Dissident Calls the Cops, Guild Stacks the Deck
By RICHARD STEIER
The criminal charges brought in June by Fred Newton against a fellow officer of the Civil Service Technical Guild, George Sona, were basic, accusing Mr. Sona of having struck him during a dispute at a union meeting and then forcibly taken his camera and refused to return it.

When several other Tech Guild officials filed internal union charges against Mr. Newton in connection with the same incident late last month, things got complicated.

The criminal case will pivot on the credibility of the parties to determine whether Mr. Sona is guilty of what clearly would be unlawful behavior. The charges brought against Mr. Newton by the other Guild officers hinge on whether his conduct was socially inappropriate.

That can be discerned simply by looking at the complaint, which accuses him of "speaking without recognition, taking pictures of specific members of the Body, and the continuing disrespect for officials acting to maintain good order."

Objected to His Bringing in Cops

Left unsaid in the complaint is that one element of that disrespect was Mr. Newton's decision to summon the police to arrest Mr. Sona. Tech Guild President Claude Fort, in a phone conversation with me several weeks before the union charges were served, was incredulous that Mr. Newton could have taken such a step against a fellow union member. He had no answer to my question about what recourse had been left to Mr. Newton if no one in higher authority at the meeting — including Mr. Fort — did not order Mr. Sona to return the camera he had seized.

RIGHTFUL CHARGES OR RETALIATION?: More than two months after he brought criminal charges against a fellow Civil Service Technical Guild official for allegedly striking him and taking his camera, Fred Newton (left) was served with an internal union complaint for his behavior during the incident. Tech Guild President Claude Fort (right) said Mr. Newton had been disruptive, but another union dissident said he did nothing more than 'try to take a picture of someone else being disruptive.'

Mike Gimbel, a retired Tech Guild official who has remained active in the union and is Mr. Fort's most-vocal defender against his internal critics, went on the offensive when I asked him about that issue, saying Mr. Newton had been "using the camera to intimidate [Jacqueline] Odina."

According to Mr. Newton and his supporters, however, it was Ms. Odina who was behaving in an intimidating manner. Behrouz Fathi, the president of the Tech Guild's transit chapter and a political opponent of Mr. Fort's, had been addressing the union meeting, according to Mr. Newton, when Ms. Odina began interrupting and heckling him. When Mr. Fathi responded by telling her, "Sister, you need counseling," Ms. Odina allegedly became infuriated, declaring, "I'm not your sister" and moving toward him in a way that several officials were alarmed enough by to restrain her.

Mr. Newton, who is the Guild's labor and political activities chair — a post he gained by unseating Mr. Gimbel in an election — took out his camera and began snapping pictures of Ms. Odina while she was being restrained. That further angered her, and she tried to get at Mr. Newton, he said, and when she couldn't, Mr. Sona tried to grab his camera and struck him in the chest during the attempt, leading others at the meeting to restrain Mr. Sona.

A short time later, Mr. Newton said, when he went to the men's room, Ms. Odina again lunged in his direction but was restrained, and when he took out his camera again, Mr. Sona struck him once more and snatched it from him.

From the outset, according to Mitch Feder, another union officer who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Fort for the Guild presidency last year, Ms. Odina "was the instigator. She pushed the chair back and leaped to attack [Mr. Fathi]," setting in motion the two confrontations.

'Intimidated a Small Black Woman'

Mr. Gimbel seemed to view the incidents not in terms of who had been the aggressor but rather based on race and gender. "What right did Fred, a large white man, [have] to pursue [Jacqueline] Odina, a small black woman, into the hall, to repeatedly flash the camera close up in her face as he towered over her in a completely intimidating manner," he stated in a July 29 e-mail, three weeks before charges were mailed to Mr. Newton.

He defended Mr. Sona's decision not to return the camera, saying, "The proper thing for George to do was exactly what he actually did and make sure that Fred not be able to continue his intimidation of Sister Odina. There was no attempt to steal the camera."

Shortly after the internal charges were delivered to Mr. Newton, Mr. Feder said last week, "They returned a camera which was not the camera that was taken from him." The criminal case is still pending, with Mr. Sona due back in court Sept. 25.

The Tech Guild, which is Local 375 of District Council 37, has long been a spirited union marked by internal squabbling and shifting loyalties, exemplified by the fact that Ms. Odina supported Mr. Feder in his election run against Mr. Fort less than two years ago. The in-fighting has intensified over the past decade, beginning with the election in 1998 of Roy Commer as Tech Guild president in an upset of the union's longtime leader, Lou Albano, and boiling over later that year when some of Mr. Commer's supporters on the union's executive board mutinied and locked him out of its offices. Two years later, Mr. Commer was removed from office and one of the former allies who turned against him, Uma Kutwal, succeeded him. Mr. Commer's allies united behind Mr. Fort, who unseated Mr. Kutwal in the 2001 election, but Mr. Fort quickly cut his ties to Mr. Commer.

Orchestrated From Above?

In yet another twist to the strange saga, Mr. Kutwal subsequently stated that he had been duped by officials at DC 37 and its international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — which were angered by Mr. Commer's attempts to highlight corruption in DC 37 and the slow response to reports of it by AFSCME President Gerry McEntee — into seeking his removal. His change of heart made him an easy target for tough cross-examination in a 2006 court trial on Mr. Commer's suit seeking reinstatement as a Tech Guild member, and the jury ruled against Mr. Commer.

The beginning of the friction between Mr. Commer and Tech Guild board members a decade ago involved his criticism of the administrator overseeing the union's legal services fund. An attorney who had helped Mr. Commer during his election campaign had looked at the fund and raised questions about how well it was managed, and also discovered that the administrator, Ira Pearlstein, was conducting his private law practice using the union's offices and resources. Mr. Commer confronted Mr. Pearlstein, who told him that Mr. Albano had given him permission to do private law work there because the local could not afford to pay him as much as he wanted to run the legal fund.

Commer's Concerns Vindicated

When Mr. Commer sought to have Mr. Pearlstein removed, he was accused by board members of trying to get him out so he could reward a campaign supporter. But three years after Mr. Commer was removed from office, an outside auditor discovered that the union's bookkeeper had embezzled $2.4 million from the local, most of it from the legal services fund. Mr. Pearlstein had not bothered to check the books, he said, because he had trusted the bookkeeper; Mr. Commer's supporters asserted that a contributing factor in his negligence was that he was too busy conducting his outside practice.

This vindication of Mr. Commer's reservations about Mr. Pearlstein was not enough for Mr. Fort to petition AFSCME to have him reinstated as a member; the Tech Guild president said it was a matter outside his own jurisdiction. And so the tensions between the two factions have continued to fester.

Earlier this year, there were charges of election irregularities in the voting processes at four different Tech Guild chapters. In one case, more than half the ballots were discovered to have been opened and then stapled shut prior to the point when they were supposed to be counted; in another, an official with ties to Mr. Fort's regime won a motion for a new vote to be held by using a surprise change of venue: he called a meeting at a restaurant in Jackson Heights although the members involved work at Bellevue Hospital.

Mr. Fort disclaimed any involvement in the funny voting business. His critics within the union say that is one of the Tech Guild's biggest problems: that he denies responsibility for what goes on under his stewardship, either because he is unaware or wants to wash his hands of the seamier machinations.

A Communist Royalist

Mr. Gimbel, who had to defend himself against charges involving one of those chapter votes that he delayed presenting a valid membership list until enough supporters for his preferred candidate could be moved into that chapter from another, serves as the union's unofficial Minister of Propaganda. A one-time ally in the crusade to get rid of Mr. Commer, retired New York City Transit Chapter Chair Mel Levy, once noted that while Mr. Gimbel is a man of the Far Left, he has shown a remarkable knack for winding up defending those who hold the power at the Tech Guild, DC 37, and AFSCME. This tendency marks him as a unique species: a Communist Royalist.

Consider a letter he circulated earlier this summer in which he lamented "the disintegration" of an orderly give and take within the Tech Guild "that started with President Roy Commer's disrespect of the democratic process ... While I opposed the previous Local 375 President, Lou Albano, in many of his actions, he never tried to openly stifle democratic debate."

Literally Stole the Vote

There is a kind of phony brilliance to this claim, since Mr. Albano was a more-genial president than Mr. Commer. What Mr. Gimbel leaves out in his pining for the democracy of old is that one reason Mr. Commer brought a high level of paranoia to his Tech Guild presidency was because he had to win it twice, the second time because DC 37 officials loyal to Mr. Albano stole ballots from a locked room after the tally for president had been finalized but before votes for other offices had been completed.

The Tech Guild's election committee, whose members were hand-picked by Mr. Albano, disregarded the obvious and fair way to deal with the disappeared ballots: declare Mr. Commer the president-elect and hold a new vote for all offices where the count was not complete, and ordered a rerun of the entire election.

It was a shameful abuse of their responsibility, and Mr. Albano, rather than take the honorable course and concede to Mr. Commer, went along with this sham on top of a scam. Reaction among the rank and file was so strong in opposition to this maneuver that Mr. Commer won the re-vote by a far larger margin than he had the original election.

Mr. Gimbel, who ran on Mr. Commer's ticket, was among those who benefited from the rank-and-file backlash. For him to suggest recently that Mr. Albano — his reputation hurt by his willingness to go along with the re-vote in a last desperate grasp for power — was fonder of democracy than Mr. Commer suggests he believes Tech Guild members have short memories.

In that same letter, Mr. Gimbel stoutly defended Mr. Sona's conduct that led to his arrest, saying that he was "astounded to find out later that Fred Newton had the temerity to call the cops ... George Sona was just doing his job. George Sona was exemplary in his actions that night!"

Mr. Sona is one of the Tech Guild's sergeants at arms. Presumably he got the job because he could be counted on to be unstintingly loyal to Mr. Fort, since his past job history casts doubts that he is temperamentally suited for a position whose first requirement is to keep order at union meetings.

Fired for Insubordination At HA

Five years ago, Mr. Sona, a veteran Associate Project Manager at the Housing Authority, was fired for insubordination toward a supervisor, the last in a series of such actions. Although he eventually was reinstated after an appeal to the Civil Service Commission, the acts that led to his dismissal raised questions about Mr. Sona's ability to control his temper.

Another Tech Guild sergeant at arms, David Grant, who was the lead plaintiff in bringing the internal charges against Mr. Newton, also seems a curious choice for that position of authority. A year ago, prior to an executive board meeting he passed out copies of biblical passages referring to homosexuality as an "abomination" and "detestable," and during the meeting itself, according to Mr. Newton, used the word "faggot" to make sure everyone knew just how he felt.

Mr. Newton, who heads the union's gay and lesbian caucus, brought internal charges, and the executive board found Mr. Grant guilty and ordered him to make a formal apology and undergo sensitivity training.

That he was allowed to remain a sergeant at arms after such a show of intolerance raises questions; those questions become particularly resonant because he is the prime complainant against his old antagonist.

Those questions were compounded when, during the opening Tech Guild hearing of the charges against Mr. Newton Sept. 10, union Vice President Michelle Keller, who acknowledged helping draft them, withdrew her name as one of the charging parties and announced that she would serve as the hearing officer in the case on behalf of the executive board.

Objectivity Doubtful

As Mr. Newton pointed out the following afternoon, he has clashed with Ms. Keller on a couple of occasions, and in a letter to this newspaper last year accused her of insensitivity toward Jewish members of the union. Given that history and her initial role in drafting the charges against him, there is no way she could be considered an impartial official in presiding over the case against Mr. Newton. But then the timing of the charges — which were served more than two months after the incident — was suspicious enough to raise questions as to whether they were meant to pressure Mr. Newton to drop the criminal complaint against Mr. Sona.

Mr. Feder asserted that Mr. Fort wasn't interested in a fair hearing, a judgment that gets added weight from the Tech Guild president's attitude toward Mr. Commer's bid for reinstatement after he was railroaded out of both the Tech Guild presidency and his union membership by AFSCME eight years ago.

Citing Mr. Fort's statements to this newspaper about Mr. Newton that appeared in last week's issue, Mr. Feder remarked, "Claude said he was being disruptive. He wasn't; he got up to take a picture of someone else being disruptive. Fred gets a little emotional at times, as we all do when we see some of the stuff that goes on at the executive board. But Claude wants to assassinate the character of anyone who disagrees with him."

Please click here for our Copyright Notice.