Submitted by Carl Horowitz
Readers of Union Corruption Update know that the New York City District Council of Carpenters and member locals have been plagued by corruption - and prosecutions. So far at least nine defendants have copped a plea following a lengthy federal probe. Ousted District boss Michael Forde pleaded guilty late in July to racketeering and faces a 10-year sentence. A former Carpenters Local 608 steward, Michael Brennan , pleaded guilty to bribery-related charges that month, as did an ex-president of that local, John Greaney. Less known perhaps is that these and other Carpenters officials allegedly lined their pockets with key help from developer Joseph Olivieri [4]. When Olivieri goes on trial in October for conspiracy, bribery and perjury, he's sure to face tough questions about his reported go-between role for the union and the Genovese crime family.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
New York Contractor Close to Mob, Carpenters Set for Trial
Monday, August 23, 2010
Feds: Construction Bigwig a Longtime Labor Racketeer
By Jerry Capeci
Even if you've never heard of Joseph Olivieri, after a quick glance, you get the idea that he's a pretty important guy in the construction industry. He's the executive director of the city's largest organization of contractors, the Association of Wall Ceiling & Carpentry Industries, which is more than 200 strong. He's also the lead columnist for the WC&C house organ, Off The Wall.
But when you look below the surface, according to the feds, Olivieri is even more powerful than he seems at first blush. And, they say, he has quietly wielded that clout since the 1990s, working for himself, the powerful Genovese crime family and corrupt union leaders who represent 20,000 carpenters in 11 different locals.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
The Carpenters' Union Sell-Out
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| Corrupt Carpenter Boss Forde leaves court after making plea. |
Carpenters' head cheats another generation of members
By Tom RobbinsThe former leader of the city's 20,000 union carpenters stood up in court last week and confessed to a lie that goes back 16 years. Michael Forde, 55, wore a black suit for his appearance in federal court on Pearl Street. This was appropriate attire for someone giving his own eulogy as a union man.
Since at least 1994, he admitted, he had been conning his members, taking a steady stream of payoffs from contractors in exchange for letting them cheat carpenters out of their hard-won benefits.
He read his plea from a piece of paper he held in his hand. "I, along with other union officials," he said, "accepted bribes in the form of cash payments from certain contractors." He added that when he took the bribes, he knew he was violating a consent decree issued by a judge in the same courthouse. The decree was supposed to represent the sworn agreement by Forde and other union leaders to shun the mobsters and crooks who have long preyed on the New York City District Council of Carpenters, making it one of the Mafia's happiest hunting grounds in the city's cash-rich construction industry.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Ex-carpenters union boss Michael Forde pleads guilty to racketeering charges; faces 10 years
Updated: Thursday, July 29th 2010
Nailed!
The drinking-and-drugging ex-boss of the city's carpenters union copped a plea to corruption charges Wednesday and is looking at nine years in federal lockup.
Michael Forde, 56, admitted selling out his membership by taking bribes from contractors, stealing union money - and then lying about it.
He cut a deal with prosecutors after a parade of lower-level union officials sold him out, including his former right-hand man.
"I along with other union officials accepted bribes including cash payments from contractors," Forde said in a loud, clear voice before a Manhattan federal magistrate.
"I made efforts to obstruct investigation into my conduct."
Forde was one of the city's most politically powerful labor leaders - and mugged for pictures with Mayor Bloomberg right before he was indicted.
Prosecutors said he used his position with the District Council of Carpenters to line his pockets at the expense of his 25,000 members.
He took thousands from contractors to look the other way when they hired illegal aliens, paid non-union wages and withheld payment to union benefit funds.
Forde pleaded guilty to bribery, racketeering and perjury - charges that carry up to 20 years.
He'll likely get 9-to-11-1/4 years as part of his cooperation agreement with the U.S. attorney's office, and has to pay back $100,000.
"Forde has admitted his guilt and it's about time," said dissident carpenter and blogger John Musumeci.
"But they still need to clean house in the District Council. Too many of Forde's cronies are still working there."
Forde was among 10 union heavies indicted a year ago.
Seven have already pleaded guilty, including reputed Luchese crime family associate Finbar O'Neill.
Reputed Genovese soldier Joseph Olivieri is scheduled for trial.
Feds who raided the District Council's headquarters found pills and a stun gun. Seven of the suspects tested positive for drugs.
Forde had pot and cocaine in his system and said in court that he's recovering from a booze and drug problem.
He was convicted of bribery in 2004, but the state court verdict was tossed out and he was acquitted at a 2008 mistrial.
Since he was busted last year, there's been a massive shakeup at the union.
His second-in-command resigned amid revelations of reckless spending of dues on steak dinners, junkets and parties.
More criminal charges could be coming, said Dennis Walsh, a mob-fighting ex-prosecutor appointed as a review officer last month.
"The union still has significant problems and, above all, needs to have its infrastructure, policies and procedures reconfigured," Walsh said.
BY Brain Kates and Scott Shifrel
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Michael Brennan, steward for mobbed-up carpenters union, pleads guilty
BY Robert Gearty
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
A shop steward for the mobbed-up carpenters union pleaded guilty Tuesday to letting a contractor-turned-informant defraud the union in exchange for $100,000 in bribes.
Michael Brennan was indicted last August on federal racketeering charges, as were District Council of Carpenters head Michael Forde and eight others.
Brennan is the fourth shop steward to plead guilty in the case. Drywall contractor Finbar O'Neill, a reputed Luchese crime family associate, has also pleaded guilty.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Forde Cohort Pleads Guilty To Racketeering
Michael Brennan was among ten people named in a 29-count indictment on August 5, 2009 with stealing millions from the union and its benefit fund and led to the ouster of powerful carpenter labor leader Michael Forde, who tested positive for coke and pot after he was busted.
Forde the indicted head of the New York City District Council of Carpenters and his two union paid co-conspirators, John Greaney, 49, a business manager and president of UBC Local 608, and Brian Hayes, 38, a business agent and trustee of Local 608, were fired from office August 12, 2009 by International Brotherhood of Carpenters General President Douglas McCarron.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Official: Exec's corruption plea won't impact Dutton development project
By Michael Valkys
Poughkeepsie Journal
Developers who want to revitalize the vacant A.C. Dutton Lumber Corp. site said their plans will not be affected by the conviction of a former company principal on federal corruption charges unrelated to the City of Poughkeepsie project.
Finbar O'Neill, described as a founder of New Jersey-based The O'Neill Group and husband of the company's chief executive officer, pleaded guilty May 20 in federal court in Manhattan to conspiracy to make unlawful payments to union representatives and making unlawful payments to union representatives and officers.
The plea was part of a federal probe into corruption involving New York City's carpenters' union. None of the charges against Finbar O'Neill were related to the Dutton project.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Developer pleads guilty of bribery
BY MICHAEL GARTLAND
Hackensack-based developer Finbar O'Neill has pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges, according to court records obtained Monday by The Record.
O'Neill, a native of Northern Ireland and a Paramus resident, pleaded guilty last month and is scheduled for sentencing on Nov. 19 before Judge Victor Marrero in the Southern District of New York.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Carpenters: The Mob's Union
Two decades later, the feds are still trying to clean up carpenters' dirt
By Tom Robbins
Union carpenters built the soaring federal courthouse on Pearl Street near Chinatown, and last week, a few of them were back to see justice done at their old job site. "We did nice work," said Billy Walsh, running his hand along a smooth maple rail separating the gallery from the business end of a courtroom on the ninth floor.
If only his union had done as well. Walsh, a carpenter for 24 years, was awaiting a hearing in the case of U.S. v. District Council of New York City of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. While he and his fellow nail-bangers were building the new courthouse floor by floor in the early '90s, federal attorneys were building a case against their union, defendant by defendant. Their civil racketeering complaint alleged that the council was under the mob's thumb, its leaders routinely shortchanging their members in exchange for bribes from employers, many of whom took their marching orders from the Mafia.
The complaint cited a laundry list of past corruption and violence, including a former council president who disappeared in 1982 while on trial, his wallet found floating near the Throgs Neck Bridge. The lawsuit asked that an outside monitor be named to ride herd on the union. The goal, the government said, was to return democracy to the members, purge corrupt officials, and shine a spotlight bright enough to keep the mob at bay.
That was in the fall of 1990. On Thursday afternoon, Walsh and a half-dozen other carpenters watched as District Judge Charles Haight considered the government's latest request for yet another monitor—the fifth so far—to try again to fix the council.
This is the mob version of Dickens's Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and Haight has had it on his docket from the start. "I have to say it is a little disappointing, a little sad," the judge said. "The original action in this case was filed 20 years ago, and here we are still trying to get our arms around continued corruption and dishonest people in the District Council." The judge talked about how hard so many, including himself, had worked with little to show for it. "It has been something of a disgrace," he said.
There is plenty of that to go around. As he spoke, a contractor named Finbar O'Neill was at that very moment standing before a different judge upstairs in Courtroom 20B, admitting that he had spent years bribing Michael Forde, (pictured right) who ran the District Council for 10 years until his own indictment last summer. The bribes, O'Neill said, were in exchange for a free hand to cheat Forde's members out of the wages and benefits due them under their contract. "This had the result," O'Neill explained, "of substantial cost savings."
O'Neill was once one of the city's most successful drywall contractors. He built offices, schools, and fashionable restaurants, while shelling out five-figure donations to favored politicians. Along the way, he became friendly with Forde, the jowly former head of the city's largest carpenters local. Under rules passed after the government's lawsuit, Forde was elected by popular vote in 2000 to head the District Council. He was re-elected twice more, if that can count toward a reform achievement.
O'Neill said he began paying Forde in 1994, doling out $5,000 to $7,500 three or four times a year. The chain went all the way to the top. In the late 1990s, O'Neill was picked up on police wiretaps regularly consulting with a soldier in the Lucchese crime family. They spoke in Sopranos-style code: "How did we do on that other thing?" O'Neill is heard asking in a 1998 exchange. "When I see you, I'll talk to you," his mob liaison responds.
The builder told the judge that he quit the business in 1999 but became "a mentor of sorts" to a contractor named James Murray, who owned a large company called On Par. The tutoring included a how-to on bribery. O'Neill said that between 1997 and 2004, he delivered more than $100,000 in cash to Forde on Murray's behalf.
The money was for the same insurance policy he'd purchased for himself: "To avoid scrutiny and sanctions by the carpenters union," said O'Neill, and to "save substantial sums of money by hiring nonunion labor and paying sub-union wages."
After his election, Forde brought Murray around to meet his business agents at the District Council. "Guys, this is James Murray," Forde announced, according to one who heard the speech. "He's an up-and-coming contractor, and I want you to help him any way you can."
Murray's education also included his own introduction to the mob. He grew close to Joseph "Rudy" Olivieri, director of the city's largest contractors' association, the Wall-Ceiling & Carpentry Industries of New York. Murray loaned Olivieri $730,000, according to prosecutors, and gave him lucrative work on his projects. Olivieri took his own orders from mob higher-ups. In 2000, an FBI agent sitting in a Bronx bar overheard Olivieri and Louis Moscatiello, a Genovese crime family official charged with overseeing his group's construction rackets: "Forde wants somebody," Moscatiello said, in apparent reference to the union chief. "Get it done as fast as possible."
Meanwhile, Forde regularly assured Judge Haight that the council was doing everything it could to stamp out corruption. "No union does as much as the District Council," his representatives defiantly claimed over and over. But when monitor number three, a former federal prosecutor named Walter Mack, reported that Murray and other contractors were cheating the union out of millions in wages and benefit payments right under the nose of Forde's shop stewards, the council leader grew incensed. He dispatched his second-in-command, a former dockbuilder named Pete Thomassen, (pictured left) to tell the judge that Mack was too difficult and costly and that the council wanted to exercise its right to remove him. Haight agreed, and Mack was replaced.
Last August, the feds indicted Olivieri, O'Neill, and Forde. He was the fourth council chief in a row to be charged with corruption. Most of the evidence came from Murray, who cut his own deal after he was caught stealing more than $10 million from the union. To get to Murray, the feds had simply followed the leads provided by Walter Mack's original investigation, the one Forde had tried to shut down.
Things were even more out of control at the union than anyone thought. At his arrest, Forde flunked the drug test, testing positive for coke and pot. After the international union ordered the council into trusteeship, it found rampant drug use. One council official (Thomassen's Son) shaved his head, his eyebrows, even his eyelashes in an apparent effort to beat new mandatory tests. Thomassen, Forde's number two, resigned this month, amid evidence that tens of thousands of dollars in dues money went for posh restaurants and resorts.
In Judge Haight's courtroom on Thursday, assistant U.S. attorney Ben Torrance rose to ask the judge to sign off on the latest watchdog for the union, a former state organized crime prosecutor named Dennis Walsh. This Walsh is no relation to Billy the carpenter, but he knows the territory, having spent several years in the mid '90s assisting monitor number two when he won the admiration of many rank-and-filers.
Haight had Walsh detail his experience. Then he asked the carpenters in the gallery if they wanted to say anything. Billy Walsh passed, but beside him, a member named Mike Bilello, a carpenter since 1975, rose and stepped past the maple rail to speak at the podium.
"I think this is our last chance," said Bilello. "We've been going through this for 20 years. We need something drastic."
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Exclusive: Plea Agreement Finbar O'Neill
Exclusive...Finbar O'Neill, the contractor prosecutors accused of delivering cash payments to indicted carpenter boss Michael Forde, pleaded guilty on May 20, to making payments to Forde, in excess of $100,000 over a ten-year period, on behalf of On Par and KAFCI in exchange for appointment of shop stewards who would permit cash payments to carpenters and other favorable treatment. Below is the transcript of the court plea.
o'Neill Plea
Friday, May 21, 2010
Contractor O’Neill Pleas Guilty To Making Payments To Indicted Carpenter Boss Forde
Exclusive...Finbar O'Neill, the contractor prosecutors accused of delivering cash payments to indicted carpenter boss Michael Forde, pleaded guilty yesterday to making payments to Forde, in excess of $100,000 over a ten-year period, on behalf of On Par and KAFCI in exchange for appointment of shop stewards who would permit cash payments to carpenters and other favorable treatment (see information).
On Par Contracting Corporation, was one of the city's busiest construction firms, owned by contractor James Murray. Murray went on the lam in Ireland after he was indicted on federal fraud and embezzlement charges in 2006.
Court records show he was freed on $8 million bond in November 2008 and began plea bargain negotiations with Assistant Manhattan U.S. Attorney Lisa Zornberg, who is prosecuting Forde.
Sources say On Par is one of six unnamed companies that paid bribes to Forde and his cohorts. "It appears Murray may be Contractor No. 1, the unindicted co-conspirator with the deepest involvement in the bribery scheme."
Murray was taught by the best: His first boss in the business was another politically active builder and a reputed Luchese crime family associate, named Finbar O'Neill, who controlled KAFCI, along with Murray, has twice pleaded guilty to his own schemes.
Murray and O'Neill's first company was a wallboard-hanging outfit called K&F Construction. The company was infamous for paying its workers by piece-rate, in violation of the union contract.
Carpenters appropriately renamed K&F as "Kick'em & Fuck'em."
After O'Neill's criminal problems drew heat, Murray went out on his own, operating out of the same Bronx building where O'Neill had been based. The new company, On Par, quickly landed many of the biggest jobs, including the massive conversion of the old office building at 63 Wall Street. It also became notorious for preferring to pay its employees in untraceable cash.
That was the conclusion of Walter Mack, the former court-appointed monitor whose job, thanks to a 20-year-old consent decree, was to check up on the union's operations. "On Par habitually paid carpenters in cash," wrote Mack in a 2005 memo, thus "cheating the district council's benefit funds of well over $10 million that I have been able to identify."
Mack also noted that Murray was assisted by a team of hand-picked union shop stewards who cleverly manipulated the union's appointment process. The designated stewards conveniently neglected to list dozens of union employees on required reports for the union.
It has been well documented by Mack that, District Council Carpenter bosses Mike Forde, Pete Thomassen and Dennis Sheil, "engaged in, at least, willful ignorance" of the corrupt conduct by companies like Tri-Built and On Par, which are believed to be two of the six unnamed contractors in the indictment and were notorious among carpenters as "cash" companies, yet permitted to work corrupt for years.
Dennis Sheil retired on December 31, 2009
Pete Thomassen, (aka, "Sneaky Pete") the much criticized asssistant supervisor, and last man standing in Mike Forde's disgraced “Unity Team," suddenly resigned on Thursday May 6.
Thomassen, the former district council president, never once informed the delegate body or membership about the revelations of corruption that Mack discovered and reported on taking place at the district council.
O’Neill was indicted with Forde and nine others on August 5, 2009. The 29-count indictment alleges Michael Forde, and nine others were involved in a scheme in which $1 million in bribes and gifts changed hands.
Finbar O’Neill was involved in the scheme in which prosecutors say, union officials falsified reports and turned a blind eye as contractors paid workers below the union rate, hired non-union labor at union only job sites, and skipped out on payments to the unions’ benefits funds.
The benefit funds provide insurance as well as money for retirement for union members.
O’Neill is accused of delivering bribes to Michael Forde and pleaded in Manhattan Federal Court, faces five years in prison.
On May 3, Page Six reported that, BRIAN CARSON and JOHN STAMBERGER, the two shop stewards charged in the August 5, 2009 indictment along with Forde and others, has also resulted in guilty pleas.
Indicted Aug. 5 were Mr. Forde, the head of the Carpenters Union District Council in New York City; John Greaney, business manager and president of Carpenters Local 608; Brian Hayes, a business agent and Local 608 officer; Mr. Brennan, Brian Carson, Joseph Ruocco, John Stamberger, and Michael Vivenzo, shop stewards; and Mr. Olivieri, a benefits fund trustee and the executive director of the Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries of New York, a trade group representing unionized contractors and Finbar O’Neill who prosecutors accused of helping to deliver cash to Mr. Forde.
