Word: teamsters
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...This is still a labor town!" That's the sort of headline that could well have run in Pittsburgh -- if only the city's two major dailies weren't shut down by a strike. To protest a plan to cut 450 of 605 Teamster positions, delivery-truck drivers walked out on May 17 against the Pittsburgh Press Co., which publishes the Pittsburgh Press (circ. 209,000 daily, 556,000 Sunday) and prints and distributes the separately owned Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (circ. 154,000 daily...
Besides being the largest private-sector union in the U.S., the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has also been the most Mob influenced. Three of its past five presidents were sentenced to prison. In 1988 the Justice Department hit the union with a racketeering lawsuit. To settle the case, the union agreed to let the government monitor day-to-day operations and organize a secret-ballot election. In the past, a small group of union insiders had chosen the Teamster president...
Those who could afford it used to phone Edward Bennett Williams, who until his death in 1988 was one of the most effective lawyers Washington had ever seen, the attorney of choice for malefactors of great wealth or high profile (among them Senator Joe McCarthy, Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Mob boss Frank Costello, the model for Mario Puzo's Godfather). Evan Thomas, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, tells the Williams story as it should be told, with due attention to the man's boozy, backslapping charm, his genius for the law, and his untiring...
Hoffa's son has pledged to root out the Mob, and his attacks on the current Teamster leadership have been fiery. But last week Hoffa sounded highly conciliatory as he pondered whether he will have to grovel for support from the Durham or Shea camps for a rules change to allow him to run. "Everyone's heart is in the right place," Hoffa says now about his opponents, sounding more and more like the consummate politician his father...
...difficulty in purging organized crime is that the Mob remains very efficient at ironing out labor disputes. In 1986, for example, local Teamster officials brought a beef to former Philadelphia mobster Nicholas ("the Crow") Caramandi. The officials, Caramandi recalls today, were upset because a Laborers Union local was monopolizing certain work at Philadelphia's Civic Center. The Mob warned the Laborers to back off, and they did. "If they don't listen, you might have to whack ((execute)) them, maybe throw someone out a window," explains Caramandi, who has since entered the Federal Witness Protection Program...