Razzle Dazzle:
Paranoia Rules At '768'

By RICHARD STEIER

In January, after winning a runoff election, Bernadino De La Cruz took office as the new treasurer of Health Service Employees Local 768 of District Council 37. He did so figuratively, anyway; actually getting inside the local's suite on the 7th floor of 125 Barclay St. was hardly that simple.

According to a complaint Mr. De La Cruz filed with the Judicial Panel of DC 37's international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 768 President Darryl Ramsey refused to give him a key to the office and told him that he had to call him in advance in order to be allowed inside. He alleged that despite his role as the local's chief financial officer, Mr. Ramsey has denied his request for a copy of the local's membership list.

"I haven't had access to reports regarding how many members, the [amount of the] dues remittances," Mr. De La Cruz said in a Sept. 7 phone interview. "That's why I brought him up on charges, because there's no really rational reason for that." Those charges were discussed Aug. 31 before John Seferian, the head of the AFSCME Judicial Panel. Mr. De La Cruz's attorney, Stuart Lichten, said he was asked to submit a written brief by Sept. 21, with a decision expected a short time later.

Ramsey: 'He's Lying'

Mr. Ramsey, who has ducked all questions from this newspaper from the time that he was first a candidate for president four years ago, ended his silence during a chance encounter on Church St. Sept. 7. "It's nonsense; he's lying," he declared even before a question could be asked. "Don't take what he tells you as gospel."

The following morning, he e-mailed a statement denying that he had placed restrictions on Mr. De La Cruz using the Local 768 office, and said he had not been given an office key because none had previously been made available to the local's treasurers. "This is to assure the safety of the local's files and documents, which I am accountable for. The membership of the local voted to sustain this decision."

Mr. Ramsey said he had not given Mr. De La Cruz a copy of the membership list because it "contains highly confidential information about each member, including home addresses, social security numbers, etc."

The statement did not explain why such safeguards were necessary in dealing with a man those same members had chosen to handle their financial affairs. Mr. Ramsey's over-protectiveness would ring truer if, by Mr. Lichten's account, a man named Jesus Rivera hadn't enjoyed free rein at the office during that same eightmonth period.

Mr. Rivera, commonly known as Tony, is a former treasurer of Local 768. He is currently a paid consultant to the local, and has been since the tenure of Helen Greene, who resigned as president four years ago as part of a guilty plea to criminal charges involving misuse of union funds for personal expenses.

DARRYL RAMSEY: 'Good reason' for his actions.

By his own account as a witness at Ms. Greene's trial, Mr. Rivera served as treasurer "anywhere from '85 to perhaps '95." He was stripped of his post after it was discovered that several checks had sat around Local 768's offices for months because he failed to deposit them.

On the witness stand, he claimed to have no recollection of an auto leased by Ms. Greene with union funds, even though two other union officials who testified said he had been involved in the discussions about the lease.

'Surrounded Herself With Idiots'

Mr. Rivera's dazed and confused performance on the witness stand led one juror, after the initial case against Ms. Greene ended with a hung jury, to say that she had put together "the opposite of a braintrust. The cynical view would be that Helen surrounded herself with idiots so she could run the local the way she wanted to."

And so the idea that Mr. Ramsey was placing restrictions on Mr. De La Cruz, the democratically elected treasurer of the local, from a fierce sense of vigilance would collapse under the weight of the unsupervised presence of a man removed from office for inattentiveness, who has mysteriously been retained for more than a decade as a paid adviser to its presidents.

That leaves us with the more-plausible argument advanced by Mr. Lichten on behalf of Mr. De La Cruz and other critics of Mr. Ramsey within Local 768: that the president's improper machinations are part of a desperate effort to retain an office to which he was re-elected by the thinnest of margins in a vote that is being challenged in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Photo by Alan Saly WORKING UNDER OBSERVATION: Bernadino De La Cruz charges that since becoming treasurer of Health Service Employees Local 768 of District Council 37 in January, he has been denied access to its offices by President Darryl Ramsey unless someone else is present. Mr. Ramsey denied that claim but acknowledged that he has not given Mr. De La Cruz a copy of the membership list because it contains 'confidential information.'

Mr. Ramsey, who first gained office in 2002 by just 26 votes over challenger Fitz Reid, last December initially prevailed in a runoff with Mr. Reid - Mr. De La Cruz's running mate - by just four votes. That margin, however, was the result of a decision by the Local 768 election committee not to count 13 other ballots; when Mr. Reid protested, five more were counted and the margin was cut to three. The election committee declared the eight remaining ballots to be invalid, claiming that they were submitted by agency shop fee payers, who give Local 768 the equivalent of dues but are not considered members.

Mr. Reid countered by noting that all eight of the voters in question are, like himself, Public Health Sanitarians employed by the Health Department, and charged that they were excluded because Mr. Ramsey - who works for Kings County Hospital - and his supporters on the election committee presumed that they cast their ballots for Mr. Reid.

He took the protest to Mr. Seferian, who has the nickname Kangaroo John because of his penchant for rulings that tilt in favor of those, like Mr. Ramsey, who support both DC 37's leadership and that of AFSCME.

Cited Wrong Agency

Mr. Seferian did not disappoint: he upheld the disqualifications on the grounds that when he contacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation, nothing in its payroll records contradicted the finding of the Local 768 election committee that the eight voters were not union members in good standing. He didn't explain why he never contacted their actual employer, the Health Department, which was the agency that could have offered definitive information about whether payroll records showed that the eight were listed as full-fledged Local 768 members.

If Mr. Reid wins the court case and those ballots are counted, he is likely to become the winner of the election, for which the original tally was held nearly nine months ago. Even if he doesn't, the issue of agency fee payers has shined an uncomfortable light on both Local 768 and DC 37.

According to Mr. Reid, roughly 700 of the 3,300 persons paying dues to Local 768 are classified as "agency shop." It is unlikely that so many persons declined to join the union and enjoy the benefits of membership, given that they are compelled to pay the equivalent of dues anyway. Mr. Reid believes there has been a conscious decision by the union's leaders - Mr. Ramsey and Ms. Greene before him - not to sign up employees in some titles that are not part of their political bases, because those persons might align with one of their election opponents.

DC 37's Count High

Within DC 37 as a whole, city records show about 17 percent of its 119,000 duespayers are classified as "agency shop." There is no benign explanation for such a high percentage - by comparison, the United Federation of Teachers has just 4,044 agency shoppers out of 103,609 members, and there are virtually no nonmembers paying agency shop fees to the city's uniformed unions. A union whose international has made one of its prime political action goals using its organizing resources to sign up any members who are not registered to vote in government elections has somehow not devoted much in the way of resources to ensuring that all DC 37 dues-payers are eligible to take part in union elections.

That is, nonetheless, consistent with a union that took no action when one local president told activists seeking clarification of their rights that there were no copies of the union's constitution or wage contract available. And DC 37's largest local, Department of Education Local 372, for its past two elections has confined voting to a single location over a four-hour period, even though its members' jobs are scattered throughout the city, leading to turnouts of about 2 percent, and DC 37 has not acted to change this.

Roberts: 'Not My Role'

A call to DC 37 leader Lillian Roberts about the restrictions placed on a democratically elected local treasurer by his president brought this e-mailed response: "As Executive Director, it's not my role to intervene because the locals are autonomous. I have no control over their internal disputes. I have no right to intervene. The locals have their own mechanism to bring charges through AFSCME. That's what has happened in this case."

"Local autonomy" was the excuse long given by Ms. Roberts's predecessor, Stanley Hill, for not getting involved in complaints made by union dissidents about the way some locals - notably those loyal to him - were conducting their business, particularly when it came to questionable elections. It was a mantra he departed from just once: when he called in AFSCME in early 1998 because of concern about the financial management of Local 372 when Charlie Hughes was its president, and it was discovered that the local was $10 million in debt. Before the year was over, investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office revealed that numerous DC 37 locals were hotbeds of voter fraud and dues theft, and AFSCME, which had turned the same blind eye to possible corruption until it was too late, forced Mr. Hill's resignation and took control of DC 37.

Playing It Safer

There is no outward evidence today of the kind of thievery that had visibly depleted DC 37's treasury even before the criminal probes took root, but neither is there much evidence of democracy at work in several locals. While DC 37's motto is "Members first," some local presidents act as if the unofficial one is, "Just don't do anything that'll land you in jail."

Mr. De La Cruz, asked whether he believed Mr. Ramsey was restricting him in doing his duties because he had something to hide, said he didn't believe so. "I think it's just simple paranoia," he said.

If so, he's not the only one afflicted.

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