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| ROY WILLIAMS - Teamsters President (1981 - 1983) In the first six months of 1979, FBI agents secretly recorded 112,000 telephone conversations from 13 phone lines in Allen Dorfman's insurance office,as part of an investigation into the mob's hidden ownership of several Las Vegas casinos. Dorfman was in charge of managing the Teamsters Pension fund, and doing out loans from the fund to busonesses frontng for the outfit. Agents stumbled upon a bribery scheme in which a 5.8-acre plot of land that the Teamsters owned next to the Las Vegas Hilton hotel and casino would be sold to U.S. senator Howard Cannon, of Nevada, at a cut rate. In turn, Cannon, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, would wrest control of a trucking industry deregulation bill, the Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act of 1980, from the Judiciary Committee chairman, Edward Kennedy. Cannon would then kill the bill, as a favor to the Teamsters.
Among others, the feds indicted Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Allen Dorfman and Roy Williams for bribery, fraud, and conspiracy (Cannon was not charged). The trial, which began about one month after the Tylenol murders, ended in December 1982. Lombardo, Dorfman and Williams, along with Thomas O'Malley, a pension fund trustee, and Andrew Massa, a former trustee, were convicted on 11 counts of bribery, fraud, and conspiracy. One month later, while out on bail awaiting sentencing, two masked-men approached Dorfman and his life-long pal, Irwin Williams, in the parking-lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt Hotel. The men shouted, "this is a stick-up" and then filled Dorfman full of holes, leaving Weiner unscathed. The outfit believed Dorfman was too soft to do his time and might turn-over for the feds in exchange for a shorter sentence. During Williams' 1983 sentencing hearing, an FBI agent testified that he'd taken an informer's statement nearly 20 earlier — made public for the first time during the hearing — portraying Teamsters President Roy Williams as a lackey of the crime syndicate. The statement was given to the FBI by Floyd Hayes, a former Kansas City Teamsters official who was shot to death in a bowling alley parking lot shortly after talking to the government. An FBI agent who took the statemement, William Quinn, said Hayes told the government Williams cleared union decisions with the mob, took kickbacks and once ordered a man shot because he was a nuisance. Two years later Roy Williams testified in a federal case that mobster Nick Civella paid him $1,500 a month for seven years in return for helping him get $87.75 million in loans from the Central States Pension Fund. Said Williams: “I make no bones about it. I was controlled by Nick Civella.”
Williams confirmed that organized crime continued to maintain a firm grip on the IBT long after Hoffa's reign. | |
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