June 19, 1982

AP MIAMI, June 18,A reputed Chicago crime boss, Anthony Accardo, and the former secretary of the Laborers International Union were acquitted today of charges they embezzled about $2 million from the union's benefit fund.

Six other defendants were convicted, but the Federal jury, which had deliberated for two weeks, said it could not reach a verdict against three remaining defendants.

The union's general president, Angelo Fosco, was among the three for whom no verdict was reached. Terrence J. O'Sullivan, the former union secretary treasurer and later head of Worldwide Insurance Company, also was acquitted.

Convicted were James Caporale, Seymour A. Gopman, Louis S. Ostrer, Alfred Pilotto, Bernard G. Rubin and George Wuagneux. Besides Mr. Fosco, no verdict was given for John Giardiello, the head of a Palm Beach, Fla., union local, and Salvatore Tricario, the business agent for the Palm Beach local.

The trial began April 12. The indictments were issued a year ago, on June 3, after a two-year investigation of the union by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor and the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force. At the time of the indictments, Justice Department lawyers and Federal investigators said the case was an important one among racketeering prosecutions, asserting that the trial would establish that organized crime controlled the Laborers International Union.

The union has headquarters in Washington and represents 530,000 unskilled and semiskilled laborers in the construction industry. In all, 16 men were indicted. Five are still to be tried, the most prominent being Santo Trafficante Jr. Mr. Trafficante, who is 68 years old and lives in Tampa, Fla., has been identified by witnesses testifying before various Congressional committees as one of the last of the old-time Mafia dons, the head of one of 26 organized crime families in this country.

Federal records trace a "Tampa Mafia family" back to 1914, when possession of heroin and morphine became illegal in the United States. The United States Narcotics Bureau, the predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration, at the time described the Tampa organization, under the leadership of Ignacio Antinori, as "the major source of illegal drugs" imported here. Santo Trafficante Sr., who had lived in Tampa since 1904, took over the Tampa interests after Mr. Antinori was murdered in 1940, according to investigators, and after his death in 1954, he was succeeded as chief by his son.

The trial of Santo Trafficante Jr. has been delayed indefinitely because the defendant has a kidney ailment that makes him too ill to travel, according to a kidney specialist who testified at a preliminary hearing.

Among the 11 brought to trial, the two best known are Mr. Accardo, who invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination 150 times in testimony before the Senate Rackets Committee in 1958 and who once served as Al Capone's chauffeur and bodyguard, and Mr. Fosco, the president of the Laborers International Union. Mr. Accardo, 76, and Mr. Fosco, 61, both live in Chicago.

At its simplest, the Government's case, according to a prosecutor, John Owens, was that 15 cents of every dollar paid by union members for health care from 1972 to 1977 was kicked back to the defendants, occasionally directly and sometimes through paper corporations set up by Mr. Fosco's 29-year-old son, Paul Fosco, by Mr. Gopman, 57, a Miami labor lawyer, and Mr. Wuagneux, 48, a Fort Lauderdale condominium developer.

The Government had two key witnesses, both unindicted coconspirators who had United States marshals as bodyguards under the Federal Witness Program. One was Joseph Hauser, who testified that he set up an insurance company, Farmers National Life, at the behest of the defendants and that the company wrote policies for the union and paid the kickbacks. The other was Daniel Milano, son of the union's late auditor, who testified both he and his father collected kickbacks and made some of the payoff to some of the defendants.

In his closing remarks, Thomas Foran, the lawyer for the union's president, Angelo Fosco, described Mr. Hauser with an epithet and Mr. Milano as "a bum." He called the prosecution "the con job of the century." In turn, the prosecutor, William Hyatt, characterized Mr. Foran's argument as a "smokescreen."