Word: suits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blacks got a brief ride on the B-movie circuit in the '70s (Shaft, Superfly), and Hispanics got short shrift, even as Mexicans were streaming into California to tend moguls' gardens and kitchens. When Latin actors did seize center screen, it was in art-house fodder like Alambrista!, Zoot Suit, El Norte and Crossover Dreams. These films meant well, but they rarely did well. They staggered under the weight of their liberal messages like a postman with the A.C.L.U. on his route. So many good intentions were riding on these films that they became morality plays, long on the uplift...
Last week in New York City, he unveiled a far-reaching civil lawsuit, charging 26 reputed mobsters and the Teamsters' 18 top executives with making a "devil's pact" to subvert the nation's largest union. Filed under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the suit aims to oust the union's entire leadership, replacing it with a court-appointed trustee who will supervise the "free and fair" election of a new executive board...
Weldon Mathis, the union's acting president while Presser is hospitalized with brain cancer, called the suit "a shameful attempt to destroy a democratic union." Several public officials also criticized the potentially dangerous precedent. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said a move by the Government to take over a union "smacks of totalitarianism." Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, a Democrat, was also wary. "I think we're getting on very, very thin ice here," he said...
Although the Reagan Administration professed enthusiasm for the Teamsters suit, the announcement caused some embarrassment. The Teamsters endorsed the Reagan-Bush ticket in both 1980 and 1984. Presser was named an adviser to the 1980 Reagan transition team, headed by none other than Edwin Meese III. "Had this information been available at the time," Attorney General Meese said last week, "President Reagan . . . would obviously not have accepted that kind of support." But evidence of the Teamsters' pact with the devil was known well before 1980. As the report of the President's Commission on Organized Crime points out, "Jackie Presser...
Early on in the suit, Jackson and her attorneycharged that evidence important to their case hadbeen denied, as many of the documents theyrequested were destroyed by Harvard. Courttestimony showed that Harvard directed 10 years'worth of confidential tenure records to beincinerated. The University has maintained thatthe destruction was inadvertent...