Working the Teamsters

"We're relevant again!" Steven Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, crowed recently. And he's right. Unions are edging back into the news. Some argue that the white-collar press slowly abandoned labor, but on the other hand, it's been hard to justify coverage of a movement that wasn't moving.

 Now that labor finally does seem to be going somewhere - shoving its way to a chair at the national table, where the fare, downsizing and stagnant wages, immigration and trade, is union meat - the press will surely follow. If labor's leaders deliver half of what they are promising in terms of new organizing, bargaining, and political efforts, there will be real stories to tell. How well will they be told?

If coverage of the biggest labor story to roll down the pike in a while is an indication, there is reason to worry. That story is the struggle inside our largest private-sector union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters - the changing of the guard there and the effort to change the guard back, which will surface at the Teamster convention in Philadelphia in July and culminate in the big union's national election in November. A serious election campaign has been under way for quite a while now between the incumbent, Ron Carey, the reformer who swept into office in 1991, and James P. Hoffa, son of the man who helped make the Teamsters a national force and a national disgrace.

It's a real story. But not much reportorial energy has been devoted so far to figuring out what Carey has been doing for his five years as president or what the race between these two men actually means to Teamsters, to labor, and to the rest of working Americans, so unnerved these days by the complicated forces warping the world of work. Instead, it can be argued, we get sideshows.

The background of the Teamsters story is fairly well known: the union's major pension fund was a bank for organized crime, many of its locals were dominated by mobsters, and its culture was permeated by self-interest and sellouts. In an effort to finally cleanse the unions the federal government filed a giant civil RICO suit in 1988 and settled it the following year, and under its terms, the Teamsters were forced to choose leaders democratically instead of by the usual convention rubber stamp. In that first one-member-one-vote election, the victor was Carey, a man put forth in Steven Brill's groundbreaking 1978 book, The Teamsters, as the kind of leader who ought to be running the union. He quickly crossed swords with the old guard, and now, as his term comes to an end, his opponents are gathering around Hoffa, the son of the mighty icon who not-all-that-mysteriously disappeared in 1975.

Hoffa and Carey, at first glance, seem an unlikely pair of warriors. Carey looks like the slightly nervous UPS driver that he once was, "a slight, gray man who greases his hair and wears ill-cut suits," as New York magazine put it. Fiery before a labor crowd, he seems edgy and distrustful around the press.

Hoffa is a pudgy Michigan labor lawyer who, like Newt Gingrich, says he'll move power away from Washington to the grass roots. He's polished on TV and unafraid to use his main claim to fame: "Hi, I'm Jimmy Hoffa," he says, over and over again at truck barns and warehouses across the land.

The name Hoffa is electric, of course, conjuring conflicting emotions in labor's collective memory, and sparking some people-page coverage on TV. In 1994, after the younger Hoffa had begun his long run for the presidency of the Teamsters, the Today show's Jamie Gangel started her story about his quest with a question: "Does the name hurt or help?" Then, with the rest of her piece, she answered it.

 After a few taped scenes of Hoffa senior from his glory days, we see Hoffa family movies - big Jimmy and little Jimmy in a rowboat; big and little Jimmy ice skating; father and son walking hand in hand. Near the end, Gangel asks him her zinger: "What do you think your father would think of your running?" Hoffa smiles: "If he was here today, he'd be smiling and putting his hand on my shoulder, and he would be very proud." The piece includes only seconds of Ron Carey, nervously licking his lips.

CBS's Eye to Eye introduced a long Hoffa segment last July with Russ Mitchell saying that although Jimmy Hoffa has disappeared, "We find Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit - Jimmy Hoffa Junior, and he wants back into the family business." We see Carey, but we see a lot more of the two Hoffas, the younger man in full campaign mode: "My father helped build this union, and I'm not going to stand by and watch a handful of people destroy it," he says. Soon we meet his sister, who observes that when her brother "moves through a room, he moves like my dad. His voice is very much like my dad's. When he's making speeches, I can sometimes close my eyes, it's almost as if my dad is speaking." Then we see a clip of the elder Jimmy Hoffa giving a stirring speech that fades, naturally, into another stirring speech, this one by the famous dead man's son.

Assessing Teamsters coverage in print is more complicated. Carey's people point to positive elements in his record - he has installed trustees to clean up some sixty local unions where the government has found evidence of corruption or fiscal irregularities; he's cut back on the leaders' tendency to accumulate multiple salaries and pensions; he's trimmed the royal trappings at headquarters (selling one of the Teamster jets to John Travolta, for example); he's built up the union's organizing machinery and launched a number of corporate campaigns. Many credit the votes and inspiration Carey delivered with making possible the recent revolution at the AFL-CIO, where the musty Lane Kirkland was finally replaced. "People are used to covering the Teamsters only as a crime entity," says Frank Swoboda, the respected labor writer for The Washington Post. "But it's done a lot as a labor union for the last five years." If so, the record has been lightly covered.

 Dog bites man - or, reformer reforms - seems not to be news. Man bites dog - questions raised about the reformer's purity - is another story. Where the press has been most excited about Carey during his term has been when charges surfaced that he was corrupt, charges that have not been upheld in subsequent investigations, but which are nonetheless altering the chemistry of the Teamster election and may even play a cameo role in that other November race, the one between Clinton and Dole.

The charges first surfaced, as do many stories, in The New York Times. Early on, Carey, who wanted the Teamsters to increasingly police themselves, was criticized by the officials monitoring the union under the terms of the RICO suit. They wanted to keep the government involved and to increase the pace of reform. Time magazine, in December 1992, and The New York Times, in a page-one piece in June 1993, covered this. In the Times, however, Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner added a new dimension. Until the nineteenth paragraph, their piece was tough and measured Timesian prose, but there, like a stiletto wrapped in velvet, was a shocker: a suggestion that Carey himself had "dealings" with the mob twenty years ago as the president of Local 804 in Queens, New York, a local made up mostly of United Parcel Service delivery drivers. The piece featured critical quotes from Michael J. Maroney, a labor racketeering expert who had been hired to help clean up a different Queens Teamsters local. The "dealings" allegation was bas on statements attributed to Alphonse D'Arco, a one-time acting boss of the Lucchese crime family turned valuable FBI informant. Although D'Arco is in hiding in the federal witness protection program, Maroney was able to interview him. The Times reporters were not, and thus relied on a second-hand interpretation of D'Arco's evidence.

Richard Behar of Time magazine, relying in part on a two-year-old FBI debriefing report on D'Arco, soon followed, on November 22, with "A Reformer and the Mob," a less subtle approach to the same theme. It also mentions Maroney. "Union boss Carey, right, likes to chat with members," read a caption. "Mob boss D'Arco told the FBI that La Cosa Nostra likes to chat with Carey."

These were the first of a spate of Carey scandal stories, of which Maroney is ground zero. Maroney, who quit his post at the Queens local in 1994 after losing a battle to expand his purview into a related local, is knowledgeable and aggressive, and he's long been a source for reporters working on labor corruption stories. After twenty-one years as an investigator, he's something of a cynic. All labor leaders, he says, "are phonies," and guilty of something or other. "It's a matter of degree." He is convinced that "Ron Carey is a phony" - buoyed by the media, in fact, by Brill's book and another, Collision, by Newsday labor reporter Ken Crowe - and that Carey, as he says D'Arco told him, "was associated with organized crime through his career."

Time's Behar, for one, trusts Maroney's judgment. But Maroney is also controversial, a man whose critics call him a zealot, someone who sees corruption everywhere. And the agency set up under the terms of the RICO suit to monitor the Teamsters - the Independent Review Board - was unimpressed with the quality of his evidence. In July 1994 the IRB - whose board members are Grant Crandall, a labor lawyer, Frederick Lacey, a retired federal judge, and William Webster, the former head of the FBI and the CIA, and whose chief investigator is Charles Carberry, who previously had helped put Michael Milken behind bars, among other things - cleared the Teamster president of seventeen allegations that had been brought against him (the IRB did uphold a minor charge that Carey had signed his wife's name on a real estate document). Seven of those charges, the IRB said, were brought by Maroney; others were brought by people associated with Hoffa and by anonymous sources. (Maroney claims the IRB listed some "leads" he had brght to its staff as "allegations" in order to discredit him.)

First on the IRB's list was the D'Arco charge about dealings with the mob. D'Arco's twenty-year-old memory of "dealings," the IRB determined, essentially boiled down to this: in his corrupt efforts to shake down employers by means of strikes, D'Arco sometimes sought to keep UPS drivers from crossing his picket lines. He contacted Carey via a corrupt and now dead Teamster leader named Joseph Trerotola, who he claimed "controlled" Carey. D'Arco would request that Carey's UPS workers not cross his picket lines, and Carey would comply. But the IRB found that, although Trerotola outranked Carey in the Teamsters hierarchy, "there was no support" for the allegation that Trerotola had any dealings with Carey "outside the appropriate union relationship."

More importantly, the IRB pointed out, respecting picket lines is a basic union tenet. For Trerotola to tell D'Arco "that Teamsters would honor picket lines," the IRB report said, dryly, "was a safe assumption."

Does Gerth now have second thoughts? "It's easy to have hindsight," he says, "when you write something and it turned out A when you wrote B. But I'm not in the predicting business. It's not my job to adjudicate. My job is to provide information, and that was a piece of information. What happens if what D'Arco said was true? I'm not in a position to say if it was true or not. But if I had withheld it, would you be calling me up now and asking if I had second thoughts about holding it?

"We couldn't get to D'Arco, so we depended on an independent analysis of his information," he says. "As reporters, we had the choice - not to report this, or to report it in a balanced, fair, and not sensationalized way." That the D'Arco material was well down in the piece, Gerth says, was a "signal to readers" that "we didn't want to suppress it and that, on the other hand, we didn't want to make a big deal out of it. A lot of readers don't even go past the front page." Gerth notes that when the IRB cleared Carey, the Times ran a lengthy story.

Another allegation that got big play in the press first appeared in Time and in Business Week in their April 11, 1994, editions. It seems that Carey, whose supporters make much of the fact that he's not the flashy-suit Lincoln-Towncar kind of Teamster, has amassed a sort of Lincoln-Towncar portfolio of real estate holdings, including Florida properties. Both magazines questioned whether someone who earned what Carey earned in the 1980s could have afforded them.

A QUESTION FOR THE TEAMSTERS' MR. CLEAN was Business Week's headline. The magazine's labor writer, Aaron Bernstein, had argued that the sources for the story were questionable and that its implications - that Carey had done something wrong - were not addressed or proven. "But I wasn't listened to," he says.

Business Week did its own extensive independent research, and was convinced it was onto something, figuring that in one year, 1989, the carrying costs on Carey's properties exceeded his salary by some $10,000. An accounting firm that the magazine consulted said the properties may have been beyond his reach, and according to Elizabeth Lesly, who wrote the article, the unidentified accountants were more definite in private. She also says Carey damaged his credibility with Business Week by misrepresenting how many properties he had (Carey claimed he had not understood her question). "He wouldn't tell us where he got the money, not in any specific way. He refused to provide dates or amounts of who loaned him money. He offered us family loans as a partial explanation with no substantiation." As for the implications of the piece, "Nowhere in the story do we suggest that he got the money from any particular source," Lesly says.

Again, Time was less shy. Its version of the story, by Behar and Edward Barnes, began this way: "The Teamsters Union embraced him as a blue collar hero, but lately the troops have begun to wonder if President Ronald Carey is mostly crusading for himself," adding later that "some critics openly wonder whether he has received payoffs" and reminding readers of Time's earlier work - that "according to an FBI report disclosed last November, Carey may have ties to a former Mafia boss currently in the federal witness-protection program."

But the former IRS agent who investigated for the IRB, using a sworn explanation of Carey's finances from his accountant, found that Carey - who paid off his primary home in 1972, who receives rental income from some of his properties, who said he inherited and borrowed and was given some money from various relatives, notably his father, and who had an investment partner in some of the properties - "would have had the funds available to purchase and maintain the real estate."

Time and Business Week both mentioned the IRB's report exonerating Carey - in their briefs sections - shortly after it came out. But neither magazine reported that the IRB had determined that "there was no proof" that Carey "could not have made these investments from his resources."

Both magazines, in turn, express doubt about the IRB's findings. "We had much better information than was in that report," says Stephen B. Shepard, Business Week's editor-in-chief, about the real estate charge. At Time, Behar returned to the report in a story in May 1995 that questioned the objectivity of the judge, Lacey, who runs the IRB. He turned up a letter in which Lacey - during his board's investigation - had expressed fear that attacks on Carey's honesty might bolster the Teamsters' old guard and help return them to power. "If Kenneth Starr said something like that, he'd be out of a job," Behar says. Behar, now a senior writer for Fortune, notes that the charges against Carey may hit the news again, since Republican congressmen are preparing for possible hearings on labor and organized crime. Indeed, Maroney says he has spoken to one GOP congressman as well as congressional staff members. And the columnist Robert Novak reported in mid-May that as part of a "massive counteroffensive" against the "new awakened sleeping giant" of labor, House Republicans are targeting union leaders who are supportive of President Clinton, including Carey, and thus they may take a skeptical look at the IRB investigation, among other things.

At the same time, Hoffa's campaign allies are recycling the Time and Business Week real estate stories in campaign advertisements under a clever headline: Cash & Carey. And Maroney hints that new allegations against Carey will surface. He continues to investigate Carey even though he's officially out of the Teamster business, and even though he says he is "uncomfortable" that his anti-Carey posture aligns him with the Hoffa forces.

In fact, he takes a dim view of Hoffa, noting, among other things, that Hoffa continues to defend his father's record - "His father was a fucking rat," Maroney says - and that a number of years ago the younger Hoffa was briefly a business partner with Allen Dorfman, one of the worst crooks ever to haunt the Teamsters. As always, Maroney is sure of his convictions and of his own abilities.

"If I was still working" as a Teamsters investigator, he says, "I'd be the one they'd assign to look into Hoffa. And - call it arrogance, ego, whatever - I'd nail his ass."

As the labor movement shrank over the years, so did the labor beat. Reporters who know unions would not need a large hotel room for a convention, but they are still around, working in places like Cleveland and Chicago and Minneapolis and Long Island. And on the whole, they've not been all that receptive to the Carey scandal stories. Reporters like Time's Edward Barnes argue that labor reporters have never had the "taste or instincts to do mafia stuff. They have to go back and deal with these guys every day."

 But there's more to it than that, as a memo written in 1994 by a public relations consulting firm for a group of old-guard Teamster leaders suggests:

The press can be divided into two camps: 1) The long-time labor reporters who are reflexively rooting for Carey; 2) Younger and less experienced reporters who remain more open. . . . By adopting the language and message of dissidents, and being open with the media, we have blunted the more cynical long-time reporters - but they will never be on our side. But we are winning over the less experienced reporters through one-on-one discussions and by being a source of information.

Why the anti-Carey forces might want to avoid what remains of the labor press seems fairly clear: on the whole, they seem to respect Ron Carey. One talks of him as a "guy who's been eating tuna sandwiches at his desk for twenty years," who it is hard to imagine as corrupt, given a long record that would seem to indicate the opposite. Carey, says another, has been "helping people all his life." A third casually refers to Hoffa's people as the "forces of darkness." Is this a kind of bias, or is it a reflection of experience and knowledge? A bit of both?

In any event, labor writers tended to handle the Carey "scandals" skeptically, although to different degrees. Some didn't report them at all; others did, but tried to put the charges in context. Stephen Franklin, who covers labor for the Chicago Tribune, made clear in his coverage of the real estate charges that they had come up "in the middle of a mud-slinging campaign. I tried to find out where the allegations came from. When I pretty much figured out that the stuff was coming out of Mike Maroney and the Michigan LaRouche folks, I steered clear."

The "Michigan LaRouche folks" are George Geller and Richard Leebove, and if Maroney is ground zero of the Carey scandals, Leebove and Geller are the shock waves, energetically pushing Maroney's information throughout the press. Both work for the Michigan Teamster who hired James Hoffa as a local union official in order to make him eligible to run for Teamster president. But it's their backgrounds that have given labor reporters pause. Both men are former acolytes of Lyndon LaRouche, the nutty fascist (LaRouche once wrote that Jimmy Hoffa's death was ordered by "the international Zionist community"), and although both portray this period as something from their misguided youth, both were deeply involved. Leebove, now a public relations consultant, and Geller, an attorney, both worked for a LaRouche newspaper, for example, that defended the some of labor's worst leaders. "Leebove's specialty had always been the heavy-handed smear," Dennis King wrote in "Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism," his 1989 eosé of LaRouche and his followers. Post-LaRouche, in the 1980s, Leebove and Geller both did work for something called BLAST, the Brotherhood of Loyal and Strong Teamsters, which functioned as a goon squad to intimidate Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform group. Several of the complaints to the IRB were made by Geller, and the IRB found that none had merit.

"Out of fairness, you've got to look at these labor writers," Leebove says. "Just because somebody's past doesn't meet their litmus test, should that deny them the opportunity to present factual stories?" Indeed, that Geller and Leebove were pushing Carey scandals was reason enough, for a few labor reporters, to avoid them. "They tried to sell me this man buys condo story; they sent me all the stuff," says Ted Reed, who covers labor for The Miami Herald. "I knew what it was - a guy trying to discredit Ron Carey. I could have done it, because the real estate was in Florida. But what was the story? MAN BUYS CONDO IN FLORIDA."

Swoboda of The Washington Post did cover the real-estate story and began his piece on it this way: "For a man of the people, Teamsters President Ron Carey seems to own a lot of real estate." But while Franklin put the story in a political context, Swoboda tried to put it in the context of his own values.

"I didn't find a shred of anything illegal or immoral, or anything that you or I wouldn't do," he says. "In the 1980s, it was not unheard of to invest in real estate. If you net it all out, one sale against the other, the repurchases and so forth, it's not a lot of money, not something that makes you want to reconvene the Watergate grand jury. You have to make some judgment of faith, I suppose."

There may be more people writing about general workplace issues - benefits, health coverage, pay, race and gender on the job - than ever, particularly since stagnant wages and spreading layoffs have finally entered the national debate. Business Week's Shepard, for example, points to "very early covers on wages, on inequality of income," in his magazine.

What often gets left out, however, is unions, which are still the only voice for American workers, and which have been proving lately that they aren't yet dead. The excitement of a new Jimmy Hoffa gets lots of air and ink. The journalistic and official investigations into Carey generate headlines and news reports and inconclusive smoke all across the country.

What's harder to find are the stories about the center ring: What's Carey's record? What goals has he reached, and where has he fallen short? Has he weakened and divided the union or is he merely trying to divide the old guard from their powers and perks? What's happened in all those local unions he says he's cleaned up? Are the Teamster reformers sticking with him? Has Carey run the union's finances down, as Hoffa claims, or has he taken steps to shore up a shaky money situation that the old guard left behind? How has he done with the Teamsters' major contracts, and all the difficult issues that his members face these days? What is Jimmy Hoffa's program and who are his people? Is he a representative of local union control against the top-down elitists, as he contends, or a stooge for the worst that American unionism has to offer, as Carey's people maintain? How do both sides finance their campaigns? Will the Hoffa forces be successful at stripping Carey of many of his powers at the coming convention, as manexpect them to do?

And, on another level, what are we in the press doing to help all the cops and nurses and guards and brewers and bakers and drivers and the rest of the working Teamsters make a decision in November, when they get their second chance in history to pick a leader?

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