Iraqgate probe, was assigned
as an overseer to remove corrupt Teamsters officials and lead
the way to free elections. But William McCarthy, who was
president until last year, and his cronies spent $10.5 million
of the union's money to litigate and obstruct the settlement at
every step.

    Carey now appears to be adopting that same defiant,
foot-dragging posture. La cey was replaced last month by a
three-member independent-review board, as scheduled in the
settlement. Yet Carey has gone to court (so far unsuccessfully)
to challenge everything from Lacey's right to sit on the board
to the government's right to issue rules for it. He has also
tried to hamper the board's ability to hire staff, to seek
redress in court or even to communicate with the rank and file
through the Teamsters newsletter.

    Federal Judge David Edelstein, who supervises the case,
lashed out at Carey in August for actions that "presage
tolerance of organized crime" and "suggest a desire . . . to
cloak corruption in secrecy." The judge blasted Carey's record
on eliminating corruption as "pathetic." Since then, the battle
has only got worse, with Carey now comparing U.S. involvement
in the Teamsters with the Polish government's attack on the
Solidarity union in the early 1980s. "((Carey)) is basically an
insecure guy who does not want anybody supervising what he's
doing," says Lacey. "It's the same dance, but with different
partners. Instead of McCarthy, it's Carey. But at least it's
done to an Irish tune," he adds with a bitter laugh.

    For his part, Carey complains vehemently that the union
will go bankrupt at the rate ($385 an hour) that Lacey's law
firm bills the Teamsters for its supervisory work. "The
government created me in a democratic process, and democracy
should be given an opportunity to work," he says. "They've been
in here for three years, and if they haven't cleaned it out, why
not? What's the problem, guys? How in hell can anybody justify
$385 an hour -- this really frustrates the sout of me -- when
we have members picking lettuce in California for $4.25 an
hour?"

    In response, Lacey says that Carey himself is draining the
union's coffers by suing the government and by having "flooded
the books" with highly paid executives in order to repay
political debts. Lacey also argues that his own success with the
Teamsters -- since 1989, more than 140 officials have been
driven from office -- has saved or recovered $14 million for the
union, far in excess of the $4 million in legal fees and
expenses his firm has collected.

    Why has a reformer like Carey turned into an apparent
reactionary? Some experts speculate that Carey believes his
militant posture is safe now because the Clinton
Administration's Justice Department will not hound the Teamsters
the way Republican Administrations did. Yet Carey's behavior,
past and present, indicates that government supervision is still
necessary. For example, the Teamsters leader doubts he "ever
would have testified" on behalf of a reputed Lucchese family
mobster named John Conti. But court records show that Carey
spoke highly of Conti in a criminal case in 1975.

    This year, one of Carey's first moves as boss was to
install William Genoese, a Teamsters official with a dubious
background, as the head of a Mob-controlled airport-workers
local in New York City. Lacey vetoed Carey's selection, calling
Genoese "unbelievably oblivious" to corruption and citing his
lengthy pattern of nepotism and misuse of union funds. "If even
a casual look had been taken at Genoese's background, you would
have known that this was a terrible mistake," says La cey. "And
Mr. Carey knew that." Moreover, the Mafia apparently likes
Genoese: earlier this year, a former Lucchese crime boss
testified about a Mob attempt to influence last year's election
by placing Genoese and other Teamsters in key union posts.

    Carey concedes that the Genoese selection was a mistake --
one that he is unlikely to repeat, he says, thanks to an
"ethical review committee" he launched last month. The committee
will operate separately from the review board, and an outside
firm will handle much of its work, including union background
checks. The independent contractor will be Decision Strategies,
a firm run by Bart Schwartz, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney
who Carey says has an "untouchable" reputation. "((Schwartz))
is now the investigative arm of the Teamsters," boasts Carey.

    But Schwartz's resume is far from spotless. A
congressional report cited him in 1990 as a main player in a
case that led to a serious misuse of law enforcement. After
Schwartz left the U.S. prosecutor's office in 1985 to join a
private investigation firm, one of his first moves was to help
a devious client provoke a criminal probe against a business
rival. As a result of the efforts, the rival suffered a
crippling IRS raid in 1986 despite scant evidence of wrongdoing.
Four years later, the case was quietly closed by the Justice
Department without any indictments. Schwartz maintains he did
nothing wrong, but the affair raises questions about his
standards of conduct.

    To his credit, Carey has made some big strides since
taking office. When turncoat Gambino underboss Sammy Gravano
testified recently about his ties to a concrete-hauling
Teamsters local, Carey slapped a trusteeship on the unit to
shape it up. Last week, he says, he launched a probe of
Teamsters links to the Mob in the movie industry. Carey also
instituted budgets for the union, a previously unheard-of
practice. He personally negotiated a contract for car haulers,
one of the union's biggest accords, and he stopped a revolt by
Northwest Airlines flight attendants who nearly quit the union
to join another.

    "The union seems to be turning in the right direction,"
says Susan Jennik, head of the Association for Union Democracy,
a reform group that has monitored the Teamsters since 1969.
"But I don't agree with Carey's emphasis on opposing the
government. It took decades for the union to get so corrupt, and
it will probably take some time before it's totally cleaned up."

    Those who doubt the immensity of the task should look no
further than the Teamsters' first open convention in 1991, which
paved the way for Carey's election. At the event, union leaders
rejected a proposal to amend the constitution to boot out their
"general president emeritus-for-life." And who holds that
prestigious post because of his "good-standing membership"? Who
else but Jimmy Hoffa, missing in action, perhaps, but proving
once again that the rank and file never gets what the rank and
file deserves.