Something Rotten At Top

The death last week of Charlie Hughes, the longtime president of District Council 37 Local 372 who went to jail for embezzling members' dues money, by chance coincided with action taken by the executive board of DC 37 Local 2054 to remove its president because of her unchecked and unauthorized spending.

There were two common threads: the spending excesses were tolerated by the DC 37 executive director at the time, and when they came before the Judicial Panel of its international union, the decisions rendered by the chair of that body, John Seferian, raised more questions than they answered.

Mr. Hughes was charged in 1998 with having plunged his local $10 million in debt. During a hearing before Mr. Seferian, it was testified that then- DC 37 Executive Director Stanley Hill and the treasurer at the time, Bob Myers, had tried to rein in Mr. Hughes's spending by limiting what he could borrow from DC 37 against future per-capita dues payments he would submit from his members.

On cross-examination, however, Mr. Hughes's attorney got Mr. Hill to admit that at the same time that he limited Mr. Hughes's borrowing, he signed off on the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime reimbursement sought by Mr. Hughes, even though local presidents are not entitled to such compensation. It became clear that Mr. Hughes's excesses for an extended period were enabled by Mr. Hill and Mr. Myers. Yet Mr. Seferian in his report on the case recommended no disciplinary action against them for failing in their fiduciary duty.

There was only one plausible reason for his nonaction: as top officers of the flagship union of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, their support was politically valuable to the international union's president, Gerald McEntee.

Later that year, the two men would be removed from office, but for other reasons: Mr. Myers was implicated and eventually criminally convicted in the looting of Local 1549, which he also served as treasurer, and Mr. Hill was bounced because the widespread corruption within DC 37 exposed by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office created too much negative publicity for AFSCME to prop him up.

This is hardly the only instance in which Mr. Seferian has been selective or worse in his rulings over the years. Since then, on one occasion he misstated a portion of the international's own constitution to justify dismissing an election challenge by an opponent of the current president of Local 372, Veronica Montgomery-Costa, who also serves as an AFSCME vice president. And he declined to recommend discipline of DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts after she was sanctioned by a Federal judge for actions concerning the board of the union's benefits fund on the ground that the judge was probably not aware of certain facts—even though the judge had cited those facts in her written decision.

Cut to three weeks ago, when Mr. Seferian decided the case brought against Local 2054 President Colleen Carew-Rogers. Ms. Carew-Rogers during her time in office made a number of spending decisions that can fairly be described as high-handed. Among them, she pushed through the purchase of a Cadillac for $41,715 as a going-away present for her predecessor, Joan Reed.

What makes that expenditure so astonishing is that Local 2054 represents College Assistants, parttime staffers who generally work 20 hours a week and are paid a maximum of $20 an hour. This means that senior employees have a base pay of $20,800, or half what it cost to let Ms. Reed, who has since died, drive into retirement in style.

The justification given for this generosity was that Ms. Reed over the years had significantly improved members' salaries and won them pension rights. The executive board was not notified until after the fact, however, just how generous the 2007 parting gift paid for with members' dues would be.

That bit of extravagance, as well as a $30,000 retirement party for Ms. Reed, were not part of the charges brought against Ms. Carew-Rogers. Instead, the board focused on three more-recent actions, none of which it had authorized: a spring party, the attending of a conference in Washington, D.C. by one of her political allies, and the mailing of a newsletter.

Mr. Seferian found Ms. Carew-Rogers guilty of the latter two charges and acquitted her on the first one, even though he deemed her defense that the members voted for the spring party a "dubious" one. Her only punishment, however, was a reprimand. This stood in stark contrast with a case nine years ago in which he ordered a local president who had criticized Mr. McEntee to make full restitution for unauthorized expenditures, then removed him from office when he was slow in doing so.

Local 2054 board members, frustrated by both the wrist-slap and Ms. Roberts's inaction when they previously complained to her, took matters into their own hands, voting Sept. 1 to remove Ms. Carew- Rogers. Yet when the new president, Carlton Berkley, arrived at the local's offices the next day, he found Ms. Carew-Rogers there and in the process of shredding documents. When he and Vice President Linda Bowman tried to stop her, they were blocked by another DC 37 official.

Something clearly stinks, and the smell emanates right from the top. That means Ms. Roberts, Mr. Seferian, and their ultimate boss, Mr. McEntee. It explains why DC 37 isn't a stronger organization, and raises questions as to why members should be paying dues to a parent union and an international that are subverting their interests to perpetuate a morally corrupt political club.