-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Crime on the Labor Front Malcom Johnson©1950 McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. New York. 243 pps. - First Edition - Out-of-Print --[3]-- CHAPTER THREE George Scalise and the Capone Mob THE CAPONE GANG'S invasion of labor unions was not confined to Hollywood. At about the same time the Hollywood shakedown was being conceived, the Chicago gangsters began systematically to take over the locals of the Building Service Employees International Union, an American Federation of Labor affiliate. Its members included janitors, porters, elevator operators, and charwomen employed in apartment houses, hotels, and office buildings in the big cities. In a comparatively short time the mob succeeded in dominating the entire union, installing its own international president and eliminating opposition with the same ruthless efficiency that it had demonstrated while rising to power during the prohibition era. Once again the union members were the first victims, with no voice in what happened to them or to their union. The workers became pawns, their union an instrument of power for outside gangsters. The home offices of the Building Service Employees International Union were in Chicago, seat of power of the Capone gang. Before capturing the entire union, the gang's domination of various locals in Chicago was accomplished by bribery, intimidation, and threats. The international president, Jerry Horan, was controlled by the gangsters, and after Horan died they named as his successor George Scalise, a Brooklyn-bred gangster who had been serving as an organizer and a vicepresident in the East. Scalise's introduction as an officer of the union, three years before he attained the presidency, was characteristic of the gang's contempt for the membership. In July, 1934, Horan, the president, came to New York from Chicago, summoned local officers to a meeting in Brooklyn, and introduced the plump, swarthy Scalise, a professional criminal of long standing. "This is your new Eastern vice-president, George Scalise," said Horan. That was all-no announcement of an election, no questions asked. Most of the union officers who attended the meeting did not know Scalise. They were to know him only too well before the year was out. Those who had any decent regard for the welfare of the union -and there were a few-were bitterly to regret that meeting. The most ironic thing of all was that the meeting took place in the offices of a strikebreaking agency which Scalise operated as a sideline to his union racketeering activities. After Horan died in April, 1937, the Capone mob named Scalise as the new union president. Again there was no election. The decision was made by the gangsters at a conference in a Chicago cafe. They passed the word on to the union's executive board, which obediently announced that Scalise had been named as Horan's successor. Scalise had served a long apprenticeship as a labor racketeer and professional criminal before reaching the big time. Officially his criminal history began in 1913, when he was convicted of white slavery, legalistically termed a violation of the Mann Act, and sentenced to four and a half years in the Federal penitentiary. The charge involved a case of compulsory prostitution in taking an eighteen-year-old Brooklyn girl to New Jersey and compelling her to submit to men whom he solicited. Scalise proved then, and later, that no crime was too low for him if there was profit in it. For more than twenty years he was associated with such top gangsters as Capone, the late Frankie Uale of Brooklyn (Capone's chief representative in the East), Joey (Pretty) Amberg, Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, and Lepke's gorilla partner, Jacob (Gurrah) Shapiro. Scalise's chief backer in Brooklyn in nominating him as the mob's Eastern boss in the Building Service Employees Union was a gangster known as Little Augie Pisano. Before getting the nod from the Chicago syndicate, Scalise was active in various union rackets, specializing in the dirty business of extortion. Scalise's special twist to the old extortion game was employing strong-arm men with fake police badges to extract cash from his victims. He organized garage workers, fomenting strikes and accepting fees for settling the strikes he started. He was vice-president of an automobile washers union, which he operated in association with other criminals, and was active in a grocery employees union, a beauty shop workers union, an Italian-American butchers union, a dry cleaners union, a laundry workers union, and a dyehouse workers union. All were rackets, and Scalise worked both sides of the street, renting strikebreaking thugs and scabs to employers to oppose his own union members. Scalise's strikebreaking activities constitute the most amazing phase of this labor racketeer's amazing career. Through a criminal associate he operated a strikebreaking agency, the Sentinel Service Company. Scalise first would sell strike prevention insurance to employers under threats of strikes. If that failed, the strikes were called and pickets thrown around the place. Then Scalise, through his strikebreaking agency, would provide thugs to break the strike he himself had started. Since he was already taking money from the union members in the form of dues, this was a system of pitting employer against union and extorting money from both. His ingenuity was surpassed only by his unscrupulousness. With Scalise in command in the East and with gunmen to enforce orders on the home front in Chicago, the mob bad a strangle hold on the union within less than a year from the day the Brooklyn gangster was introduced as "your new Eastern vice-president." When the international union's convention was held in Chicago in May, 1935, some of the country's best known thugs were in attendance, including Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Baby Faced Nelson, and Machine Gun Kelly. Brooklyn was represented by Scalise's sponsor, Little Augie Pisano, who was accompanied by Joe Adonis, then, as now, rated as one of the top representatives of the underworld. Another active participant in the Chicago convention was a cocky swaggering killer by the name of Louis (Two Gun) Alterie, president of the Theater janitors local, and a voting delegate. A year before, in 1934, Two Gun Louis had had the distinction of being among the delegates to the American Federation of Labor convention in San Francisco as an official representative of the Building Service Employees Union. His career as a gunman was well known, for Alterie boasted of his open gun battles with rival mobsters on the streets of Chicago. As a prosperous gangster and labor official, he owned an expensive ranch near Phoenix, Arizona, to which he repaired when Chicago's winter winds began to blow. What Alterie did not know, as he made his boisterous presence felt at the convention, was that his activity in the union soon was to end. The mob had other plans for him. In July, 1935, Alterie was efficiently removed by blasts from sawed-off shotguns. That is one of the few pleasant things about labor gangsters: they often kill each other off. While the poor deceived delegates cheered and shouted and enjoyed themselves in that Chicago convention hall in 1935, the real bosses of the union pulled the strings from a luxurious suite in the Bismarck Hotel. They included Frank Nitti, Francis Maritote, Paul DeLucia, and Louis Campagona—the same group which directed the Bioff-Browne shakedown of Hollywood. The union's campaign of expansion was charted at that convention, and the next five years saw it carried out to the accompaniment of a series of violent strikes. Whatever else might be said of their new man in the East, George Scalise, he was a good organizer. When Scalise became the Eastern vice-president there were only eight locals, with a total of 1,41o members in that area. When he became president in 1937 there were twenty-five locals and 13,915 members in the East. When Scalise was forced to resign in 1940 there were thirty-eight Eastern locals with a membership of more than 61,ooo. It is too bad that an organizer of Scalise's exceptional ability could not have toiled for the workers instead of against them. In 1940, Thomas E. Dewey, then District Attorney of New York County, finally caught up with Scalise and convicted him—for the first time since his conviction on charges of white slavery in 1913. In May, 1940, he was indicted for grand larceny, accused specifically of stealing $60,000 from the union's treasury between May, 1937, and March 31, 1940. Actually he looted the union of much more, and also shook down landlords for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Evidence at the trial showed that he received a total of more than $300,000 in salary and expenses from the union. The expenses covered such pleasant union business as a sojourn in Havana with several other Capone hirelings, Scalise paying the entire bill and charging it to the union. He also was indicted in Chicago for embezzling $118,000 of union funds, and a third time by the government for income-tax evasion. One of the important witnesses against Scalise at his New York trial was his chief assistant extortionist, one Izzy Schwartz, who was also under indictment and whose previous record included convictions for grand larceny and rape. The stocky, beady-eyed Schwartz established Scalise's link with the Capone gangsters, described how they had elevated him to the presidency at the Chicago cafe conference, and told how Little Augie Pisano of Brooklyn had first sponsored Scalise as the union's Eastern vice-president. The agreement, Schwartz said, was for Scalise to kick back half of everything he got, including his salary, to the mob. Asked why he had held back the story until his own indictment, Schwartz said he was afraid he might get shot. "I still think I may be murdered for what I am doing," he said. Martin W. Littleton, Scalise's attorney, expressed skepticism. "That may be a shock to you, but it ain't no shock to me," blurted Schwartz. Schwartz pleaded guilty to participating with Scalise in extorting at least $100,000 from hotel and apartment house owners, under threats of strikes, but he got off with a suspended sentence as a reward for his evidence against Scalise. The latter was convicted and sentenced to a term of ten to twenty years in prison. Scalise then pleaded guilty to incometax evasion and got three years on one of three counts of the Federal indictment. The other two counts are still hanging over him. In 1948 the government obtained a judgment of $307,947 against him for back income taxes, interest, and penalties. Long before Scalise's conviction it was generally known throughout organized labor that the Building Service Union was controlled by the mob, with Scalise as their front man. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, knew it, or should have known it. Scalise's record as a procurer and gangster was certainly no secret. Yet, instead of trying to remove this blight on labor, Green, the respected and powerful labor leader, agreed to sit down at the same conference table with Scalise. Scalise was the president of an AFL union. That made it all right. It apparently did not matter too much what else Scalise was or how he had become a union official. Instead of trying to clean up the mess, the AFL hierarchy hid behind the time-honored dodge of "local autonomy" which in so many cases covers a multitude of abuses to which the top labor officials conveniently close their eyes. Even if charges were preferred against the Building Service Union, the AFL would refer them back to the international on the grounds of local autonomy. It is a perfect setup for labor gangsters. Instead of expelling them from the AFL and cleaning house, Green and the other labor moguls opened their arms to criminals like Scalise and conferred with them on how best to further the interests of the working man. The only working man who interested Scalise was Scalise—and he never did an honest day's work in his life. While Scalise was on trial in New York the Capone gang's technique in capturing a union was dramatically exposed in Chicago by a dying union leader, Matt Taylor, aged sixtynine, who had been active in labor for thirty-nine years. For thirty-five of those years he was president of the Chicago Elevator Operators Union, Local 66, under the jurisdiction of the Elevator Constructors Union. Throughout his long career Taylor had been regarded as an honest union official who had worked his way up through the ranks. In a sworn statement, dictated a few weeks before his death on September 7, 1940, Taylor described in detail how the mob, acting through Scalise and Tom Burke, a vice-president of the Building Service Employees Union, had seized his local, forced him out as president, and stolen $30,000 of the union's funds under threats of death. Taylor charged that the mob had instigated the murder of three rebellious labor racketeers and that he himself had been told by Burke that he was "lucky to be alive." The Building Service Employees Union wanted jurisdiction over Taylor's union of elevator operators in order to give the Capone gang a strike weapon in Chicago's Loop buildings. The gang started a pressure campaign against him in 1936, and their first weapon was bribery. Describing a meeting with Building Service President Jerry Horan and Louis Campagna, Capone gangster, Taylor said, "When we got through dinner, Campagna threw a certified check for $50,000 at me. He said, 'Matt, I want you to step out as president of the Elevator Operators Union, and we want to take that union over, because we can help our cause then.' " "You don't think I'd sell out for $50,000, do you?" Taylor replied. "I am just building my local. I never sold out a union in my life." "Matt, you are a damn fool. You'll regret it some day," said Campagna. Taylor claimed in his sworn statement that political influence was exerted to force him to transfer the jurisdiction of his union to the Capone-dominated international. He said he learned of this influence while on his way back from Washington, where he attended a dinner for James A. Farley, then Postmaster-General in the Roosevelt cabinet. En route to Chicago he said he talked with Harry Bates, international president of the bricklayers union and a member of the AFL executive board. Bates told him (Taylor) that somebody was putting a lot of pressure on Green, president of the AFL, to give Scalise jurisdiction over all the elevator operators in the country. Taylor learned that the pressure was being exerted by judge Oscar Nelson of the Cook County Superior Court. He said he so informed Green at the AFL executive session at Atlantic City in August, 1937. Scalise and judge Nelson were at the meeting. After the meeting Taylor realized he was beaten. If Scalise and the mob had both Green and judge Nelson on their side, there was only one thing left to do. The next month he agreed to transfer his union to the Building Service international, after receiving assurance from Scalise that he, Taylor, would have autonomy and his rule would not be disturbed. Thereafter, the mob intensified its campaign against Taylor. Four gunmen robbed him Of $5,000 worth of bonds. He received repeated warnings that "the mob is going to get you." He was told that Tom Burke was determined to seize control ,of the local. "I thought things over and I drew $3,000 from my personal account," Taylor said. "I met my lawyer and said, 'I've got three grand here.' He said he didn't think it would be enough, but he'd see what he could do." "What did you pay the $3,000 for?" "To call the heat off me," Taylor replied. "Who did you believe the money was to go to eventually?" "The mob." Two or three days after paying the $3,000 Taylor said his lawyer instructed him to go to Burke's office, where Burke greeted him by saying, "You have come to your senses, haven't you? You want to go along, don't you?" Burke stated his terms as follows, "We want 50 per cent of the union's money, a new executive board, and I want a new treasurer. Your constitution is too strong." "Where do I get off?" Taylor asked. "You are lucky to be alive," Burke replied. The plan was to install a gangster named Louis Schiavone as the new treasurer, but Schiavone was murdered before he could take office. Taylor said he believed his first payment of $3,000 had gone to Schiavone for the mob, but that Schiavone had held out part of the money and that the gang had ordered his execution. Two days after the murder, Taylor said he drew $3,000 from his union's treasury and paid it directly to Burke. Thereafter he paid Burke installments totaling $30,000 from the union's funds. He did it to save his life, although he knew he was under sentence of slow death from tuberculosis and diabetes. After March, 1940, he rebelled and refused to pay any more. His bitterness against Burke and Scalise was so great that he planned to kill them both in a Chicago hotel, "but something went wrong." Taylor's affidavit was made public by the Chicago authorities after his death. judge Nelson pronounced the charges ridiculous insofar as they pertained to him. In Washington, Green described the statement as "amazing," but denied he had exercised any influence in the transfer of Taylor's union. "I had nothing to do with it," said Green. "It was done before I knew it-through a vote, I was told, of Taylor's own local. I did not talk to Taylor about it, and to the best of my recollection I never met him. Judge Nelson never talked to me about the transfer either." Even if Green's statement is true, it does not clear him of gross negligence and failure to carry out the responsibilities of his office. Taylor's charges caused a flurry of investigation, big headlines, optimistic statements from the authorities, and not much else. The Chicago police expressed the belief that the dying union leader had told the truth. But Taylor was dead and there was no corroborating evidence. Burke, of course, made a blanket denial of the charges and continued his activity in the union. Further details of George Scalise's criminal activity in the Building Service Employees Union were revealed by James J. Bambrick, a union official who, like Taylor, became a victim of the mob. Bambrick was the founder and first president of Local 32B of the Building Service Union in New York, which under his leadership became the largest and most powerful local in the entire union. Bambrick's story is a tragic one. An articulate, intelligent labor leader of unquestioned ability, he had a long and honorable record in the labor movement. He led Local 32B to a position of strength and stability in a chaotic field, obtaining for its members notable gains in wages and working conditions. But the mob, through Scalise, finally destroyed him, and Bambrick went to prison for stealing union funds which he said were taken from him by Scalise practically at the point of a gun. A proofreader and compositor by trade, Bambrick was a business representative of Typographical Union No. 6 when he accepted an offer in January, 1934, to become general organizer for Local 32, Manhattan Superintendents Union, an affiliate of the Building Service Union. The plan was to organize all workers in Manhattan office buildings, hotels, and apartment houses and to apply for a separate charter from the Chicago parent organization, since Local 32's charter applied only to superintendents and janitors. Bambrick was to work for a commission of one-third of the initiation fees and dues of new members. From this agreement it is easy to understand why labor organizing is a big business and attracts criminals in the upper income brackets. Considering the thousands of workers employed in Manhattan's skyscrapers, Bambrick, if successful, stood to make a financial killing. He was successful, but he said he never collected a fraction of what was due him. Scalise and the mob saw to that. Bambrick ran into gangster trouble almost from the beginning, especially after Scalise's introduction as the international union's Eastern vice-president. The charter for Local 32B was granted in April, 1934, and Bamb rick became its first president. The infant local selected Manhattan's unionized billion-dollar Garment Center as its first test of strength. A strike was planned in that area for November 1. To his dismay Bambrick realized that the Garment Center also was the stronghold of the Lepke-Gurrah mob and that this combination was working hand in glove with Scalise. A few days before the strike was to begin Bambrick was asked to meet a committee in a Garment Center loft building. It proved to be a committee of one-Jacob Shapiro ("Gurrah" was Shapiro's nickname). A squat, hard-eyed man with the face of a baboon, Gurrah was seated at a cutter's table when Bambrick entered. "Don't call no strike," Gurrah ordered, without any preliminaries. "We are running this district." Bambrick protested that the strike had been voted by the men and could not be called off. Gurrah grinned lazily, waved a hand, and said, "Never mind that, George (Scalise) will call you later." Returning to his office, Bambrick found a note saying that Schwartz, the union's "international representative" and Scalise's number one assistant, wanted to see him that night. Bambrick met Schwartz, who calmly admitted that he and Scalise were working with Lepke and Gurrah. The plan was to hold up the building owners in the district for $1,000 a building as the price of calling off the strike. "It's a cinch," Schwartz explained. "Everybody is scared stiff of the LepkeGurrah mob." The loot would be about $300,000 and Bambrick's share would be 25 per cent if he went along without any trouble. Bambrick said that he refused and that Schwartz branded him as a fool to pass up an easy bankroll. The next day he learned from the landlords that Lepke's men had already been around to sell them "strike insurance" for $1,000 a building. The owners told Bambrick's organizers that Scalise and Schwartz were in on the shakedown. They predicted that the strike would be called off. In this dilemma Bambrick first contemplated taking the whole extortion story to the police and the newspapers. He decided against it because he feared that it would demoralize the district and destroy a year's work by the union. Moreover, he and other union officials admittedly were afraid of the gangsters, though in retrospect Bambrick now feels, as he explains in his book (The Building Service Story, privately published by the Labor History Press), that he should have exposed them then, regardless of the consequences. "It might have wrecked the union in the process," he says, "but it also might have exterminated this racket vermin from the labor movement." Instead, Bambrick decided to fight them another way, by calling the strike as scheduled. There was violence with the Scalise crowd, but, with the help of the unionized needle workers in the district in the form of sympathy demonstrations and with the intervention of Mayor LaGuardia, Bambrick's local won union recognition and its first closed-shop contract. By the end of 1934, Local 32B had 7,000 members and 250 closed shop contracts. Under Bambrick's leadership, the local won successive wage increases in 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, and 1940. Unlike Scalise, Bambrick was working hard for his men. The development that five years later was to ruin Bambrick's career came during a strike in March, 1936. It was preceded by a series of events in which Scalise, according to Bambrick, increased his pressure against Local 32B, tried to force Bambrick to allow the rackets, staged internal disorders and demonstrations within the local, and openly boasted that he controlled all the other locals and would destroy Bambrick and 32B entirely if he did not get more cooperation. According to Bambrick, Scalise met him in a restaurant in the Chanin Building late on the afternoon of March 4 and announced, "The Boilermaker is going to knock you off at 6 o'clock tonight." He identified "The Boilermaker" as a gunman from Chicago. Scalise suggested that Bambrick needed protection and that he, Scalise, could provide it. Instead of engaging Scalise's protection, Bambrick appealed to the police, who assigned plain-clothes men to guard him during the remainder of the strike. "From that moment on," Bambrick said, "I lived in an atmosphere of stark terror—trying to lead a strike and carry on negotiations—while fighting against attempted shakedowns by these hoodlums all over town." Furthermore, Bambrick said he had to contend with political interference and crooked policemen as well as the open gangsterism of Scalise. The cops knew of the extortions and the other rackets, and the price of their silence was cash on the line. Highly placed politicians and public officials were in collusion with Scalise. They were willing to sit down with him, talk with him, and ask favors of him, in spite of his known criminal record. During a strike by building-service workers in one big Manhattan building, Bambrick said he received a telephone call from a State Supreme Court justice, demanding that Bambrick order the men back to work. It developed that the judge was a big stockholder in the building. "I can't do that, judge, against the wishes of the men who voted this strike," Bambrick said he replied. "It's their decision and I can't sell them out." The judge threatened him, Bambrick said. An hour later Bambrick received a telephone call from Scalise, who was in Chicago. Scalise threatened him and cursed him for "pushing around my friend, judge Despite this pressure, Bambrick said, the strike continued and the men won a wage increase. His continued resistance to Scalise finally got Bambrick in trouble with the international union, which brought him up on charges of "exceeding his authority." They postponed disciplinary action when publicity on the Capone gang's activity in the union was just breaking in the Chicago newspapers. Later, an attempt was made on Bambrick's life, but the thugs assaulted one of Bambrick's colleagues by mistake, a vicepresident of Local 32B, in the darkness at Bambrick's door. As further evidence of political interference, Bambrick said that during contract negotiations for workers in a large prominent building, a State Senator brought pressure to bear upon him. The politician accosted Bambrick in a corridor and told him that the $3 wage increase sought by the men was out. "I have just talked with Little Augie Pisano by telephone in Florida, and he says the men can't have $3. He says that a $1 raise is tops and that I am to tell you that. That's Pisano's orders." Bambrick replied that it was up to the men to decide, that he was only representing them. The politician answered, "I also want you to know that I have had a talk with Lucky Luciano in Dannemora prison. He's not going to like this either." Nevertheless, Bambrick said, the men held out and won their $3 increase. The blow that finished Bambrick fell in March, 1941, nearly a year after Scalise's conviction. Bambrick was indicted for stealing $10,000 of his union's funds. At that time Local 32B boasted more than 19,000 paid-up members, closed shop contracts covering 3,000 buildings, and nearly $282,000 in the treasury. It was the largest and strongest local in the international union. In court Bambrick in tears pleaded guilty and told his story of how Scalise extorted the money from him during the strike of March, 1936, as the price of preventing a Chicago gunman from killing him. The union's books were doctored to make it appear that the local was making a loan of $10,000 to the international union. The sum Of $7,500 was paid in checks signed by Bambrick and David Sullivan, then the secretary-treasurer of the local. What happened to the remaining $2,500 is open to question. The court evidently felt that Bambrick kept it, although he denies it. Bambrick told me that Scalise got it in cash and returned it to him in varying sums with instructions to pay off other extortion demands, including those of the grafting policemen who knew of the racket setup and Scalise's shakedowns. Unfortunately for him, Bambrick has no way now of proving his story. On his plea of guilty he was sentenced to a term of one to two years in prison. Later, in another court action, it was revealed that Scalise used part Of $32,000 he stole from the union to hire lawyers for his own defense. Here was a case in which the dues-paying members not only were robbed by thieving racketeers, but were forced in addition to pay for the gangsters' efforts to escape justice when caught! Commenting on Bambrick's case on the day he was sentenced, District Attorney Dewey said: The crime to which Bambrick has pleaded guilty illustrates one of the great dangers resulting from the domination of unions and union officials by gangsters. The defendant, Bambrick, for many years apparently was a legitimate labor leader with a long record in behalf of labor. Then he went into the Building Service Union. Thereafter this international union brazenly made a professional criminal, George Scalise, its president. Forced to take orders from the Capone mob and Scalise, Bambrick at first resisted and then succumbed. Eventually, in some situations such as the one before the court today, he became a coconspirator with Scalise. An interesting facet of the case involves the alleged collusion of an official in Dewey's office with Bambrick's enemies in the union. Without denying his guilt, but pleading extenuating circumstances, Bambrick has always contended that a "deal" was engineered by an assistant district attorney in Dewey's office to remove him from the presidency of Local 32B. He based his contention on the following: In February, 1941, before Bambrick's indictment, Frank Gold, a minor official in the union, was convicted on ten counts of extorting more than $5,000 from building owners. On December 2, 1941, after Bambrick had gone to prison, Gold got off with a suspended sentence on the recommendation of Assistant District Attorney Victor J. Herwitz, who said that Gold had given evidence against Bambrick and others. As an assistant on Dewey's staff, Herwitz had obtained the indictments against Scalise, Bambrick, and other officials of the union. In February, 1942, some months after David Sullivan's election as president of Local 32B succeeding Bambrick, Herwitz suddenly resigned from the District Attorney's office with the announcement that he had been hired as counsel to Local 32B, the union he had investigated and whose officials he had prosecuted. On February 15, 1943, Hyman Palatnik, another minor union official who also had been indicted for extortion, filed a suit charging that Herwitz, while serving as assistant district attorney, had conspired with Sullivan to get control of the local; if Bambrick was removed and Sullivan elected in his place, Herwitz would be appointed as the union's counsel at a fee ranging from $33,000 to $40,000 a year; and as part of the alleged conspiracy Sullivan was "to receive immunity for alleged criminal acts" if in return Sullivan, after his election as president, would retain Herwitz. Naming Herwitz, Sullivan, and the union as defendants, Palatnik asked for restoration of his job at $75 a week, back pay, and damages of $6,400, claiming that he lost the job as a result of the alleged conspiracy. Palatnik said he was persuaded to resign his position in the union on the promise that the extortion indictment against him would be dismissed. Herwitz wanted him to resign, according to Palatnik, because he "found it indelicate" to accept a retainer as counsel to the union while Palatnik was still both an official and under indictment. Palatnik said he resigned on February 9, 1942, with the understanding that he would be reinstated. Herwitz was named as the union's counsel the very next day, and the indictment against Palatnik was dismissed, with the official explanation that Palatnik had cooperated in the investigation. In furtherance of the conspiracy, Palatnik alleged in his complaint that Herwitz, with the active cooperation of Sullivan, obtained the indictment of Bambrick, then plotted to have Sullivan elected as president of the union. At a conference in the Hotel Lincoln, it was charged, Herwitz asked Sullivan who else might be a strong candidate against him. Sullivan replied that George Planson, manager of the local's employment bureau, would be such a candidate and that it would be necessary to eliminate him. Herwitz summoned Planson to his office and told him he could either resign from his position in the union or face indictment on criminal charges. Planson resigned, and Sullivan was elected president in September, 1941. Herwitz and Sullivan never had to face the conspiracy charges. The suit was dismissed when it was disclosed that Palatnik had received a sum of money, which was construed as a release at the time of his resignation. However, an attorney, David Ashe, retained by the rank and file of local 32B, brought charges against Herwitz before the Bar Association in an effort to have him disbarred. This time Herwitz went into the Army, remained out of civilian life for three years, and on his return the charges were not pressed. In a statement published in the newspaper PM on November 22, 1943, Ashe, commenting on the conspiracy allegations, said: "Whatever the facts may be, the situation is such that it calls for a full, impartial, and open investigation . . . the membership of the union and the public generally are entitled to an explanation, which only a public investigation can give." On the same date the newspaper published an excerpt of a letter written by George Riddock, a member of Local 32B, appealing to Governor Dewey for a public investigation and revealing that he had protested to Dewey, as District Attorney, on the conspiracy charges. "By promptly ordering a public investigation of this scandal you will earn the everlasting gratitude of the 25,000 members of the union who are being irreparably harmed and whose treasury is being milked by this unholy tie-up," Riddock wrote. "I am enclosing for your information a photostatic copy of a registered letter of protest I sent you on May 2 3, 1941, when the rumor of this alleged conspiracy first appeared in the public press." A spokesman for Dewey said that the Governor had "no comment" to make on Riddock's letter. Those two words, "no comment," constitute a device which politicians sometimes use when faced with embarrassing questions they do not choose to answer. Dewey throughout his public career has worked the device overtime. Local 32B was torn by factional strife for years after Sullivan's election as president. Sullivan was under fire almost constantly, the rank and file accusing him of accepting kickbacks and taking money to call off pickets in strikes. The Palatnik conspiracy charges also were a storm center of controversy. Sullivan was brought up on charges before the international union, but in a series of frantic maneuvers he succeeded in enjoining the international from rendering a final decision in his case. Meanwhile the rank and file Of 32B were completely neglected by their leaders. What did the union do for its members in the way of collecting back pay due them under the Fair Labor Standards Act? Not a thing. Several thousand of them engaged their own labor attorney to press their claims, and they won. Here was an outrageous bit of business. The workers thus ignored included middle-aged scrubwomen, working by night with their brushes and pails in Manhattan's skyscrapers. Scrubwomen work alone, seldom seen, ignored and forgotten, except when their union payments are due. Many of these women are the sole support of large families. Yet part of their hard-earned money goes to support faithless union leaders who do not even bother to collect money due them in back pay. The union bosses even had the temerity to suspend one rank and filer, Peter McManus, when he charged that Sullivan deliberately and knowingly had refused to render the services of the union's legal department in the collection of the back pay claims. Two other members were similarly expelled for making rebellious statements about fighting to "free Local 32B." They were reinstated by the international at the request of more than 5,000 indignant members, over the violent objections of Sullivan and Herwitz, who insisted that they should be disciplined for attending an "outlaw meeting." Strange are the ways of politics and politicians! As District Attorney it was Tom Dewey who prosecuted Scalise and exposed the Building Service Union as a racket union controlled by the Capone gangsters. In the presidential election campaign Of 1948, the first union to announce its support of the Republican candidate, Tom Dewey, was the same Building Service Union. On September 9, 1948, Governor Dewey received a delegation from the union headed by William L. McFetridge, who had succeeded Scalise as president. McFetridge presented to the Governor a resolution adopted by the union's executive board indorsing Dewey's candidacy. One of the members of that board then, as now, was Tom Burke, first vice-president, who had been linked many times in testimony with Scalise. "The action of the governing body of the Building Service Employees Union was the fruit of conferences between Mr. Dewey and Mr. McFetridge and David Sullivan, president of Local 32B, held here in mid-August," The New York Times reported solemnly. Candidate Dewey, the former racket buster and crusader, looked pleasant while being photographed with the union delegation, and said, "I am deeply gratified by the expression of confidence by one of the greatest unions in America. Mr. McFetridge, Mr. Sullivan, and many of the others are old friends and we have had a happy relationship over the years." The sordid story of the Building Service Union in the days of Scalise and Bambrick is an incredibly complete digest of criminal activity in unions. The big-time gangsters (Capone's friends) placed one of their stooges (George Scalise) high in the union hierarchy as Eastern vice-president by means of a rigged election. Once there, Scalise stole from the union treasury, extorted large sums from building owners, and ignored completely the welfare of his men. Two honest local officers (James Bambrick and Matt Taylor) were bribed and threatened and finally broken by the gang, and an assistant district attorney in Dewey's office was legally charged of having been in collusion with Bambrick's enemies inside his union. The building owners, from whom Scalise extorted huge sums, put up no resistance at all, but merely passed the burden of their payments on to the public in higher rents. The Building Service case defines an almost universal pattern for labor gangsterism. pps. 34-54 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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