Attracting Money and the Mafia

No union has been so often investigated and exposed as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America. As far back as the 1950s, it was dissected by the Senate McClellan committee--which later branded it a "hoodlum empire"--and thrown out of the AFL-CIO as a pariah unfit to live in the house of labor. Since then, it has been the target of endless grand-jury investigations and many exposes of Teamster-Mafia deals, and some of its officers have been jailed; James R. Hoffa ran the union from a cell in Lewisburg federal penitentiary between 1967 and 1971. Now Hoffa's disappearance and presumed murder have focused new attention on the giant union, leading to one clear--if dismaying--conclusion: the decades of exposes and cleanup attempts have accomplished next to nothing. The Teamsters go rolling along, more powerful and perhaps more corrupt at the top than ever.

Long Reach. Mass unemployment is causing many Teamster locals to lose dues-paying members, but overall the union is still growing. It is the nation's largest (2.2 million members), richest and most aggressive labor organization, with a stop-or-go hold over deliveries of everything from automobiles to bread. Over-the-road, long-distance truck drivers are still the well-paid Teamster elite (average salary: $20,000), but the union has also largely fulfilled its boast to organize "everything aboveground on wheels." It represents drivers of almost every imaginable vehicle from ice cream trucks to hearses.

Moreover, the union is almost daily extending its reach into scores of manufacturing and service industries that have little if anything to do with trucking. Expulsion from the AFL-CIO freed the union of the federation's jurisdictional boundaries; its organizers go after almost everyone who earns a paycheck, sometimes extending their efforts to shops that have only three or four workers. Last year the Teamsters participated in a third of the 9,000 representation elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, far more than any other union, and won about half--a solid record.

Teamsters today are almost literally everywhere. They include brewers in Memphis, drawbridge operators in New York City, pipeline workers in Alaska, telephone answering-service employees in Boston. In Chicago, Teamster locals take up two full columns in the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory; they represent armored-car drivers, newspaper deliverers, gas-station employees, airline stewardesses and meat packers. The city's Local 727 goes by the somewhat unbelievable official name of "The Auto Livery, Chauffeurs, Embalmers, Funeral Directors, Apprentice Ambulance Drivers and Helpers, Taxi Cab Drivers, Miscellaneous Garage Employees, Car Washers, Greasers, Polishers and Wash Rack Attendants Local." In Michigan recently, state police sergeants and lieutenants voted for Teamster affiliation--and got it. In California, the Teamster net covers scientists, nurses, firemen, even district attorneys.

Why such organizing success for so scandal-scarred a union? One reason, certainly, is the Teamsters' reputation for representing their members well. Some critics charge that the union some times neglects to press grievances for its members, and about a dozen retired Teamsters have filed lawsuits contending that the union brass in some areas illegally denied them pensions. But on the whole, the Teamsters do deliver the contract goods--and not only for truckers. Policemen in Vernon, Calif, had been getting 5% annual raises before they joined Teamster Local 911; this year the local won them a 16.5% boost.

Goon Squads. In addition, the Teamsters in their organizing campaigns can call on muscle. Sometimes it is physical. The union has never lost the aura of violence. During the struggle between the Teamsters and Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers of America in California, Teamster goon squads wielding baseball bats and chains have waded into U.F.W.A. workers, and in 1973 a U.F.W.A. picket was killed by shots from a passing car.

More often these days, though, the muscle is economic pressure exercised quietly by lawyers and skilled negotiators, and backed by the Teamsters' awesome power to shut down almost any company by cutting off truck deliveries. When faced by a recalcitrant manufacturer in the Los Angeles area, and increasingly elsewhere in the nation, the union subjects him to TEAM (for Teamster Economic Action Mobilization). Its essence: a quiet warning to retailers that if they continue selling the manufacturer's product, Teamster pickets will appear in front of the stores, carrying signs urging shoppers not to buy it. The method, with exceptions, is legal and exceedingly effective. In most cases, the retailers tell the manufacturer they will no longer carry his product, and the manufacturer facing the freeze usually capitulates.

Organizing success and a mass membership bring political power. Some 93% of the candidates endorsed by the Teamsters won in last fall's California state elections. Teamster President Frank E. Fitzsimmons, who succeeded Hoffa when Hoffa gave up union office several months before being released from prison, was close to President Nixon. Indeed, Nixon showed preference for the Teamsters, who supported him for re-election in 1972. Hoffa charged that the condition of his parole barring him from resuming union activity until 1980 was the result of a deal between the White House and the Fitzsimmons leadership; no one in the Nixon White House ever denied it. To hear one Teamster official tell it, even Bobby Kennedy, the relentless prosecutor of Hoffa, made quiet appeals for Teamster support in his 1968 race for the presidency on the eve of his assassination.

Success also brings money--and money attracts the Mafia. Employers pump barrels of money into some 240 Teamster pension funds round the country. The funds' assets now total perhaps $4 billion; the Western Conference of Teamsters alone has a pension fund of $1.4 billion, fed by employers of 475,000 Teamsters in 13 Western states who contribute between $6 and $26 per member per week.

Most of the funds are professionally administered and honestly run, yielding many truckers up to $550 a month after 20 years' service. Where the trouble --and the Mafia--comes in is with the huge (estimated assets: $1.5 billion to $2 billion) Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund, based in Chicago. The target of many federal probes over the years, the Central States fund is characterized by a federal investigation as nothing less than a lending agency for the Mob.

Friendship Loans. Numbingly complex, with its funds shifting continually between banks and from one business to another, Central States makes legitimate loans to legitimate borrowers, but it also makes other loans mainly on the basis of friendship. All too frequently, says a U.S. Attorney in Chicago, the loans are not paid back, and no real effort is made to collect, especially if the borrower is a pal of a top Teamster official.

Officially, the fund is administered by eight Teamster officers and eight employer representatives. Four of the Teamsters' trustees have known connections with the Mafia: Frank Fitzsimmons, William Presser, Frank Ranney and Roy Williams. In practice, say federal investigators, just who gets money is determined by the union trustees; they are influenced heavily by Allen Dorfman, once a special consultant to the fund until he was convicted of accepting a $55,000 kickback from a borrower and went to prison for eight months. He was forced to sever his Teamster connections, but he still calls many shots.

Central States has $783.5 million outstanding in real estate loans and mortgages alone. The money has gone into the building of bowling alleys, apartments, factories and lavish resorts, such as La Costa, near San Diego, into which the fund has put an estimated $50 million. According to the San Diego Union, a $270,000 house was built there for Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons says he is "only thinking about buying it."

Missing Money. A lot of the fund's money, too, has gone into Las Vegas hotels and gambling casinos, such as the Dunes and Caesars Palace. Some of it has simply vanished. The Government has brought fraud and conspiracy charges against borrowers and trustees alike. Last year prosecutors secured an indictment against Irwin Weiner, a Chicago bail bondsman with Mob connections, for allegedly defrauding the fund of $1.4 million in a scheme to buy a plastics plant in New Mexico. As the case was about to go to trial, the Government's star witness was shotgunned to death before his wife and children. The prosecution pressed ahead anyway, but Weiner was acquitted.

Teamster ties with the Mafia go way back. Nicholas P. Morrissey, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Joint Council 10 in Boston, observes, "Most people who come out of prison go into this kind of work [trucking, warehousing and longshoring]." Hoffa had friends in the Mob and indeed used them in his climb from the boss of Detroit's Local 299 to his election as the union's president in 1957. But Hoffa always retained a degree of independence of the gangsters.

In contrast, Fitzsimmons, who was Hoffa's hand-picked successor but then became a rival, is said to show no such resistance. Indeed, he has left the 15 regional vice presidents pretty much alone, making them again the semiautonomous barons that they were before Hoffa began centralizing most of the power around himself. To veteran Teamster observers, that means an open season for the underworld and increasing Mafia penetration.

Federal investigators suspect that Hoffa may have been murdered to keep him from interfering with kickbacks flowing to underworld brokers of loans from the Central States' pension fund. On the day of his disappearance, Hoffa was scheduled to have lunch with two Mafiosi: Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, unofficial boss of New Jersey's Teamsters, and Detroit's Anthony ("Tony Jack") Giacalone. Investigators believe that on the agenda was a $3 million loan from the fund that the Mafia was trying to arrange for a "recreation center" in Detroit. On some previous loans from the fund, Mob figures had got a 10% kickback from the borrowers; on the recreation-center loan, they reportedly were demanding an additional 10% from the union officials.

There seems little chance that the unsavory publicity about Mafia connections likely to be brought to light by Hoffa's disappearance will deflect the union from its course very much. The lurid headlines are an embarrassment, certainly. The Teamsters lately have sought respectability through a magazine and billboard advertising campaign that proclaims: TEAMSTERS--A PART OF THE AMERICAN LIFE.

Shady Outlook. On the whole, though, the road ahead stretches straight and smooth for the union. Says Investigative Editor Jim Drinkhall, who has written many reports of Teamster shady dealings for Overdrive, an independent monthly trade publication: "Essentially, their idea is 'Who cares what they do as long as I get mine?' " Many employers do not care either; they regard the Teamsters as a good union to deal with because it keeps the members in line and has held wildcat strikes to a minimum.

Within the union, Fitzsimmons has opponents who consider him a bungler. But so strong is the Teamsters' tradition of sticking with the man in power that the critics' major hope for unseating him at the union's 1976 elections is that Hoffa will somehow turn up alive, well and able to run in opposition. Failing that, Fitzsimmons could still face substantial opposition from dissatisfied Teamsters who do not like his leadership style. No strong opponent has surfaced so far. Last week, at a Boston convention of Teamsters representing warehousemen, Fitzsimmons moved through crowds of overfed men in white shoes who sported FITZ IN '76 buttons. Whatever the result of the election, or the Hoffa case, the outlook for the Teamsters seems to be more members, fatter contracts, richer pension funds --and more corruption.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.