Guilty in Illinois

"The message is clear"

When Roy L. Williams, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was convicted last week in Chicago's U.S. District Court of conspiring to bribe Senator Howard W. Cannon of Nevada, he was not exactly breaking with Teamster tradition. In 1957 the union's president, David Beck, was found guilty of embezzlement, larceny and income tax evasion. Beck's successor, Jimmy Hoffa, got 13 years in 1964 for jury tampering, fraud and conspiracy. Williams, 67, had thrice before escaped federal conviction. Said Chief Government Prosecutor Douglas R. Roller after the verdict, "The message of the jury is clear. Such conduct will not be tolerated."

This latest U.S. Government success against the corruption-riddled Teamsters climaxed a grueling eight-week trial and 17 months of pretrial arguments over the admissibility of 2,000 reels of conversations taped by the FBI. Convicted with Williams were four co-defendants with strong Teamster ties; each faces a maximum of 55 years in prison and a fine of $29,000. All plan to appeal.

The jury found the conspirators guilty on all eleven counts of the indictment, which charged that the defendants had "cut a deal" with Cannon in a face-to-face meeting in Las Vegas on Jan. 10, 1979, and agreed to sell the Senator 5.8 acres of choice Teamster-owned property at a $200,000 discount in exchange for his help in blocking a trucking deregulation bill. In fact, the deal hardly got beyond the talking stage, and Cannon voted for the deregulation bill when the Senate passed it in 1980.

The Government based its case on 53 wiretapped conversations, from over 200,000 discussions recorded by the FBI over a one-year period. On one reel, the jury heard co-defendant Allen M. Dorfman tell associates:

"Roy Williams just unequivocally comes out and says, 'You got the property, Senator.

Don't worry about it.' " Williams testified that he promised Cannon only a "fair chance" to bid on the land, and said the Jan. 10 meeting was arranged simply to lobby the Senator. Cannon, who lost a bid for a fifth Senate term in November and was not charged in the case, testified he had neither been offered nor had accepted a bribe. The mostly blue-collar jury of six men and six women deliberated 27 hours over four days before reaching a unanimous guilty verdict.

Williams, who will be sentenced with the other defendants on Feb. 10, can legally keep his job as Teamsters' president until his appeals are exhausted.

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