12/31/95
The Worlds of Arthur Coia
Part one of a two part series
By Dean Starkman,
with reports from John Mulligan and Mike
Stanton
Journal-Bulletin staff writers
Arthur A. Coia wears dark chalk-striped suits,
shirts with monogrammed French cuffs and intricately patterned
ties.
He has a weakness for Ferraris and is a crackerjack
amateur golfer
The bathroom in his executive suite, designed
by his wife, Joanne, has handsomely tiled floors, brass fixtures
and an impressive collection of colognes. The monogrammed robe says: "AAC."
The trappings reflect Coia's polished approach
to a gritty job. He is the general president of a sprawling empire
of 750,000 tunnel diggers, toxic waste haulers and oil riggers:
the Laborers' International Union of North America.
Coia does not fit the mold of the cigar-chomping
labor boss.
He can be intimate, even with a stranger.
Coia will grab an arm, lean close and press his point with a gentle
force, smiling with warm, basset-hound eyes. His sheepish grins and malapropisms - he once said union leaders
should be skilled at "tele-genetics" - give him a boyish
charm.
An unabashed social climber, Coia glows when
talking about the intimate dinner he and Joanne attended with
the Clintons at the White House. Last year, President Clinton
gave Coia a Callaway "Divine Nine" golf
club; the driver, alongside the President's handwritten note,
is on display in a glass case at Laborers' headquarters.
Not much seems to cloud this otherwise sunny
disposition, except, perhaps, the suggestion that he, his father
or their union have ever been involved with the Mafia.
"There is crime out there," Coia
says, bristling. "It's like any other industry, government
and church or whatever. But the unjust accusation, that organized
crime controlled this union, is a lot of baloney."
Coia, if nothing else, has shown over his
career that he can thrive in two worlds.
Over 25 years, he rose to the top of a union
that the government ranked among the nation's four most corrupt.
Along the way, he was accused of pilfering union funds, kowtowing to the mob and squashing efforts
at reform.
Then last year, after a wild go-round with
federal prosecutors, Coia emerged in a new role: he was tapped
by the Justice Department to reform the Laborers.
And a long list of his accusers - former
colleagues, friends, a law client - now find themselves on the
outside looking in.
Coia's grandfather, Pasquale, helped to found
Providence Local 271 early in the century, when the Laborers were
a ragtag collection of sewer workers and brick haulers.
The old man liked to amuse his grandson with
a one-man-band routine; and the lad grew up playing the accordion,
his first love.
The boy's father was a worker.
Arthur Ettore Coia left school in the eighth
grade. He joined the local at age 20, in 1933, and trudged to
work in the sewers of Providence. For 35 cents an hour, he grunted under loads of brick.
The legend was already in the making
Coia's father quickly made a name for himself.
A diligent organizer, he rallied highway workers in North Providence,
parimutuel clerks at Narragansett Park, gas station operators,
plaster tenders, and macaroni plant workers. He was elected president
of the local. Then he was named business manager. By 1954, he
was the "international representative."
Coia's father became a major force in Rhode
Island. Gruff and taciturn, with the flat nose of a prizefighter,
the old man radiated authority. In 1964, he gave the word and
a thousand workers walked off construction sites around the state.
When the City of Providence threatened layoffs, in 1977, Coia's
father called a demonstration that clogged traffic on Kennedy
Plaza.
"We're against mob rule," Coia's
father said. "But we had to bottle up the city to give our
message."
Life in the simple ranch house on Standish
Avenue in North Providence was not always rosy. His father was
away a lot. Coia has told friends the relationship could be tense.
Coia, though, says his father was a visionary
with an abiding compassion for working people.
"My father," Coia says, "was
a legend."
Almost singlehandedly, he molded the union
into a political force that, to this day, holds Providence City
Hall in its grip. Few candidates crossed its formidable political machine; most have joined it. The union has
doled out pensions to City Council members and hired Providence
political figures and their relatives. The city's current administration director, Frank E. Corrente,
was the Coias' business partner for years.
The old man had the ear of Rhode Island governors
and found open doors when he walked through the halls of Congress.
And early on, Coia's father developed other,
sinister contacts. He had a longstanding relationship with the
legendary boss of New England organized crime, Raymond L.S. Patriarca.
Coia's father, by his own account, said he
and Patriarca had known each other for 45 years, dating to the
1930s, when they were both young men.
Coia's father said the relationship was casual.
But illegal FBI wiretaps, planted in the
early 1960s, crackled with the sound of Patriarca barking orders
about the Providence Laborers. The mob boss, records of the tapes show, tampered in everything from union elections
to who got kickbacks on coffee machines sold to unions.
"Hit them, break legs to get things
your way," he was overheard saying.
Once, Patriarca learned that two workers
at Narragansett race track were dropping his name, saying they
didn't have to join the Laborers.
"If they don't join," Patriarca
replied, "tell them I won't put any of them to work next
year up there."
The year is 1976.
The scene is a dinner party at the posh Jockey
Club on Miami's Biscayne Boulevard.
Arthur A. Coia, a few years out of law school,
is mingling among the guests. With his father's help, he is already
a top Laborers' executive in Rhode Island.
The host was a flashy insurance man named
Joseph Hauser, a longtime acquaintance of Coia's father.
Hauser's past was murky. He claimed to have
survived the Nazis' Mauthausen concentration camp before arriving
from Poland as a 12-year-old refugee. He had grown up to be a
dynamic salesman, who made grandiose promises and lived like a
movie star.
He wore custom-tailored suits, handed out
$100 bills as tips and swallowed ulcer pills by the handful. His
speciality, authorities would later discover, was bribing influencial Laborers and Teamsters executives around
the country.
In the 1970s union corruption was rampant.
Federal antiracketeering laws were new and largely untested. The
Senate's Permanent Subcommitee on Investigations would discover that Hauser alone had diverted at
least $11 million from Teamsters and Laborers' funds in Arizona,
Indiana, Florida and California.
Soon after the Florida party, Hauser hired
Coia to do legal work. The swindler also paid more than $130,000
to an insurance firm owned by Coia's law partner.
At the time, Hauser was bidding to sell multimillion-dollar
life insurance policies to two New England Laborers' benefit funds.
Prosecutors later alleged that Coia's father vigorously lobbied fund trustees on Hauser's
behalf.
Hauser won the contracts.
Indicted
On Sept. 23, 1981, a federal grand jury in
Miami indicted the two Coias, along with three others for racketeering
for taking bribes from Hauser
In a bombshell, the government also indicted
New England mob boss Patriarca as a co-defendant. Hauser, now
a convicted swindler, would be the star witness for the prosecution.
The indictments were part of a nationwide
sweep of pension fund abuses that snared a who's who of mid-1970s
labor leaders and organized crime figures, including mob boss Anthony "Big Tuna" Accardo of Chicago.
To reporters, the Coias expressed bafflement
at the indictments. Coia's father said Patriarca was "a friend
of mine," but no more. "When we see each other, we say
hello - casually," the elder Coia said.
The younger Coia said he had had even less
contact with the mob boss. "I think I met him in a restaurant
once," he said, and added that he had never met anyone called
"Big Tuna."
"Is he a big guy?" the younger
Coia asked. "Is he heavy?"
Coia said he had nothing to do with the Providence
insurance agency, which, he said, was owned solely by his law
partner
A federal judge, James L. King, dismissed
the case without hearing evidence, ruling the government had filed
its charge too late. Prosecutors appealed, and a higher court
reinstated the charge.
Hauser testified for days during the trial,
creating more than 1,000 pages of transcript. He spun a sordid
tale of kickbacks, secret meetings and bribery. He said the younger Coia held a hidden interest in the little
Providence agency, which was used as a conduit for bribes. He
said he gave white envelopes bulging with cash, between $2,000
and $10,000, to Coia's father
He also testified that he and Coia's father
met Patriarca in a North Providence restaurant to devise the whole
scheme.
But in December 1984, King dismissed the
case again for the same reason: The statute of limitations had
expired. By law, the decision could not be appealed a second time.
The case never went to a jury.
Coia today disparages the government's case.
He says it was based entirely on the word of Hauser, "a total
liar."
"The whole thing was full of baloney,"
Coia says.
A father's confidante
When Ronald M. Fino was a boy, his mother
told him that his father was in the army. One day, she took him
to the "army fort" for a visit. Years later, Fino learned
the camp was the New York state penitentiary at Attica.
Daddy was a mobster.
The son of Buffalo underboss Joseph E. Fino,
Ron Fino seemed destined for the Laborers' highest echelon. As
a young man, he was installed in Buffalo's Local 210, a notoriously
mobbed-up affiliate, and soon took command.
Fino reported directly to Joseph Todaro Sr.
and his son, Joseph Jr., the boss and underboss of the Buffalo
mob, who shielded a criminal empire behind a Buffalo pizza business.
On the Todaros' orders, Fino handed choice
jobs to mob goons.
When a mob capo wanted a union training center
in New Jersey to stock with no-show jobs, the senior Todaro told
Fino to take care of it.
When Fino tried to shut down a contractor
who was dumping illegal hazardous waste, the senior Todaro told
him to back off: The contractor had been paying the mob.<
As he rose in the Laborers, Fino met an elite
crowd of top mobsters and Laborers' officers around the country.
He seemed to have it made.
But Fino never forgot the sight of his father
in prison, and a belief that the mob had abandoned his father.
At the end of his life, Joe Fino had been reduced to accepting
a job from his son as a common laborer.
Fino carried his resentment quietly.
In the late 1970s, he met the elder Coia.
Handsome and articulate, not unlike Coia's
own son, Fino won the older man's trust.They chatted regularly,
and Fino made a habit of staying home Sunday mornings waiting
for Coia's father to call.
In statements Fino would make to agents of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fino says the elder Coia
confided his most closely held secrets.
Fino says Coia's father had an arrangement
with large Massachusetts and upstate New York construction companies.
They paid him kickbacks. He says Coia's father bragged he carried "plenty of cash" to
bribe New England politicians.
Fino says the elder Coia's confided that
his closest organized crime contact was Patriarca and that he
owed his career to the New England mob boss. "On several
occasions, (he) has told me he loved Patriarca," Fino told
prosecutors.
Their travels took Fino and Coia's father
to lush retreats around the country, including Boca Raton, Hawaii,
Lake Tahoe. Fino says they always went first-class, indulging
in the finest wines and poshest hotel suites. Union training funds,
Fino says, were open-ended expense accounts.
Fino says in the mid-1980s they rang up a
$600 bill entertaining a top mobster in Miami. Fino says Coia
told him to charge the New England Laborers Training Trust Fund
fund.
Another time, Fino says, Coia upbraided him
in Honolulu for staying in a cheaper hotel room and making others
"look bad."
Life was a whirl of ocean views, Montrachet
and fresh-cut roses.
In 1981, their travels took them to Miami
for the biggest event on the union's calendar: the general convention
of the Laborers' International.
A beating
Murmuring voices, smoke and laughter floated
up from the floor of a convention hall of Miami's Diplomat Hotel
as more than 2,000 delegates gathered in a festive mood.
With free liquor flowing in hospitality suites
upstairs, the hall, in the words of one participant, was "a
sea of booze."
Surveying the scene were Fino and Coia's
father; according to Fino's statements, the older man told him
to look over the seating arrangements.
Coia's father pointed out that the front
seats had been reserved for "made" Mafia soldiers and
mob-controlled delegates, Fino says, while regular delegates sat
toward the rear.
Fino says it was a security measure. The
elder Coia "explained that this was done so that the delegates
who were not controlled by the LCN could not get at (the board
members) and the other officials on the dais," Fino says.
As general secretary-treasurer, Coia's father
presided over the convention, and, nominally, faced an election.
But no one had ever challenged the ruling
elite.
That is, until Miami
Peering up from the convention floor were
two delegates from Iowa, Dennis Ryan, an Iowa City construction
worker, and Fred Noon, a sewer worker from Des Moines
They had packed a stack of leaflets and a
copy of a 1980 Mother Jones article entitled "The Crookedest
Union in America; and it's not the Teamsters" and driven
Noon's brother-in-law's pickup 25 hours to Miami
with the idea of running an opposition slate.
Neither had been to a Laborers' convention
before. Ryan, who intended to do much of the talking, remembered
a remark from a former delegate: " 'If you want to get to that microphone,'
" the man told him, " ' you're gonna need a platoon
of Marines.' "
Ryan thought he was kidding.
Handing out leaflets in the lobby, they were
descended upon by a squad of giants, 6 feet 5, 300-plus pounds,
"no fat," Ryan recalls. These union "sergeants-at-arms"
punched and shoved the dissidents, scattering leaflets. The punches,
Ryan noticed, were always aimed at the genitals. "It's nothing
personal," the sergeants-at-arms kept saying.
One man showed a gun strapped to his ankle.
"Whoa," Chris White, a dissident,
says he thought. "This is the Chicago Mafia."
The convention floor, a dissident recalls,
was like "being in the ocean with the sharks."
Red-faced delegates screamed at them, spit
on them and blew air horns in their faces. Ryan and Noon found
their chairs had been swiped. A sergeant-at- arms told them to
find a seat or get off the floor.
Ryan, in a statement he prepared for the
Labor Department, says the elder Coia thundered from the dais
against "outsiders" at the convention out to "destroy"
the union.
Coia shouted, "We must protect this
labor organization from its enemies from without and from within,"
Ryan wrote
The incumbent president, Angelo Fosco, who
at the time was under indictment for racketeering, was nominated
amid a sea of bobbing "Fosco" signs. Confetti and balloons
flew. Someone blew an air horn in Ryan's face.
Ryan is only 5 feet 6, 145 pounds - but scrappy,
Noon says.
Coia's father, right in front of Ryan, called:
"Other nominations?"
Ryan headed for a microphone, but someone
swiped it.
"You little . . .," a delegate
screamed. "Why don't you get the . . . out of here."
Someone stepped on Ryan's foot and shoved,
and the beating started. At least 20 sergeants-at-arms and delegates,
including two mob associates from Chicago, a witness recalls, jumped Ryan, beating and kicking
him for several minutes in full view of the dais.
Coia shouted, "Will the delegate get
to the microphone," Ryan wrote.
Bruised, his shirt ripped, a cut over his
eye, Ryan fumbled for his glasses. Someone handed them to him.
He straightened, limped to a microphone and looked Coia's father
in the eye
"I wish to make a nomination for president,"
Ryan rasped. "I think it's time we returned to the tradition
this union was founded on."
"Those last remarks are out of order,"
Coia's father said, according to Ryan.
The incumbent slate won, 2,342 to 5.
A wedge of sergeants-at-arms and security
guards hustled Noon and Ryan through the jeering crowd and into
a hotel security office. They left that night.
Back home in Des Moines, someone threw a
woman's purse with a dead rat on Noon's front lawn.
A top Laborers' executive from Chicago, flashing
diamond rings and gold chains, drove out to denounce Ryan at a
local meeting. "You could have heard a pin drop," Ryan
recalls.
Ryan soon found that the local no longer
assigned him work.
After a few years, he left the Laborers.
Unwanted attention
In 1986, the President's Commission on Organized
Crime had weighed in with a 393-page report that called the Laborers
one of the nation's "Bad Four," the worst of the worst.
The commission of federal judges and former
U.S. attorneys decried the violence of the Miami convention, the
looting of benefit plans, the death threats, and murders of dissident
candidates.
The panel criticized both Coias for using
union funds to pay private investigators and lawyers. The panel
also said its evidence implied Coia's father was a "trusted
associate" of organized crime.
The Laborers' International, the commission
concluded, was a racketeering case "waiting to be made."
"The commission believes there is little
chance that the LIUNA membership will be able to eliminate organized
crime's influence, or control their union, if the current leadership . . . remains intact," the report said.
The report spurred federal investigations
around the country.
Despite the unwanted attention, Coia's father
did not lay low after the report. Instead, according to Fino,
he lobbied to take control of the entire international.<
Fino says Coia's father had complained frequently
about, Fosco, the affable and pliant general president, saying
he was "always drunk" and often failed to brief his
mob handlers.
Coia's behind-the-scenes maneuvers caused
ripples among mob families across country, Fino says, until Coia's
father was told at a "sit down" of Mafia leaders to
back off his challenge. Coia's father obeyed, Fino says.<
In Providence, the Laborers dedicated a new
three-story brick headquarters, set amid the fashionable boutiques
and coffee shops of South Main Street. It was called: the Arthur
E. Coia Building.<
Virtually all of Rhode Island's top politicians
attended, including Gov. Edward D. DiPrete and Mayor Joseph R.
Paolino Jr., to honor the elder Coia.
DiPrete, who is now under a racketeering
indictment, brushed aside questions raised in the president's
commission report about the elder Coia and his mob ties.
"I get invited to many functions as
governor, and I try to attend as many functions as I can,"
DiPrete said. "I don't feel ashamed of myself at all."
On Jan. 13, 1989, Fino rented a black Thunderbird,
picked up a woman with whom he was romantically involved, and
disappeared. A few weeks later, the Buffalo News reported the news: Fino was an informant
for the FBI.
In a rare interview, Fino told the Wall Street
Journal in 1990 that he bolted because his union colleagues had
begun to suspect - correctly - that he had been a government mole.
Fino said he had since lived a furtive existence
and had not been able to see his two children for years.
"Would I do it again?" he told
the Journal. "No. The price is too expensive."
For seven years, the government has used
Fino as its main guide to organized crime's grip on the Laborers.
He has testified in successful prosecutions in Cleveland, Binghamton, N.Y., northern New Jersey, and
New York City. He gave a series of statements to prosecutors and
FBI agents on life inside the Laborers. The Journal-Bulletin has
obtained some of the statements.
In them, Fino says he had less contact with
the younger Coia than with his father, and when they did meet,
they spoke of careers, golf and sports cars.
But as both rose in the international, their
contacts increased. By 1987, Fino says he saw the younger Coia
20 or 25 times.
Coia says he knows Fino and makes little
effort to hide his contempt for him. Coia says Fino is so desperate
for money he once tried to sell a story to the National Enquirer
about O.J. Simpson's days in Buffalo. And he even tried to peddle
information about corruption to Laborers' internal investigators.
Fino, he says, is not a legitimate source
of information.
"Ron Fino is a paid-for-hire witness,
a paid-for-hire story," Coia says.
'Southwind'
While Fino became an informant, Coia prospered
beyond even his father's expectations.
In Providence, he has built an interlocking
network of interests that blurs the line between union responsibilities
and private business.
He started a law firm and built it into one
of the state's leading worker's compensation firms. A Journal-Bulletin
review of court records shows the firm, Coia & Lepore, earned more than $3 million in the past five
years in Worker's Compensation Court fees.
And, government records show, Laborers' benefit
funds have also hired Coia & Lepore to do legal work.
Back in 1974, Coia convinced Mayor Joseph
A. Doorley to fund a legal service plan for city workers. The
city has so far paid $6 million to the plan. The plan's trustees,
all Laborers' officers, have hired Coia & Lepore to provide
its legal services.
Coia & Lepore has also been hired by
a second Rhode Island Laborers' legal fund and by the Laborers'
Rhode Island Health and Welfare Fund, according to government
records
One of the legal funds, last year, engaged
in an even bigger transaction. It paid $2.3 million to Coia's
real estate partnership for an office building, called Gateway,
on Providence's South Main Street.
Coia says the trust funds operate independently
of the union.<
"It's not the union," he says.
"That's why there're trustees there."
The outside income has augmented Coia's union
salary, which last year was $218,959.
He and his family live in an exclusive part
of Barrington. Their house, named "Southwind," is an
elegant cream-white contemporary with a curving driveway, landscaped
yard, a private beach and a spectacular view of fishing boats
bobbing in the sunrise on Narragansett Bay.
Coia also bought a house in Delray Beach,
Fla. In Washington, he keeps a room at the Carlton Hotel, a short
walk across a leafy plaza from Laborers' headquarters.
His golf game got serious. At a driving range,
he routinely hit hundreds of balls as a time and, at one point,
lowered his handicap to zero.
Coia and his wife, in 1983, built a kennel
on a Rehoboth, Mass., farm and began breeding champion Rottweilers.
One of their dogs, Double-C's Agib, won the "best of winners"
title at the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York.
At one point, Coia tried to mate his stud
dog with a bitch owned by Raymond J. "Junior" Patriarca,
then underboss of New England organized crime.
Coia says he found himself sitting in a lawyer's
office with the younger Patriarca during Coia's racketeering trial,
in which Patriarca's father was a co-defendant. Coia says Patriarca, who became mob boss upon his father's
death in 1984, proposed the mating.
"I didn't know that he had a Rottweiler,
and I had a Rottweiler - two Rottweilers," Coia says.
Coia says he is not sure whether Patriarca,
who is now in federal prison, visited the Rehoboth kennel, or
whether the crime boss was charged a stud fee.
The coupling failed to produce puppies.
In the union, Coia followed his father up
the ranks. Elected president of Providence Local 271 in his 20s, he soon became business
manager of the Rhode Island District Council, patiently tending to the affairs
of a dozen health care, construction and state and city employee locals.
He was named manager for the New England
region in the late 1980s. Soon, after his father had taken ill,
Coia decided to try to move up to his father's job, international general secretary-treasurer. He lobbied for
support among members of the union's general executive board.