Teamsters Assail Justice Dept. Suit : Deny Mafia Controls Union, Call Action ‘Political Ploy’

The Teamsters Union sharply rebuked the Justice Department Wednesday for preparing a civil suit aimed at taking over the labor organization, likening the unprecedented move to actions by communist and fascist regimes.

The Teamsters, the nation’s largest trade union with 1.7 million members, strongly denied the basis for the department’s proposed civil racketeering action. “Organized crime has never, does not today and never will control the international union,” the union said in a formal statement issued by its Washington headquarters.

The international labor organization, the only major union to support Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns, said the planned legal action is “a political ploy designed to take the pressure of numerous problems off the Administration.”

The Times disclosed Wednesday that a team of Justice Department lawyers, with help from the FBI and the Labor Department, is drafting a massive lawsuit based on federal anti-racketeering law to oust the Teamsters’ 21-member executive board on grounds that the union has long been under the influence of organized crime.

Government attorneys estimated Wednesday that the trial for the suit, which would remove the union’s top executives from office and put it under court-supervised trusteeship, could take more than two years. One source said it may not be filed for several months because of its enormous complexity, which attorneys said rivals that of the breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who has investigated the union as a member and now chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent investigations subcommittee, said there are “many people within the Teamsters Union who are absolutely honest and law-abiding citizens.” But he added: “The problem is the pervasive corruption at the top that has an intimidating effect on the membership.”

The Teamsters, however, countered that such a suit “is an insult to the rank-and-file members of this union and will be dealt with accordingly when and if such action is filed.”

The union, calling the suit “an obviously specious attempt to interfere with the free trade union movement,” added: “It is insulting to us that the government would even consider any such litigation.

“Takeovers of unions are nothing new--communists and fascists have been doing so for decades,” the Teamsters said. “However, it is a sad day in the history of the United States and the American labor movement when such tactics are employed.”

Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the government would attempt to prove that each of the 21 members of the union’s executive board, including Teamsters President Jackie Presser, have been convicted of crime or have acquiesced in criminal activity without taking steps to discourage it, according to the legal sources.

The suit is expected to include evidence that has increased in recent years showing the Mafia’s influence on the Teamsters. The President’s Commission on Organized Crime, in its final report in 1985, said the Teamsters Union “at both the international and local levels . . . continues to suffer from the relationship with organized crime.”

The government is expected to rely on convictions and indictments of Teamsters officials across the country and on new information developed by extensive, court-approved wiretapping.

The evidence used by government attorneys presumably also would include disclosures from an ongoing criminal trial in New York, in which Mafia boss Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and 10 associates are defendants. In that trial, former Teamsters President Roy L. Williams and others have testified recently that Williams’ 1981 election and Presser’s subsequent election in 1983 were controlled by Salerno through members of the Teamsters executive board.

In addition, Presser and two associates are facing criminal trial in Cleveland beginning Aug. 10 on a federal racketeering indictment charging them with siphoning off $700,000 in union funds to make payments to mob-related “ghost employees” over a 10-year period who performed no work for the union. Presser and the others have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The Teamsters’ statement Wednesday, noting that Presser “announced a new day for this international union” upon his election in 1983, added: “And a new day it has been.”

It pointed out that he was reelected overwhelmingly at last year’s convention by 1,755 delegates “casting their votes individually on record, who in turn were elected by 1.7 million rank-and-file American workingmen and women in accordance with the international constitution as approved by the Department of Labor since 1961.”