Charges against Coia could be problematic for
AFL-CIO president
By JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal-Bulletin Washington Bureau
Laborers Union President Arthur A. Coia and AFL-CIO President John
Sweeney are close allies.
WASHINGTON -- In the three years since the Justice Department said
Arthur A. Coia was"controlled by" the Mafia, no image has better captured the
Laborers Union leader's fight for his good name than his moment of acclaim from AFL-CIO
President John J. Sweeney, on a stage in Las Vegas last year.
"Arthur Coia is a standup union leader!" Sweeney
declared to 2,100 cheering delegates, capping Coia's kickoff -- lit by lasers and buoyed
by the theme from Rocky -- of the September 1996 Laborers convention that would launch
Coia's victorious reelection campaign.
Only later did it emerge that Sweeney had delivered his homage to
Coia in defiance of a union election-officer's ruling that it was an impermissible
endorsement -- paid for by rank-and-file dues.
Sweeney's favors to the Laborers general president -- he also made
Coia the first chairman of the AFL-CIO's new organizing committee, in 1996 -- may become a
liability, now that Coia, a native of Rhode Island, faces fresh charges of mob
associations.
Sweeney's dealings with Coia also illustrate how
Sweeney, the standard-bearer of labor's bid to reverse a long slide toward political
impotence, came to rely on the leader of a union with a well-documented history of
violence, Mafia ties and pilferage from the funds of its blue-collar rank and file.
The spotlight on the Laborers, along with the focus on illegal
financing in last year's Teamsters election, once more underlines organized-labor's
troubled relations with its own black sheep.
"These scandals are sure to affect the image" that
Sweeney has tried to project, "of a new,fresh, uncorrupted labor
movement that stands in support of social justice," said Herman Benson, of the
Association for Union Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy group based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Coia, 54, was charged Thursday by a union prosecutor with having
ties to mobsters and taking kickbacks from a union vendor.
The charges grew out of an internal
investigation, headed by a former federal prosecutor hired by Coia, meant to clean up
corruption in the Laborers' Union.
If Coia is found guilty during a secret union
disciplinary proceeding, he will lose his $254,000 job as Laborers general president.
An AFL-CIO spokeswoman said Friday that officials have yet to
consider whether Coia should be permitted to keep his prestigious chairmanship of the
labor federation's organizing committee.
IN SPEAKING ON COIA'S behalf at the 1996 convention, Sweeney
defied the ruling of a law professor hired to ensure fair balloting.
Asked why he didn't obey the election-officer's ruling, Sweeney
responded: "Why should I? I don't answer to him," saying he answered instead to
officers of the AFL-CIO.
The union-paid election-monitor's job was created
as part of an agreement that Coia negotiated with the Justice Department in 1995,
forestalling a federal takeover of the Laborers and his own ouster. The same pact created
the in-house cleanup unit that charged Coia last week.
To dissidents inside the Laborers Union, Coia's
role in Sweeney's own rise suggests a possible explanation for the AFL-CIO president's
support for Coia: political debt.
In February 1995 -- just as he was nailing down the reform deal
with the Jusice Department -- Coia was one of about a dozen union leaders
who approached then-AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to ask that he step down.
When Kirkland refused, the union officials -- intent on reviving
their politically dormant movement to battle the Republican congressional majority --
began to assemble the building blocks of a coup.
When Kirkland was nudged into retirement in the summer of 1995,
his longtime second-in-command, Thomas R. Donahue, became interim president of the
13-million-member labor federation.
By the time Donahue declared his candidacy for president in the regularly scheduled fall election, Sweeney had lined up enough support -- including Coia's -- to be the front runner.
Sweeney's lead was not insurmountable, however, and Coia was among
the Sweeney backers whose support was considered soft.
Donahue approached the September convention with classic
challenger's strategy: to lean as hard as possible on Sweeney's shakier supporters and see
whether Sweeney's slim majority could be pried apart.
As delegates gathered at the New York Sheraton, one bloc of
Sweeney supporters -- the Carpenters -- bolted on cue to Donahue's camp, setting the stage
for Coia to make his much-anticipated move.
Over bagels and orange juice on the morning of
Oct. 23, Donahue supporters dangled a plum job in a Donahue administration as an
inducement for Coia to jump Sweeney's ship. Coia savored the position of
"kingmaker," as he put it during an interview that night.
"Right now you got one guy in a position to determine the
whole presidency of the.AFL-CIO," Coia said. That, he said, was "not bad for a
small-time, hometown guy from Providence, Rhode Island." Coia stressed, however, that
his political muscle-flexing was for the benefit of his rank-and-file members, not
himself.
There may have been some exaggeration in that
boast. But Donahue's political consultant, Tad Devine, said the Sweeney and Donahue camps
both took seriously the possibility that Coia could trigger a stampede.
The front runner worked hard to hold Coia on Oct. 24, the crucial
second day of the convention. "Sweeney stayed in Athur's lap all day," Devine
recalled.
IN THE END, Coia stayed with Sweeney, placing his name in
nomination for the AFL-CIO presidency. Coia said at the time that no inducements were
offered for his loyalty.
But Sweeney did confer on Coia a symbol of high
status in his administration. Early in 1996, during the first AFL-CIO
convention under President Sweeney, Coia was named chairman of the federation's new
organizing committee.
Eleven months after Coia helped Sweeney get elected in New York,
Sweeney returned the favor, flying to Las Vegas -- at Laborers Union expense -- to address
Coia's convention.
Sweeney rejected the election-officer's ruling that six paragraphs
of his 17-page speech amounted to an impermissible endorsement of Coia and read the
passages anyway.
Dissidents fumed and two challengers to Coia were awarded five
minutes each to address the convention the next day.
But in what dissidents took to be a clear show of the Coia camp's
dominance of the convention, half the delegates staged a disruptive walkout when
challenger Bernard "Barney" Scanlon, 70, of Long Island, N.Y., rose to claim his
five minutes.
Scanlon failed to muster enough delegate votes to get on last fall's mail ballot for election to the union's highest
office. In that vote, Coia swamped his only challenger for a five-year term as general
president, a top Chicago Laborers official named Bruno Caruso.
IN LIGHT OF the charges against Coia, one passage jumps out today
from Sweeney's Sept. 23, 1996, speech to the Laborers: the "entire labor movement
owes you a debt for the courageous work you are doing to root out corruption in this great
union."
In light of this year's political storms over campaign finances
and official access-peddling, Coia's banter with
Sweeney on the dais in Las Vegas jumps out with irony not intended at the time.
"Now the last time I gave a president a golf club, the media
had a field day with it. It caused a whole brouhaha and controversy," Coia said,
joking about how he and President Clinton had swapped gifts of fancy golf sticks just days
before the Justice Department presented Coia with its racketeering suit, on Nov. 4, 1994.
"So I'm going to go one better today, John," Coia said.
Delegates chuckled appreciatively as their president presented the
AFL-CIO president with a handsome commemorative golf bag, engraved with
the logo of The Laborers Union of North America.
The Journal-Bulletin's Web site, projo.com, includes an archive of
Journal-Bulletin reports on Arthur Coia dating back to 1995, with links to related sites.
Go to http://ww.projo.com/special/coia/main.htm.
Copyright © 1997 The Providence Journal Company