Married to the Mob.

'Can you imagine? Planned Parenthood." Jimmy Hoffa Jr. is eating a thick 10-ounce cheeseburger at Carl's Chop House in a run-down section of Detroit just blocks from his Teamster offices, lamenting the prior affiliation of Bill Hamilton, a top aide to Teamster president Ron Carey. "This guy is more adept at putting condoms on bananas than representing Teamster families," he says. Just a few yards away sit a group of about ten weathered-looking guys in jeans and shiny union jackets -- exactly the union rank-and-file that Hoffa argues Carey and his liberal aides don't represent. "He's tied himself to every wacko left-wing group around," complains Hoffa.

Beefy and pleasant, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. is what one labor observer calls "the Pillsbury Doughboy of the union movement." He's big and not particularly sharp, a former Michigan State football player who is as animated discussing his beloved Detroit Lions as he is talking about the issues roiling the Teamsters union that his father so famously built. But his attitudes are in sympathy with those of his union's blue-collar rank-and-file; he's a social conservative (pro-life and a long-time member of the National Rifle Association) who is more interested in building a muscular union than in forming grand left-wing alliances. That is why Jimmy Hoffa Jr. last year became the catalyst for a burgeoning Teamster scandal with far-reaching implications not just for the union, but for the nation's politics.

In last year's Teamster vote, the Carey re-election campaign was so frightened by Hoffa's strength -- fueled partly by his name, redolent of corruption, but also of the Teamsters' glory years --that it illegally raided the union treasury of hundreds of thousands of dollars to help beat him. At stake was not just Carey's posh set-up at the Teamsters' "marble palace" in Washington, D.C., but also a new vision of unionism and the future of John Sweeney's aggressive, hard-Left AFL-CIO. Carey - Sweeney unionism seeks to create a broad left-wing political movement embracing feminists, environmentalists, gays, and other interests not likely to be represented at Carl's Chop House. Indeed, the current scandal is a lesson in what happens when radical politics meets corrupt unionism -- with an assist from the most ethical Administration ever.

Ron Carey's reputation as a union reformer -- which has now been completely shredded -- was first made by Steven Brill's 1978 book The Teamsters. Brill portrayed Carey as practically the only clean Teamster, a former UPS driver living in a house he shared with his father in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York. Insofar as he had politics, they were working-class conservative. Carey was soon adopted by liberal editorialists as the Great White Hope of the Teamsters. When he won election in 1991, he took a sharp turn left. He hired aggressive Left-wing staff from the Mineworkers union and from the ranks of former campus radicals. Veterans of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are all over the fundraising scandal that first prompted a federal election official to order a new Teamster election, then to disqualify Carey from running in it.

Carey also allied himself with John Sweeney, then the president of the Service Employees International Union, who was a major player in a coup planned against Lane Kirkland's traditional, anti-Communist leadership of the AFL-CIO. Richard Trumka of the Mineworkers and Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) masterminded the plan to deliver the AFL-CIO over to the wing of the union movement dominated by the remnants of the anti-anti-Communist New Left. In June 1995 Kirkland stepped down in favor of his protege Tom Donahue, a traditional Catholic Democrat who represented at least a step to the Left. The plotters could have been satisfied with Donahue, but they realized that Sweeney had the votes to win. In October 1995 he knocked off Donahue, effecting a revolution in the politics of the AFL-CIO.

Carey and Sweeney are ostensibly union reformers, but there has always been a disconcerting whiff of the mob about them. Carey's old Local 804 in New York City has, according to published reports, been linked to organized crime. Did that change under Carey? "The mob doesn't give up a local to a reformer without a serious fight," says one union watcher. "There was no fight." Carey has consistently been given a clean bill of health by the Federal Government, but there is by now a long litany of untoward circumstance and shady characters in his record: in 1975 he testified on behalf of a gangster indicted in a loan-shark scheme; one of his close aides was indicted in 1987 for investing the local's funds in a mob pension scheme (Carey signed the checks); a Luchese crime-family boss turned government informer reportedly fingered him as a mob asset; and it turns out Carey owns several Florida condominiums that strike critics as beyond his supposedly modest means.

The same mob informant who fingered Carey -- Alphonse D'Arco, considered a credible source by the Federal Government in other cases -- also named Sweeney's old SEIU Local 32B-32J as a mob-influenced outfit. Sweeney left the local in 1981 to take over the SEIU national presidency. But, as New York magazine has reported, he continued to draw a salary from the local -- a practice called "double dipping," which reformers loathe -- until his election as AFL-CIO president in 1995. Approving Sweeney's salary, according to New York, was his hand-picked successor, Gus Bevona, whose $400,000 salary has been a monument to union abuse. These associations may have given Sweeney a crucial advantage in the AFL-CIO race over the left wing's ideal candidate, Richard Trumka. In addition to liberals, Sweeney could count on the support of dinosaurs like Edward Hanley of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers and the notorious Laborers union president, Arthur Coia. "I think the Left supported Sweeney," says one union watcher, "because they knew he could get the support of some mobbed-up unions."

The Left rejoiced when Sweeney knocked off Donahue, smelling a chance to capture the unions that it had not had since before the Vietnam War. Steven Fraser, an editor at Houghton-Mifflin and former campus radical, has spearheaded an effort to promote cooperation between labor and the intellectuals, on the model of 1930s union politics. Last year, Fraser published Sweeney's book, America Needs a Raise, and organized a "teach-in" at Columbia University where Sweeney and other union leaders shared a podium with such stars of the Left as Betty Friedan and Eric Foner. Sweeney's staff, in turn, is heavily dependent on long-time radicals. "The AFL-CIO is dominated at the department level by an SDS alumni association," says a former union official. "That's where Sweeney gets his ideas from. That's his base."

The Clinton Administration was a big beneficiary of labor's new leadership. The AFL-CIO PAC gave the Democrats $1.1 million in direct contributions in 1996 ($14,000 went to the GOP). In a sharp turnabout from the days when the Teamsters endorsed Republicans, Carey began dumping millions of dollars into the Democratic Party --$2.5 million from the Teamsters PAC in 1996 alone. As one Teamster watcher says, "Without a change in membership, the union leadership went from Reagan Democrat to ultra-liberal." Indeed, a symbiotic relationship developed between the Teamsters and the Clinton Administration that probably helped entice Carey's campaign into its fund-swapping scheme.

CAREY became close to top White House aide Harold Ickes, whose law firm has done work for New York locals fighting charges of mob influence. Before becoming White House counsel, Charles Ruff was hired by the Teamsters, seemingly to help quash rumors of Carey's mob connections. (To work on the case, Ruff hired the private investigation firm of Palladino and Sutherland, which did bimbo-suppression work for Clinton in 1992.) And top Clinton campaign official Terry McAuliffe allegedly was in on last year's money-laundering plans. Meanwhile, Carey had seen how the Teamsters' Independent Review Board and the Justice Department ignored his tainted associations over the years, and surely he noticed how Justice went easy on big Democratic donor Arthur Coia. "These guys believed they controlled the cops," explains one GOP congressional staffer.

They could be forgiven for having similar misapprehensions about the press. Carey's old associations have hit the papers, but the overall tone of the coverage has always been positive -- even when he was disqualified from next year's election because of his misappropriation of union funds. The Washington Post reported that "outside of the campaign-finance scandal, Carey has been a singularly effective fighter against corruption." A New York Times headline read: "Carey's Sad Fall." When the fundraising scandal first began to be fully fleshed out in October, there was a shocked quality about the coverage -- how could things go so wrong for, as a Washington Post story characterized them, a bunch of "liberal do-gooders"?

But, as one former union official points out, many of the old campus radicals around Carey had shilled for the Black Panthers, cheered on Ho Chi Minh, and cut sugar cane in Cuba. "These guys are latter-day Leninists," he says. "If they run an operation, you know it's not going to be run according to democratic norms." It's not necessarily surprising either that there might be a mob taint around the figures championed by these "liberal do-gooders": organized crime is politically indiscriminate, and in the past had no problem allying itself with Communists in the trade unions.

Since the New Left types around Carey and Sweeney are so committed, they have added energy to the movement. It has, since the ascension of Carey and Sweeney, adopted more aggressive, shrewder organizing tactics. But the thrust of its effort is to consolidate union power in Washington, D.C., in order to create more lobbying punch and to fight ideological battles. "All the money is getting sucked up to Washington to pay for this left-wing stuff," explains one former union official, "while the bread and butter of the union movement, which is grievances and contract negotiations, gets neglected." Despite the fanfare, the AFL-CIO's membership rolls have dropped by 100,000 over the last year or so. At the same time, Sweeney has spent AFL-CIO resources promoting causes Lane Kirkland never would have touched. Sweeney fought against California's anti-preference Civil Rights Initiative (he marched with Jesse Jackson in San Francisco) and filed a lawsuit to hinder efforts opposing same-sex marriage in Hawaii (he recently won an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force).

This is a democratic politics at odds at least with much of the rhetoric of the Clinton Administration. The differences were more than rhetorical in the fight over fast track, which the unions won in a rout. It helped that the battle was fought on the ground most favorable to the unions, a House of Representatives whose Democratic leadership is dominated by old-style Democrats like Dick Gephardt. But, as the Democratic National Committee fights off debt and scandal, union dollars have become more important to the party. Sweeney has said the AFL-CIO will be active in next year's congressional races, raising members' monthly dues to fund a $12 million "mobilization fund." Al Gore now is compelled regularly to give suck-up-to-union speeches, but the union strength ultimately benefits his adversary Gephardt (and perhaps eventually a left-wing true believer like Jesse Jackson, for whom many top AFL-CIO aides worked in 1988).

Needless to say, this is potential poison for the Democrats. In this year's race in Staten Island, New York, to replace retiring Republican Rep. Susan Molinari, the AFL-CIO played a big role. Its candidate, Democrat Eric Vitaliano, won only 38 per cent of the vote -- despite the predominance of union households in the district. "They know the AFL-CIO doesn't represent them any more," says one former union official. The thrust of the new unionism is explicitly to take labor beyond the mundane concerns of average workers. As one newspaper report from the Columbia AFL-CIO teach-in put it, "[Sweeney is] shifting the American union movement away from the narrow goal of better pay and benefits." A kind of contempt for working people is at the root of the Teamster fundraising scandal. Explains one veteran of left-wing battles: "This is ideological avarice, people who think they know what's best for the workers rather than relying on Teamster voters to make up their own minds."

If Teamster voters ever are allowed to make up their minds -- this spring's scheduled re-vote may be delayed by federal election officers -- they will probably chose as their next president Jimmy Hoffa Jr., which means trouble for the current leadership of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney would not have won the AFL-CIO presidency without the support of Carey and his huge block of Teamster votes. Meanwhile, the architects of the anti-Kirkland coup -- Richard Trumka, now secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and AFSCME's Gerald McEntee -- have both been implicated in the scandal. If Trumka is indicted for funneling AFL-CIO funds to Carey, filling his position could become a real battle, with Hoffa and traditional unionists like American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman on one side and the Sweeney forces on the other. If the scandal doesn't touch Sweeney himself, he is probably popular enough to hold onto power -- but with a different constellation of forces beneath him.

JIMMY Hoffa Jr., whose Teamster office complex in Detroit is in the shadow of a slate-grey Tiger Stadium, certainly doesn't project the image of a new, dynamic, revitalized labor. His office is a spartan wood-paneled affair with a spare tie thrown over a door-knob and a lost-in-time feel about it. The streets outside are cracked and potholed, and the neighborhood consists almost entirely of liquor stores and abandoned buildings -- as if it were Srebrenica in between the shooting. Hoffa himself seems to have no big new ideas beyond the Detroit Lions' need to shore up their offensive line. But, as a recent New Republic editorial grudgingly concluded, the Teamsters membership seems to prefer him as its leader.

Carey has certainly handed him any number of compelling campaign themes. Says Hoffa: "He has made our union basically an annex of the Democratic Party and the Clinton White House. It's not good for our union and we have little to show for it." The Clinton White House doesn't have much to show for its alliance with Carey and Co. either -- except for another scandal and a stinging policy defeat. Hoffa, of course, has blind spots, and he may have engaged in financial shenanigans of his own last year. Asked about the Teamsters' notorious corrupt past, he is dismissive: "That's what they say." He may eventually surround himself with his own shady cast of characters, but at least they will be garden-variety crooks rather than ideologues bent on radically changing America on the backs of union workers. For now, the motto of the movie Hoffa, a poster of which hangs above Jimmy Hoffa Jr.'s desk, applies most aptly to Carey and his radical allies: "He did what he had to do."