The Real Clinton Record
It Didn't End With Whitewater
Rael Jean Issac
Mrs. Isaac is co-author, with Erich Isaac, of The Coercive Utopias.
IN his acceptance speech at the 1992
Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton promised zero tolerance
for those in government who ``cut corners and cut deals.'' But
less than three years later the Justice Department cut a highly
questionable deal with Arthur Coia, president of the mob-ridden
Laborers International Union of North America, whose 700,000 members
for the most part fill low-skilled construction jobs.
Corruption in the Laborers Union is
an old and open book. As far back as 1978 a Justice Department
report to the White House contended that the Chicago mob dominated
Angelo Posco, then president of LIUNA, and in 1986 the President's
Commission on Organized Crime, pointing to the looting of union
benefit funds by the mob, death threats, and murders of opposing
candidates, urged the Justice Department to file civil-racketeering
charges. In 1988, the FBI announced a RICO investigation of LIUNA.
On November 4, 1994, the Justice Department
delivered a draft of its 212-page RICO complaint to the Laborers:
the key demand, Coia must go. The complaint chronicled a massive web of corruption
that had continued for decades, with capos from an assortment
of crime families either running locals directly or installing their appointees. LIUNA,
it said, has been ``continuously and systematically controlled,
exploited, and dominated in the conduct of its affairs by the
Cosa Nostra.''
The complaint was unsparing concerning
Coia personally. Four consecutive presidents of the union, including
Coia, were ``controlled and influenced by organized-crime figures.'' Indeed,
according to the complaint, Coia had tried (unsuccessfully) to
replace the previous president in 1986 because he believed ``that [Angelo] Fosco's conduct harmed
LIUNA and the Cosa Nostra's control of LIUNA'' (italics added).
From 1986 to July 1994, the complaint charged, Coia had conspired
with the Todaro crime family of Buffalo to transfer training funds
of upstate New York locals to Buffalo, where the money would be
used for the benefit of Cosa Nostra families and associates. (They
were foiled when the victim-locals protested and a court upheld
them against Coia.) Some of the material was old but nonetheless
telling, like the 1981 indictment of Coia's father (who, as secretary-treasurer
of the union, was second in command), New England mob boss Raymond
Patriarca, and Coia himself for racketeering and taking bribes
from an insurance swindler: it fizzled when the judge ruled the
statute of limitations had expired.
Despite the damning indictment, within
three months Justice had cut a deal: Coia could stay. In fact,
Coia would be Justice's subcontractor to clean up the union --
giving the ``appearance,'' in the delicate phrasing of Bill McCollum,
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime,
of putting the fox in charge of guarding the chicken coop. Why
did Justice make such an unprecedented arrangement? The official
explanation is that the government saved money that would otherwise
have been wasted in lengthy litigation, and that Coia himself
-- who was more knowledgeable? -- could root out the mob more
efficiently. Indeed, Justice professed great pride in this pioneering
method of dealing with union corruption, and Attorney General
Janet Reno cited it as a model for future racket busting.
There is no doubt that Coia had wielded
a canny combination of carrot and stick. He threatened an all-out
fight in the courts if he personally were pushed out.
Showing he meant business, he hired
the firm of Williams & Connolly, which also represents President
Clinton on Whitewater, to represent him in his negotiations with
Justice. To represent LIUNA he hired Robert Luskin, himself a
former Justice Department official. Luskin made an unusual offer
on Coia's behalf: the union would hire him and a contingent of
former FBI investigators to root out corruption. Moreover, Coia
agreed to a consent decree acknowledging significant corruption
in the union (which he had previously denied) that gave the Justice
Department the option, until 1998, of putting LIUNA under trusteeship if it was not satisfied
with Coia's progress.
Did Justice have other inducements
to keep Coia in place? What has raised eyebrows is Coia's role
as one of Clinton's most important political and financial allies.
Coia has co-chaired a series
of fund-raising dinners for the Democrats, each of which has raised
millions of dollars. In 1994 alone, LIUNA contributed over a million dollars to Democratic
candidates. It has become one of the largest donors of ``soft
money'' to the Democratic Party. It even loaned $100,000 to Clinton's inaugural committee. Coia
personally contributed $1,000 (the maximum permitted) to Clinton's
Legal Defense Fund. He joined the board of the Back to Business
Committee, where, humorously, he lent his moral authority to the
committee's vigorous denials of merit in any of the ``character''
charges against the Clintons.
Money translated into social access. Soon the President and Coia were Bill and Arthur, eating breakfast together, exchanging gifts of specially made golf clubs.
(The President's thank-you note for
his arrived on Coia's desk the same day as the Justice Department's
complaint.) Coia was invited to a small White House dinner where the President played
the saxophone; a Judiciary subcommittee documented over 120 such
contacts.
DID all this have any influence on
the decision-making process at Justice? At hearings by Rep. McCollum's
subcommittee at the end of July, Justice Department officials
vigorously denied it and Democratic members of the committee indignantly
insisted that there was absolutely no evidence of any White House
interference.
Was there then only the appearance
of a quid pro quo? Coia knew the Justice Department complaint
was coming. There were obvious channels for a discreet phone call.
The President and Coia were represented by the same law firm,
and attorney - client privilege would forever protect such a channel
of communications. Or Coia might have approached White House Deputy
Chief of Staff Harold Ickes. According to Coia himself, the President
had designated Ickes as his White House contact. Before taking
his White House post, Ickes had represented a number of unions
on mob-related charges, including the Laborers. Indeed the court-appointed
trustee for a Teamsters local demanded that Ickes's firm withdraw
as the local's counsel because of what it complained was its ``lack
of independence'' from mob influence.
But even if there were no contacts
between the White House and Justice, there did not have to be
interference for there to be influence. Janet Reno's Justice Department
has bent itself out of shape to be helpful to the President on
Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Paulagate. The political appointees
at Justice could not but be sensitive to the President's friendship
with Coia. Last week, Ronald Fino, for 16 years an FBI informant
within the Laborers on the Cosa Nostra, speaking behind a protective
screen, warned McCollum's subcommittee that you can no longer
tell a mobster by his fedora hat. ``Projecting an image of goodness, popping up and chairing
charitable fund-raising functions combined with a voice for social
justice, the racketeer builds a formidable defense against the
Justice Department and prosecution.''
However the decision was made, and
whatever the merits of the agreement between Justice and LIUNA
-- and it is too soon to tell whether Coia will truly clean up
the union or merely get rid of mob rivals -- several things are
clear, all of them disquieting.
1. Coia had a tremendous victory as
he was transformed overnight from accused racketeer to racket-busting
pioneer. In effect now endorsed by the Justice Department, he
is a sure winner in the union elections in September and is thus
guaranteed control of LIUNA until well after 1998, when Justice
loses its power to intervene if dissatisfied with Coia's ``progress.''
Significantly, under terms of the agreement, LIUNA's $1-billion pension fund, the pot of
gold which had been the mob's chief target, is off limits to the
team of investigators Coia agreed to hire. Reform in this area,
U.S. Attorney James Burns acknowledges, is ``up to the union.''
2. The President continued to lend
Coia the prestige of his public friendship (including 24 White
House visits) after he had been warned about the forthcoming Justice
Department complaint. At the McCollum hearings, documents were
produced showing that the FBI wrote the White House counsel's
office in 1994 that Coia ``is a criminal associate of the New
England Patriarca organized crime family'' and the subject of an FBI criminal probe.
Another
Justice Department memo that same year referred to Mrs. Clinton's
staff having been warned, on the occasion of her planning to speak
at a LIUNA conference, that ``we plan to portray him as a mob
puppet.'' (Undeterred, in early 1995, while Coia was still fighting
off the complaint, Mrs. Clinton went to Florida to address LIUNA's
conference, Coia proudly accompanying her.) Kenneth Boehm of
the National Legal and Policy Center, which focuses on ethical
issues in government, says: ``The appearance problem is enormous
here. In the case of a federal judge, a conflict of interest includes
the appearance of a conflict of interest. The rationale is that
the public should have confidence in its
public institutions. If the President allows himself to be seen
with a figure like this, it is a betrayal of public trust.''
3. Even as the Justice Department
was chronicling the mob's wholesale pillaging of LIUNA's pension
and training funds, departments of the Federal Government were
providing the union with millions of dollars for ``training and
education.'' A current study by the Heritage Foundation finds
that in fiscal 1994 the EPA, HUD, Education, Labor, and Health
and Human Services between them gave over $11 million to LIUNA,
most of it as ``training funds.'' Bizarrely, the Department of
Labor, in its annual Inspector General report, cites the prosecution
of Michael LaBarbara for stealing training funds from a LIUNA
local, while at the same time LIUNA received $475,000 more in,
yes, training grants. The taxpayer hardly anticipates
that government agencies will be showering discretionary funds
on people with colorful nicknames.
One of the documents released by the
McCollum committee shows just how far Coia thought he could go.
At Coia's behest Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler
sent a memo to both Harold Ickes, who oversees the Clinton campaign
from the White House, and Debra DeLee, chief executive of the
1996 Democratic convention, urging them to consider giving Coia
a speaking role at that convention.
Sorry, folks. With all the publicity,
he won't be at the podium.