LABORERS (LIUNA)
DOJ Extends, Weakens, Controversial Agreement
On Jan. 8, the U.S. Dep't of Justice and the Laborers' Int'l Union
of No. Am. announced the second one-year extension of the controversial
1995 Operating Agreement that resulted from DOJ's 1994 draft RICO complaint.
The Agreement is now scheduled to terminate Jan. 31, 2000. The National
Legal and Policy Center, a union corruption watchdog, reiterated its previous
demands that DOJ: 1) remove Arthur A. Coia as LIUNA General President,
2) replace Robert D. Luskin as LIUNA's "in-house prosecutor," and 3) impose
the full terms of the pending Consent Decree thereby allowing court-appointed
officials to clean up LIUNA and stopping LIUNA from "cleaning up itself."
"The so-called LIUNA 'internal reform effort' is a failure. DOJ has placed a great deal of trust in the independence and effectiveness of the 'internal reform effort,' but the fact is Luskin and the 'reform' team are not independent and are not as effective as a court-appointed team would be," said NLPC President Peter Flaherty. "Luskin's $245,000 forfeiture to the federal government in May 1998 for his 'willful blindness' in accepting mob money-laundering profits was a virtual admission of guilt and is proof that he shouldn't be trusted to rid LIUNA of organized crime."
The Extension actually went backwards. DOJ capitulated on two issues.
1) DOJ must now allow the "internal reform effort" to curtail its efforts to accommodate LIUNA's "budgetary constraints" and "need to maintain other programs and services," thus allowing LIUNA to limit the resources of the "internal reform effort," which many LIUNA dissidents claim is under-funded and under-staffed already.
2) DOJ can no longer impose the Consent Decree if it believes it is "necessary and desirable" to do so. Now the Consent Decree can only be imposed if DOJ "reasonably concludes that the failure to [do so] would substantially interfere with accomplishing the purposes of the Agreement," thus making the imposition of the Consent Decree more complicated and remote.A further shortcoming of the extension is that it is only for one year. LIUNA is far from corruption-free. Even U.S. Attorney Scott R. Lasser admitted, "additional time is needed to complete efforts to eliminate corruption from the union." At the current snail's pace of the "internal reform effort," it could take another ten to fifteen years before the corruption is reduced to an acceptable level. By extending the Agreement a mere year, DOJ leaves the door open for LIUNA's slick legal team, led by Luskin and LIUNA general counsel Michael S. Bearse, to weasel out of the Agreement next year. The fact that DOJ capitulated on two fronts in this extension shows that DOJ is weakening. Further, the fact that the Clinton Adminstration is coming to a close may provide LIUNA a reason to "get while the getting is good." Lastly, it's expected that once Coia is exonerated of all wrongdoing, slapped on the wrist or given a platinum parachute to leave LIUNA in the coming weeks or months under pending corruption charges, LIUNA will argue it should be free from the impending Consent Decree for good.
In addition to the unions and organizations covered in this Union Corruption Update,readers can look forward to news and information on other corrupt and abusive unions in future editions.
All back issues of the Union Corruption Update can be viewed at NLPC's website (www.nlpc.org). Also available is a union by union index of all Union Corruption Update articles.
If you have ideas or suggestions for future editions of Union Corruption Updatte,please email NLPC at nlpc@nlpc.org. Thank you.
Union Corruption Update is part of NLPC's Organized Labor Accountability Project which is investigating and exposing corruption and extremism in the Teamsters, LIUNA, AFL-CIO and many other union organizations. NLPC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation promoting ethics and accountability in government through research, education and legal action.
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