Breaking the Devil’s Pact: The Battle to Free the Teamsters from the Mob

11. Lessons, Reflections, and Speculations

210 11 Lessons, Reflections, and Speculations Racketeering is the cancer that almost destroyed the American trade-union movement.1 —David Dubinsky, A Life with Labor, 1977 We got our money from gambling, but our real power, our real strength, came from the unions. With the unions behind us, we could shut down . . . the country.2 —Vincent Cafaro, lieutenant, Genovese crime family, April 1988 Regardless of unionism’s strength, politics, or workplace locale . . . accusations of corruption, bossism, and union bureaucracy are deployed . . . to discredit the unions, both those that are tarnished by such malfeasance and those that are squeaky clean. . . . [Due to this] demonization . . . the unions are now highly regulated institutions , far more so than almost any other voluntary institution in American society. . . . But all that has not stopped those who still tag the unions as a fount of corruption, payoffs, and barely veiled coercion.3 —Nelson Lichtenstein, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2010 Politics U.S. v. IBT, a government lawsuit that charged the nation’s largest and most powerful private-sector union with being racketeer ridden, has to be placed in political context. This lawsuit would be impossible in most countries , especially where there is a “Labor” political party. That U.S. v. IBT Lessons, Reflections, and Speculations 211 was politically possible in 1988 confirms what all well-informed American political and labor observers know: the private-sector labor movement has weakened dramatically since the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the Teamsters Union experienced a 35 percent membership decline from 1976 (2 million members) to 2010 (1.3 million members). Nevertheless, nearly one in five private-sector union members is a Teamster. The IBT also continues to wield considerable political clout; in 2010, it ranked twenty-first among all political contributors in the United States, ahead of Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Walmart. DOJ attracted a barrage of criticism for filing U.S. v. IBT. Many labor leaders, politicians, and celebrities, among others, damned the lawsuit as an attack on a free and democratic labor movement. We find such criticism highly cynical. The close relationship between organized crime and the Teamsters Union had been common knowledge at least since the Senate ’s 1957–59 McClellan Committee hearings. Indeed, in 1957, the AFL-CIO expelled the IBT from the labor federation on account of corruption and racketeering. Scores of criminal prosecutions over the next three decades confirmed and illuminated organized crime’s influence in the union. In the mid-1980s, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (PCOC) reported that the IBT was the most racketeer-ridden union in the United States. The IBT’s leaders had done nothing to resist Cosa Nostra’s influence. To the contrary, they (some actively and some passively) collaborated with LCN to exploit the union and its rank and file. It is a depressing comment on the state of American politics that, despite this notorious record, 264 members of Congress signed a petition, in 1988, denouncing DOJ’s anticipated civil RICO lawsuit against the IBT as an attack on a democratic labor movement. Given the labor movement’s close relationship with the Democratic Party, the government probably would not have brought U.S. v. IBT when the Democrats controlled the White House. Indeed, the lawsuit’s opponents claimed that it demonstrated the Reagan administration’s intent to destroy the labor movement. (President Reagan had previously drawn labor ’s enmity for breaking the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike in the first year of his first presidential term.) Ironically, the IBT, practically alone among labor unions, had endorsed Reagan’s presidential candidacy in 1980. President Reagan delivered a taped address to the 1981 IBT international convention, thanking the union for supporting his campaign and effusively praising the union, including General President Roy Williams and former General President Frank 212 Lessons, Reflections, and Speculations Fitzsimmons. “I hope to be in team with the Teamsters,” Reagan said.4 The IBT endorsed Reagan again in 1984 and George H.W. Bush’s presidential candidacy in 1988. That Reagan’s DOJ filed U.S. v. IBT in 1988 therefore shocked some labor-movement pundits and, of course, most Teamsters. By the mid-1980s, the FBI’s and DOJ’s organized-crime-control program had achieved unstoppable momentum. Cosa Nostra was the FBI’s number-one crime target; major prosecutions were taking place all over the country. Still, the 1986 President’s Commission on Organized Crime criticized...