Word: pension
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Success also brings money-and money attracts the Mafia. Employers pump barrels of money into some 240 Teamster pension funds round the country. The funds' assets now total perhaps $4 billion; the Western Conference of Teamsters alone has a pension fund of $1.4 billion, fed by employers of 475,000 Teamsters in 13 Western states who contribute between $6 and $26 per member per week...
Most of the funds are professionally administered and honestly run, yielding many truckers up to $550 a month after 20 years' service. Where the trouble -and the Mafia-comes in is with the huge (estimated assets: $1.5 billion to $2 billion) Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund, based in Chicago. The target of many federal probes over the years, the Central States fund is characterized by a federal investigation as nothing less than a lending agency...
Federal investigators suspect that Hoffa may have been murdered to keep him from interfering with kickbacks flowing to underworld brokers of loans from the Central States' pension fund. On the day of his disappearance, Hoffa was scheduled to have lunch with two Mafiosi: Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, unofficial boss of New Jersey's Teamsters, and Detroit's Anthony ("Tony Jack") Giacalone. Investigators believe that on the agenda was a $3 million loan from the fund that the Mafia was trying to arrange for a "recreation center" in Detroit. On some previous loans from the fund, Mob figures...
...Teamsters that had developed since 1967, when Hoffa was imprisoned for jury tampering, fraud and conspiracy. Under the benign leadership of Frank Fitzsimmons, Hoffa's hand-picked successor as president, powerful local Teamster chiefs allowed the Mob to wheel and deal with the union's $1.3 billion pension fund. Gangsters from Chicago and Cleveland arranged loans from the fund for clients who were less than impeccable credit risks, then harvested illegal kickbacks. Nor did the Teamsters protest when mobsters took over control of a number of Las Vegas casino-hotels built with multimillion-dollar loans from the union...
...week's end the FBI and other law-enforcement officers were still sifting through the testimony of Chuckie O'Brien and the other fragmentary bits of evidence. They chased down and then dispelled rumors that Hoffa had withdrawn $1.2 million of his pension settlement just before his disappearance. Hoffa's family kept saying that he must still be alive, but the possibility that he had just vanished on his own or been abducted seemed increasingly remote with every passing day. Local 299 President Johnson discounted the kidnaping possibility. Said he: "I don't think that Jimmy...