FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR

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Conceding that Friday's move was a step in the right direction, some investigators and officials in the field nonetheless contend that it is another case of the cleanup team's doing the barest minimum necessary to keep the feds at bay. The Buffalo local, they say, is such a well-known Cosa Nostra fortress--and so prominently featured in the Justice Department's original complaint--that union investigators had to act. Also, some of the ousted officials took with them large life-insurance policies with immediate cash value. Those officials also dropped a lawsuit against the international union that could have forced Coia to testify about an embarrassing matter. In 1994, according to the original Justice complaint, he tried to consolidate all of upstate New York's training funds--a traditional source of slush--in the Mob-controlled Buffalo local but was blocked.

On just about every aspect of the case, in fact, Justice and its critics dispute each other so sharply that they might be describing entirely different proceedings.

The government case: though the Justice-Laborers pact has been denounced as a sweetheart deal, it was justified. A suit seeking to put the Laborers under government control could have dragged through the courts for years. Even then, it is not certain that Coia would have been ousted. "It is not a crime to be controlled by the Mob," prosecutor Coffey points out. To convict Coia under federal racketeering statutes, the government would have to prove that he committed two felonies as part of a criminal conspiracy. So far, "we don't have enough evidence," says an FBI agent.

Under the deal Justice accepted, officials contend, mobsters are indeed being cleaned out--not only in Buffalo but also in the New York City area and soon in Chicago--and Coia has agreed to a rank-and-file vote in September. "It's a stunning achievement in this short period of time," says Coffey. "It took years to accomplish this in the Teamsters." Moreover, Coia himself is very much a target of the investigation his union bankrolls. Says Gow: "I've spent more man-hours on him than on any other entity." Time has also learned that a grand jury is interviewing witnesses about Coia and that the FBI has set up a task force to re-examine allegations against him.

The critics' case: the present deal makes it difficult and in some cases (only a few, says Coffey) impossible for FBI field agents to pass evidence against suspected mobsters to the people responsible for booting them out of the union. Leaving Coia to run the union during the cleanup was at best a bad error of judgment, given the evidence linking him and his father, who also held a top union job, to organized crime. Moreover, a number of events cast doubt on the integrity of the cleanup effort: in New York, Salvatore Lanza, identified with Cosa Nostra in the original complaint, was promoted to treasurer of the union's New York regional PAC. In California rank-and-filers who gave information to the Laborers' investigators were subsequently threatened by local union officials.