Word: pressers
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...days later, the President's commission turned around and bit its creator. The Commission on Organized Crime noted that the Reagan Administration had "contacts" with one corrupt union, the Teamsters, and its president, Jackie Presser. The report warned that such sociability with a tainted union "can lead to an erosion of public confidence and dampen the desire to end racketeering...
Although Teamsters President Presser was the target of a federal strike force that wanted to charge him with embezzling funds from his Cleveland local, the Justice Department last year decided not to prosecute. A federal grand jury is now probing the reasons for this decision. One reported explanation was that Presser had been used by the FBI as an informant on Mob activities...
...Teamsters was one of the few unions to support Reagan in the 1980 election. After Reagan won, Presser was made a consultant on union matters to the President-elect's transition team. He was a guest at the White House in 1983 when he met with Ed Meese, then a Reagan aide and now the Attorney General. After the 1984 election, Reagan and Meese visited Presser to thank him for his support...
Senior federal officials told TIME that the decision not to prosecute Presser was made by Deputy Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen and Stephen Trott, chief of the Justice Department's criminal division. Both had earlier approved the strike-force decision to present the Presser evidence to the same Cleveland grand jury that indicted the other men. The two Government officials changed their minds after Presser's lawyers asked the department last month for a high-level review of the case. The FBI joined the review, saying that its program of protecting informers would be jeopardized if the Teamsters chief...
...Cleveland strike force, composed of investigators from both the Justice and Labor departments, had compiled a 100-page memo recommending that a grand jury be urged to indict Presser for allegedly putting "ghost workers" on the Local 507 payroll. The prosecutors had won convictions of or guilty pleas from two men: Allen Friedman, Presser's uncle, and John Nardi Jr. Evidence showed that from 1972 to 1981 the two were paid a total of some $275,000 by the Cleveland local without doing any work for it and that Presser had signed their paychecks. Friedman complained bitterly last week...