The Mob and the Deputy Chief of Staff
McGowan, William
The Mob and the Deputy Chief of Staff Meet the White House's Harold Ickes: Longtime Democratic insider and counsel to a mafia-infested union BY WILLIAM McGOWAN Back in January 1993, after serving...
...the union has defrauded, its members have been deprived of their rights, and membership in Local 100 has fallen from 25,000 to 5,000...
...Others say it is a function of his narcolepsy and the medication he takes for it...
...But after a week of negative press reports in January about Ickes' unsavory clientele and his role in the Dinkins stock transfer, the deal unraveled...
...Ickes also practiced labor law, in emulation of a man he has called his "hero," Joe Rauh...
...Ickes, said Clinton the day after the convention, "was one person without whom I might not be here...
...I just don't see how you can divorce the two so completely...
...With problems over Zoe Baird's nomination to be attorney general and allegations about Ron Brown's questionable ethics, Clinton could little afford the embarrassment...
...Like his responses in the Whitewater matter, his fractional answers conceal as much as they reveal...
...The Trouble with Harold Those familiar with Ickes' work with Local 100, however, found Shannon Little's terse and tepid statement unsatisfactory...
...But given his reputation for toughness and for leadership, it wasn't long before Ickes became the point man for Whitewater...
...without a doubt there are a lot of sharp knives out for him...
...The good news about Harold Ickes is that he is skilled and has a sense of history and realism missing in the greenhorns who dominate the White House staff...
...Ickes testified for three days before the federal grand jury in Brooklyn that was impaneled in 1990 to probe the "Dear Dad" matter...
...Even though Ickes may not have been in bed with a mobbed-up union & la John Gotti's lawyer Bruce Cutler, it's hard to believe his claims that he didn't know about the union's mafia associations and equally hard to understand why he continued to represent it...
...They have converted collective bargaining agreements into tools of extortion...
...Unlike many of his comrades who disdained hand-to-hand politicking and the nitty-gritty of the smoke-filled room, Ickes reveled in it...
...Ickes took a very broad view of attorney-client privilege," said one former prosecutor...
...Son of Harold M. Ickes, FDR's highly regarded secretary of interior, Ickes Jr...
...In light of the reports, Ickes was forced to withdraw his name...
...Ickes says he may have been aware of allegations of the union's ties to organized crime and the violations of labor law these ties were said to have encouraged...
...The bad news is that an examination of his record as a New York labor lawyer and a leading Democrat suggests a proclivity for stonewalling and a dread of full disclosure that could be dangerous for the Clintons...
...According to David Wright, a New York labor lawyer who has opposed Ickes and restaurant management in court on behalf of these workers, Ickes was "the worst enemy of hundreds of restaurant workers in New York...
...Asked about his role in the "Dear Dad" controversy, Ickes is cordial, but seems as if he's still in the grand jury mode...
...Yet even if the charges against him have gotten wider play because of personal and political foes, there are still reasons to ask whether Ickes is fit for such high office and should be given such a powerful brief...
...His career is strewn with questionable moves that may not have broken laws yet certainly stretched the outside of the envelope of propriety—bad enough for any administration, but worse for one that promised the highest ethical standards...
...Such missteps could be explained as bad luck...
...By January of this year, however, Ickes was brought back from the political grave and given the job he had just missed when the administration opened...
...He can conduct himself like a blue-chip lawyer and his friends and many in the press swear he is an affable charmer at heart...
...There were still more indications that the union might have been steeped in mafiosi, not least of which was the number of union officers who had mob-related felony records...
...Ickes' 30 years of hardball politics have made him more than a few enemies...
...Pointing to the convictions of Chickie Amodeo, John DeRoss, and the felony records of other Local 100 officials and business agents, David Wright, a New York labor lawyer, says, 'it is inconceivable to me that a lawyer in Mr...
...According to Michael Maroney, a former senior investigator for the Department of Labor, Ickes was present during an official government interview in 1985 when Anthony "Chickie" Amodeo, the union's president before being forced to step down under the terms of a 1992 federal consent decree, admitted that he had known Castellano, then head of the Gambino crime family, for more than 40 years...
...After serving as special counsel to the Democratic National Committee during Ron Brown's tenure as chairman, Ickes jumped into a leadership vacuum in New York state to manage the 1992 Democratic primary for the Arkansas governor...
...This, Ickes' critics claim, demonstrated a "see no evil" mentality at odds with the code of ethics embraced by the AFL-CIO...
...Some say this wildman reputation is carefully cultivated to give him an aura of danger he uses to his advantage...
...Ickes used his network of personal relationships to keep a fragile coalition of feminists, labor leaders, and liberals together in the face of concern over Gennifer Flowers' still-lingering charges of marital infidelity...
...But instead of advising the union that DeRoss should be suspended pending the outcome of the indictment, Ickes urged that DeRoss be removed from his union post only after DeRoss was convicted...
...Such horsepower attracted some dubious clients, however, many of them corrupt labor unions, leading some of its opponents to jokingly refer to it as "The Firm...
...Prosecutors, citing physical evidence analyzed by the Secret Service, would later say this note was probably written sometime during the campaign in October 1989, not in 1985 as Dinkins insisted...
...Finally, there was the harsh language of the 1992 federal RICO complaint against the union, which under the terms of a consent decree banned Chickie Amodeo for life and put the local into the hands of federal trustees...
...Another wake-up call could have come in 1986, during the successful racketeering trial of union vice president John DeRoss, who was identified publicly throughout the trial as a captain in the Gambino family...
...Ickes' career, which has been likened to "a Baedeker to the liberal politics of the last 30 years," has distinguished origins...
...I just couldn't ask for a better colleague," said Mack McLarty, who put Ickes onto the Whitewater case just a few hours after he walked through the door...
...In addition to Whitewater and health care, after all, Ickes will be supervising the midterm congressional elections...
...David Wright articulated this quandry and the doubts many feel about Ickes' ethical compass...
...But he has been known to explode into screaming fits, which his intense blue eyes and unkempt hair only make more maniacal...
...According to Dinkins, he sold the stock—once valued at around $1 million—to his son in 1985, before he became mayor, for the sum of $58,000 payable in four years' time...
...Since the creation of Local 100 in 1983, the officers of Local 100 have abused (their) trust and power and have worked with organized crime to reap enormous profits at the expense of the union membership," the complaint alleged...
...The core issue here was whether Dinkins lied about stock he once owned but said he later sold in the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, a Harlem communications company run by his political ally Percy Sutton...
...At 54, he is older than most of the staff, too, and unlike Mack the Nice McLarty he is the kind of heavy who doesn't mind cracking the whip or saying no to powerful people...
...But when asked to produce a bill of sale to verify the transfer, all the mayor had was a note scrawled on a legal pad from his son—subsequently called the "Dear Dad" letter—raising questions that the letter was part of a scheme to dodge taxes and avoid conflict of interest charges...
...Lawyers typically represent people who are in trouble," he says...
...The union had been heavily investigated over the years by the elites of law enforcement," he says, "and no charges were brought against it in the years we represented them...
...He went to Mississippi that summer as part of the drive to increase black voter registration...
...Based on the evidence available to date," said Ms...
...There he was beaten so badly by a gang of whites that he lost a kidney...
...One of the Democrats Ickes stayed close to as he worked at Meyer, Suozzi was Bill Clinton...
...Pointing to the convictions of Chickie Amodeo, John DeRoss, and the felony records of other Local 100 officials and business agents, David Wright, a New York labor lawyer, says: "It is inconceivable to me that a lawyer in Mr...
...They may not be at the level of Armand D'Amato," says one former New York prosecutor, referring to the Long Island influence peddler and brother of Senator Al, "but they are not far behind...
...It is the nature of the business...
...As elected union officials they have an obligation to investigate and remove people who are corrupt and inimical to the labor movement...
...was 12 when his father died in 1953...
...Noting that anyone who had talked about what went on in the grand jury was doing so illegally, Ickes insists there was "complete cooperation" with the grand jury and that all documents that were subpoenaed were turned over...
...Ickes' greatest liability was his work on behalf of Local 100, his chief client from 1983 to 1991...
...Only slightly less troubling is Ickes' alleged role in covering up a stock transfer deal on behalf of David Dinkins...
...With such notable New York political figures as English, and former Suffolk County Democratic chairmen John Klein and Basil Patterson, the firm of Meyer, Suozzi was a political powerhouse in the state...
...Those familiar with the grand jury proceedings, however, say that Ickes did not help concoct the note but did aggressively stonewall prosecutors searching for key campaign documents...
...In fact, the union was put under federal trusteeship in 1992 after the government charged it with links to the mafia...
...But he steadfastly rejects claims that he was aware of any illegality or any links between the mob and the union hierarchy...
...Local 100—part of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers International, which represents employees at such well-known New York restaurants as Sardi's and Tavern on the Green—has long been reputed to be under the control of the Gambino crime family...
...They have failed to enforce union members' rights...
...Believing that the case would be too hard to win, they declined to file any charges...
...They should have done all this before, not after...
...Some of them involved the same restaurants that prosecutors have said paid off Local 100 so management could ignore collective bargaining agreements in the union contract, essentially purchasing union inaction at the expense of workers rights...
...The subsidiary issue is whether Ickes, as Dinkins' campaign counsel, might have helped him get away with it...
...When I questioned him about his work with Local 100, Ickes fell back on an old labor lawyer saw, pointing out that not all clients are saints...
...To be out there getting votes for Jesse Jackson one week and the next week rubbing elbows with Tony the Horse...
...After returning to New York to attend Columbia Law School, he co-chaired the New York delegation for Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 convention, and then went on to work for Birch Bayh, Morris Udall, Ted Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson...
...Choosing to go West instead of Ivy League, Ickes graduated from Stanford in 1964...
...At the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, he was part of an effort mounted by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to force integration of all future Democratic delegations from Mississippi...
...An FOB since their days at Project Pursestrings, an antiwar organization in Washington, Ickes stayed in touch with the Clintons through the seventies, frequently having dinner with them and his former girlfriend Susan Thomases (another politically influential New York lawyer) when the Clintons came to New York...
...As for critics like David Wright, who pursued the cases that Ickes would not, Ickes says: "Wright has an economic interest in this...
...According to most attorneys and arbitrators who came up against him in his work before the NLRB, Ickes was a tenacious advocate with such an effective command of the law that opposing attorneys often wilted...
...Although he was cleared of criminal wrongdoing before Clinton brought him back to Washington, Ickes left behind a string of murky controversies in New York...
...The loss deprived the White House of what its stumbling first year revealed it needed the most: an advisor with deft political antennae who could work closely with both Hillary and Bill Clinton and show the neophytes around them what brass-knuckled politicking was all about...
...If there was an article in the paper saying DeRoss was a capo, they should have investigated him...
...Later, Ickes was informed by investigators that his client was electronically recorded talking to Castellano as part of a federal probe into organized crime activities...
...Ickes says that these workers had "very easy" recourse to the NLRB complaint process, and did not even need a lawyer to do so, although many familiar with the NLRB's budget-strapped realities say this is not so...
...In 1977, Ickes joined the Long Island labor law firm of Meyer, Suozzi, English and Klein...
...York—many of whom would not go on the record, citing Ickes' reputation for vindictiveness and his formidable powers as deputy chief of staff—were not surprised that he had put himself in a position where he could be charged with obstruction of justice...
...Ickes' position would not have known that his client was involved in some level of corruption...
...I am not going to get into a fight with David Wright...
...As for the consent decree that forever bars Chickie Amodeo and other union officers from further union work, Ickes quickly points out that the agreement had a "non-admissions clause" which effectively means that Amodeo and the union acknowledged no crimes...
...Ickes should have advised the executive board that they had a duty to investigate public allegations that John DeRoss was a mafia capo, that there were associations with organized crime," says one labor attorney...
...He was also in the doghouse over a phone call he and Stephanopoulos made to Altman to get former Washington U.S...
...Ickes has "the experience of political damage control," noted George Stephanopolous...
...And according to news reports, federal investigators caught Paul Castellano, head of the family, on tape saying that Local 100 "was my union and I don't want anything to happen to it...
...According to certain tabloid press accounts, federal prosecutors were convinced that Ickes had had a hand in the letter's concoction and had perjured himself in his grand jury testimony...
...The firm claimed Little's two-line statement was a full exoneration, and it was sufficient to clear the way for Ickes' return to the White House...
...And judging from his performance with cases he handled on behalf of individual members of Local 100, it seems unlikely that Ickes was in it to help the rank and file...
...Ickes delivered more yeoman service to Clinton by managing the Democratic National Convention in New York that summer, taking great pains to handle the prickly egos of influential Democrats seeking the spotlight...
...Nevertheless, there were a number of grievance cases Ickes decided not to pursue...
...During this time he told friends his position as deputy chief of the White House staff was "a done deal...
...During the years Ickes developed a reputation and a cult following for his devotion to causes and candidates of the left, he also developed a colorful personal style...
...Dismayed at the way her friends in official Washington dropped her once she no longer represented access to power, Ickes' mother moved the family to a farm in Maryland horse country, although Harold attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington—the same place where Chelsea Clinton now preps...
...He certainly knew that the union was controlled by organized crime," says Maroney...
...He was withholding an extraordinary amount of material—records, memos—from the inquiry, saying it was privileged...
...Once back on the team, he was to have spent the bulk of his time on the health care initiative...
...But in November 1993, former Wedtech prosecutor Mary Shannon Little, who was investigating Local 100 as part of a federal action against the union, released a brief statement...
...By March, just 10 weeks into his new job, he had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury on his knowledge of Roger Altman's so-called heads up briefings about the RTC investigation into Madison Guaranty...
...But those familiar with Ickes' track record in New William McGowan is a journalist and author in New York...
...In court testimony widely covered in the press at that time, DeRoss and Castellano were caught on tape having a discussion over drinks at a Manhattan steakhouse that presiding Judge John Keenan characterized as involving "the splitting of payoffs and respective jurisdiction over certain unions and payoffs...
...That is his ball game...
...During Herman Badillo's 1973 bid for the New York mayoralty, for example, Ickes got into a brawl with a fellow campaign aide and bit the leg of a third aide who tried to break it up...
...Ethical difficulties notwithstanding, he is seen by many as the last of the great crusaders, a prince of the left who has never sacrificed principles for political expediency, remaining true to liberal ideals through the wilderness years when the Democrats were out of national power...
...Little, "there is no evidence of criminal misconduct on the part of Harold Ickes or Meyer, Suozzi...
...But then disturbing allegations surfaced: that Ickes knew about mob infiltration of a labor union he represented as a lawyer in New York, and that he had lied to a federal grand jury in connection with a stock transfer deal involving then-Mayor David Dinkins...
...The Mob and the Deputy Chief of Staff Meet the White House's Harold Ickes: Longtime Democratic insider and counsel to a mafia-infested union BY WILLIAM McGOWAN Back in January 1993, after serving as deputy director of the transition in Little Rock, Harold Ickes, Jr., a near-legendary figure in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, seemed a sure bet for the powerful job of deputy White House chief of staff...
...He also points out that he was not in a position to exert attorney-client privilege—a technical distinction that makes little practical difference in terms of his alleged refusal to turn over what the federal prosecutors wanted to see, say those familiar with his testimony...
...As their counsel, Ickes was supposed to take on discrimination and wrongful dismissal cases, pushing those with the most merit before the National Labor Relations Board...
...Ickes represents a conundrum for the Democrats, particularly those on the left: How to square his devotion to the good fight in light of uncomfortable facts about his past, facts that in many instances directly contradict the principles for which the good fight is supposed to be fought...
...Coming on the heels of Jerry Brown's upset win in Connecticut, New York was crucial for Clinton...
...Ickes' storied career in liberal politics adds to his gravitas...
...His mentor was Jack English, a Long Island Democratic Party chairman and Kennedy family loyalist whom Ickes met during the 1968 presidential campaign...
...He has the experience of the rough and tumble of New York politics...
...The trail Ickes left in New York weaves through the same territory of half-truths, dodges, unsavory associations, and seedy appearances that Whitewater does...
...Attorney and Clinton detractor Jay Stephens fired as an RTC lawyer...
...The next day Ickes officially withdrew his name from consideration...
...After the election, Ickes went to Little Rock, where he played his pivotal role as deputy director of the transition...
...But there is, of course, absolutely nothing in the canons of legal ethics that requires an attorney to represent a crooked labor union...
...There were, in fact, so many with mob ties that honest union locals trying to pry members away from Local 100 circulated FBI-style "Wanted" sheets within Local 100 shops, again illustrating the wide availability of information that Ickes must have ignored...
...As last spring's headlines revealed, however, Ickes quickly fumbled...
...On the night of January 13, 1993, Clinton had an anguished meeting with Ickes in Little Rock...
...It's quite a strange dichotomy, really," he says...
...Although he was self-effacing, he was not unsung...
...Hardly the "lightweight weenie" that Roger Ailes called him during the 1989 Dinkins-Giuliani New York mayoral contest, Ickes is of the old school, with one of the most extensive vocabularies of expletives in politics and a taste for confrontation...
...He made a lot of money (on these cases...
...Ickes position would not have known that his client was involved in some level of corruption...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 7
