For years, one quote has clung to Chicago Teamster boss William Hogan Jr. like a ring on a pudgy pinky.
“I am living proof,” Hogan once said, “that nepotism works.”
On Thursday, it finally worked against him.
On the advice of a court-appointed review board, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters stripped Hogan of his authority to run Local 714, an organization he inherited from his father and operated like a family business.
The action not only tears the power from Chicago’s most prominent labor leader but jeopardizes Hogan’s bid to gain control of the international along with Jimmy Hoffa Jr.
After a nearly yearlong investigation of 714, the Washington-based Independent Review Board found that the local was being run for the benefit of Hogan, his family and his friends–not for the local’s 10,700 members.
“For decades, this local’s representatives have trampled over members’ rights in the rush to take care of their own,” the review board said in its report.
Nepotism was at its worst, the board said, in the high-profile, high-paying movie and trade show industry division, which “was run as a Hogan family fiefdom within the local.”
The report concluded that the union should be taken from Hogan and put in the trusteeship of the Washington-based international.
Hogan–a man with a slight build and a sharp, often profane tongue–saw the move as an escalation of his battle against International Teamster President Ron Carey, a reformer elected in 1991.
Hogan and Hoffa are vying to topple Carey in a November election, campaigning on promises of restoring the Teamsters to the power and high wages they once enjoyed.
In a written statement released Thursday night, Hogan charged Carey with trying to rig the outcome of an election “he knows he can’t win.”
“I will rise above these malicious, politically motivated distortions of the truth,” Hogan said. “Today’s events will only galvanize hundreds of thousands of Teamsters across the country into working even harder to ensure that Ron Carey is not re-elected.”
In New York, Carey scoffed. “Those who scream the loudest about retaliation are the ones with their fingers deepest in the cookie jar.”
The review board was formed after the Justice Department began to take over and clean up the Teamsters in the 1980s. In Hogan’s view, the board is in cahoots with Carey.
Leaders are often kicked out of a union after a local is put into trusteeship. Such an action would preclude Hogan from running in the election.
The ouster of Hogan worked better on paper than it did in execution.
When several officials from Teamster headquarters arrived at the Local 714 offices at 6815 W. Roosevelt Rd. in Berwyn, a beefy Hogan aide closed the steel door in their faces. The standoff began shortly after 3 p.m. as the officials, led by the appointed trustee, St. Louis Teamster boss John Metz, tried to gain entry.
Metz said the refusal to admit him and Barbara Hillman, a Chicago lawyer retained by the international union to help carry out the takeover, was merely delaying the inevitable.
“I am the duly appointed emergency trustee for this local,” said Metz, who heads Teamsters Local 610. Like Hogan, he is a leader of the Midwest Teamster District Council, a regional umbrella group.
Hillman said the international would seek a court order to remove Hogan and his staff from the local headquarters. A hearing could be held as early as Friday.
Stripping Hogan of his authority was the climax of one of Chicago’s great labor stories.
William Hogan Sr. founded the local in 1934 and handed over leadership to his son. There has been no contested election for leadership since 1961.
The younger Hogan has built the local into a powerhouse, exerting influence over one of the city’s premier industries, trade shows.
Until last year, he headed the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau. This year, he was named Man of the Year by the Jewish National Fund.
When the film industry began to flourish again in Chicago, he helped nurture it. At the same time, his family, from children to distant cousins, flowed in to fill Teamster jobs and create companies to support the industry.
Half the members permitted to work in trade shows or movies since 1993 had personal connections to Hogans or top stewards, the review board found.
The board noted that Hogan’s son, William Hogan III, has the high-paying job of transportation coordinator. In that job, he hires local transportation companies on behalf of the producers. The son also is an owner of at least three of the companies he hires, including Movies in Motion, whose trucks are familiar to anyone who has passed a movie location.
“Nepotism and favoritism are prominent factors influencing entry into and work assignments in the local’s trade show/movie division,” the review board said. “Local members in positions of authority in the division and their relatives own businesses which are dependent for profit on Local 714 employers.”
The board also noted that a longtime family friend, Nick Sam Boscarino, was 714’s chief steward at the Rosemont Exposition Center. At the same time, through his 10-year-old daughter, Boscarino had ownership of four companies that did business with the center.
That, the review board found, was a conflict of interest and another example of how Hogan’s cronies prospered in Local 714.
Boscarino resigned his Teamster post May 30, the day he had been scheduled to give his second deposition before the board.
The panel also found that Hogan and the local failed to call membership meetings, entered into scam collective bargaining agreements and possibly violated the National Labor Relations Act in the way work was divvied out. There are no seniority lists in Local 714.
“For every minute of work,” the board found, “these individuals were dependent for work assignments on the unguided discretion of the appointed chief steward, who served at (Hogan’s) pleasure.”
