Copyright 1988 Newsday, Inc.  
Newsday (New York)September 15, 1988, Thursday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 9
Other Edition: Nassau and Suffolk Pg. 94

LENGTH: 632 words

HEADLINE: A Worthy Descendant Of Jackie Presser

BYLINE: Murray Kempton

BODY:
The federal government has charged that Bobby Cervone Sr. illicitly collected at least $ 223,000 from abusing his office as business agent of Mason Tenders Union Local 113 in Queens.

That is a modest score by the prevailing scale for larceny. Even so, if we are to believe his prosecutors, Cervone achieved it with exercises of creative imagination so versatile and so ingenious as to suggest that, after its long torpor, the American trade union movement may at last have raised up another labor statesman with the vision and stature deserving of a biographer more appreciative than Assistant U.S. Attorne Anthony J. Siano sounded yesterday.

Genius finally consists of the capacity to take every affliction and inconvenience on life's path and turn it to your own profit. And it does not arrive quickly; Bobby Cervone was a Mason Tenders local business agent for 40 years of devotion he spent refining his craftsmanship until every scam imputed to his old age has the ring of an authentic masterpiece.

A construction trades business agent soon learns to identify three primary varieties of disturbance to his peace.

One is the rank-and-filer who drinks on the job. Another is the rank-and-filer whose honest social passions inflame him into incessant demands for enforcement of the union contract to the letter generally left for dead.

The third is the man of color who is aroused by the business agent's resistance to all promptings to the ideals of equal employment opportunity and who musters his pickets and carries their reproach and protest to the mild extreme of intrusions upon the contractor's construction site.

The run of business agents suffer these thorns as best they can and, when inclined to extortion, never think to use them but stick instead to the tired old conventions of shaking the employer down with threats to strike or sales of exemptions from having to contribute to the union's pension and welfare fund.

But Bobby Cervone was unique for possessing the wit to assess the pest at his true worth as instrument for gain. Saddle him with a mason vulnerable to grape and malt and, his prosecutors allege, he would ship him to the work site of a contractor hitherto insensitive to the majesty of the Mason Tenders local. This poor soak need reel back from lunch only once to stir horrid portents of an afternoon when he would fall off the scaffold and file a damage suit. To be relieved of the prospect of that curse might cost a $ 500 payment to the business agent and was altogether a bargain.

Even the honestly militant rank-and-filer whose complaints were otherwise a bane could be stuff for Bobby Cervone to transform into a blessing. He appointed one such firebrand to the shop stewardship on one job, and he displayed so much talent for inspiring trouble that, as soon as peace and order was restored by his removal from that site, Cervone was delighted to send him to another.

Cervone's indictment alleges that each of the employers thus beset ended up paying him 1 percent of the gross total of the construction contract. Such can be the cash value of sincerity shrewdly exploited.

Even the revolt against the color barrier in the construction unions had its uses. There was Big William who descended upon work sites with his band of pickets and demands for minority rights so insistent that only a fee could appease him. His prosecutors claim that Big William was so useful a servitor for Cervone that he is referred to affectionately on the wiretaps as "my n-g-er."

None of these prodigies would, of course, have been possible without the disciplined refusal of all distractions by concern for the class struggle, which is just as well because a social revolutionary with a genius equal to Cervone's could have been the American Lenin.