In 1989, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters entered into a consent decree with the Department of Justice. The decree followed decades of criminal investigations into Teamsters leaders, who were closely affiliated with organized crime. As part of the consent decree, the Teamsters submitted to strict government oversight of their internal operations. That oversight persisted for the next 25 years.

An article from Michael McMenamin in the May 1989 issue of Reason, “Cleaning Up the Teamsters,” lays out why such drastic action was necessary. It should be a glaring reminder that the “good old days” of strong labor unions were anything but.

Teamsters president Jackie Presser had been an FBI informant from 1974 until his death in 1988. He became president of the union in 1983, with backing from the mafia. He was indicted in 1986 and died before he was convicted.

The Teamsters’ record of corruption was astonishing:

Despite nearly $800,000 in annual salaries and benefits from his various union positions, Jackie Presser did not hold an enviable job. Four of the last five presidents of the Teamsters have been indicted, three of them convicted. The two who weren’t convicted, Frank Fitzsimmons and Jackie Presser, both died in office. The other three, Dave Beck, Jimmy Hoffa, and Roy Williams, were all indicted, convicted, and removed from office.

“For 40 years, Teamsters presidents have had to live with the fact that organized crime exerts significant control over their union,” McMenamin wrote. The attitude was exemplified by testimony from Teamsters president Roy Williams to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime in 1986:

Q: So that any Teamsters president, sitting where you sat for several years, has to take into account that portions of his union are under the control of organized crime and not under his control?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you think it’s possible that someone sitting in that chair could significantly change and disrupt the activities of organized crime?

A: Not without having a bigger organization than they got. They was here a long time before any of us ever got here, and they have got pretty powerful. And you fellows haven’t been able to do nothing with them either.

Q: And they remain extremely powerful today?

A: Yes, they do.

Controlling the trucking industry gave the Teamsters unique power to punish businesses that organized crime wanted to target. They had centralized power through the National Master Freight Agreement and became the largest labor union in the world, with 2.3 million members in the late 1970s.

The reason they were able to maintain this power was federal regulations. McMenamin wrote:

The Teamsters’ market power was made possible by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which, starting in the 1930s, eliminated open competition in over-the-road trucking and substituted a rigid cartel. Labor costs could grow indefinitely and be passed on to customers through government-mandated rate increases. It was only a matter of time before a union leader with the ambition, vision, and ruthlessness of Jimmy Hoffa came along to capitalize on the market opportunity given him by the government.

The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed by Jimmy Carter, deregulated interstate trucking and removed that government support to the Teamsters’ power. Nonunion trucking companies were allowed to compete. This worked out great for businesses, which no longer had to deal with mobbed-up, overpriced trucking companies, and for consumers, who reaped the benefits through lower prices.

The government still continued to chip away at Teamsters corruption, indicting individuals on a case-by-case basis, but it was clear that the organization’s structure was inherently linked to organized crime:

A graphic picture of how organized crime operates within the Teamsters was drawn by U.S. District Judge Harold Ackerman in 1986 when he placed Teamsters Local 560 in New Jersey into trusteeship: “It is not a pretty story. Beneath the relatively sterile language of a dry legal opinion is a harrowing tale of how evil men, sponsored by and part of organized criminal elements, infiltrated and ultimately captured Local 560 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest local unions in the largest union of this country.

“This group of gangsters, aided and abetted by their relatives and sycophants, engaged in a multifaceted orgy of criminal activity. For those that enthusiastically followed these arrogant mobsters in their morally debased activity there were material rewards. For those who accepted the side benefits of this perverted interpretation of business unionism, there was presumably the rationalization of ‘I’ve got mine, why shouldn’t he get his.’ For those who attempted to fight, the message was clear. Murder and other forms of intimidation would be utilized to insure silence. To get along, one had to go along, or else.”

It is impossible to break the mob’s hold on the Teamsters one case at a time. As the President’s Commission on Organized Crime concluded: “At both the international and local levels, the IBT obviously continues to suffer from the relationship with organized crime. Indeed, so pervasive has this relationship become that no single remedy is likely to restore even a measure of true union democracy and independent leadership to the IBT.…If the Local 560 case is representative of the depths of the problem, systematic use of trusteeships by the courts may be necessary to prevent organized crime from continuing to do business as usual in the IBT.”

A government takeover of a labor union might sound totalitarian, and the DOJ’s efforts to put the Teamsters into trusteeship were criticized as such at the time. But McMenamin makes the case, persuasively, that the government had to correct mistakes for which it was ultimately responsible:

Government, at a minimum, has a positive obligation to protect citizens from violent crime. Given the extensive role the federal government has claimed for itself in protecting and regulating unions, it has a special obligation to ensure that union members are free from violence or threats of violence as they participate in the internal affairs of their unions. Yet the federal government has failed, and failed miserably, over a period of more than 30 years to give even minimal protection to those honest Teamsters who have dared to challenge the influence of organized crime in their union.

It was the government that created the conditions that allowed the Teamsters to achieve unprecedented market power, conditions that encouraged organized crime to enrich itself at the expense of the union’s membership. And it is the government that has known since the McClellan-Kennedy hearings in the late 1950s of the mob influence in the Teamsters. And working on a case-by-case basis, it is the government that, in the words of former Teamsters President Roy Williams, hasn’t “been able to do nothing with [organized crime] either.”

“The government helped create the mess. Now it has a chance to clean it up,” McMenamin concluded. The end of the oversight in 2015 could be viewed as a successful cleanup effort. But that mess existed for decades, as thousands of Teamsters members had money stolen from them and their physical safety threatened so that corrupt union bosses and organized-crime leaders could maintain their power. That’s no way to run an industry, and it’s no way to protect workers.