Nathan Newman wrote:
>Gus Bevona was also one of the quiet heroes
-Wow. And mob control of the Teamsters laid the groundwork for successes in Vegas.
You seem intensely uncomfortable with the fact that the world (and people) are not always easily slotted into pure good and evil categories. Yes, Jimmy Hoffa's investment practices through the Teamsters pension funds, whatever the side corruption, was very good for workers in Vegas.
And guess, what? Getting the mob out of the Teamster pension funds hasn't benefitted the Teamster retirees:
http://www.tdu.org/Newsroom/NYTPension/nytpension.html
"Since 1982, under a consent decree with the federal government, the fund has been run by prominent Wall Street firms and monitored by a federal court and the Labor Department. There have been no more shadowy investments, no more loans to crime bosses. Yet in these expert hands, the aging fund has fallen into greater financial peril than when James R. Hoffa, who built the Teamsters into a national power, used it as a slush fund."
Or as the article notes, when the stock market stunk in the 1970s, those Hoffa investments were paying better dividends than most were making on Wall Street:
"In the 1970's, the fund's assets grew by as much as 10 percent a year, according to some media reports from that period. Luck played a big part in that success, because the decade was a bad one for stocks and bonds. Thus, the fund made better returns on its unorthodox real estate portfolio than it would have on a conventional mix of investments. "
I'm not recommending turning all pension funds over to the Hoffas of the world, but calls to "root out corruption" just as easily lead to laws and court decisions that hand control of workers money to Wall Street professionals.
The history of the labor movement is just more complicated than slotting everyone into bad and good actors in some morality play.
Nathan Newman