Painters in Blood

Dow Wilson was never a man to be ignored. A swashbuckling, Shakespeare-spouting romantic, he was also a volatile, foulmouthed labor leader who spent years fighting chicanery in his union's higher echelons. As the $13,000-a-year secretary of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers' San Francisco Local 4--biggest in the U.S.--he commanded the unwavering allegiance of nearly all 2,600 local members. Wilson, 40, was parted from that job on April 5, when shotgun blasts tore into his chest and shattered his skull.

Wilson's murder, an unsettling echo of labor's internecine wars in the '30s, came as a grisly epilogue. His career had been built on his crusading efforts to prove that the union's entrenched leadership had for years been a party to "sweetheart" contracts and other schemes to hold down rank-and-file wages in exchange for cumshaw from grateful contractors.

"Hands Off." Similar charges of jiggery-pokery have been leveled by other disgruntled locals throughout the 200,000-man international union, notably in New York and Washington, where the hierarchy has been repeatedly enmeshed in legal challenges. Wilson preferred more direct action. A onetime seaman, he first roiled the San Francisco local in the mid-1950s by assailing its leaders' cozy relations with contractors, later ired the painters' Indiana-based Big Brotherhood by merging two Bay Area locals that covered the same territory--a convenient setup for employers who had been able to play off one against the other. Last year a Sacramento local passed over its own business representative to elect Outsider Wilson as its negotiator. His influence growing, the San Francisco leader went on to play a militant role in a five-week strike involving 15 northern California painters' locals. The upshot: a settlement giving the area's painters $6.51 hourly in pay and fringe benefits, highest scale in the U.S.

The brotherhood's $25,000-a-year international president, S. Frank Raftery, 47, who had only recently succeeded to the post that became a family fiefdom during his father's twelve-year tenure, ordered top-level hearings on charges that Wilson was "bringing discredit" on the union. When 300 of Wilson's men showed up carrying protest placards (sample: "Get your hands off our throat"), the hearings petered out. Anything but subdued, the San Francisco firebrand planned to run for international vice president in 1968.

Wilson's assassination prompted outraged demands for an investigation of the painters' international leadership. The outcry was redoubled this month when Lloyd Green, 45, a Wilson ally from the nearby Alameda County local, was killed by a shotgun blast hours after his men had rejected a dues increase ordered by Raftery's headquarters.

No Wreaths. Last week San Francisco police arrested five men charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Two were painting contractors who had been administrators of a $500,000 union-employer welfare fund; the third was the fund's accountant; another was a contractors' association official, and the fifth a San Francisco saloonkeeper. The welfare fund has been under federal investigation ever since several union members, including Wilson, began questioning its management.

The international brotherhood has not been accused of complicity in the murders. However, the leadership made no show of grief. President Raftery and colleagues sent no wreaths or even a word of condolence on either death.

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