A TIME investigation turns up a Watergate-era cover-up
The top officers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters turning Government informers and supplying tips against their enemies in the union? The Nixon White House calling off Government investigations that threatened to incriminate the President's supporters in the nation's largest union? Such Watergate-era allegations began to surface as long ago as 1975, but they attracted little attention, partly because they came initially from an informer of dubious credibility.
But now TIME has obtained support for these charges, and more, from a far more reliable source: long-secret files of the Internal Revenue Service. In some 500 pages of reports to their superiors from 1972 to 1974, veteran IRS Agents John Daley and Gabriel Dennis of the service's Los Angeles office asserted:
1) That three important Teamster officials—Frank Fitzsimmons, then president, William Presser, then boss of Ohio's Teamsters, and his son Jackie—met regularly with the IRS agents between 1972 and 1974. The trio allegedly supplied information about their foes in the union, in the hope of persuading the Government to prosecute these enemies rather than themselves.
2) That Fitzsimmons described a secret meeting between himself and President Richard Nixon in the White House in late 1972. At that session, the President allegedly summoned Attorney General Richard Kleindienst* and personally ordered him to make sure that Government investigations of the Teamsters then in progress did not harm Fitzsimmons or his allies. If true, this story could have formed the basis for an additional charge of obstruction of justice in the eventual impeachment proceedings against Nixon, but Watergate investigators apparently never heard the tale. The IRS did convey the agents' reports about the alleged meeting to the Department of Justice in 1973, but the department did nothing with the information. In effect, the story was covered up far more effectively than the Watergate scandals were.
All that might seem ancient history. Nixon and Kleindienst, of course, are long since gone from office. Fitzsimmons died in May and William Presser in July. Jackie Presser, however, is very much alive and a powerful ally of another Republican President, Ronald Reagan. As "communications director," or official spokesman, of the Teamsters, Presser helped to swing the union's support to Reagan in the 1980 campaign, and was named a senior labor adviser to one of Reagan's transition teams. Some Teamsters are convinced that he is next in line for the presidency of the union. His accession might come soon if the incumbent, Roy L. Williams, is convicted of attempted bribery, a charge on which he is now awaiting trial. Says Presser: "I'm waiting my turn and it's down the road."