"Huge Union Corruption Draws a Yawn From Liberal Media"

ChronWatch ^ | Wednesday, August 27, 2003 | Jim Sparkman

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

"Huge Union Corruption Draws a Yawn From Liberal Media"

Posted by the ChronWatch Founder, Jim Sparkman Wednesday, August 27, 2003

The liberal media has an inexhustable appetite for any news about any form of corporate corruption. They fed on Ken Lay and Enron for months, and still get an occasional meal over his corporate corpse. When it comes to union fraud, we find a distinct disinterest on the part of the liberal media. This item by Michelle Malkin tells of a case of huge union corruption that draws a yawn from the media.

Three months ago, this column wondered if the New York Times would ever cover the abominable Democrat teachers' union scandal in Florida. Investigators from the FBI and Miami-Dade's Public Corruption Task Force raided the powerful United Teachers of Dade headquarters at the end of April. In July, they raided the Tallahassee home of the union president Pat Tornillo.

This week, Tornillo — the Ken Lay of the Left — finally confessed to massive looting of teachers' union dues.

Here, in its 74-word entirety, is what the nation's paper of selective record found fit to print on Aug. 26: ''Pat Tornillo, the longtime leader of the Miami-Dade County teachers union who had been accused of billing the union for $650,000 of luxuries, pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return and mail fraud in exchange for a two-year prison sentence. Court records showed he billed the union for four Caribbean vacations, several cruises, a trip to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and other first-class travel expenses.''

The Times' news brief, recycled from an Associated Press dispatch, was buried on page A16.

The national significance of this public education corruption should have been screamingly obvious to the scribes at the Times. With a new school year opening and renewed cries of chronic public school underfunding, the Miami-Dade fiasco belongs on the front page. The cash-strapped Miami-Dade public school district is the fourth largest in the nation. The implications of Tornillo's pending imprisonment — and the indelible taint the scandal has left on the Democrats' campaign cash flow — are even more newsworthy.

The four-decade imperial reign of Tornillo has had a profound influence on Florida politics. He led the nation's first statewide teachers' strike, built the largest labor union in the South, amassed a $4 million annual payroll for his organization, lavished Democrat Party coffers with those union funds, and wielded his clout in dozens of Democrat elections from school board to governor. In last year's Democratic gubernatorial race alone, Tornillo's union and its local affiliates donated nearly $300,000 to the state Democrat Party, plus more than $50,000 in in-kind donations and more than $15,000 in direct contributions to its favored (and ultimately losing) candidate, Bill McBride. Tornillo lent the McBride campaign two top union officials and secretly spent more than $2 million on McBride political ads.

When he wasn't bullying union members into sending students home with notes endorsing Democrat candidates and causes, Tornillo oversaw a disastrous spending binge on real estate and used the union's political and economic clout to secure lucrative construction and insurance contracts for cronies. Miami Herald reporters unearthed records showing ''how Tornillo lived the life of royalty on the union's dime, expensing everything from round-the-world vacations, $20,000 hotel bills and antique furniture. The union also paid for his phone, cable, and power bills, his housekeeper, and his home insurance.''

While teachers pleaded for pay increases and fought layoff measures, Tornillo used their union dues (at $843 per year, they're the highest in the nation) to buy tailored suits from Hong Kong and matching python-print pajamas from Nieman-Marcus for his wife and himself. The Herald also reported that after Tornillo returned in 1995 from an extravagant African safari junket with executives of a troubled health maintenance organization, Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, he awarded the company a $195 million insurance contract to the firm against the recommendation of union staff.

Rank-and-file educators and parents have demanded federal disclosure rules to stop future teachers' union plundering. Damaris Dougherty, founder of the Teacher Rights Advocacy Coalition in Miami, testified before a Senate committee in June:

''We need federal Legislation that will wrest from [the United Teachers of Dade] and similar corrupt unions the power they have inappropriately usurped from the workers. We need you to come to the aid of workers in this country so that workers can reclaim their organizations and return them to their lofty goals. Without federal intervention, corrupt union executives will continue to manage dues monies as their personal expense accounts.''

Will the New York Times editorial writers — never ones to miss drum-beating about disclosure when it comes to corporate looters — support the workers? Or will they stand aloof with the union thugs in snakes' pajamas?

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

I commented the other day how expedited and hush-hush this trial was. I was shocked to hear that Pat cut a deal, and now it's all over with.

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/970366/posts

[caisson71]

Thank goodness for alternate sources of news. Hopefully, the lamestream media will become a yawn for us.

[.cnI redruM]

Liberals like their unions corrupt. An honorable union leader wouldn't have endorsed a creep like Al Gore.

Jim Sweeney is so unlike James Hoffa or Layne Kirkland it's pathetic. All three men habitually endorsed Democratic candidates, but Hoffa and Kirkland made the Democrats actually support workers. Sweeney just steals people's union dues.

Illegal aliens swarm across the Southern border. Sweeney refuses to let labor take a stand against this invasion of lower-wage labor on explicit orders from the DNC.

[EdReform]

"''We need federal Legislation that will wrest from [the United Teachers of Dade] and similar corrupt unions the power they have inappropriately usurped from the workers."

About the NEA

[lilylangtree]

ping

[mabelkitty]

Fine. When all these voters are locked up in 2004, they'll bitch then.

[y2k_free_radical]

when RINO's fraud it is in the billions

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Check this out...expanding from a previous Tornillo thread.

Ping.

[Rome2000]

Excellent piece by Sparksman

The internet has rendered the newspaper impotent.

"Newspapers" are rapidly going the way of the Horse in the 1920's

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Yes, indeed.

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

*****In four decades as Florida's most prominent education union leader, Tornillo can claim some proud moments of advocacy and tangible progress for teachers. But his plea for forgiveness would be more sympathetic if his sin was merely theft. What is hard to shake is his relentless righteousness through the years. He once filed a formal ethics complaint against the education commissioner for awarding bonuses to school superintendents. "Teachers are being told to do more with less," he argued then. "The commissioner is using tax dollars to stuff the pockets of administrators who are already more than adequately compensated."

Those words, once imbued with a sense of educational honor, are now as fraudulent as his $4,158 shopping spree in the Big Appple. Tornillo may someday, through prison and restitution, compensate for his theft. But his sanctimony will endure.*****

The cut and paste above, is from the following source:

Tornillo's sanctimony

In pleading guilty Monday to mail fraud and filing a false tax return, Pat Tornillo proves he was more self-indulgent than those he condemned during his four decades as teacher union leader.

A Times Editorial© St. Petersburg Times
published August 27, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/27/Opinion/Tornillo_s_sanctimony.shtml

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Actually, all but the first paragraph was written by Michelle Malkin. The author wasn't very clear with that.

[getmeouttaPalmBeachCounty_FL]

Going back to the beginnings of this investigation, the person who really cracked this nut open, ironically, was an investigative reporter for Miami's Channel 10.

Look at what the union boss and his paid thugs did to her:
****
Tornillo Faces New Investigations Into Old Behaviors

Board Members Worried About Possible Influence Peddling

POSTED: 5:08 PM EDT August 26, 2003

MIAMI -- Disgraced United Teachers Of Dade's former union boss Pat Tornillo is facing new investigations within the Miami-Dade School Distict

Board members want district contracts reviewed for possible influence peddling by Tornillo. Channel 10 investigative reporter Jilda Unruh knows firsthand that Tornillo's influence and power could be vindictive and abusive.

Tuesday, school board member Dr. Marta Perez (pictured right, file photo) did not mince words when talking about Tornillo.

"The public should be very aware, this is how monsters are created," Perez said.

Yesterday, Tornillo agreed to serve two years in prison, after admitting he'd used union money to enrich himself. Now Perez fears Tornillo's crimes may not have stopped at bilking the union.

"I'm calling on the district to take a look and see ... how much he influenced some of the contracts -- some of the sweetheart deals with his friends," Perez said.

One of those friends is lobbyist Rick Sisser, and one of those contracts is HIP Health Insurance. As Channel 10 first documented in August 2001, Sisser's contract with HIP made him millions after Tornillo demanded the district select HIP as its primary health-insurance carrier in 1996. Although HIP was in serious financial trouble, and district officials recommended against awarding HIP the contract, Tornillo prevailed. Perez, who voted against the HIP contract, says, like others who opposed Tornillo, it earned her his notorious wrath.

She told Channel 10 reporter Jilda Unruh, who has covered Tornillo's activities for years, "Jilda, at great risk, great personal risk -- just as you, you know very well that because you covered some of his stories, you were threatened."

Unruh says it's true. Stories she did about Tornillo as a slumlord at the UTD towers for retired teachers, or living for free in a UTD-owned house on Brickell, earned her a Tornillo tongue lashing.

Unruh: What do you pay, Pat?

Tornillo: Huh?

Unruh: What do you pay?

Tornillo: None of your business.

more...
http://www.click10.com/news/2435070/detail.html