It came like a thunderclap on June 12: a so-called "bottom-line decision" by the Ontario Labour Relations Board that rocked the Toronto construction industry by summarily deposing the leadership of the city's largest, most powerful and -- until then -- influential construction union.
The ruling thrust rich and rebellious Local 183 of the Laborers' International Union of North America under the trusteeship of its Washington-based parent, transferring control of $57-million in cash and $1-billion in pension funds to the international union's Hamilton-based subsidiary. And it instantly threw Local 183's Tony Dionisio, the most powerful labour leader in Canada's largest city, out on the street.
But nobody knows why. More than two months after making the summary decision, the labour board has yet to release any reasons to explain why it placed Local 183 under trusteeship. And the truth about one of the key charges levelled during the long and bitter dispute leading up to the June 12 decision -- allegations of organized-crime links within the international union's Hamilton operation -- remains unexplained.
Among the evidence considered by the board was a set of blurry surveillance photographs the Toronto local submitted in an effort to establish that one of LIUNA's Hamilton officials had met with notorious organized-crime figures there.
Local 183 told panel members the pictures showed Cosmo Manella, a LIUNA official, meeting with unsavoury characters -- in violation of the union constitution, which specifically outlaws knowingly associating with any member or associate of any organized-crime syndicate. Mr. Manella told The Globe and Mail in an interview that the photographed encounters were hardly as sinister as Local 183 claimed.
Although they sit at the heart of the bitter, years-long dispute between LIUNA and Local 183, the surveillance photographs and the questions they raise remain its biggest mysteries.
In the meantime, the U.S. takeover of the city's largest construction union -- and the apparent downfall of its powerful leader -- nears completion.
Mr. Dionisio, once both honoured and feared for his role in building Local 183 into a powerhouse and successfully raiding other unions while Local 183 overtly sought political influence with lavish donations to election campaigns, is now relying on friends to help fund a storefront counterattack with a nationalist theme.
He has been down before -- and has bounced back stronger than ever. A short, Portuguese-born welder who spices his defiant oratory with nuggets of peasant wisdom, Mr. Dionisio has long been at odds with the Italian-Canadian leadership of the international union. LIUNA first removed him from office a decade ago, when he was charged with offering a secret commission -- in the form of home repairs -- to a federal official. But once acquitted, he regained control of the Toronto local and built it into a powerful rival to the international parent.
Under Mr. Dionisio, Local 183 gained 30,000 members, making it the largest union in Toronto and dwarfing LIUNA's other Canadian locals. It also set records for political donations: raising $750,000 for Paul Martin's bid for the Liberal leadership and doling out more donations than any other business or individual in the 2000 municipal election. In 2003, Mr. Dionisio and Local 183 were early and generous supporters of John Tory's failed mayoral campaign.
And there is no question that he is idolized by thousands of the workers whose labour continues to fuel Toronto's residential construction boom. At a raucous meeting at Local 183's palatial Downsview headquarters on the eve of the labour board hearing this spring, they roared with approval when Mr. Dionisio offered a simple summation of the complex dispute.
It's a cash grab, he told them. What he learned "running around with chickens" in Portugal, he said, "is that when the chickens were well fed the foxes ate them before we did."
His problem now is that the labour board has fingered him and the Local 183 executive as foxes -- in part, it would seem, because of the amount of union money Local 183 spent trying to dig up dirt on LIUNA. Internal union arbitrator Brian Keller, who originally approved the trusteeship that Local 183 fought unsuccessfully at the labour board, came to a similar conclusion.
But Mr. Keller did remark in his decision that Local 183's suspicions about LIUNA's possible organized-crime links were "fully understandable." The reason: a series of U.S. Justice Department actions in the 1990s that purged the international union of long-established mob links, resulting in a new constitution with a specific provision barring LIUNA officials from "knowingly associating with any member or associate of any organized crime syndicate."
In the eyes of Local 183 and its defenders, the Manella photos rang alarm bells. "Call it paranoia, call it reasonable concern," said Local 183 lawyer Brian Shell, noting the "directions, orders and prosecutions" previously directed at LIUNA by the U.S. Justice Department under anti-racketeering statutes.
"All we can say is what we know -- that Mr. Manella, it was reported to us, was accompanied by persons who were identified to us as known organized-crime figures," Mr. Shell said. "That's all we know. We don't know what they talked about."
The local got "really nervous" when it discovered that Mr. Manella had been appointed as an agent of a LIUNA-led investigation into its affairs, according to Mr. Shell.
In the escalating battle between the two labour groups, both spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private investigators and forensic accountants in an effort to dig up dirt on one another. LIUNA agents combed through Local 183's finances, while Local 183 dissected complex real-estate transactions undertaken by those its partisans call "the hounds of Hamilton."
The photos introduced to the labour board were potentially the most volatile evidence either side obtained. They were accompanied by affidavits from William Henderson and Richard Grant, two retired Toronto police officers with a combined 40 years experience as specialists in organized crime. The former officers filed affidavits identifying five of the figures purportedly meeting with Mr. Manella as "well known to law enforcement in the Greater Toronto Area."
One picture purports to show Mr. Manella chatting with Domenic Musitano Jr. outside the Holiday Inn in Oakville, "a known meeting place for the Musitano organized crime group's meetings," according to Mr. Henderson. "Domenic Musitano Jr.'s brothers are currently serving extensive penitentiary terms for involvement in murder and it is suspected that Domenic Musitano Jr. is acting as a 'go-between' on behalf of his brothers and other criminal elements," he testified.
Other figures in various photographs that apparently show Mr. Manella chatting in front of different stores in Hamilton were identified by the investigators as Michele and Cosmo Commisso, the latter "alleged to be the head or the boss of the Commisso organized-crime family," according to Mr. Henderson.
But there was nothing sinister about the meetings, Mr. Manella said in an interview with The Globe. "I got caught in a situation of who I am, and where I was born, and knowing certain people," he said, adding that he "grew up on College Street" and has known the Commisso family all his life. Michele Commisso "is no longer engaged in any activity," according to Mr. Manella. "If he were, I wouldn't be associating with him."
The meeting with Mr. Musitano was a "different situation," according to Mr. Manella. He said that Mr. Musitano invited him to Oakville to discuss the possibility of organizing the work forces of the new hotels and casinos in Niagara Falls, but that he declined the offer.
"That was the end of it. I met with him once and that was it," Mr. Manella said. "And I may have been set up on that, for all I know."
Mr. Shell, the Local 183 lawyer, said in an interview that he complained about the meetings to Halifax lawyer Ronald Pink, who was heading LIUNA's investigation of Local 183 in his capacity as counsel to its executive board -- and using Mr. Manella as his agent in the investigation.
Mr. Manella said he discussed the issue with Mr. Pink and his investigators, and they concluded that "there was no criminal element involved in my work with the union."
The fact that neither of two independent hearings credited the photos "speaks for itself," according to Joseph Mancinelli, the Hamilton-based official who heads LIUNA's operations in Central and Eastern Canada.
The "paparazzi-style" photos misrepresent innocent encounters, said Mr. Mancinelli, who succeeded his father, Enrico Mancinelli, as LIUNA's top Canadian official in 2001. "I would say that a photograph is nothing but a photograph. You really can't read into it what they're doing, what they're not doing."
And so the U.S. takeover of Toronto's richest, most political union proceeds, fully sanctioned by the Ontario government, but for reasons that remain opaque. Nothing is clear and definite in this volatile world of foxes, hounds and large amounts of money.
