UNION CANDIDATE ALLEGES PLOT TO SWAY VOTE
Suit says Laborers faction loyal to
ex-official trying to control outcome
JAY JOCHNOWITZ Staff writer
Albany Days before Laborers Local 190 was to begin filling the
void left by ousted leader Samuel Fresina, a legal battle broke out over allegations that
Fresina's loyalists were trying to control the outcome.
Carmen Francella Jr., who plans to run for the Fresina's job as
business manager in the 1,000-member union, filed suit in U.S. District Court Friday
seeking to have a nomination meeting scheduled for Monday postponed until after
mid-September.
Francella in the complaint alleged that he was
being denied membership lists that would allow him to properly campaign and that he has
been personally threatened. The nominations meeting, he also noted, was moved from its
longtime location in the Laborers Temple on Third Street in Albany to Laborers offices in
Glenmont.
The suit, filed by attorney Karen Kimball, states that the meeting
would violate the Laborers constitution and that the president of the Laborers
International Union of North America, Arthur Coia, was involved, giving Fresina's allies an unfair advantage in the upcoming election.
Neither the Laborers' headquarters in Washington,
D.C., nor the local's attorney, Eugene Devine, responded to calls for comment.
Fresina this month quit his posts as business manager of Local 190
and chairman of the Laborers' New York state political action committee after he was found
in an internal union disciplinary case to have given, as a PAC board member, $221,000 in
PAC funds to an alleged organized crime associate, Salvatore Lanza. Lanza was the PAC's
administrative officer and had been ordered removed by the union's disciplinary lawyer in
Washington because of his supposed mob connections. But Fresina and other
board members insisted they had to make the payment to buy out his contract or face a
court battle.
Copyright 1998, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.