Little progress in federal case alleging mob control of docks

NEW YORK -- Two years ago, federal prosecutors boldly proclaimed a civil racketeering lawsuit against the mighty International Longshoremen's Union that would "once and for all" shatter suspected mob control on the nation's docks.

Today, the start of the trial -- much less the end of any ostensible corruption -- is still nowhere in sight.

Lead defendant John Bowers continues as ILA president, the post he's held since 1987, collecting a salary of $587,078 last year. Legal paperwork abounds, but no trial date is expected until next year.

When the lawsuit was announced July 7, 2005, authorities alleged the Genovese and Gambino organized crime families used the ILA to dominate domestic docks from Maine to Texas.

The defendants were accused of rigging ILA elections, steering union benefit contracts to mob-linked companies, and extorting money from businesses operating on New York's piers, sort of a true-life version of the Oscar-winning 1954 movie "On The Waterfront." The alleged offenses amounted to a "mob tax" imposed on goods coming through the ports, a cost passed along to consumers, the government said.

The lawsuit sought to install court-ordered trustees to replace Bowers and other veteran union executives with court-ordered trustees.

The defense still hopes to persuade a judge to dismiss the whole thing.

"We don't think this suit ever should have been brought," said ILA attorney Howard Goldstein. "But efforts to convince the government otherwise obviously were unavailing. We don't think what they're asking for is appropriate, right or necessary."

Goldstein and other defense attorneys return to court July 31 for a hearing on their motion to dismiss.

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf declined to comment on the languishing case. When the wide-ranging civil lawsuit was announced, the prosecutor had declared it would "once and for all ... end mob domination" of the 45,000-member longshoremen's union.

The lawsuit, with nearly three dozen individual defendants, has moved in barely perceptible increments across 24 months. A review of court documents and interviews shows assorted twists with resulting delays.

Before the civil case could begin, two ILA officers and a reputed mobster went on trial in federal court, a proceeding that proved bizarre throughout.

One defendant, ILA bigwig Harold Daggett, broke down while testifying that he was a mob target rather than a coconspirator. He described wetting his pants when Genovese family hit man George Barone stuck a gun against his head during a 1980 meeting.

"He cocked the trigger and said 'I'll blow your brains all over the room,"' a sobbing Daggett recalled.

Co-defendant Lawrence Ricci, a reputed Genovese capo, missed Daggett's waterworks; he disappeared three weeks into the trial and his body showed up two months later in the trunk of a car parked behind the Huck Finn Diner in Union, N.J.

Despite his death, Ricci, Daggett and ILA official Arthur Coffey were acquitted of extortion and other charges for allegedly conspiring with the Genovese family to establish Daggett as Bowers' successor -- a designated union "puppet" to keep the illegal income flowing.

The verdict, on charges similar to those in the civil case, was a sharp rebuke to the feds. Both Daggett and Coffey are among the civil defendants. And Barone, a former ILA official who confessed to a dozen slayings after joining the Witness Protection Program, is one of the key government witnesses in the civil lawsuit.

The civil case, covering decades of alleged corruption involving the ILA and organized crime, has created a mountain of court filings. Pretrial depositions, usually a mundane task, evolved into a court fight still raging after 17 months.

There were problems with paperwork from the past as well. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard K. Hayes said in a March hearing that deposition transcripts dating back to the early '90s had been kept in offices in the World Trade Center towers.

"The United States doesn't even have the deposition transcripts ... because they were destroyed on Sept. 11," he said. "We have some of them, but not all of them."

Around the ILA offices, business continues as usual.

"People are obviously concerned with it," said Goldstein. "It's not easy having it hang over their heads. But you've got to live with it, because it's not going away unless something dramatic happens."