Arts/Review

Mob control of union a shocking read

POWER AND GREED: Inside the
Teamsters Empire of Corruption. By
Allen Friedman and Ted Schwartz. Frank-
lin Watts, 1989. Hardcover, $27.95. Avail-
able through the People’s Co-op Bookstore.

This is a book about crime, where unions
are used as just another racket along with
drug-running, prostitution and bootleg-
ging. Power and Greed is a true story of
Mafia and gangster control of the Interna-
tional Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauf-
feurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of
America.

Co-author Allen Friedman, a_ self-
confessed former con-man, thug and arson-
ist, was for many years a union organizer
and “muscle man” for the Teamsters. He
was, he says, a close associate of the late
Jimmy Hoffa and was personally asso-
ciated with the Mafia and the Cleveland
Syndicate, or “Purple Gang.”

The violence the Teamsters faced during
their first 20 years, from 1902 on, is very
similar to the situation of most other labour
unions of that time, as they struggled to
organize. Why this union become con-
trolled by racketeers and gangsters when
other unions managed to remain more or
less principled is the key question this book
seeks to answer.

Ewan Macoll
death breaks
long tradition

The folk music world lost one of its
most respected and creative’ songwriters
with the death last month of Ewan Macoll
at the age of 74. He died Oct. 22 in London
after suffering complications from heart
surgery.

Known throughout the English-speaking
world for his finely-crafted songs, he began
singing in the 1930s, performing protest
songs in the streets of Manchester with a

group of young unemployed workers -

known as the Red Megaphones.

He filled the half century between that
beginning and his death last month with a
profusion of songs, documentary radio bal-
lads, plays and recordings. -

Perhaps the best-known single contribu-
tor to the creation of a popular culture in
Britain, he was at the centre of the two
cultural movements which emerged in the
1950s, political theatre and the folk song
revival. In both, he sought to bring together
past traditions of Britain and his native Sco-
tland with the current struggles of the work-
ing class and progressive movement.

“I have always functioned on the basis
that folk music is a continuum of the old
and the new, and there has to be that conti-
nuum for it to work,” he wrote in an intro-
duction to one of his many radio ballads.

He added later in a comment in the Sep-
tember, 1965 issue of the U.S. folk song
magazine Sing Out! that “politics is just as
valid a subject for songs as any other kind of
human activity.”

His work includes scores of songs, both
traditional ‘and political-topical, including
Shoals of Herring, Freeborn Man, Dirty
Old Town and The Ballad of John Axton,
many of them published by the Workers
Music Association which he helped found.

A number of the songs were written fora
series of radio documentaries which he pro-
duced with Charlie Parker for the BBC, on
such subjects as the fishing industry and the
workers who built Britain’s famous M-1!
highway. In writing them, he steeped him-
self in the traditions of the people he was

10 « Pacific Tribune, November 20, 1989

Friedman claims that the influx of neigh-
bourhood gangsters marked a major
change in the Teamsters. “Suddenly,” he
says, “there were men involved who had
neither loyalty nor ideology. They began
changing the face of organized labour in
many counties, taking control and becom-
ing extortionists.”

Friedman, who grew up in Cleveland,
was Closely associated from childhood with
the Mafia, which existed among the Italian
community of that period, and the Jewish-

‘run Cleveland Syndicate. Bootlegging was

the mainstay during the era of prohibition
in the Twenties. According to Friedman,
Lucky Luciano, a well-known Mafia leader,
decided in 1928 to take over the bootleg
trade. The key to controlling the trade was
to control the drivers.

. The Mafia decided to take control of
the Teamsters Union, and it would take
more than thirty years for the full influence
of their organization to be comprehended
by the general public.” Friedman reports
that his brother-in-law, Bill Presser, would
eventually become part of the behind-the-
scenes manoeuvering that helped the
underworld control the most powerful
union the U.S. and that he himself would
become a “slugger, and organizer and an
arsonist.” His nephew, Jackie Presser,

. from 1960s con-

EWAN MACOLL ..
cert.

writing about and fashioned new songs

from those roots.

In one case, he took his song, Shoals of
Herring, back to the fisherman about
whom it was written. The man told him:
“Boy, I’ve known that song all my life.”

Although he had long been known
throughout the labour movement in Bri-
tain, the folk song revival of the 1960s
brought Macoll’s music to a wide North
American audience. Probably one of his
best known songs, The First Time Ever I
Saw Your Face, written for his lifelong
partner, singer-songwriter Peggy Seeger,
has been recorded by several well-known
artists, including Gordon Lightfoot, Nana
Moskouri and Roberta Flack.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both
Macoll and Seeger carried on the tradition,
writing songs and producing records and
cassettes for the anti-apartheid movement,
the 1984 British miners’ strike and other
movements. The two also performed on a
number of occasions in this province.

On his death, people throughout Britain,

Scotland and Ireland paid tribute to him ;

and his lifetime of work for the socialist
cultural movement.

Norman Willis, general secretary of the
British Trades Union Congress, said: “His
music celebrated the best of the spirit of

~ British workers, whilst never forgetting the

internationalism of which he was such a
strong part.”
— Sean Griffin

would eventually become Teamsters presi-
dent and his record of “fraud, deceit and

frequent criminal activities would be care- '

fully covered up as he rose to power.”

Friedman worked closely with former
president Jimmy Hoffa, probably the best
known Teamster leader and who eventually
fell victim to a gangland disappearance in
1975. Hoffa organized and conducted his
first strike at age 16 in 1931, as a dock
worker for Kroger food stores. The strike
was successful and Hoffa went on to organ-
ize the inside workers, who later affiliated
with the Teamsters.

This move brought Hoffa into close con-
tact with Cleveland’s organized crime and,
for a short period, ona collision course with
the Mafia, for favouring the Cleveland Syn-

dicate. But the gangsters found the new

organizer knowledgeable about the various
criminal alliances and willing to work with
all of them. Hoffa was reputedly a great
organizer, a spellbinding public speaker and
very popular with the membership. How-
ever, he was a gangster along with the rest of
them, using pension funds to invest in Los
Vegas, murdering the opposition by arson
or bombing, and buying off politicians. —

Richard Nixon was in their power, as we

know from Watergate, and Friedman
claims that he personally carried a suitcase
containing an estimated million dollars to
former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s aide,

Edwin Meese. Former attorney-general -

Robert Kennedy pursued Hoffa with a ven-
geance, and Friedman thinks it was per-
sonal as well as political. He is certain that
the Mafia had something to do with Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy’s murder.

“The rank and file had no sense of the
corruption at the- top,” Friedman writes,
while giving the opinion: “The workers like
a tough man. They want someone who is

willing to stand up to the boss. However, .

the workers can be fired, but the union
organizer cannot.”

There is so much crime and corruption
exposed in this book — not only within the
union but in every facet of life, up to the
government level — that it’s hard to see
how things can keep operating. I have been
associated all my adult life with people who
struggle for justice, people who have been
blacklisted and starved in the fight to estab-
lish real unions for the betterment of work-
ing people, and this book shocked me.

— Jonnie Rankin

RUSSIA HOUSE. By John Le Carre.
Knopf Publishers, 1989

British author John Le Carre has
dominated the spy genre for three
decades. In his own words, he has never
attempted to write a “spy book;” rather,
he has written novels which happen to be
about espionage.

The essential feature of Le Carre’s
works, which transcends the stock in
trade, is balance. Even in the depths of
the Cold War, Le Carre spurned stereo-
types. Master spy George Smiley wasn t
all that different from his Soviet nemesis,
Karla. The Little Drummer Girl, while
essentially pro-Israeli, expressed poig-
nantly the Palestinian view.

In this post-Cold-War period, Le
Carre is now master of the anti-spy. Rus-
sia House has been proclaimed the first
spy novel in the era of perestroika. More
accurately, it is the first expression of new
thinking to permeate a best selling novel
in the West.

Russia House is about reaching
beyond east and west for universal
human values, and how a British indi-
vidualist and a Soviet romantic find in
new thinking an idealism that can not be
satisfied by cold war institutions.

The principal character is British pub-
lisher Barley Blair, a saxophone-playing,
good-for-little, middle-class drunk whose
humanity grows on you until, by the end,
he has become a genuine hero.

His counterpart is a Soviet nuclear
scientist who has dispelled cold war
myths about the Soviet military threat by
writing the truth about the actual dismal
state of affairs of the Soviet arsenal, and
he wants Blair to publish it in the inter-
ests of ending the arms race.

The scientist is abetted by a Soviet
woman who, naturally enough, becomes

Russia House a ‘new
thinking’ spy novel

the object of Barley’s internationalism.

All in their individual ways are loyal to
their countries and their established
values. But each increasingly finds those
values contradicted by the respective
power structures.

This triangle poses a problem to
Western intelligence: what to do with a
manuscript which, by telling the truth,
undermines Star Wars and countless
other mad U.S. schemes justified by the
hoax-of Soviet military superiority?

Barley is pressed into service to ascer-
tain the authenticity of the manuscript
— and, of course, to get more informa-
tion useful to the western military. He
proceeds to do so, until he realizes that
the Soviets will be sacrificed to the
advantage of the Pentagon. Since. this
would breach Barley’s trust with the
scientist and his Russian lover, he makes
a choice which perhaps Le Carre is offer-
ing to all of us.

The story line is augmented by bril-
liant descriptive passages of Moscow and
Leningrad. At one point after describing
in detail the Odessa Hotel, Le Carre con-
trasts perceptively the old building with
the new politics, “... the reconstruction
can not yet be seen. It is still strictly in the
audio stage.”

It has been reported that a crew is
already in Moscow filming the movie
version, and that Sean Connery will take
the role of Barley Blair. If the film cap-
tures any of Barley’s spirit, or of the
texture of old and new thinking that Le
Carre has woven, it will be great cinema.

(Russia House is available only in
cloth for $28, and it’s hard to get other-
wise. The main branch of the Vancouver
Public Library reports an eight-week
queue on the reservation list. The paper-
back edition is expected in the new year.)

— Fred Wilson __