49

ON THE FIRST DAY of summer, the longest day of the year, the temperature climbed into the low seventies, the sky was a cloudless blue and sunshine was everywhere. It was the wrong kind of a day for Tommy Arena to receive some very bad news. He was sitting in his North Providence office early in the afternoon, swapping war stories with another business agent. The telephone call was from Teamster headquarters, the “marble palace,” in Washington. The Union’s general counsel was relaying the information he received from the Justice Department in that same hour. Its investigation of Arena uncovered sufficient evidence to conduct a hearing under the terms of the Teamsters’ national settlement agreement with the US government.

Arena was devastated by what he was told. The probe into whether he had any ongoing relationship with the “Mob” in Rhode Island dragged on for over two months. Specifically, the federal agents were trying to determine whether Arena and anyone they considered part of the State’s criminal establishment were doing business with each other for their individual or mutual benefit. During that entire period of time, Tommy kept his hands clean. He stayed away from all three of the freight forwarding warehouses and the restaurants where he normally made his collections. And just in case the agents tapped the telephones at those locations, he made no calls to any of them while he waited for the investigation to come to an end.

The freight forwarders, like Jack Newton, knew what they had to do. Arena made that perfectly clear to each of them a day after he got word that the Justice Department lawyers were coming to Providence. “There ain’t gonna be no collections for a while,” he told them. “But that don’t mean you don’t keep producing the fucking paperwork. When we start up again, I gotta know everyone’s assessment for every week.”

He gave each of them the number of a post office box he rented in Cumberland so they could send the information to him weekly. “I don’t know if anyone will have to pay the whole retroactive,” he said. “We’ll see. But don’t skip no fucking weeks on me. If it ain’t all there later on, someone will come by to see you and find out why not.”

Arena said that they should pass the word to each of the drivers who came in to pick up freight. “Every fucking one of youse had better understand if you get asked any questions about collections, you don’t know what they’re fucking talking about, and Tommy Arena never asked no one to give him anything that wasn’t in the contract.”

The three freight forwarders assured him they understood and that they’d be certain the drivers got the message. But Arena didn’t let up. He had another warning to pass along.

“If any one of youse says the wrong fucking thing to these shitheads who come nosing around and they charge me with breaking the law somehow, you’ll get called to testify in court about what you said. And you’ll have to go because they’ll stick a subpoena on you. Then I’ll know who mouthed off. They may get something on me, but my partners will make sure whichever one of youse puts his fucking foot in it will get fitted for a pair of cement sneakers.”

Arena knew they understood him clearly. He could read the fear in their eyes. Every transaction between them was always on a cash basis. But they were giving him his percentage from the gross, not the net, so there were no missing funds for the feds to go looking for. Whatever they paid Tommy one week became part of their expenses under a bunch of legitimate looking headings the next. Whatever showed up as the figure on the bottom line was the amount that got deposited in the bank.

There was nothing else the federal agents could trip him up on. Arena never fooled around with the money the employers paid in under the terms of the labor contracts for health and welfare or pension fund contributions. He knew how many other Teamster agents and officers hustled themselves into trouble that way.

The Justice investigators spent almost every day of their four-day weeks in Arena’s office. They were there for a month and a half, but never on Monday. He kidded them about having a day off every week. After a while he learned that they flew back to Washington on Friday afternoons, caught up with everything else at work on Monday and returned to Providence on the 7:00 a.m. Delta shuttle Tuesday mornings.

The agents had a right to go through every file and record they wanted to see, and Arena figured they did just about that. They had little to say to him personally except when there seemed to be something missing from a file that they thought ought to be there.

The feds made copies of every check he signed for the Local in the past five years. All the invoices that were received from the Union’s vendors were reviewed. They requested his own income tax returns for the same period along with statements from any bank that paid him interest during that time. Arena chuckled to himself at all the work they were going through for nothing. All his illegal transactions were in cash, not on paper, and that money sat in several places he was certain the government would never be able to find. His wife was the only person who knew where it was all hidden.

Arena was asked, of course, whether he knew anyone from the Tarantino family. It was a question he was ready for. He said that Sal Tarantino drove a truck and was a member of Local 719 years ago, when Tommy was still driving himself. “I had some beers with him back then,” he told them, “and I got Sal’s kid a summer job once or twice while he was in college. But I swear I ain’t spoken to no one in the Family for maybe fifteen years unless you count the two or three times I bumped into young Sal at a restaurant.”

“How about the Tarantino office building on Atwells Avenue. You ever been in there?” one of them asked.

“No way. I ain’t never set foot in the place. In fact, I ain’t even sure where it’s at.” They sat him down just that one time and questioned him for almost three hours. They never came back and asked him if he wanted to reconsider certain answers he gave them.

“So what the fuck went wrong?” Arena kept asking himself out loud after the phone call from Washington. His collections had resumed the Monday before the call. He gave everything a chance to cool off for two unbearably long weeks after learning that the agents checked out of their motel and left town.

Arena asked every one of his collection accounts whether they were spoken to by the investigators. Most gave him a flat “No.” Some told him that the government agents asked general questions about him, like whether Tommy ever bragged about knowing anyone in the Tarantino family or whether they ever saw him with anyone in Rhode Island who had a criminal record. According to what they told him, their answers to all those questions were in the negative.

All three of the freight forwarders had their books examined by the federal agents. That part of the probe took one day in two cases and two days in the third. Some records were copied at all three locations, but very few, they said.

“So what the fuck went wrong?” he kept muttering. “Think, asshole, think!”

Exactly four weeks from the day he got the crushing phone call from Washington, Arena received a registered letter from the Department of Justice. It informed him that the hearing in his case would begin on November seventh in the US District Courthouse in Providence. He had the right to hire a lawyer to defend himself and to present whatever witnesses he chose. But he knew it would have to be at his own expense, not the Union’s.