MANHATTAN (CN) - In a recent lawsuit blasting the "monarchy" of Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr., lead plaintiff Fred Gegare did not mention that he is running against Hoffa, who is seeking a fourth term this fall.
Gegare's campaign website directs visitors to his June 13 federal complaint, which alleges that Hoffa "ruthlessly orchestrates" federal mob investigations against his political opponents.
The allegation is more eyebrow-raising, as Hoffa has publicly denounced such investigations since he took office in 1999.
A week after Gegare and 50 co-plaintiffs sued Hoffa, a Teamster attorney brushed off the lawsuit as "frivolous," and stopped just short of calling it politically motivated.
Whatever its merits, the lawsuit by Gegare and 50 Teamster co-plaintiffs has shined a spotlight on the allegations that have dogged the Hoffa family for generations.
Hoffa's father helped elevate the Teamsters to international prominence before mysteriously disappearing at a restaurant near Detroit in 1975.
Plagued with corruption allegations throughout his life, the elder Hoffa reportedly expected to meet two Mafia soldiers before he went missing. He was declared legally dead several years later. His body has never been found.
When the younger Hoffa first became president decades later, he launched an anti-corruption program to try to persuade the federal government to let the union police itself, without oversight.
Although that effort failed in his first term, Hoffa won two more elections, and recently announced that he would seek a fourth term.
Gegare's lawsuit takes Hoffa to task for failing to end the government's consent decree, which forces the Teamsters to fund an Independent Review Board (IRB) to investigate the union for corruption.
Edwin Stier, who resigned from Hoffa's anti-corruption program Project RISE in 2004, told Courthouse News in an interview that the government has no reason to dissolve the consent decree.
"As we began to step on big toes in the union, Hoffa backed off," Stier said.
Hoffa intended for Project RISE to replace the consent decree, by proving to the government that the Teamsters did not need federal oversight.
Signaling his seriousness, Hoffa tapped Stier, a former federal prosecutor, to head the program, and former FBI agent Jim Kossler as his deputy.
"The General Executive Board in 1999 took on the responsibility to police the union, and in fact, we did," Stier said. He said his firm "brought charges against a number of high-ranking union officials and cleaned up a number of corrupt situations. And had the union continued to do that, it might have satisfied the federal government that and then could be brought to end the consent decree."
In his resignation letter in 2004, Stier wrote that Hoffa had backed off from high-profile prosecutions "in the face of pressure from a few self-interested individuals," making the positions of Project RISE's investigators "untenable."
"When Jim Kossler and I first appeared before the General Executive Board in July 1999 to present an anti-corruption plan intended to make the Teamsters Union capable of protecting its members from organized crime and systemic corruption, I delivered a warning," Stier wrote in an open letter. "I told you that before retaining us, you needed to consider whether you would be willing to hold friends and political allies accountable to the standards of conduct by which all Teamsters are bound."
In the interview, Stier said that Hoffa's handling of union corruption has not improved since 2004.
