Tables Turned on UFCW

By COLlive reporter

Racketeering, extortion, money-laundering and other offenses are a few of the schemes that heads of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Local 348 in New York City have been charged with.

According to ILPC, Anthony Fazio Sr., John Fazio Jr. and Anthony Fazio Jr., members of the family who ran the chapter, were arrested and charged in Manhattan federal court for extorting $2.4 million from UFCW members and employers for more than a decade and a half.

The defendants, respectively, current president, past president and secretary-treasurer of the union, kept the money or shared it with cronies.

“As leaders of Local 348, the Fazios were supposed to advocate on behalf of their members, not strong-arm and threaten business owners in order to make a profit under the table,” commented U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

For supporters of embattled and now imprisoned Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, the news was a bitter-sweet bit in what they consider an injustice for what has been done to the family owned Agriprocessors, once the largest kosher meat producer in the country.

UFCW has been involved in a scrappy battle to unionize and represent the workers at what was Agriprocessors’ slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa. The UFCW also collected information on a warehouse in Brooklyn that was owned by Aaron Rubashkin.

According to the six-count, 52-page indictment, the Fazios from 1995 until early 2011 used their leadership positions in Local 348 to collect payments from over a dozen union employers, in violation of federal and state law.

Often, they used the threat of work disruptions, among other intimidation tactics, to obtain funds. All told, said prosecutors, the three Fazios extracted a combined $2.4 million.