Word: teamster
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Files and folders tucked in his arm, Detroit Labor Lawyer George S. (for Stephen) Fitzgerald, 56, strolled into the McClellan committee's high-ceilinged hearing room last week, as he has most days since the committee began to grill Teamster President James Riddle Hoffa and half a dozen Fitzgerald-represented Hoffa lieutenants. But this time the beet-faced, bulge-bellied barrister plopped himself not in the customary attorney's seat but in the red-leathered witness chair. For two days Witness Fitzgerald (without counsel) angrily denied that he had been furtive or unethical in carrying out sometimes strange...
Lawyer Fitzgerald was worth questioning in his own right, but he was also on the spot because the McClellan committee has grown more and more curious about the small army of legal eagles who defend, protect, advise and counsel the Teamsters. In all they total 120-so many that they even have an organization of their own: the National Conference of Teamster Lawyers, which meets periodically, discusses such items as the legal ramifications of hot cargoes, NLRB decisions, right-to-work laws and at its latest session last month in California a timely new topic: "Hints to the union attorney...
Handymen to the Hungry. Conference members work hard for their pay, are topnotch labor-relations experts and, for the most part, community pillars. Conference Chairman Clarence Beck of Salt Lake City, no kin to deposed Teamster Boss Dave Beck of Seattle, is a Mayflower descendant and Son of the American Revolution. But an important few serve as Teamster policymakers and handy men to power-hungry bosses. Examples...
...Milwaukee's David Previant, 47, framed Teamster constitutions that sapped power from local unions and centralized it in conferences and national officers. CJ Seattle's Sam Bassett, 61, a quarter-century Beck intimate, arranged secret Teamster loans to truckers, joined Teamster officials in borrowing union funds to make a killing on Campbell Soup stock...
...only that pretensions to learning can be a dangerous thing. Alternately arrogant ("I cannot be responsible for the inadequacies of your staff") and evasive ("Don't expect me to say yes or no in this instance"), Gibbons left the stand to rejoin the high-binding band that conducts Teamster affairs. It was very unlikely that smooth-talking Harold Gibbons would ever field another invitation to lecture at Harvard...