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FORMER LABORERS ENFORCER TELLS OF TOUGH TIMES AND EVEN TOUGHER GUYS

By Mike Hudson

Editors' note: The following interview contains strong language and should not be read by the squeamish.

"My son is serving Butch's sentence. He's paying for what we all did."

As wide as he is tall, Chuck Congi looks older than his 64 years would suggest. Once a powerful man, he now walks with the aid of a cane, and inactivity due to an on-the-job bout with cyanide poisoning in the 1980s has taken its toll.

Congi, whose cousin was the late labor racketeer Michael "Butch" Quarcini, is also the father of former Laborers Local 91 president Mark Congi, who was sentenced in July to 15 years in prison on racketeering and extortion charges, the harshest sentence meted out by federal Judge Richard Arcara in the case.

Two weeks ago, the elder Congi appeared on a Channel 4 news special about the union's 40-year reign of terror in the construction business here. No sooner had promotional spots for the series begun to run than his house was targeted by gunmen who fired at least four handgun rounds at the structure as Congi's 4-year-old granddaughter slept inside.

City police and the FBI say they are continuing their investigations into the incident.

Being the odd man out in Local 91 is nothing new for Congi, who had a falling out with Quarcini in 1985 and was effectively banned from the union. Quarcini issued an order that no union members were to talk to Congi, an order issued with such severity that his own son hasn't spoken to him since.

A member of Local 91 since 1959, Chuck Congi is no angel either, and freely admitted to numerous felonies he carried out under Quarcini's orders during a lengthy interview conducted last week at the offices of the Niagara Falls Reporter.

Reporter: Your son Mark got the toughest sentence of all the Local 91 defendants, and you've said many times now that he was treated unfairly by the court. Why shouldn't he have been sentenced to 15 years in prison?

Congi: "After Butch died, they needed a fall guy, somebody to make an example of. Mark was it. He gets 15 years, now that's ridiculous. Nobody got killed, people do murder and don't get 15 years. Here, the other week, Robert Malvestuto was sentenced. He gets four years. He throws a bomb into a house, and it deafens a guy. How could they give him four years, and the guy who told him to go over and scare those guys, he gets 15 years? Now, I don't know if Mark gave the orders to go over there, but that's what kind of orders he gave. This guy has to be scared, this guy, they won't sign a contract, whatever these orders were, he passed them off to these certain guys. Bertino was one, Shomers was another. These were the Arm, you know? Mark wasn't considered the Arm, he was the Show. Because of his size and his looks, he made an impression on you. Like, 'Holy Christ,' you know? I mean, 'We don't want to mess with this guy.' And that's what Butch had him for.

"Mark was, all he was, was a messenger boy. Trust me when I tell you, because I know Mark. Mark was an altar boy and he was raised by his mother to respect people. He could never go out and beat somebody up, even the FBI never said he did. That's not Mark, I'm telling you. He was ashamed to even be there.

"Why wasn't Cheryl (Cicero) ever charged? Did you ever ask yourself that? Those last five years, she ran that place. And she would talk to you like she was a man, like she was gonna punch you in the face. Butch was at breakfast, golf, the Como, he wasn't even there. She was the business manager. The day-to-day business was run by his daughter, Cheryl Cicero.

"Cheryl and her husband (Joel Cicero) had 100 times the power that my son had, and the judge gave her husband probation. Why? Why were certain people not investigated? Why weren't they indicted? They were running the hall. You mean that none of those guys said Cheryl was running the hall and giving the orders? So I think they made a deal with her. I really in my heart think that's why her husband got probation.

"There are a lot of people in jail right now who shouldn't be in jail. And a lot of people aren't in jail who should be. And I believe that with all my heart and soul."

Reporter: How did you get involved with the Laborers? How did you meet Butch?

Congi: "Well, to begin with, Butch was my cousin, half cousin, whatever. I always called him my cousin. He was older than me, and I didn't really know him. But I went to work on the Power Project when I was 17 years old. I lied about my age. I was already married, and Mark was on the way. My father went and seen Mac McGill, who ran the hall, and at that time, the going rate to get on the site was 150 bucks. Then you had to buy your book at the hall. So he gave Mac McGill $150, and Mac put me to work down at the intake gates.

"Seventeen years old and I didn't know one end of a shovel from another. I mean, I was ... it was a joke. Put me in a crew, a dynamite crew, with Bill Scales, and here I'm drilling holes, packing dynamite in these holes with gravel and stuff, but I started seeing all over the job, on telephone poles and that, 'Butch For Financial Secretary.' It didn't say Quarcini, but if you looked real close, at the bottom it said Butch Quarcini.

"So he comes to the job one day, he's riding around the Power Project in a truck and he sees me and says, 'Chuck, I didn't know you were here.' I says, yeah, I figure about three months. And he goes, 'Come over to my house, I want to talk to you.' He lived on 16th Street at the time. So we go over to 16th Street, and he's sitting around with some guys. He's got Mario D'Antonio, Scorch Mantell, I don't know his real name, we called him Scorch, Nunzio LaVerdi and Ronny DiGrillo was there. And they said, 'OK, we got an election coming up and we need guys to go out and shut down the phones of all the guys that're running against Butch.' I go, all right, but Jesus, how are you supposed to shut down a phone? He goes -- and in them days you could do it -- if you called from a pay phone someplace, like out in the country where nobody used it, if you called somebody and left it off the hook, that person couldn't call out no more. The line was tied up. I didn't know this, right? So they had these little blocks of wood we could put behind the thing so it couldn't come down, hang the phone up on the thing so everybody would think the phone was OK, and all these people, they were tied up. Then we had to go to their houses, and he wanted us to pick up dog shit, put it in bags, set it out on the porches and set fire to it. When they come out stomping it, you know, right? Trick-or-treat shit. I mean, that's what it was.

"We'd flatten their tires, key their cars, call them and threaten them on the phone, 'Get out of this race, you don't know what you're getting into.' They didn't know who you were. This is 1960, the year Mark was born, this is when it happened, when this was taking place.

"First he ran for financial secretary, then he ran for recording secretary or something, then he ran for business agent, and finally he made a deal with Mac McGill, in '64 I guess it was, because he got in in '65. We had to go pick up all the DPs -- the guys who couldn't speak English -- drive them down to the hall, I mean, I must've picked up 300 guys that day. North Tonawanda, Buffalo, wherever they were at, wherever they were living, and take them down to the hall to vote. And Butch won the election.

"So he gets in and, believe it or not, he didn't want to give me a job. He says, 'I want guys with experience out there in the field.' I said I worked on the Power Project, I worked at Hooker. So finally my father went down and talked to him. He said, 'What the hell? This is your cousin, what're you doing?' Butch says, 'OK, I'll put him on a road job. He should be able to handle that.'

"Well, it was fantastic, because I was making at that time 50 cents an hour at the country club, mowing lawns at the country club. I had nothing, I mean nothing. Here I got a small kid. Anyway, we were building the Youngstown expressway, going from Lewiston to Youngstown, and I'm working 12, 13 hours a day, six days a week. I'm bringing home like six, seven hundred dollars. I mean, Jesus, you go from 50 cents an hour, you're lucky if you're making $50. The wage scale at that time was 10 to 12 dollars an hour. That was up there, because a plant worker was only getting eight bucks an hour.

"So Butch knew what I did before, he knew I had balls. So he says to me one day, he calls me into the office, he says, 'You gotta do some things for me.' I said, you know, what do you want me to do? He goes, 'These people, they won't sign a contract with us, they're bringing in scabs to do jobs, and we gotta intimidate them. We gotta scare them into signing.' Buzz Doyle was there too. So Buzz takes me for a ride, we go to a store, and he buys Karo syrup. I mean, he bought like seven, eight bottles of it, right? He goes, 'Take this Karo syrup, put it in all the equipment.' He goes, 'Now there's a guard there, you gotta watch for the guard, but all the equipment on the job, I want you to put a bottle of Karo syrup into the gas tank.' So that's what we did. We went out and did all that.

"That was the mentality then. We were going to lose the hall if we didn't do all these things and get this job done.

"So we did that, and the next thing he tells me is to shoot holes in all the pipe there. 'You gotta go to each pipe,' he says. 'Make sure you go to each pipe and shoot a hole in the pipe.' And I says, OK, but what would be the reason for that? He goes, 'Well, when they put 'em in the ground, and they try to test the pipe, it'll fail. They gotta take all the pipe back out again.' I went out, there was hundreds of pipes, we had to keep reloading the rifles, right? There was two or three guys with me, and we all had guns and we're shooting the pipes. The next day, the very next day, they were in the office asking for us to sign up the company. They knew.

"Even when it was happening, in the back of your mind, you had this feeling. Somebody's gonna pay for this someday. But that was how they slowly sucked you in, until you had nowhere else to go. If Butch told you you were through, that was it. You might as well go commit suicide. Do you think those 20 guys would risk their families, going to prison for nothing?"

Reporter: When we first started doing stories on this, somebody gave us a list of contractors. People in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and when we talked to them, we kind of had to drag it out of them because they were still afraid of Local 91 even down in Pittsburgh or wherever.

Congi: "We were doing a job in Lockport once, and this guy comes in, and he signs up at the hall, but we were about to go on strike. And this guy wouldn't lay us off. If they lay you off, you get unemployment. So Butch calls me in and says to go see this guy. And I'm thinking, what am I gonna tell this guy? I finally go over there and I tell him, his name was Sergio, and he was from Cleveland Cement, and I says, Sergio, now if you don't lay us off, you're gonna make a lot of guys mad. Now, it's up to you, but I talked to a guy this morning who said he'll drive to Cleveland, he'll find your house, and wait till your kids are in the house, and burn the fucking place down. I says, now it's up to you, I have nothing to do with this. I'm bringing a message to you right now. You know what he did? He shut the whole fucking job down and he left town and he never came back. Even after the strike, Sergio never came back to that job. Real nice guy, you know what I mean? And I felt so fucking bad. Jesus. But what are you going to do?"

Reporter: You and Mark became estranged over the union. Have you been in touch since he's gone to prison?

Congi: "My daughters, his sisters, said, well maybe you should write a letter to him. But this is a problem with the Italian people. Honor thy father. I got divorced from his mother, I was going out all night and doing all this shit. When I think back, oh God Almighty, it was so wrong. This is hindsight, you know? But you look back and you say, how could I even do this shit? How could a person, you know, go out and burn a $15,000 piece of equipment? At that time, that was a lot of money. A backhoe. You set fire to that friggin' engine and all the rubber hoses on that thing, and it's gone. This guy, what's he supposed to do, you know what I mean? Now you do this to a guy two or three times, he doesn't give a shit, he'll come in and sign. What we did was wrong, I'm not saying it wasn't. But just like we made a choice to do it, he made a choice to come in here and try to take our work.

"Anyway, I got sick from cyanide poisoning on the job, and my lawyer went and sued everybody, including the union. That was it. Butch told Mark not to talk to me, not to come near me, or he couldn't work at the hall. Plain, blank, simple. So Mark got word to me, 'If I come near you, I will not have a job and my family won't eat.' And I said, well, don't worry about it. I can love you from afar, you know what I mean? No problem.

"But then it went on for so long, and I seen more and more heat going on at the hall, and I went to talk to Butch. I said, Butch, I'm retired now, but I read a lot of stuff in the paper, they know it's you guys doing this, it's just a matter of time. Jesus. But he tells me, 'You want my job? Why don't you try for it?' I said I wouldn't take his job for all the money in the world. He had his problems, too, but he was, I think he enjoyed it. He was the type of guy that, he loved a challenge. And then he'd go get drunk. Stupefied drunk. God forbid if you ran into him in a bar. People would see him in a bar and run the other way. You didn't want to be around him when he was drinking. He was brutal.

"With Mark, you have to understand, from the day he was born, every day at the house it was Butch this or Butch that. Butch was like a god to that kid. I know he'll read this, and maybe we can talk."

Reporter: What would you tell him?

Congi: "I'd tell him I love him, most importantly. And I'd tell him he got a raw deal. And that, if he's protecting anybody, he ought to make a phone call about it because he's got two kids to take care of."

Reporter: What do you hear from the feds about the shooting at your house?

Congi: "Nobody's come to me. They never even came to the house. And I think it's because, a lot of the things I told the feds, they never told the judge, see? And I think that if they have to go back to the judge and get a warrant or something, they might have to tell him stuff they didn't want, that they didn't want to tell the judge. The whole thing with this is that the truth has never been told. I know nobody from the hall did it, but I'm too old to be getting my house shot up, no matter what the reason."

Reporter: Who do you hold responsible?

Congi: "Judge Arcara, for one. Before Mark faced sentencing, I was asked to write him a letter about my son. I would never have written a letter to him if I had known that Arcara would have misplaced the trust that I placed in him in a private letter, for his eyes only, and turn around and give it to the news media. It's deplorable. I opened up my soul to him, and as far as I'm concerned, he drove a dagger into my heart.

"After that letter was released to the news media, my house was attacked with gunfire. One bullet hit my window three feet from my head and just 20 feet from where my 4-year-old granddaughter was sleeping. So I hold him responsible for what happened at my home."

Reporter: So you think it was done by people still loyal to the Quarcini regime?

Congi: "There's not a doubt in my mind."

Reporter: Given all the controversy that's surrounded Local 91 and the headlines it's generated, what would you say people ought to know about the union?

Congi: "I want the people to know the vast majority of Local 91 are good people and always were. You had an asshole running the place for 30 fucking years and he did a lot of harm to Niagara Falls, the county and the people working at the hall. He hurt them the most. You got 20 guys in fucking jail here. He should have went to fucking jail."

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com February 20 2007