uncharted.ca

…the union's trustees…could be trusted to skim the benefit funds and steal the pension money. Welfare annuity and benefit fund money turns over much more quickly than the money in pension funds. With benefit funds, the main focus is on kickbacks. Benefit fund vendors pay for the right to overcharge for real or bogus services. The truly grand larceny goes on in the pension funds, which are required to have large reserves….

… Under Messera's direction, the share of funds invested in real estate would more than quadruple to 25 percent of all fund assets. Since nearly all the value was bogus, the pension fund was impaired….

…[they] told the members that the problem in the fund had been caused by bad investment advice on the purchase of derivative contracts and that the money had been recovered-both totally false….

Stealing from pension funds is a quiet, undramatic crime that is hard to discover and attracts relatively little notice. In 1978, when the Luccheses robbed German airline Lufthansa of $6 million, the theft provided tabloid headlines for weeks. At the time, the heist was the largest successful cash robbery in American history. It would serve as the dramatic armature of Scorsese's Goodfellas. But in the 1990s, when the Genoveses were discovered taking out ten times that sum from the Mason Tenders pension fund in real estate swindles, the story created barely a ripple.

It's easy to see why Hollywood chose to portray the robbers rather than the real estate operators....In the Lufthansa robbery, there was a guard who had to be struck senseless; half a dozen employees who had to be taken unawares and handcuffed; a supervisor who had to be plied with a hooker while his keys were stolen; alarm systems to deactivate; and two technologically challenging vaults to unlock with the duplicated key.

No one tried to stop Messera from stealing the money-not the lawyers; not the accountants; not the trustees-either from management or the union side.…

Why not allow dissent? Because it would be undemocratic, explains Peter Gilmore, editor of UE News, the paper of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. "We would rather devote space to what members are doing rather than give up valuable space for one member to sound off."