Word: becks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Teamsters' President Dave Beck appeared before Senate investigators five years ago. the nation thought it saw a man being destroyed. He was accused of stealing $370.000 from the members of his International Brotherhood of Teamsters, of betraying his friends and of robbing a friend's widow. Robert F. Kennedy, then the Senate committee's chief counsel, wrote an early epitaph: "He was dead...
...that was needed was someone to push him over and make him lie down as dead men should." But Beck did not lie down. In the years since the Senate hearings, he has spent just one night behind bars, meanwhile dwelling on the $160,000 estate he built with Teamster money. Ironically, of all the charges of wholesale corruption brought against him, he stands convicted of two of the most trivial-pocketing $1,900 from the sale of a Teamster-owned Cadillac, and allowing false information to appear on tax statements he neither saw nor signed...
...social sense. Beck's punishment has already been severe. Before the Senate hearings, he took inordinate pride in the fact that he was a member of dozens of boards, a regent of the University of Washington, a member of the state board of prison terms and paroles. After the hearings. Seattle hanged and burned him in effigy, and his stature was irredeemably lost...
...Beck made money, and his financial comeback has been phenomenal. Today, he puffily points out that the estate left by his late wife "is one of the largest now pending" in the local courts. "I make more money since I left the Teamsters than they ever paid me." he says. "I've got six corporations, and I don't take any salary. I put it all back into the corporate structure-and may my mother never draw another breath if this isn't so." Since 1957 he has acquired a $450,000 warehouse, a $900,000 motel...
...bank." he likes to say, "said there could be no better manager than me." Last week Beck's time ran out. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review his conviction for tax fraud, and his attorneys conceded that jail was only a few days away. At 68, Beck faces two concurrent five-year federal prison terms and a 15-year sentence in the Washington State Prison. But things could be a lot worse...