Word: teamster
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More often these days, though, the muscle is economic pressure exercised quietly by lawyers and skilled negotiators, and backed by the Teamsters' awesome power to shut down almost any company by cutting off truck deliveries. When faced by a recalcitrant manufacturer in the Los Angeles area, and increasingly elsewhere in the nation, the union subjects him to TEAM (for Teamster Economic Action Mobilization). Its essence: a quiet warning to retailers that if they continue selling the manufacturer's product, Teamster pickets will appear in front of the stores, carrying signs urging shoppers not to buy it. The method...
Organizing success and a mass membership bring political power. Some 93% of the candidates endorsed by the Teamsters won in last fall's California state elections. Teamster President Frank E. Fitzsimmons, who succeeded Hoffa when Hoffa gave up union office several months before being released from prison, was close to President Nixon. Indeed, Nixon showed preference for the Teamsters, who supported him for re-election in 1972. Hoffa charged that the condition of his parole barring him from resuming union activity until 1980 was the result of a deal between the White House and the Fitzsimmons leadership...
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...
...loans to legitimate borrowers, but it also makes other loans mainly on the basis of friendship. All too frequently, says a U.S. Attorney in Chicago, the loans are not paid back, and no real effort is made to collect, especially if the borrower is a pal of a top Teamster official...
Officially, the fund is administered by eight Teamster officers and eight employer representatives. Four of the Teamsters' trustees have known connections with the Mafia: Frank Fitzsimmons, William Presser, Frank Ranney and Roy Williams. In practice, say federal investigators, just who gets money is determined by the union trustees; they are influenced heavily by Allen Dorfman, once a special consultant to the fund until he was convicted of accepting a $55,000 kickback from a borrower and went to prison for eight months. He was forced to sever his Teamster connections, but he still calls many shots...