Breaking A Devil's Pact

By Laurence Zuckerman

"He was ridiculed. He was vilified. He was hated irrationally -- but he was right." With that paean to Robert Kennedy and his long battle against the crime-ridden leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani took on the task that has stymied Kennedy and other prosecutors for the past 30 years. Giuliani, however, comes to the fight armed with a powerful weapon.

Last week in New York City, he unveiled a far-reaching civil lawsuit, charging 26 reputed mobsters and the Teamsters' 18 top executives with making a "devil's pact" to subvert the nation's largest union. Filed under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the suit aims to oust the union's entire leadership, replacing it with a court-appointed trustee who will supervise the "free and fair" election of a new executive board.

Earlier prosecutors were forced to fight the union's corruption by charging individual leaders with specific crimes: Teamsters President Jackie Presser, for example, is under indictment for racketeering and embezzlement, and past Presidents Dave Beck, Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Williams all went to jail. RICO frees the Justice Department to take action against an entire institution. Building on more than 300 convictions of Teamsters and union-related Mob figures since 1970, the lawsuit portrays the leadership of the 1.6 million- member union as a front for the Mafia. Organized crime, charged Giuliani, "has deprived union members of their rights through a pattern of racketeering that includes 20 murders, a number of shootings, bombings, beatings, a campaign of fear, bribery, extortion, theft and misuse of union funds."

Weldon Mathis, the union's acting president while Presser is hospitalized with brain cancer, called the suit "a shameful attempt to destroy a democratic union." Several public officials also criticized the potentially dangerous precedent. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said a move by the Government to take over a union "smacks of totalitarianism." Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, a Democrat, was also wary. "I think we're getting on very, very thin ice here," he said.

Giuliani counters that restoring democracy to the union is precisely the Government's plan. But Ken Paff, national organizer for the reform group Teamsters for a Democratic Union, believes the answer isn't a trusteeship but an open, supervised election. "Our people will vote no if given the chance," he says.

Although the Reagan Administration professed enthusiasm for the Teamsters suit, the announcement caused some embarrassment. The Teamsters endorsed the Reagan-Bush ticket in both 1980 and 1984. Presser was named an adviser to the 1980 Reagan transition team, headed by none other than Edwin Meese III. "Had this information been available at the time," Attorney General Meese said last week, "President Reagan . . . would obviously not have accepted that kind of support." But evidence of the Teamsters' pact with the devil was known well before 1980. As the report of the President's Commission on Organized Crime points out, "Jackie Presser had . . . an extensive record of organized-crime associations through organizations that were infested with La Cosa Nostra associates and convicted felons."

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi/New York and Elaine Shannon/Washington