A UNION IN BONDAGE TO THE MOB
Beating or murdering anyone in their way,
racketeers are plundering the hard-earned funds of America's laborers
Reader's Digest Senior Editor Eugene H.
Methvin was a member of the President's Commission Crime.
In January 1982, Ben Medina announced his reform candidacy for a
top job in the Laborers' International Union (LIU) Local 332 in Philadelphia. One night
soon after, five armed men wearing Halloween masks entered his home,
bound and gagged his wife and beat Medina to death.
In Baltimore, Bobby Love, the business manager of
Laborers' Local 194, planned to run for president on a reform ticket. Two
days after Medina's murder, he, too, was assassinated.
No one was ever prosecuted, yet there is little mystery about the
murders. Both men were part of a restless stirring among the LIU's
466,000 members against the crime syndicate La Cosa Nostra (LCN) which, according to the
President's Commission on Organized Crime, has long dominated the union. Few workers are in greater need of honest, vigorous union protection. From Florida's
construction sites to Alaska's arctic oil fields, LIU members perform some of the dirtiest
and most dangerous jobs in America. They work in tunnels far below the
earth's surface and atop the tallest buildings. They do blasting, excavation, demolition.
They are garbage collectors, mail handlers, hospital workers and
government blue-collar employees. Three-fourths are black or Hispanic.
Court proceedings and legislative hearings disclose a scandalous
record of exploitation, intimidation and terror. Union officials pocket huge salaries,
plunder the members' welfare funds and shake down their employers.
Rank-and-filers who protest have been blacklisted, beaten, stabbed and murdered.
Even when the Justice Department convicts Mafia figures, the mob
regimes continue. Examples: In Cleveland, when Mafia member Anthony Liberatore came out of
prison after serving 20 years for killing two police
officers, he was made business manager of LIU Local 860. Liberatore then executed a rival
racketeer by a car bomb and paid a $16,000 bribe to an FBI clerk for the names of
informants in the mob. Liberatore was returned to prison for both crimes. Federal
authorities say, however, that he still controls Local 860 from prison.
In Chicago, Local 1 is run by Vincent Solano, who is also an LCN
boss. He uses the union hall to run gambling, extortion and prostitution
rackets, according to the sworn testimony of one of his minions, Ken Eto. After Eto was
convicted on a gambling charge in 1983, Solano apparently suspected he might squeal in return for leniency. Two hit men fired three bullets into the back of Eto's
head, leaving him for dead. But Eto survived-and told all to the FBI.
Five months later, the two bungling hit men were found tortured, stabbed and then
strangled-a warning to other mobsters not to flub their assignments.* *No one was ever
charged in any of these cases.
In St. Louis, mobster Paul Leisure seized control
of a key LIU local by ordering the bombing murder of its boss. When FBI
agents planted a bug in Leisure's headquarters, they heard him plotting the murder of
gangland rivals. In 1985 prosecutors sent Leisure and four of his men, all on the union
payroll, to prison. But the local was taken over by LCN boss Matthew Trupiano, who last
year went to prison for four years on a bookmaking conviction.
The situation is neatly summarized in a conversation (picked up by
an FBI bug) between Ronnie Scaccia, the Mafia-connected boss of an upstate New York LIU
local, and a fellow mobster: "No matter what happens nobody can take over control of
this union on us. If they get me, you're here. If they get you, I'm here.
If they get both of us, my brother's here. If we go to jail, we got
something waiting when we come out."
Lone Dentist. Such corruption provides a setting
in which mob pirates can plunder union pension and welfare funds of millions of dollars.
In Chicago, for example, mob associate John Serpico,
president of Local 8 and an LIU vice president, established a dental plan for some 16,000
union members in the Midwest. He put Robert J. Cantazaro, a mob-connected bail bondsman
with no experience in medical-benefits programs, in charge.
Cantazaro hired a dentist, opened a single clinic
and siphoned off 68 cents of every dollar of the $5.1 million collected from union members
by Serpico. Only 32 cents went to provide dental care for union members and families.
In New York, Ralph Scopo, president of LIU's District Council, drew $$311,600 in yearly salary and expenses in 1984 He was also a soldier in the Mafia's Persico family, whose thugs assured him total control over 19,000 union laborers in 21 locals.
Scopo and his Mafia combine monopolized New York's construction
industry through threats of murder and "labor troubles,"
inflating building costs as much as 40 percent. The LCN Commission and seven large
concrete firms rigged bids and allocated major construction jobs, with winners kicking
back a share of their profits to the Mob. Contractors who bought "labor peace"
could hire nonunion workers, disregard safety rules and omit payments to
union pension and welfare funds. Last November a jury convicted Scopo, three LCN
Commission members, and other ranking ganglords for racketeering. Scopo and the bosses got
100-year sentences.
Twice-Paid Lawyer. Insulating such bosses from
the law is Robert J. Connerton, LIU's general counsel and chief lobbyist. Connerton has
spent over three decades in Washington, D.C., lobbying against
anti-racketeering laws and enforcement. He helped knock the teeth out of the
Landrum-Griffin Act, "the union man's bill of rights," in 1959. And he directed
the lobbying that killed a Reagan Administration request for more
investigators in the Labor Department's Office of Labor Racketeering.
Meantime, Connerton's union connection has made him a millionaire
His biggest coup was the creation of a "one case" law firm to
represent mail handlers in a claim against the U.S. Postal Service for back pay and
overtime. Through LIU publications, Connerton got 90,000 union members to send in consent
forms so that he could represent them in a private capacity. He then
negotiated a multi-million-dollar settlement with the Postal Service and pocketed a $1
million "fee" for representing these "private clients"-union members whose dues were already paying his salary, which in 1986 was $122,559.
Masked Gunman. In 1972, Joe Caleb, bright and
popular young president of Miami Local 478, made the mistake of asking questions about the
administration of multimillion-dollar LIU trust funds-money controlled by District Council president Bernard Rubin, a secret ally of the Chicago syndicate.
Caleb soon was murdered.
His death touched off investigations, prosecutions
and gangland killings that continue to this day. Hugo Menendez, a Labor
Department investigator, began looking into Rubin's operations-and uncovered the tip of a
vast conspiracy to loot LIU welfare funds from Massachusetts to Arizona. Rubin and his
lawyer skimmed off more than $6 million from the LIU. They went to prison-but there the
trail stopped, temporarily.
Then, under heavy pressure by Senate and FBI investigators, two
key middlemen became government witnesses. Insurance-fraud artist Joe
Hauser testified that he and his Mob friends had collected $180 million one year from the
Laborers, Teamsters, and Hotel & Restaurant Employees, exacting
"between 20 and 30 percent" in kickbacks for
union and Mafia racketeers. The combine left 20 union trust funds foundering in eight
states. Mob associate Dan Milano, Jr., testified about cash kickbacks to Chicago Mafia
chief Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo, LIU president Angelo Fosco and a flock of Florida
LIU officials.
Just months after Connerton, Fosco and other LIU officials
delivered a $$25,000 campaign contribution to Vice President Mondale at the White House
and another $125,000 to the Democratic National Committee, Justice Department lawyers were
indicting Fosco, Accardo, Tampa LCN boss Santo Trafficante and 13 others
from Chicago and Florida on racketeering charges.
Among the defendants was Chicago Local 5 president Al Pilotto, who
doubled as an Accardo LCN capo. Seven weeks after the indictment, as Pilotto was playing
golf in suburban Chicago, a ski-masked gunman shot him five times. Incredibly, Pilotto
survived. But soon one of the golf partners was discovered with his throat cut, and
another associate was found tortured and burned to death.
At this point the hit man in the Pilotto shooting turned himself in to the FBI. He revealed that the two dead men had been his bosses and had informed him that Accardo had ordered the Pilotto hit to keep the Local 5 president quiet.
None of this evidence of Mafia involvement was deemed relevant to
the racketeering trial. Twelve were convicted, but jurors acquitted Fosco and Accardo.
Subsequently Hauser, the top Mafia specialist on looting union pension funds, told Congress that Accardo had "handpicked" Fosco as LIU president in 1975. Another Mob associate testified he had personally delivered payoffs to Fosco. When the President's Commission on Organized Crime sought to question Fosco, the union president fled behind the Fifth Amendment.
Brave Rebels. As the Florida prosecutions unfolded, Fosco and his allies faced insurrection from within. A scattering of rank-and-file rebels from Fairbanks to Miami formed "Laborers for a Democratic Union" and challenged Fosco's re-election to the presidency of the LIU. But when Dennis Ryan, an LDU delegate, tried to nominate an opponent at the 1981 convention in Hollywood, Fla., he was beaten savagely by approximately 20 delegates and sergeants-at-arms. From an underworld informant the FBI learned the attack was ordered by Ralph Scopo in New York. .
A month later, Ryan and eight fellow Laborers filed a suit
accusing Fosco and other top LIU officers of racketeering asking that a court-appointed
trustee take over the union. But the of attorneys, paid out of the LIU treasury, stalled
for time, withholding crucial documents, conducting endless depositions
and filing a frivolous countersuit.
The LIU dissenters' hopes focused on Robert E.
Powell, LIU senior vice president and the ranking black in the hierarchy. Powell, whose
reputation for integrity was good, was urged by many rank-and-filers to challenge Fosco
for the presidency.
Powell became the target of a campaign of intimidation. In an
affidavit, he described a death threat delivered personally by Fosco.
Midnight phone calls threatened Powell's wife and daughter. Dead pigeons and rats were
placed on his car. He moved his family out of Washington and began wearing a bulletproof
vest and packing a pistol. Finally, in 1984, Powell retired in despair.
With him went the last hope of rank-and-filers for a cleanup from
within. Their war chest exhausted by LIU counsel Connerton's blizzard of
legal paper, the dissidents' lawsuit was dismissed last year.
SEVENTY-SEVEN LIU officers, members and service providers have
been convicted since 1980, yet killers and thugs still dot the union payrolls. Of the
nation's "50 biggest Mafia bosses" named by Fortune magazine, four were LIU
officers and five more have been prosecuted in racketeering schemes involving
the union.
Since 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
has made it possible to remove corrupt union and corporate officials.
But under four presidents and nine attorneys general of both parties, civil RICO suits
have been filed against unions only three times. One was against Ralph
Scopo's LIU District Council and one local in New York; last March a judge
placed both under federal trusteeship, removing 16 of the 25 of officers; he banned 13 for
life from holding union office, and expelled 7 from the LIU altogether.
Such vigorous Justice Department intervention must be repeated
with the LIU and wherever the mobsters influence its components. As Robert Powell
testified before the President's Commission on Organized Crime: "As soon as you put
one in jail, another one steps in his place. Until the U.S. government places these groups under trusteeship and gets someone in there to turn
these organizations back to their members, you will never clean out the corruption."
Until that day, America's 466,000 Laborers will be in bondage.