Among the big Chicago locals that were scrutinized by the Independent Review Board under the authority of the consent decree the Teamsters signed with the federal government in 1989 was Local 714. This 10,700-member local covering a wide variety of workers, from law-enforcement officials to metalworkers, had been run by members of the Hogan family since it was founded in 1934.
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The IRB recommended that the local be put into a trusteeship, and shortly after, Teamsters president Ron Carey appointed John Metz, a Teamsters leader from Saint Louis, as trustee. Metz soon discovered that business agents at the less privileged small shops in the local often dropped valid grievances of workers, and he compiled a four-page list of contracts that had expired but hadn’t been renegotiated, even though some of them had expired two years earlier. Even movie and trade-show workers had been treated shabbily if they were outside the elite core. Dozens of individuals had worked virtually full-time for a decade or more yet hadn’t been allowed to join the union; they were still designated casual workers. A lawsuit filed last summer by some of them contends that the local’s contract directed employers to pay into the pension and health funds maintained by the union, but the workers had never been told that they were covered, so they’d had to pay for their own health care.
Soon after Metz was named trustee, the IRB barred Joseph Hogan from the union for failing to cooperate with its investigation and for alleged ties to the mob. An internal panel also held hearings on ethics charges the IRB had leveled against James Hogan, William Hogan Jr., and William’s sons, Billy III and Bobby, but no action has been taken yet. William Hogan had been running in the number two slot on James Hoffa’s national slate, but after the IRB report was issued he dropped his union membership and withdrew from the campaign.
In January ’98 Metz had announced that he would recommend to the international that the trusteeship end and elections to replace it be organized. Many of the reformers, including Zebrauskas, thought it was too soon, that Metz hadn’t been able to do enough to clean up the local in the year and a half that he’d been trustee. Seventeen of them traveled to Washington, D.C., to argue against ending the trusteeship, which angered Hogan loyalists. According to a 1998 IRB report, Zebrauskas and other reformers claimed they were threatened at a union meeting that February by Dennis McNamara, a former cop who’d worked as William Hogan’s driver. Several witnesses testified that McNamara called the people who’d gone to Washington “scumbags” and said the way to deal with them was not to break car windows and slash tires but to do bodily harm, to “make them limp like they do in the joint.” One witness stated, “When he was done, the room was going crazy….Everybody was clapping and yelling.” Ten days later, according to press reports, a masked gunman fired a bullet into the office of Chris Gunnels, a union steward who’d come from New Jersey to help clean up the trade-show division. Gunnels was in the office, but the bullet hit his computer. Shortly afterward he left town.
Later at the dimly lit Fraternal Order of Eagles on the southwest side, where the reform slate had frequently met to plan strategy, supporters hoisted a few beers. “At least now I’ve got my balls,” one man in dark glasses declared. “I didn’t have them for 22 years.” Another man said, “I think it’s a great day because we had a voice. We lost, but finally we had participation. I’m proud of these guys who stood up and risked their jobs. You’ve got a lot of character.” Greg Zebrauskas said, “It’s a sad day today, but not really. We’ll win this one day.”
