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INVESTIGATORS CLAIMFBI Tried To Undermine Probe Of Teamsters BossBv MATT YANCEYAP Labor Writer WASHINGTON (AP) — FBIagents tried to undermine a government probe of Teamsters President Jackie Presser, admitting only after an indictment was prepared that they had authorized his role in a scheme to embezzle union funds, say congressional and other investigators.In the first public airing of the Justice Department’s decisionlast July to close a 32-month, $1.1million investigation of Presser, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was told Friday that the prosecution was dropped because the FBI hadcompromised the case.However, it wasn’t until June 20,1985—just seven days before the deadline that the Justice De-Partment had set for indicting resser — that senior Justice officials interviewed FBI agents in detail about their dealings withAnd even then, Justice officials admitted that the interviews were “not vigorous” because they did not want to turn the agents against one another, theinvestigators said.“Theevidence suggests... that the Justice Department may have a flawed supervisory relationship with the FBI,” the Senate panel was told.Tne investigation into charges that Presser funneled $700,000 to “ghost employees” of a Teamsters local in Cleveland was opened in 1981. After beingclosed since last July, it was reopened in March by a Cleveland grand jury.In addition, congressional and FBI officials confirmed Friday,another grand jury in Washington is investigating whether FBI agents tried to thwart the earlier probe and then lied about Press-er’s relationship with thebureau.“The reason for closing thecase were the claims by FBI agents that they had authorized those payments by Jackie Presser,” Howard Shapiro, the subcommittee’s chief investigator,testified Friday.Based upon those claims, Shapiro and other government investigators said, senior Justice Department officials in Washington concluded it would be impossible to win a conviction against Presser, even if the statements by the FBI agents werefalse.All the government witnesses Friday testified there was no evi-dence that the case against Presser was dropped or mishandled because of political considerations stemming from his close relationship with Reagan administration officials.Rather, they said, the major decisions in the investigation were all made by career attorneys and later concurred in by middle-level political appointees.The committee, however, was told that in late 1983 the FBI hadinformed David Margolis, head of Justice’s organized crime section, that there was an “informant problem” in the Presser case.Margolis was informed that FBI agents had authorized payments by Presser to one “ghost employee,” said John Sopko, a former member of the Justice Department’s racketeering section and now a Senate investigator.After that disclosure, Sopko testified, “there does not appear to be an aggressive effort by the Justice Department to determine what the FBI was doing.”“As late as April 1985,” he said,“the department suspected it stilldid not know the full scope of the FBI’s relationship with Jackie Presser.”According to several documents, FBI agents told Justice Department officials in the June 1985 interviews that they gave Presser authorization in 1978 to make the payments.However, Justice officials were quoted by Senate investigators as saying there is no written record of those authorizations until 1983.Presser has denied that he was an FBI informant. And Senate investigators testified Friday that they had found no evidence describing him as one.
Newspaper Details
Kerrville Daily Times
Kerrville, Texas, US
Sun, May 11, 1986
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Madison H.
NA, 26 May 2023
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