Organizing Portland: Organized Crime, Municipal Corruption, and the Teamsters Union

Abstract

RobertC.Donnelly Organizing Portland Organized Crime, MunicipalCorruption, andthe Teamsters Union In mid-twentieth-century Portland, gambling dens, broth els, and unlicensed bars operated virtually uninhibited by police as long as vice racketeers paid scheduled kickbacks to key city law en forcement officials. Despite Mayor Dorothy Lee's efforts to reform city government from 1948 to 1952, some municipal officials, both before and after her administration, tolerated, sanctioned, and may well have profited from the city's vice economy. By the 1950s, word of Portland's reputation as a "wide open" citywhose local officials entertained payoffs had traveled north to Seattle, where racketeers, with help from some Team stersUnion officials, had been exploiting that city's criminal operations. By !954> the Teamsters and local racketeers, with support from the Multnomah County district attorney, were operating profitably in Port land and were well on their way to controlling the city's booming vice industry. Clearly, political reform efforts in Portland had not been suc cessful. In 1956, however, Oregonian crime reporters Wallace Turner and William Lambert ? using information provided by Portland's own crime boss, James Elkins ? exposed organized crime and municipal corruption in Portland and unwrapped a scheme by corrupt Teamsters officials to take over the city's vice rackets. Union racketeering had already caught the nation's attention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Senate investigators had gathered evidence on the Teamsters' organiza tional tactics and the illegal activities of certain Teamsters officials. By 1957, theU.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the La 334 OHQ vol. 104, no. 3 ? 2003 Oregon Historical Society OHS neg.,OrHi 12695 A booming wartime economy transformed Portland into a vibrant twentieth-century city. Driving south on Broadway in the 1950s, visitors and locals could turn west toPark Avenue, turn east to thewaterfront, or turn back toBurnside tofind some of the city's numerous gambling dens, bootlegging joints, and houses of prostitution. bor or Management Field, better known as theMcClellan Committee, concluded that Portland not only had a local crime problem but also a situation that had serious national ramifications. Those who were eventually accused of corruption and criminal ac tivity also played a part in their undoing. "Were itnot that the conspira tors in this particular case had a falling out," theMcClellan Committee concluded in its 1958 interim report, "the Committee believes that gam bling and law enforcement in Portland would now be completely under the domination of a teamster-backed [sic] underworld. In other cities of theUnited States, where similar tactics have been employed, this type of domination has been achieved successfully."1 The Portland case was not unique, but it offers insights into how urban crime, municipal corrup Donnelly, Organizing Portland 335 tion, and illegal union activities worked together to open the city to orga nized crime. When the International Brotherhood of Team stersbegan to recruit unskilled laborers in the early 1930s, the union broke from its traditional policy of limiting its representation to specialized crafts and laid the groundwork for the rise of amore militant membership. At the time, the Teamsters were less a national union than a "loose confederation of locals controlled by powerful bosses.2 The criminality that existed, historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains, "was largely concentrated in highly decen tralized, multi-employer industries, which gave individual union leaders .. .the opportunity to skim the pension fund, cut sweetheart deals, or sim ply run the local as a family business."3 When the Teamsters opened its ranks to unskilled workers ? generally, laborers who were hired for tough, physical jobs ? the union fragmented, pitting old-line union officials who had fought for collective bargaining, better wages, and saferworking conditions against a new legion of "hard-fighting and 'troublesome' re cruits," many of whom were motivated to join the labor movement to acquire wealth.4 By the 1940s, the Teamsters had become top-heavy with officials, and "internal oligarchies" exercised control over certain industries. AfterWorld War II, a large group of full-time labor officials assumed leadership of the union, according to Lichtenstein, "open[ing] the door to a whole set of corruptions that became an integral part of the postwar union mythos."5 There were...