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

1. Introducing the Litigants and the Judge

1 1 Introducing the Litigants and the Judge The leaders of the nation’s largest union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), have been firmly under the influence of organized crime since the 1950’s. . . . [O]rganized crime influences at least 38 of the largest [IBT] locals and joint councils in Chicago, Cleveland, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and other major cities.1 —President’s Commission on Organized Crime, March 1986 [The impending civil RICO lawsuit against the IBT] is a groundless attack, . . . an obviously specious attempt to interfere with the free trade union movement . . . [and] a calculated political ploy designed to take the pressure of numerous problems off the [Reagan] administration . . . . Organized crime has never, does not today and never will control the international union.2 —IBT official statement, June 11, 1987 The filing of United States v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters (U.S. v. IBT) in June 1988 pitted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), armed with the powerful RICO law and supported by skillful amici curiae lawyers, against the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the nation’s largest and strongest private-sector union, and Cosa Nostra (LCN),* the nation’s most powerful organized-crime syndicate.3 * Until the 1960s, the media usually referred to the Italian American crime families as “Mafia” or “the mob.” But wiretaps in the 1960s recorded the mobsters referring to their organization as “Cosa Nostra” or “Our Thing.” By a linguistic error, the FBI began to call it “La Cosa Nostra” (literally , “The Our Thing”) and “LCN.” Because it has become standard, we use the LCN acronym but otherwise refer to Cosa Nostra without the “La.” 2 Introducing the Litigants and the Judge This chapter sets the stage for this twenty-two-year (and ongoing) legal battle by introducing the plaintiff, the amici curiae, the defendants, and the judge who presided over the case for its first twelve years. The Plaintiff: U.S. Department of Justice U.S. Attorney Giuliani’s office in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section (OCRS) of DOJ’s headquarters (Main Justice) in Washington, D.C., jointly prepared the U.S. v. IBT complaint.4 This lawsuit launched a major battle in DOJ’s decades-long war against the Cosa Nostra organized-crime families. By the end of the 1950s, due largely to the highly publicized revelations of the U.S. Senate’s McClellan Committee hearings,* labor racketeering had become a salient national issue . When Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), who had served as counsel to the McClellan Committee, became U.S. attorney general in 1961, he made Italian American organized crime a top priority. (This despite lack of cooperation from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who denied the existence of a national organized-crime syndicate and preferred to focus investigative resources on Communists and other “subversives.”) Based on his acrimonious personal confrontations with IBT General President Jimmy Hoffa at the McClellan Committee hearings, RFK relentlessly pursued Hoffa, who began serving a prison sentence in the mid-1960s. After J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, the FBI reinvented itself as a modern law-enforcement agency. By the late 1970s, LCN’s labor racketeering had become the FBI’s and DOJ’s top organized-crime-control priority.5 The 1983–1986 work of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (PCOC) left no doubt about Cosa Nostra’s firm grip on organized labor. Former IBT president Roy Williams told PCOC that “every big [IBT] local union . . . had some connection with organized crime.”6 Indeed, PCOC * From 1957 to 1959, Senator John L. McClellan (R-Ark.), chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations, held televised hearings on organized crime in North America, especially in the Teamsters Union. The hearings, which more than one million American households viewed, led to the criminal convictions of more than twenty people, including high-level Teamsters officers (e.g., IBT General President David Beck). The hearings cast a national spotlight on organized crime’s relationship with labor unions and led to enactment of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA or Landrum-Griffin Act), which established close federal regulation of labor unions. Introducing the Litigants and the Judge 3 found strong evidence of LCN influence in thirty-eight IBT local unions and joint...