Deal Making

Twists in the Teamsters'case

It was, said the Government's chief prosecutor Douglas Roller, "a day of reckoning." Hours before he was to report to a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., Roy L. Williams agreed to resign from the presidency of the 1.9 million-member Teamsters Union in exchange for remaining free on bail while he appeals his case. He was convicted in December for conspiring with four other defendants to bribe Senator Howard W. Cannon of Nevada in 1979.

Williams, 68, who suffers from emphysema, made the agreement from his bed in Kansas City's Park Lane Medical Center. "He is convinced that in his condition he is not going to survive incarceration," Defense Attorney Raymond G. Larroca told Chicago's U.S. district court judge Prentice H. Marshall, who acted after Larroca assured him the union leader would submit his written resignation this week and not interfere in future Teamsters affairs.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Amos Massa and Thomas O'Malley, two of Williams' convicted co-defendants and former Teamsters' pension fund trustees, submitted an affidavit from former FBI Agent H. Edward Tickel, a 14-year bureau veteran and surreptitious-entry expert, to support their claim that some of the evidence in the conspiracy case was obtained illegally. Tickel, 42, alleges that he made three "black bag" break-ins into the Chicago offices of Co-Defendant Allen Dorfman in late 1978 or early 1979, before the FBI had obtained court approval to conduct telephone tapping and bugging.

Dorfman, a millionaire insurance executive and longtime Teamsters associate, was gunned down in a gang-land-style slaying Jan. 20. Tickel also maintains that he entered Williams' hotel suite at the Chicago Sheraton-O'Hare in late 1979 without court approval, to check out likely spots for hidden cameras and microphones. Tickel says that he was under the false impression that all of these entries were properly authorized. The FBI fired Tickel in 1982 after he was indicted for a range of crimes, including trafficking in stolen jewelry and tax evasion, charges for which he was convicted last month. At his trials, Tickel charged that he informed FBI Director William Webster about his illegal entries in November 1980, but Webster disputed Ticket's accounts. Since then, the FBI has had no comment on any aspect of the affair. The allegations nonetheless inspired attorneys for O'Malley, Massa and Williams to file motions for a new trial.