The liberation of the Teamsters

National Review, March 30, 1992 by Eugene H. Methvin

'TONY, did you ever think we'd see the Soviet Union and the Teamsters Union come unglued in the same year?"

No," Tony replied, "and I sure thought the Teamsters Union would outlast the other one."

It did-but by only a few days. On December 1, the Ukrainians voted themselves out of the Soviet Union, and one week later the Slavic republic presidents pronounced the union dissolved. Meanwhile 1.6 million Teamster rank-and-filers held their first free secret balloting, and voted themselves out of the Mafia-dominated Teamsters Union and into a new one with the same name but new faces. Reform candidate Ron Carey and his entire slate of 15 rebels swamped the Old Guard, only 3 of whom remained on the executive board. "It's good-bye to the Mafia," Carey proclaimed. "The members will come first."

Boris Yeltsin took power in the Kremlin on December 25. And Ron Carey took power in the Teamsters' marble palace at the foot of Capitol Hill on February 1.

Four Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists played key roles in the long story of the Teamsters' liberation. When I came to Washington 33 years ago the top story was the epic McClellan Senate Rackets Committee investigation. Two Portland Oregonian reporters were the lead-off witnesses. They had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing an underworld plot to use Teamster money and muscle to penetrate their municipal government and monopolize the rackets. A third, Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, had won the 1958 Pulitzer for reporting on Jimmy Hoffa and his Mafia allies and thereby pointing Senator John McClellan and his investigators to paydirt. Mollenhoff understood that reporters are like bird dogs: they can point, but they can't shoot. That takes someone with the power to compel testimony, subpoena records, and prosecute wrongdoers.

Nearly 1,300 other witnesses followed in 250 days of televised hearings that transfixed the nation as mobsters and union racketeers paraded before the senators. John F. Kennedy was a member of McClellan's committee, and Robert F. Kennedy was chief counsel. McClellan was proud that his probe helped catapult them to the Presidency and Attorney Generalship.

But Senator McClellan was bitterly disappointed with Congress's response. In 1959 it passed the Landrum-Griffin Act, "the working man's bill of rights." But union lobbyists "knocked the teeth right out of it," McClellan declared. For example, union members were denied the right to go to federal court to challenge elections won by violence and fraud; only the Secretary of Labor, whose bureaucracy the unions heavily influenced through House and Senate labor and appropriations committees, could do so. In 1971 Senator Robert P. Griffin declared that the courts and bureaucrats had given the act bearing his name "far too narrow and restricted a construction" so that it had "fallen short of its aims."

McClellan retaliated by giving Uncle Sam a new set of teeth. He drafted and piloted onto the lawbooks the 1970 Organized Crime Control Act, which contained the famous Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) provisions. RICO's civil provision, he predicted, would assure the "wholesale removal of organized crime from our organizations and forfeiture of their ill-gotten gains."

Unfortunately, the Justice Department's racketbusters were too habituated to criminal prosecutions to seize this new weapon. Only once in 15 years did they use civil RICO to remove gangsters from a union. In 1985 when they indicted the Mafia's ruling "commission," FBI Director William Webster said, "We had RICO for ten years before we knew what to do with it." In fact, they still did not know what to do with the civil RICO tools.

Beginning of the End

BUT THE prosecutors were soon to get a powerful prompting from my friend Tony Dolan. He helped set the stage for the downfall of both unions, the Soviet and the Teamsters. Tony won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Mafia penetration of the unions, police, and city government in Stamford, Connecticut. He then became chief speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and was prime draftsman of the Evil Empire" speech. He also persuaded President Reagan to create the 1983-86 President's Commission on Organized Crime (PCOC), and thus set the stage for the Teamster liberation drama. A former union president himself, Ronald Reagan had had to battle both Mafia and Communist attempts to take over the Screen Actors Guild.

At the PCOC's first public hearing, on November 29, 1983, by alphabetical order I sat next to Commissioner Tom McBride, a former Labor Department racketbuster and associate dean of the Stanford University Law School. McBride asked a Justice Department witness: "Has any thought been given to the application of the RICO civil or equitable remedies against the Teamsters Union as a whole?" Suppressing a cheer, I whispered to McBride, whom I had barely met, You're a man after my own heart!" The witness could not answer, and Chairman Irving Kaufman requested the Justice Department to respond. It did not.