A Reformer and the Mob

By RICHARD BEHAR

"Roughshod" and "musclebound." That's how President Clinton last week described organized labor's lobbying tactics against lawmakers who support the free-trade agreement. Those ugly terms, which evoke old stereotypes of spaghetti-sucking Mob bosses and pistol-blazing hitmen, infuriated Ronald Carey, the leader of the 1.4 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He demanded that Clinton apologize for using "code words" that are "an insult to every working man and woman in America."

They may be insulting; they may also be true, at least as far as Carey himself is concerned. Outwardly, Carey is a zealous reformer who swept into office two years ago in the first democratic election in Teamster history and pledged to revitalize the country's most corrupt union. But the union's hard times have gotten harder; the Teamsters are trucking toward bankruptcy, membership is eroding, and Carey's alleged links to the Mob have observers wondering where his allegiance lies.

Now TIME has obtained a two-year-old FBI debriefing report of Alfonso ("Little Al") D'Arco, the former acting boss of the Lucchese crime family, who has been hiding in the Witness Protection Program since 1991. According to the report (see opposite page), D'Arco revealed that Carey was tied to La Cosa Nostra through the late Joseph ("Joe Shrugs") Trerotola, a legendary Teamster kingmaker who resigned in 1991 at age 82 amid charges he allowed organized crime to flourish in the union.

Moreover, according to the confidential report, D'Arco stated that whenever he initiated illegal pickets or strikes, he would call Carey to advise him, and that "Carey would honor the strike without even investigating the nature, purpose or legitimacy of the strike." According to investigators, this suggests that Carey's own Teamster Local 804, which he still controls, and which represents United Parcel Service workers in the New York City area, declined to deliver packages to employers who were under attack by the Lucchese family -- presumably for failing to make payoffs.

Carey vehemently denies the allegations. He says he has never had close links to Trerotola nor has he ever met or spoken with D'Arco. "I don't even know who D'Arco is," explodes Carey. "I've had no association with those folks." Echoes Teamster spokesman Matt Witt: "D'Arco -- if he said those things -- would have a motive, because a weakened Carey is good for ((D'Arco's)) lifelong Mob associates, and by smearing Carey he makes himself more valuable to some elements in the government ((who dislike Carey))."

D'Arco's allegations are disturbing for several reasons. An articulate communicator with deep knowledge of interfamily operations, D'Arco is viewed by federal agents as the nation's most important Mafia rat since Joseph - Valachi, who provided the first real glimpses into organized crime 30 years ago. D'Arco has appeared on the witness stand in virtually every major Mob trial of this decade. If he is lying about Carey, his credibility as a witness is badly damaged. And if D'Arco is telling the truth, the credibility of the government is in question for sitting on hot information that was gleaned just weeks before Carey took office in 1992. That silence, in turn, would fuel speculation that Carey himself might be a federal informant along the lines of the late Teamster leader Jackie Presser.

In order to dispel Mob rumors swirling around Carey, the Teamsters' Independent Review Board ( IRB), the three-member federally created agency that polices the union, released a statement in September maintaining it "has absolutely no credible evidence supporting any allegations" of Mob ties to Carey. But when reached by TIME last week and confronted with the FBI report, IRB member Frederick Lacey, a former federal judge, sounded less absolute. "The matter is still open," he said uncomfortably. "We are awaiting further evidence relating to these allegations." The problem, insiders say, is that the FBI has refused to make D'Arco available for an in-depth interview by the IRB. Unfortunately, FBI officials refuse to discuss the subject.

For Teamsters, Carey's alleged Mob connections are yet another painful indicator that corruption in the union may simply be too vast for any real reform. Four of the Teamsters' past eight presidents were indicted on criminal charges; three of them went to prison. In 1989 the union settled a racketeering suit in which the feds accused its leadership of forging a "devil's pact" with the Mafia. To avoid a government-imposed trusteeship, the Teamsters agreed to allow the members to freely elect their president. Since then, Lacey and his team have driven out more than 150 misbehavers.

Along the way, however, the brotherhood has also been losing rank-and-file members -- 500,000 since the mid-1970s, 68,000 of those just since Carey's election. This membership dive, along with mismanagement by Carey's plundering predecessors, has wrecked the union's finances. The International lost $58 million in 1992. The union is still slow to reveal its books to its own executive board -- nearly six months passed before this year's first-quarter figures were available -- but an unaudited draft shows a $25 million bath for the first half of 1993. The total net worth of the International is roughly $60 million today, down from $154 million in 1991. At the current rate of brotherly rot, the union will be insolvent by 1995 unless Carey seeks and achieves a politically unpopular dues increase.

To his credit, Carey has instituted 21 trusteeships in tainted locals. But in too many cases, his hand was forced. In December 1991, Lacey charged that the top officers of construction Local 282 were Mob linked, but Carey waited seven months to call in a trustee. Meanwhile, the officers handpicked their successors before resigning. In March, Carey pronounced the new leadership of 282 clean and lifted the trusteeship. But four months later, both the new and old officers were indicted for turning their local into a Mafia "candy store," in the words of one FBI official.

"Carey says there was no way he could have known that these new guys in 282 were dirty, but I could have told him that," says Susan Jennik, head of the Association for Union Democracy, a reform group that has monitored the Teamsters since 1969. "It's hard to believe he could be so naive. Local 282 is in his backyard. He grew up around these people."

Critics have long charged that Carey stood by while his own local, 804, was infiltrated by organized crime. In 1992, Carey's treasurer was barred from the union for allegedly taking kickbacks in return for investing the local's money in a pension-fund scheme. Carey, who received immunity in return for testimony, stated he had no knowledge of those investments, even though they were the local's biggest cash outlay in the early '80s.

Then there is Local 295, which handles freight at New York City's airports. Carey tried to deliver this corrupt local into the control of an old Teamster hand named William Genoese, but Lacey vetoed Carey's choice. The Lucchese family, it was later revealed, had also been trying to place Genoese in a key union post.

Today 295 is run by two court-appointed trustees, including Michael Moroney, a labor-racketeering investigator since the 1970s. Even so, Carey earlier this year took a detour around the Teamsters' constitution by intervening in a dispute against Local 295 on behalf of its Mobbed-up sister Local 851. The Lucchese clan has long dominated 851, as Moroney reminded Carey in a stinging letter last February. Yet Carey told the Detroit News in June he had no knowledge of Mob influence at 851. Two months later, the local's leaders were indicted for Mafia-linked extortion.

. Could Carey be so blind? Apparently, yes. When questioned by TIME about Local 239, on New York's Long Island, whose entire board stepped down in the face of embezzlement charges in 1990, the reformer asks, "What's 239? I don't even know what 239 is." Once his memory is jogged, Carey insists that "there has never been an allegation of corruption in 239 from the government or from anyone else." In fact, Carey himself terminated the local's trustee in 1992, leaving the chapter in the hands of Patrick Bellantoni. According to D'Arco, Bellantoni is better known to the wiseguys as "Pat Lagano," a protector of Lucchese family interests.

Joe Trerotola, whom D'Arco links to Carey, was one of the country's most powerful Teamsters before he quit in dis grace. He was also a chairman of the Irish American Teamsters, whose letterhead listed Carey as a "committee member." In 1986 the group celebrated its silver anniversary with a dinner dance honoring union boss Jackie Presser as its "man of the year." Presser subsequently died before he could be tried on embezzlement charges. Carey, through a spokesman, remarkably insists he has "never been on any committee of Irish Teamsters."

Is Carey's memory failing -- or is he a friend of the Mob? If his family ties turn out to be real and continuing, it will be a crushing blow for a faltering union that believed it was finally getting a breath of fresh air.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: International Brotherhood of Teamsters

CAPTION: Falling Off

Teamster membership