It was a heartwarming scene in federal court last week in Buffalo.
Two days after Father's Day, former Laborers Local 91 Vice President Salvatore Bertino became the first ex-officer to plead guilty in the massive racketeering and extortion case. As part of a deal to trim a potential 20-year prison term he faced if convicted at trial, Bertino agreed to testify against his cohorts in what prosecutors refer to in court papers as "the Local 91 criminal enterprise."
Besides a recommended sentence of 63 to 78 months in federal prison, he secured a promise from prosecutors that they would not press charges against his son, Anthony, also a Local 91 member, so long as his involvement was in an incident the elder Bertino had already told them about, which did not involve violence against an individual.
How nice. That must have been some scene around the Bertino table, back before little Anthony was old enough to start pushing people around.
"What did you do at work today, Pop?"
"The company building the new Target store won't give us any no-show jobs. So me and some of the boys broke into the place and dumped black tile adhesive all over their brand-new floor. That'll show 'em."
"That's really neat! Would you pass the asparagus, please?"
And a year later:
"I heard you come in after midnight last night, Dad. Did you have to work late?"
"No, those jerks at BFI had the nerve to hire trained technicians to install a liner at their landfill, instead of giving us work we're not qualified for. So we went over and tore the thing up. Did $100,000 damage."
"Wow, that's cool! I hope I can be just like you someday. Is there any more ham?"
And a year after that:
"Did the tilesetters give you their work at the Wegman's job yet, Dad?"
"Not yet, so about 20 of us got together and stomped the crap out of four of them."
"Sweet. Can I borrow the car?"
Salvatore Bertino copped to all of the above as part of his plea agreement. During Tuesday's session, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Harvey described the testimony that would have been expected if the case went to trial.
Particularly telling was Harvey's account of Bertino's style of negotiating with other unions during jurisdictional dispute. During a beef with union carpenters during work on the Lewiston-Porter Middle School soon after Local 91 leaders began to sense the feds were investigating their racket, he shared this wisdom, according to Harvey.
"You don't know who you're talking to -- I come from a different part of the world, a different country," Bertino told a union carpenter, according to the federal indictment.
Since that may not have been explicit enough, he soon thereafter told a carpenter, "You motherf-----, you f---ing motherf-----, the fun doesn't begin until the feds leave."
Surprisingly enough, Anthony Bertino followed in his father's footsteps, first joining Laborers Local 91 and then taking part in the on-the-job "fun."
In 2001, he and his father, along with fellow union member Pat Ciccarelli, were charged with beating up a state Department of Transportation worker who had the audacity to ask the three to move their car. The nerve of the guy -- just because their black Lincoln Town Car happened to be blocking the only open lane of traffic during a reconstruction project on Williams Road.
Like most of the Local 91 cases that made it to town or city courts, not much came from that one. The alleged attack, though, along with one on Niagara Falls Reporter Editor in Chief Mike Hudson weeks earlier in the men's room at the old Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center, helped convince the feds that the use of violence by union members wasn't something out of the past, but an ongoing problem.
They continued presenting witnesses to a grand jury and finally, in May 2002, rounded up Salvatore Bertino and more than a dozen other union officers and members and slapped them all with federal felony charges.
With a trial date less than three months away, the senior Bertino became the fifth Local 91 member to strike a deal with prosecutors. Brian Perry, James McKeown and Andy Shomers each entered guilty pleas, while Anthony Cerrone agreed to cooperate with investigators in return for sentencing considerations after he was convicted of taking part in a mass assault staged by Local 91 members on union tilesetters during construction of the Wegman's store on Military Road.
But while Shomers expressed what seemed like sincere regret for the thuggery he admitted engaging in over the years, Bertino sounded a lot like the apologists who made, and still make, excuses for the threatening tactics used throughout the reign of former business agent Michael "Butch" Quarcini, who died while under indictment in 2003.
When Judge Richard Arcara asked Bertino what he meant by the "different country" remark, Bertino had an explanation.
"I didn't intend to harm anyone. I think it was a misunderstanding."
And when Arcara asked about the profanity-laced tirade cited above, Bertino had an explanation. Seems the younger Bertino had picked up a saw belonging to a union carpenter and was walking away with it until the carpenter stopped him, triggering an altercation.
"My son had scratch marks on his neck and I was really irritated by this, because he was almost twice bigger than my son," Salvatore Bertino told the judge.
That comment spoke volumes about the sense of justice favored the disgraced former regime. They saw absolutely nothing wrong with a couple dozen of them attacking four union tilesetters, but God forbid one carpenter try to take his saw back from a laborer who had no business touching it in the first place.
Other than saying "guilty" when the judge asked how he pleaded, Bertino never really conceded he'd done anything wrong during a court session that lasted more than two hours.
He talked about his humble beginnings as a Sicilian immigrant who came to Niagara Falls after serving in the Italian army. He told the judge he likes gardening, playing cards and playing soccer. Normally, he would have been whisked off to prison immediately pending sentencing after entering his plea, but the judge granted a defense motion to put off detention for a month.
His attorney, Angelo Musitano, asked the judge if his 53-year-old client could travel home to Sicily to visit his parents, particularly his father, who is 85 and ailing.
"He knows he's going to prison and he knows they might not be there when he gets out of prison," Musitano said.
Such requests for sympathy almost make you feel sorry for the guy, until you remember why he was standing before Arcara in the first place.
Bertino was an officer in a union whose identity was linked as closely with "three against one" as with "91." They weren't trying to simply protect their own jobs, as some of their attorneys have halfheartedly argued, they were trying to take jobs for which they weren't qualified and to which they weren't entitled.
In many cases, those jobs belonged to members of other unions who had been trained to perform them and received them through the collective bargaining process. But none of that mattered to the indicted members of the "criminal enterprise."
Like Shomers, Bertino and his attorney put all the blame on Mark Congi, the local's former president and the most-indicted defendant remaining. Bertino agreed to testify about a number of assaults on people and property he said were ordered by Congi, as well as "an occasion when Mark Congi stated that he wanted to murder or seriously injure a person whom he believed was cooperating with the federal investigation."
Congi and the rest are scheduled to go to trial in September, but each plea makes it tougher to imagine things ever going that far, or what his defense might be with this many former underlings turning against him.
As for Bertino, his son wasn't in court to hear his father's not-so-tough talk. Thankfully, neither was his father.
Since this edition marks the fifth anniversary of the birth of the Niagara Falls Reporter, Citycide would like to thank Publisher Bruce Battaglia and Editor in Chief Mike Hudson for being bold or intoxicated enough to dare start an advertising-based venture in a place like Niagara Falls; Senior Editor Rebecca Day for putting the paper and Web site together every week while resisting the urge to knock our heads together; and our array of regular and occasional columnists for making our editorial package both wide and deep.
Most of all, though, thanks to those of you who make it all possible by reading the paper and supporting it with advertising. Keep it up, and the next five years will be even more newsworthy.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 28 2005 |