(5 of 6)
Yet UNIRAC was only a glancing blow. By 1985 even Gigante's own son Andrew was a union vice president on the docks. Thomas Gleason, president of the I.L.A. until 1987, is reputed to have been a virtual Genovese puppet. Today, at 89, he is paid $100,000 a year as president emeritus and serves on the union's executive council. His successor, John Bowers, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in several recent prosecutions for taking payoffs and even soliciting a murder. In February, a decade after UNIRAC, the U.S. filed a civil racketeering suit that seeks to have trustees oversee elections and to permanently bar Genovese operatives from the waterfront.
Yet even those measures have failed in the past to rid unions of mobsters. Case in point: the Teamsters, whose officials and lawyers have spent the past year stonewalling three court-appointed officers and bogging them down in % lawsuits. Since the officers began their work in 1989, only 14 tainted Teamsters have been banned or prompted to quit on their own, and many Mob-tied officials remain ensconced.
For the first time in the union's history, the Teamsters rank and file will elect leaders by secret ballot over the next two years, supervised by a court officer who has the difficult task of monitoring more than 650 locals. But even fair elections can be corrupted. In 1988 the government blocked Michael Sciarra, a Genovese mobster, from running for the leadership of the Teamsters' Newark-based Local 560, a violence-torn cabal that was celebrating its first experiment with democracy. With Sciarra sidelined, the Newark membership proceeded to elect his brother Daniel. But Michael was still being greeted in 1989 with hugs and standing ovations by roomfuls of Teamsters.
The U.S. is seeking to bar Michael from Local 560 for secretly running it from the wings. "This case is a microcosm of how difficult it is to remove the Mob," says Newark prosecutor Michael Chertoff. "Sometimes victims support the guys who are victimizing them. It's very tribal." Along the highways of New Jersey, bridges and signposts are sprayed with graffiti supporting Sciarra and his ironically named party, Teamsters for Liberty.
Sometimes government paralysis is to blame for the Mob's gains. Since Luciano's day, Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market and its union have been Genovese-controlled. Each year upwards of $1 billion worth of seafood passes through this wholesale market, the country's largest. For 20 years, brothers Carmine and Vincent Romano were the family's point men, controlling all parking, loading and unloading.
In 1988 the U.S. succeeded in placing a trustee at the fish market with a four-year mandate to battle racketeering. Carmine and Vincent have been banned forever, yet some crime fighters say this has left brother Peter to call the shots. In reality, little has changed. Earlier this month, the frustrated trustee, attorney Frank Wohl, issued a blistering report about the fish market's "frontier atmosphere." He blames New York City for failing to regulate the market, a charge that has endured for a half-century.