ATU Stain Not Wiped Away
The sentencing of Sal Battaglia, the former president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, to 57 months in Federal prison closes a sordid chapter in the history of the mob-riddled school-bus union.

But it also leaves several questions unanswered. Mr. Battaglia served as president of the union for just five years, but Federal prosecutors have stated that Local 1181 was under the thumb of the Genovese Crime Family since at least the early 1980s. Given the fact that the late Julius "Spike" Bernstein, a close friend of Genovese leader Matty "The Horse" Ianniello, held a key position in the local since the mid-1970s, the Federal estimate appears conservative.

Yet even after Mr. Battaglia and Mr. Bernstein were indicted along with Mr. Ianniello and other reputed Genovese mobsters three years ago, the International ATU took no action to cleanse the local. It basically left it to the Federal Government to remove Mr. Bernstein from his longtime position as secretary-treasurer of Local 1181 by forcing him to resign as a condition for being granted bail. Mr. Ianniello pleaded guilty in September 2006 to having essentially controlled the local, but Mr. Battaglia was allowed to remain as president; it took a superseding Federal indictment two months later, and the insistence by prosecutors that he, too, had to resign his union position if he wanted bail set, to get him out of there.

This suggests that ATU International President Warren George was paralyzed by either timidity or stupidity. Even when the International commissioned a probe of the local by an outside attorney, it blinked when members of the union's board refused to answer his questions, saying they wanted to consult with Mr. George. If they ever asked him, Mr. George should have ordered them to cooperate or immediately surrender their positions; instead, nothing was done and those board members remain.

One of the current Local 1181 trustees, Tommy Mullins, has said that it would have been unjust to punish board members unless it could be proven that they had engaged in wrongdoing. But it's hard to imagine that they were unaware of the maneuverings of Mr. Battaglia and Mr. Bernstein; in fact, one remaining board member is a son of Mr. Battaglia's.

Over the past three years, Local 1181 has held a questionable officers' election and pushed through a contract deal that members were asked to vote on with incomplete and misleading information that they received for the first time from Mr. Battaglia on the night of the vote. A union trusteeship has continued for more than 19 months, and Mr. Mullins postponed the new officer elections that were to be held this spring, frustrating the hopes of a reform group within Local 1181 of gaining control and making the union one that serves its members.

Among the crimes committed by Mr. Battaglia and Mr. Bernstein were taking payoffs from bus company owners in return for not seeking to organize their employees. There are few greater sins a union official could commit. Yet, stunningly, the AFL-CIO has not pressured the ATU to act more forcefully to rid the plague brought to the union by the likes of the two men and the mob bosses they served by making a clean sweep of the Local 1181 board. Past history tells us that keeping in place those board members who stood by while a union was pillaged increases the chance that it will fall back under the sway of organized crime once Federal prosecutors have moved on to other business.

Mr. Battaglia was just a small-time if corrupt chump who, as often happens in these cases, will wind up doing more time behind bars than the man who was pulling his strings. His entry into the Federal prison system does not wipe away the long stain on the local that its international union allowed to linger for so long.