Vegas Vanishing Act

Even in Las Vegas, a town not noted for softies, Al Bramlet, 59, stood out as mean. The high-living, free-spending boss of Local 226 of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 22,000 employees in Nevada's casino hotels and restaurants, Bramlet made enemies as effortlessly as gamblers throw dice. Following a strike last March, his own rank and file accused him of selling out to employers with sweetheart contracts. Other union chiefs despised him as a double-crosser. Establishments that resisted his organizers had fire-bomb problems. But like Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa, Bramlet is a labor leader who apparently made one enemy too many: the Mafia. Last week, with a chilling sense of dej`a vu, the FBI and Nevada authorities were wondering if they would ever find a trace of Al.

On the afternoon of Feb. 24, Bramlet flew back to Vegas from a one-day trip to Reno. Waiting for him at the airport, TIME has learned, were three men. Bramlet spoke with them briefly, then called union headquarters to tell his daughter Chris that he would be home in 30 minutes. He never got there. Several hours later, Bramlet phoned an official at the Dunes Hotel casino and asked that a $10,000 "personal" payment be made to a gambler. It wasn't, and Bramlet has not been heard from since.

The reason, investigators say, may have been a quarrel Bramlet was having with the Mob over the use--and presumably abuse--of a portion of the culinary local's $42 million pension fund. Some $16 million of the fund has already been loaned out to resorts and developments that are backed by Las Vegas gambling bosses.

Bigger Cut. The latest proposal for dipping into the culinary pot--reportedly cooked up by a Chicago Mafia triggerman named Tony Spilotro--called for founding a clinic-pharmacy where ailing union members would receive medical treatment and drugs. The Mob would skim off funds for its own use.

Bramlet had no objections, but he kept insisting on a bigger cut for himself. Says an investigator: "He was demanding more out of the thing than the Mob thought he should get." Following one stormy negotiating session last summer, Bramlet was severely beaten. "I fell off a barstool," he told friends. Then, two weeks before his disappearance, the pension fund trustees turned down what is known in the union as Bramlet's "memorial hospital." Said an insider: "That thing was just too shaky. The trustees couldn't hold still for it." Bramlet was left in the awkward position of not having come through for the Mob.

Bramlet desperately started trying to convert his assets into cash. Perhaps he intended to pay off the mobsters, or maybe just flee, since a contract had reportedly been put out on him. In either case, he will not be drawing his own pension from the fund.

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