The longtime Chicago leader of the Teamsters has been expelled from the union by an independent oversight board, which found that he had betrayed the membership's interests.þþIn a decision issued on Wednesday, the oversight board said the Teamster official, William T. Hogan Jr., had tried to negotiate a deal whose effect would have been to push down wages and benefits for thousands of the union's members in Las Vegas.þþMr. Hogan was motivated, the board found, by a desire to help an employment agency that would have provided nonunion laborers to do convention work in Las Vegas. Mr. Hogan's brother was a senior executive at that company, based in Chicago.þþThe ruling is an embarrassment to James P. Hoffa, the Teamsters' national president, who initially had Mr. Hogan as his running mate when he first ran for the presidency, in 1996. Mr. Hogan dropped off the ticket after government investigators accused him of improper nepotism at the local he ran.þþLabor experts said yesterday that the ruling was likely to hurt Mr. Hoffa's efforts to persuade the Bush administration to end federal supervision of the Teamsters. The union agreed to that supervision, and to the oversight board, in 1989 as a way of settling a racketeering lawsuit in which the government charged that the Teamsters were controlled by the Mafia.þþYet the Hogan expulsion could also help Mr. Hoffa: while he and Mr. Hogan were often allied, they had a prickly relationship, with Mr. Hogan often threatening to turn Chicago's Teamsters against him. þþMr. Hogan was not the only Teamster expelled by the oversight board on Wednesday. Dane Passo, a personal aide to Mr. Hoffa until last year, whom the board also implicated in the scheme, was ousted as well.þþMr. Hoffa had sent Mr. Passo to Las Vegas to help oversee the Teamsters' operations there. Mr. Passo brought in Mr. Hogan, his longtime mentor in Chicago, and together, the board said, they tried to negotiate a deal between a Las Vegas local and the Chicago employment agency that would have undercut Teamster membership by giving convention jobs to hundreds of nonunion workers.þþMr. Hogan and Mr. Passo can seek to have the board's decision overturned by appealing to Judge Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who helps oversee the Teamsters.þþMr. Hogan and his lawyer, Matthias Lydon, did not respond to calls to their offices yesterday, and Mr. Passo could not be located for comment.þ
Source: NY Times
