Fred Gegare’s June Surprise

With the Teamsters 2011 convention a little more than three weeks away, Fred Gegare has come up with a June Surprise: Aaron Belk, the late Ron Carey’s executive assistant, has been added to his Fighting for the Members Slate as a candidate for Southern Region vice president.
Aside from rising from a loading dock in Memphis to the top of the Teamsters’ hierarchy by being elected an international vice president on Carey’s reform slate in 1991, Belk distinguished himself in trying—though unsuccessfully—to block the political contributions in 1996 that resulted in Carey’s downfall. At a 1998 Congressional hearing, Belk testified: “I can hold my head high and I can look at myself in the mirror each morning knowing that I did my job to the best of my ability by turning down these large contribution requests and by refusing to support and condone the actions of the 1996 Carey campaign staff and their consultants.”
At the end of this month, we’ll find out whether Gegare, currently an international vice president, will make the 2011 Teamsters election a three-way race by overcoming the barrier facing all outside candidates of being nominated for president by winning the votes of five percent of the 1,700 or so delegates to the Teamsters convention in Las Vegas.
James P. Hoffa, the incumbent international president, and New York Teamsters Local 805 president Sandy Pope are expected to be the other two candidates in the fall election. Hoffa, barring the unforeseen, certainly will be nominated. Pope has the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the nationwide reform group, whose support was crucial to Carey two elections in 1991 and 1996 to the presidency of the Teamsters. Last month, Pope announced she had enough delegates pledged to be nominated.
Pope is running alone—without a slate—hoping to win the votes of the rank and file by contrasting her history as Teamster over the past 33 years—working as a selector, a truck driver, a local union organizer, an international staffer, and finally elected president of a local—against Hoffa’s scant background with summer jobs as a Teamster while in college and later as a lawyer. He was elected international president in 1998 primarily because he was the son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa. Gegare—who has 39 years of experience at every level of the Teamsters—split with Hoffa last year proclaiming his leadership was disastrous.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.

My Boyhood Hero William J. Crowe

My boyhood hero, my brother Bill, died yesterday at the age of 84. So many of my memories of him are when we were young. One of my favorites was a trip to Rockaway Beach back in late July or ear1y August of 1945. Billy had just turned 19, I was 11, and this angry woman came up to us and said to him, “Why aren’t you in the service?” People were like that back in WW II. Billy said, “Because my father has pull.” And we left her fuming. In fact, Billy had just gotten out of a military hospital after recovering from the second wound he suffered as a Marine in the Battle of Okinawa.
He met his wife, Lee, who was a WAVE, when he was stationed in Washington, D.C., before mustering out of the service. Whenever he arrived at his favorite bar in D.C., the piano player would sing Harrigan (H-A-double R-I-G-A-N spells Harrigan). He and Lee got married and moved to Youngstown, Ohio, her home town, where he went to Youngstown University on the GI Bill, then worked in the steel industry and had three kids. When Lee died a few years ago, her best friend asked me where she and Billy had met. I told her in Washington after he came back from Okinawa. The friend hadn’t known that Billy was not only a Marine, but an infantryman who had seen some dreadful action.
Billy loved the ocean and came home to New York every summer to go to the beach and to go swimming in the Atlantic. I can still see him hanging out with his friends before the war in front of Marco’s Candy Store on 47th Street in Woodside; and taking me to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on a bitter cold, windy day and asking what do you want to eat: chow mein or Pizza? I would say both. He ran in the Penn Relays for St. Ann’s High School in Manhattan. He loved boxing. Our father had been a boxer in his youth. Billy took me to many a boxing match at places now long gone: the outdoor arena at Queens Plaza in Long Island City and Sunnyside Gardens on Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside.
No matter how old a brother is, no matter how fulsome a life he had led, it is heartbreaking to lose him.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

THE LAKE OF DREAMS, a lockpickers novel

THE LAKE OF DREAMS
by Kim Edwards

This is a literary work, meaning that like most literary novels it moves slowly. The protagonist, Lucy Jarrett, is a modern woman, who travels the world working in exotic places, moving from affair to affair until she finds a Japanese man to love.
Lucy’s DNA provides her the mystical skill of picking locks, which she applies to ordinary locks and to an almost heroic task in uncovering the buried, tragic story of a pioneering feminist among her antecedents.
In the course of achieving her goal, Lucy manages to put the death of her father in a context which releases her from a lifetime of guilt and provides a previously unknown 90-something cousin with a mollifying solution for her abandonment as a child and adult.
The novel is worth reading for both the unfolding detective-like skills of the protagonist; the vivid picture of the transformation of a town’s economy from a production to a cutesy, tourist milieu; and for the comparison of society’s restrictions on an independent woman in the early 1900s versus the unfettered life that an educated and self-confident Lucy pursues in modern times.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

The Arabs and The Aeneid

As I was in the process of editing my latest novel, THE ABSCONDER, I came across a scene in which the protagonist, Chris, who has memorized THE AENEID in Latin and in English says, “I won’t bore you with the Latin. But I can offer you what Aeneas said to his companions when Troy was burning around them and the Greeks were overwhelming them: Come, let us die/We’ll make a rush into the thick of it./The conquered have one safety: hope for none.”
Those lines immediately gave me a better understanding of the passionate courage of the Arab populace across the Middle East rebelling against the dictators that have deprived them of the basic freedoms every human being should enjoy. To make the quote fit the Arab uprisings all that is required is to substitute the word oppressed for conquered. The result would be: Come, let us die/We’ll make a rush into the thick of it./The OPPRESSED have one safety: hope for none.”

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

Gegare on how Hoffa lost millions

Fred Gegare today (March 16, 2011) on his website revealed at least one of his serious disenchantments with Teamsters President James P. Hoffa contending that a panicked Hoffa dumped millions of dollars in stock held by IBT entities at rock-bottom prices during the financial crisis of 2009.
“Nearly $30 million dollars of Teamster dues money and charitable contributions were lost when Hoffa's weak knees got the best of him. Countless millions more have been lost because the IBT no longer owns the stock and can't benefit from the market's rebound,” Gegare said.
Gegare has an inside knowledge of the Hoffa Administration since he is an International Vice President who was elected on Hoffa’s 2006 slate. He shocked the Teamsters world when he announced last year that he was running for Teamsters International president against Hoffa.
At the time, Gegare claimed that the union faced a dire future under Hoffa’s disastrous leadership. That generality finally has been brought somewhat into focus by Gegare proclaiming today on his website that Hoffa ignored the advice of financial professionals and bypassed the Teamsters General Executive Board to sell the stock. He said, “By running scared, Hoffa incurred staggering losses that have crippled some of the IBT's most important funds. The Strike and Defense Fund plunged nearly $15 million. The Scholarship Fund saw $3.4 million vanish. The General Fund experienced a $10.2 million decline.”
If Gegare has many more weapons of character destruction to use against Hoffa such as this rush to sell the stocks that portrays him as somewhat clueless then the Teamsters 2011 election will prove to be exciting indeed. In addition the question of the silliness of the rank and file voting to elect James P. Hoffa as a strong leader, because his father Jimmy Hoffa was, will be resurrected.
Gegare is heading the Fighting for the Members slate in his campaign against Hoffa.
Sandy Pope, president of New York Teamsters Local 805, also is running for the Teamsters International Presidency with the backing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.

IBT Election Supervisor to Hoffa: tsk, tsk

Richard W. Mark, the official overseeing the Teamsters 2011 International union election, issued his decision today (March 15, 2011) on the Hoffa campaign’s attempt to use the IBT’s treasury (in the form of jobs and benefits) to buy off the opposition led by Fred Gegare. The penalty imposed amounts to tsk, tsk.
Tsk, tsk has a variety of meanings: You should be ashamed of yourself or perhaps, I disapprove of what you are doing or have done.
In sum, Teamsters International President James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy Hoffa) and some of his cohorts were found by Mark to have offered jobs and at least one extra pension to three Teamsters officials, IBT Car Haul Director Fred Zuckerman and International Trustees Henry Perry and Frank Gallegos, in exchange for their support or for not running in the 2011 Teamsters International Election.
Kenneth Conboy, the Teamsters Election Appeals Master, ordered Mark to come up with a punishment short of denying Hoffa the privilege of running for reelection. Why? The crucial element: the three refused the offers.
Back in 1997, Conboy was the official who barred Ron Carey from running for reelection in 1996 for his supposed involvement in a scheme to misuse the Teamsters’ treasury in his election campaign. Five years later—and somewhat too late—a federal jury found that Carey was telling the truth when he swore to federal agents and a Grand Jury that he knew nothing about the dirty deal. A tsk, tsk wasn’t imposed on Carey, but as part of his pre-trial punishment he was not only barred from running for reelection, but was expelled from Teamsters membership.
Mark’s remedy for the failed dirty deal: “The Hoffa campaign and each candidate on the Hoffa-Hall slate are ordered to cease and desist from using union resources to conduct campaign activity.”
In addition, Mark ordered the posting of a notice to Teamsters members across North America saying: “The Election Supervisor found that before and during May 2010, IBT officials associated with the General President Hoffa’s campaign offered IBT jobs, including salary and benefits, to three individuals in exchange for a promise to support the Hoffa campaign in various ways.”
While the Hoffa folks might be embarrassed by having to face the members who actually read the notice, the sentence imposed by Mark falls far short of Gegare’s demand that Hoffa be disqualified as a candidate.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.

An interview with the author of THE TRUCKERS

An interview with Kenneth C. Crowe, author of THE TRUCKERS, by the $100 Plus News of the Association for Union Democracy (www.uniondemocracy.org)
The interview appeared in $100 Plus News on Jan. 6, 2011:

$100 Plus News: What made you write the story now? Were you working on it for some time?
Ken Crowe: The original version of THE TRUCKERS was completed ten years ago in July, 2000. My agent figured there was no market for a labor novel. So, I put the book away with other novels I had written, seemingly doomed to gather dust in a closet. Along came the e-book and online publishing revolution in 2008 led by Amazon’s CreateSpace and Smashwords. I took the novels out of the closet and began rewriting them and putting them on the internet as e-books and
paperbacks. Last summer, I reached THE TRUCKERS. I rewrote the ending to accord with the emergence of Sandy Pope as the TDU-backed, rank and file candidate for IBT president.

$100 Plus News: There is a tension between Helmut Knall and Tommy Kerrigan about whether the International Pres. should get involved in local elections, with Kerrigan believing it was inappropriate despite Knall’s attempts to persuade him that he must support local reformers against the “old guard” which still ran the majority of the locals. Do you believe that dynamic was present
in the Carey administration? Is that meant to be a lesson for reformers?
Ken Crowe: Ken Paff has always believed in reforming the Teamsters from the bottom up. When Ron Carey was elected the IBT’s general president he thought that Teamsters at the local level shared his vision of unselfish, committed leadership, that the good guys would follow his example and the membership would oust those who didn’t. Ken Paff was right in that winning the top
is not enough.

$100 Plus News: Was there any merit to Kerrigan’s position to stay out of local politics?
Ken Crowe: No. That is like the President of the United States staying out of Congressional and Senate elections. A sympathetic base (local union officials in the case of The Truckers or the Teamsters) makes governing so much easier and leading so much more pleasant.

$100 Plus News: After the novel ended we are left with the irony that despite Kerrigan’s successful efforts to win the battles against the companies for the rank and file, it was union enemies from within that were his undoing. In that regard it’s a sad story, though Kerrigan comes across as a hero who gave his life for the working person. Any thoughts?
Ken Crowe: The sophisticated, vicious, unrelenting campaign to destroy Truckers Union president Tommy Kerrigan had its parallel in the Hoffa campaign operatives’ continuous onslaught to undermine Ron Carey from the moment he was elected. Just as in my novel, THE TRUCKERS, the Teamsters old guarders were aroused by self-interest and some rather sordid consultants to turn
out their supporters in their locals or risk losing their comfortable life styles to an awakened rank and file. Myths are built on the bodies of the assassinated, the murdered, and the martyred.

A suggestion: my novel, THE TRUCKERS, has been described as a fun read. It is serious and tragic too. Try it free on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, or Apple.