Whether the late James R. Hoffa rests under the New Jersey Turnpike, it is safe to say he turned violently last week when Ralph Nader ambled into the marble-clad headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Even those media cognoscenti with a firm grasp of the obvious, who might opine that “politics makes strange bedfellows,” should have chuckled at the deeply incongruous liaison between Nader and James B. Hoffa, the current union head and the son of the presumably murdered Teamster legend.
Nader, the path-breaking consumer activist whose politics have long been way left of the union’s traditionally right-leaning hierarchy, now proves an accidental ally due to Clinton administration trade policy.
In sum, the Teamsters and the man expected to get the Green Party presidential nomination on Sunday believe the policy costs lots of American jobs, emboldens dictatorial thugs and continues the awful treatment of workers overseas.
The whole issue is actually rather more nuanced, with a remarkable consensus in the public policy and academic communities, about the potential benefits of, say, trade with China. But the Teamsters, as well as several other major unions, are unhappy with what we’re doing on trade, and very miffed with Vice President Al Gore because of President Clinton’s commercially driven foreign policy.
It’s a protectionist rage that encompasses the North American Free Trade Agreement, including visions of maniacs bearing down on Americans in 18-wheel death traps.
“You are driving along in Maine or Minnesota or Illinois, looking in the rearview mirror and there’s a big Mexican truck bearing down on you with a driver who doesn’t have to meet the same standards in reality that U.S truck drivers have to meet,” Nader said.
The gathering last week lured a big media contingent, most fixated by capital politics, notably whether Gore would be hurt by a union embrace of Nader. Unfortunately, their sense of history, not to mention current events, seemed so impoverished as to prevent a true savoring of what really was an odd assemblage.
After all, here was Nader, 66 and one of the more admirable souls in our public life, playing footsie with Hoffa and the ethically challenged Teamsters.
For starters, there was the fact, seemingly unappreciated by most in the room, that Nader, a longtime apostle of clean air and water, was now side-by-side with a group associated with heavy-polluting trucks.
In addition, Nader was catalyst in the mid-1970s formation of the now-defunct Professional Drivers Council, or PROD, an insurgent Teamster group hated by the union establishment. And there’s Public Citizen, a Nader operation, which literally represents Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a PROD successor that detests Hoffa and has been a target of harassment, even physical violence.
Then there is the union’s political history, which includes often hopping into bed with Republicans, many of whom surely deemed Nader scum.
In presidential elections, the hierarchy supported Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush, albeit having a brief fling with Clinton during an internally chaotic period of the 1990s. That was when a David-turned-Goliath reformer, Ron Carey, improbably became president but turned tragic bumbler, forced out in a fundraising scandal that brought criminal convictions and an ongoing Justice Department investigation touching top Clinton-Gore allies.
There’s more.
Assuming they even knew, Nader and the news media could have noted that the union has been under tight government oversight since a landmark consent decree in 1989 prompted by evidence of decades of corruption. A court-sanctioned chief investigator, as well as a three-person review board that includes former CIA and FBI chief William Webster, continues to find the sort of unseemly doings that should make Nader gag.
For example, the board in recent days has charged Lawrence Brennan, president of Detroit Teamsters Local 337 and perhaps Hoffa’s closest longtime ally, with embezzling union funds and diverting them to his own re-election campaign. It is alleged that Brennan and five top aides shafted their own members by voting themselves hefty pay and bonus hikes, then diverting those sums into their own re-elections.
In the grand tradition of Teamster nepotism, Brennan followed his dad, the late Hoffa’s senior administrative assistant and a prime hatchet man. When the younger Hoffa, a Detroit lawyer, was barred by the government from running for office in 1991 because he did not satisfy the most minimal requirements, Brennan put him on his payroll as an administrative assistant so he ultimately could.
But to appreciate the union’s stumbles, Nader need only open the June edition of its magazine, which was placed in press kits for the event.
By court order, each issue must include a report to members from Webster’s independent review board. This issue marks the 51st such report and brings to light the following:
– Local 239 in East Meadow, N.Y., was placed in trusteeship for holding membership meetings without a quorum, paying more than $53,000 in unauthorized bonuses and raises to certain employees, and shafting members through loose enforcement of contracts.
– Local 806 in Garden City, N.Y., has been placed in trusteeship after holding just four membership meetings in five years and voting a top official pay hikes and Christmas bonuses of $62,899 without any justification.
– The board rebuffed Hoffa and insists on a new hearing into its belief that the president of Local 19 in Grapevine, Texas, lied about the sources of a contribution made to Hoffa’s election campaign. Hoffa sought to have the charges dismissed.
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– Modestino C. Festa, a member of Local 560 of Union City, N.J., was permanently barred for associating with Michael Sciarra, a member of the Genovese crime family. The board urges similar action against Joseph Aligo, a member of Local 707 In Hempstead, N.Y., for also dealing with Sciarra.
– Benjamin Camadeco, former secretary treasurer of Local 815 in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and Larry Plotnick, president of the local, were charged by the board with embezzling at least $104,982 in union funds.
There’s far more in the latest report, but that gives a flavor. It’s about the same aroma I smelled when exiting the Nader-Hoffa news conference.
Outside the building I found one Dan DeSanti, president of Local 701 in North Brunswick, N.J., with a cigar jammed in his mouth that was only slightly smaller than one of Sammy Sosa’s bats.
In fact, with his brown-on-beige sports jacket and slacks ensemble, gold pinky ring, tasseled loafers and major-league sun tan, the bespectacled and lanky DeSanti looked like he’d just arrived from the set of “The Sopranos.”
Other members of the union board soon joined him, because Hoffa wanted to take a group photo, and the talk was refreshingly X-rated.
Amid a discussion of Gore and George W. Bush, the only declaration that I can attempt to reprint here was DeSanti’s that, “Humpty Dumpty could win this [expletive] race if he ran.”
Still, as I watched the board members, several unsuccessfully fighting calories and busting out of far-from-designer clothing, I was reminded that the Teamsters still exhibit distinct virtues.
After all, amid the reflexive insincerity and pomposity of Washington, they do not exude any sense of self-righteousness, craving to please or penchant for the politically correct.
When one colleague saw DeSanti with his flagpole-like stogie, he quickly opined, “Hey, the new rule is you gotta be 500 feet from the building.”
“Yeah, and the next thing you know you’ll have to be in [expletive] Mexico,” said another with derision at a prohibition on smoking near the building.
Hey, guy, look at the bright side: You could then meet Nader at a Tijuana truck stop and make sure those tractor-trailers headed north are not unsafe at any speed.