Copyright 1994 Newsday, Inc.  
Newsday (New York)December 6, 1994, Tuesday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. A33

LENGTH: 343 words

HEADLINE: Feds Probe National Laborers Union

BYLINE: By Kenneth C. Crowe. STAFF WRITER

BODY:
The first solid evidence that the U.S. Justice Department is building a possible national civil racketeering suit against the 500,000-member Laborers union recently emerged in documents filed in federal court in Manhattan.

The filing shows that Chicago-based Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Oswald, Chicago FBI agent Ernest Luera and Washington, D.C.-based lawyer J. Kenneth Lowrie of the Justice Department's Organized Crime Section were present at the interrogation of Frank Lupo, an ex-New York union official now in prison. Oswald and Lowrie declined to comment.

Lupo, who is cooperating with the government, was being questioned on Aug. 9 by New York Assistant U.S. Attorney Allan Taffet about the pervasive corruption and mob presence in the New York Mason Tenders District Council, an affiliate of the Laborers. The district council represents about 6,000 workers who do some of the hardest and dirtiest work at construction sites across New York City and Long Island.

For the past two years, law-enforcement sources and union dissidents have reported that Oswald and Luera were traveling the country, gathering information for a racketeering action against the Laborers International Union of North America that would be similar to the one brought against the Teamsters in 1988 - designed to cleanse the union of corruption and organized crime influences.

Several sources said draft complaints for a civil racketeering case against the Laborers had been forwarded from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago to top Justice officials for review.

Laborers general president Arthur A. Coia recently told Newsday, "I can tell you that there has been no evidence presented to me that the Justice Department is investigating our international union." Coia has said that the union's reputation has been unjustly smeared by reports of its purported ties to organized crime.

In 1978, a confidential Justice Department report to the White House contended that the Chicago mob dominated the late Angelo Fosco, then general president of the Laborers.