U.S Senate Oversight Hearings on IUOE giving history of corruption

(5) Neither in locals under trusteeship nor in those free of it doe any accountability exist for union funds. Literally millions of dollar have vanished from the IUOE treasury, often reappearing in the form of improved living standards for union bigwigs. In at least two locals the rank and file have had to kick back 5 percent of their salaries over and above the regular dues they pay.

(6) Collusion between IUOE leaders and management has beer frequent, with certain favored contractors granted such concessions as paying IUOE members $1 an hour less than the wages prescribed in contracts.

(7) IUOE officials themselves have controverted the basic principles of unionism by owning companies with which they deal across: the table as union negotiators.

(8) All these evils have been made possible and easy by a dictatorship which like its counterparts everywhere. discourages its foes by all the foul means at its command. In the IUOE's case, these include job reprisals, threats, intimidation, and acts of violence up to and including murder.

Although no one individual can be credited as architect of the grand design for keeping the IUOE in thrall. the union has spent almost a third of its 62 years under the firm and powerful thumb of William E. Maloney. Elected international president in 1940. Maloney reigned unchallenged until February of this year, when he resigned^, giving ill health as the reason, a week after the committee suspended its inquiry into the IUOE.

Maloney himself did not appear before the committee; a certificate from a Miami Beach doctor under whose care he has been for a cardiac ailment described the condition of the septuagenarian labor lord as very serious. Out of the testimony of union witnesses and documents submitted by committee staff members, however, came a clear-cut delineation of a man thoroughly steeped in autocratic concepts—one who had flouted every legality in his roughshod ride to power, and who, having got there, consistently sacrificed IUOE interests on the altar of his own abundant appetites, treating the union treasury as his private Fort Knox and winking at contract violations by employers with whom he had gainful side dealings.

• A memorandum prepared by committee investigator Pierre Salinger, partly based on files of the Chicago Tribune and put into the record, traced Maloney's muscular climb from rank-and-file obscurity to the top of the heap. Arriving in Chicago around 1918, reportedly broke and in search of a mechanic's job, he became a permittee of local 560. By 1924 he was made a business agent by local president Edward Moore. By 1929, in an early show of his proclivity for repudiating his mentors, he split, with Moore and sided with Arthur Huddell. then IUOE general president, in a plan to merge local 569 with local 42 of the Brotherhood of Shovelmen. Local 569, however, backed Moore; what happened at, one of its meetings at the time was described to the committee by Clarence Donath, a hoisting engineer and IUOE veteran of 35 ^years. Maloney, he recalled, walked in with an ultimatum from Huddell that the local amalgamate with local 42 of the shovelmen:

* The membership voted that they did not want to go over, so we stayed out and fought.

Mr. DONATH. Yes, sir; they did. They voted to throw hint out of the meeting and expel him from the union.

Mr. KENNEDY. Was that a pretty close vote as to whether to oust him?

Mr. DONATH. About 400 to 1.

Mr. KENNEDY. Leaving Maloney voting for himself and the 400 voting against him?

Mr. DONATH. That is right (p. 8253).

This vote, whose landslide nature revealed that Maloney had totally failed to win friends and influence people during his 5 year tenure as local 569's business agent, was also in a sense historic. for it records one of the few opportunities ever available to IUOE members to express their views of Maloney with full freedom. Local 569 was to pay for its rebuff. however. Obviously grateful for Maloney's support, IUOE president Arthur Huddell granted him a charter for a new Chicago local, No. 150, which had no members at all at the time. and made Maloney its supervisor, or trustee. Local 150, which has remained in trusteeship to this day, soon began absorbing local 560. With a callousness increasingly characteristic of official IUOE attitudes toward the rank and file. local 560 members who tarried over transferring were not allowed to carry over their death benefits, and the money which they had already put in for this purpose was thus confiscated. Donath. who held out until 1935, testified that he lost years in death benefits and had to start fresh.

Not much time remained to Huddell to serve as Maloney's benefactor within the IUOE. A year after he had made Maloney a president of local 150,he was shot near the heart by a gunman as he sat in

a Washington,D.C. restaurant: he died 10 days later of pneumonia. Of the two men with Huddell at the shooting, one was Frank E. Langdon, editor of the international newspaper, who was also shot; the other was IUOE vice president, John Possehl, whom the gunman completely missed. Possehl succeeded Huddell as president of the union; a Washington Herald account of the crime, which did not , bring even one arrest, reported that the gunman was George MacScullen, of Chicago, and that he had admitted having been hired by, Maloney and Possehl to do away with Huddell and Langdon,

That Maloney evoked the same high regard from the new IUOE president as from the old was evident when, in January 1934^., local 150 members notified Possehl that they had voted to oust Maloney, then out of town in Miami, and to call an election. Possehl snapped back with a sharp warning that this action bespoke rebellion and ordered the local to recognize Maloney's authority.

This abortive attempt to throw off Maloney's yoke, all the more remarkable because from its start local 150 had been his custom-built chattel, provided further telling proof that he would win no popularity contest if the rank and file were polled in unfettered fashion: local 150's ouster vote was 263 to 1. Admittedly the provocation was strong. Maloney, his assistant, John Lynch, and a dozen noted Chicago gangsters were then under indictment for extortion arising out of the operations of a notorious outfit called the Trucking and Transportation Association and informally known as TNT and Crime. (MISSING TEXT) •

which had wrung 81 million from contractors during1932 • Maloney was later acquitted of this charge