Independent Investigator's 50/50 and Special Request Report

2004-11-0550-50RuleandRequestSystem(4)

Independent Investigator’s Report Concerning Shop Steward Assignments obtained by LU 608 member John Corrigan

2004-06-29 Shop Steward Corrigan Ocr

Report To The General President

Exhibit: A, F, H, K, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V
Report to the General President

Thomassen Shocked by Guilty Verdicts

Regularly Schedule Delegate Body Meeting-- In the first address to the full delegate body since the April 27, bribery conviction of EST Michael Forde and local 608 business agent Martin Devereaux, President Peter Thomassen informed the delegates as to the effect the conviction will have on council operations and outlined the procedures that will be followed in the wake of the verdict.

President Thomassen expressed his surprise at the guilty verdict and stated that "even to those people who attended the trial and listened to the testimony, the guilty verdicts were astounding and many felt were unsupported by the evidence". Thomassen told the delegates he attended the trial daily and was "shocked at the verdict", citing the fact that there was "no witness at the trial who admitted to actually passing a cash bribe to Mike Forde or Martin Devereaux".

Thomassen then told the delegates that in light of the jury’s guilty verdict, members have asked if and when EST Forde and business agent Devereaux must relinquish their elected positions as union officials and be relived of their official duties.

Thomassen said that the council would follow the by-laws and comply with all federal labor laws. He informed the delegates that under Section 504 of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, union officials "convicted by a jury trial can continue to hold their offices until such date as they are sentenced". In this case Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Atlas has set a date for June 30, at which time he will decide whether to throw out the jury’s verdicts or impose sentence. He also told the delegates that he has been in contact with General President Doug McCarron and the District Council has his full support regarding this matter.

President Thomassen went on to say, "if Justice Jeffrey Atlas does impose sentence, then under Section 9(C) of the district council by-laws he will immediately become Executive Secretary- Treasurer Protem and the Vice-President shall become President Protem, until such time as an election may be held".

Carpenters EST Guilty in Union-Bribe Probe

By BARBARA ROSS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The Executive-Secretary Treasurer of the New York District Council of Carpenters and a business agent for one of its locals were convicted yesterday of taking a bribe from a mob-run firm to let it use nonunion workers.

After a day of deliberations, a Manhattan jury convicted council boss Michael Forde and Local 608 agent Thomas Devereaux of accepting $10,000 in cash as part of a $50,000 promised bribe. The payment was made by a defunct construction company owned by Sean Richard in connection with renovations at the Park Central Hotel in midtown.

Richard, the former son-in-law of the imprisoned boss of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family, was the key prosecution witness.

Forde, 50, of Woodside, Queens, and Devereaux, 53, of Cresskill, N.J., face anywhere from probation to seven years behind bars when they are sentenced by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Atlas on June 30.

They were among 38 people and 11 companies indicted on racketeering charges in September 2000 after a three-year probe by the Manhattan district attorney's office and the NYPD into mob-controlled contractors.

Richard, 39, said he put $10,000 cash in an envelope and gave it to Tony Rucereto to give to the union officials over a beer in Hooters, a restaurant across from the hotel on Seventh Ave.

Forde, who was elected head of the 25,000-member district council in 1999 after his predecessor was convicted of corruption charges, will have to relinquish his post because of the conviction.

Carpenter Chief Nailed

Sleaze in the Woodwork

by Tom Robbins

When a Manhattan jury last week found carpenters union head Michael Forde and another union official guilty of receiving a bribe, it was the second corruption conviction in a row for the top official of the city's 25,000-member carpenters union. Forde, the $216,000-a-year chief of the New York District Council of Carpenters, won election in 1999, promising to break with the bad old ways associated with his predecessor, Frederick Devine, who was found guilty of stealing union funds in 1998.

The charges against Forde and union business representative Martin Devereaux stemmed from the 1998 renovation of the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue ("A Mob Soprano Sings," Voice, April 21-27, 2004). In March of that year—the same month Devine was convicted for misappropriating more than $200,000 of union funds—Forde and Devereaux visited the hotel and met with mob-tied contractors Sean Richard and Anthony Rucereto. In testimony at the trial last month, Rucereto stated that, a few days later, he shared a "very cordial lunch" with Forde and Devereaux at a restaurant near the hotel.

"I asked Mike to step outside," said Rucereto. There, he told Forde he'd been instructed by Richard to offer him $50,000 to ignore contract violations at the job site. "Give us some good men," Rucereto said. Forde "didn't say a word," Rucereto testified. "He was stone cold." Back inside the restaurant, however, Rucereto said that Forde told him to just make sure there were no non-union men on the job. No witness admitted actually passing cash to Forde or Devereaux, but tapes and other testimony at the trial showed they were told of widespread problems at the job site.

Cutting down on non-union construction jobs was a major part of Forde's platform and many members were hoping he'd make good on the pledge. But the corruption charges, filed four years ago by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, hung over the district council like a cloud, and last week several rank-and-file members expressed dismay. "It doesn't seem like it's ever going to change," said a carpenter who had supported Forde. "Whoever you put in there gets mixed up in that stuff."

As of last week, Forde, 49, was still at his desk at union headquarters at 395 Hudson Street. A union spokesperson said Forde would remain in office "at least" until his sentencing on June 30. Forde and Devereaux face up to 25 years in prison.

A Mob Soprano Sings

Tough guys, cold cash, and an old hotel: bribery charges haunt carpenters' chief
by Tom Robbins The Village Voice

Were the producers of The Sopranos in the courtroom at 100 Centre Street last week when a mob songbird named Sean Richard took the stand? If not, they missed some terrific plot material: a strutting, puffed-up wiseguy with an ego the size of South Orange, as well as some not-so-funny real-life illustrations of the human cost of doing business, Mafia-style, that the HBO series could use to bring it back to earth.

Richard, 39, is a former crown prince in the gang that inspired Tony Soprano's crew. He is the ex-husband of the daughter of John Riggi, the imprisoned boss of the DeCavalcante crime family, the bumbling New Jersey-based gang that is a Class B auxiliary for New York's five Cosa Nostra families. Richard was in court to tell about how he allegedly bribed Michael Forde, the man who heads New York's carpenters' union, offering him and a top aide $50,000 to look the other way so that Richard's construction firm could more profitably employ non-union labor in the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue.

Richard's allegations, made more than four years ago, are a dagger to the heart of the carpenters' union leadership. Forde was elected head of the 25,000-member New York District Council of Carpenters in 1999 after his predecessor was convicted on his own corruption charges. Forde has vigorously denied that he took a bribe and says he has pressed reforms in the union and won significant contract raises. If convicted, he will have to give up his post.

Just before noon on Thursday, Richard entered Part 33 of Manhattan Criminal Court, Judge Jeffrey Atlas presiding. He walked with shoulders back and chest high, bedecked in a black double-breasted suit and a bright-red tie. In the witness box, he cupped his hands on the rail before him and assumed an angelic posture and tone of voice, his deep-set eyes darting around the room.

He was raised in the Bronx, he said, and later moved to New Jersey, where he met Sara Riggi in 1996. They married a year later. He first met his new father-in-law on a prison visit with his wife and found the man "a fascinating individual." He launched a construction business, with Sara, using her illustrious maiden name, as president. His new connections allowed him to gobble up so much work that someone left a ham on his doorstep, a mob warning that he was being a hog.

He then shifted across the river to Manhattan, where, with the backing and partnership of the Luchese crime family, he was allowed to win a rigged bid to renovate the old Park Central, an aging 30-story hotel already renowned in underworld lore as the place where World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein was fatally plugged. At $5 million it was Richard's biggest job yet, but his profits depended on doing it without paying union-scale wages and benefits.

The job commenced in early March 1998. A few days later, around St. Patrick's Day, he believed, a pair of carpenters' officials—Forde, then president of Local 608, the largest of the city's locals, along with union business agent Martin Devereaux—strolled into the hotel. They were friendly and polite, he said, and suggested that since he was based in New Jersey he should acquire a special contract known as an "international agreement" from the union's Washington headquarters, one that would allow him to use more of his own New Jersey-based workers. Perceiving that such a contract would provide useful cover for his non-union project, he used one of his father-in-law's pals to help obtain one. He then instructed a partner, Anthony Rucereto, to set up a meeting with Forde and Devereaux where he could reward them for their advice and pay them to steer clear of the project.

The meeting took place sometime in April at the Hooters restaurant across the street from the hotel. Richard said he gave Rucereto an envelope containing $10,000 to give the officials as a down payment on the bribe. As he told the story, the four men took a table by the window, where they each ordered a beer. He made a special point of recalling a remark by Forde that he "really shouldn't be having a beer because the union was cracking down on drinking on the job."

Other than that, however, Richard recalled few specifics. Although he never saw any money change hands, he said, when they left the restaurant Rucereto no longer had the envelope.

A couple of weeks later, Devereaux dispatched a shop steward to the site. He was "a young guy who seemed a little nervous," Richard said, but who followed orders to stay away from the non-union workers on the upper floors. All went well until the morning of Friday, June 19, 1998, when a group of troubleshooters from the District Council, specially deputized to smoke out non-union jobs, descended on the project, armed with video cameras and walkie-talkies. The group herded all the carpenters on the job into the lobby, where the investigators took names. There were 27 workers present, they later reported, just six of them union members.

Summoned to the site, Forde and Devereaux arrived together. According to testimony later given by Patrick O'Neill, the official who led the raid, Devereaux acknowledged he had been to the job four or five times, but he said he didn't want anything to do with it because it was being run by "gangster types."

An irate Richard immediately faxed a letter to the president of the international carpenters' union, complaining that the raiders had behaved like "storm troopers." He asked that O'Neill be barred from dealing with his firm, since "we have been dealing with Michael Ford [sic], president of Local 608, [with] whom we are in good standing."

Grilled on cross-examination by defense attorneys Dino Lombardi and Michael Dowd, Richard admitted that he had embarked on a Soprano-esque orgy of consumption around that time. While his wife was giving birth to two daughters, he spent thousands of dollars on cocaine, gambling, and strippers. He bought a $4,000 bracelet for a girlfriend, and though he recalled the bracelet, he couldn't be sure of the girlfriend because he was seeing "a couple of women at the time." He was a regular at the Plaza's Oak Room, where he consumed cold seafood and "sang a Sinatra tune or two" with the piano player.

The party ended only after he got a formal notice from the district attorney in the late summer of 1999 informing him that detectives had been listening to his cell phone conversations for more than a year. He went to the authorities with an offer: "I can give you names on a silver platter," he told the D.A. He was placed in the witness protection program, where the government has spent an estimated $500,000 on his needs, according to a figure supplied at the trial by prosecutors.

Richard was followed on the stand by Vincent McIntyre, the nervous shop steward sent to the Park Central. Like Richard, McIntyre is also from the Bronx, but there the similarities ended. In a soft voice, his eyes shyly dropping to the floor between questions, McIntyre explained that he had never been a shop steward, and had received no training for the post before Devereaux sent him to the hotel. On the job, when he tried to go upstairs to see if workers had union cards, some tough men brusquely ordered him to "get back downstairs." He stayed in the lobby, where he filled out the shop steward reports as best he could, listing the half-dozen workers who had union cards. Devereaux showed up on the job about once a week, but when McIntyre told the business agent about the problems, he testified, Devereaux assured him "he would take care of it," and to just hold on to the reports for the time being. When O'Neill and the union's raiders arrived in June, he retrieved the steward reports from his knapsack, where he had stuffed them.

There was no witness protection program for McIntyre, however. A carpenter for eight years, he left the union after the incident and today works as a doorman. The trial continues this week.