My Honorable Brother

by Bob Weintraub

  The three men played a game throughout the road show. After each meeting with one of Fiore’s supporters, they would grade his performance in their separate notebooks, from a low of fifty points to a high of one hundred. On the way to their next stop, they compared scores, while dissecting the pros and cons of the meeting itself. Doug never gave himself a mark below ninety.

  The lowest grade came from Walsh, who hit him with a seventy-five after one visit during the first week. He was incensed that Doug forgot to discuss his pro-Israel position in a meeting with a wealthy Jewish couple who lived on Providence’s East Side. Walsh was certain the Shapiros were waiting for Fiore to bring it up, but he was afraid it would look phony if he tried to prod Doug into mentioning it. Fiore couldn’t attempt to excuse the lapse by telling Walsh that his mind was wandering during the conversation. He didn’t want to confess that he kept thinking about Pat Hanley who lived just a block away on the same street.

  Three of Fiore’s “pillars” were State senators, including the second and third most powerful republicans in that chamber. Five others were State representatives and eleven were either mayors or selectmen in various cities and towns. Fiore noticed that it was his supporters from the political arena who were most vocal about the need to keep State government out of casino gambling. He assumed that the Tarantino family contributed significant financial assistance toward getting them elected to office and ensconced in their positions.

  Doug spent the weekend between meetings catching up on his sleep and studying the tape of the thirty-three people he would be seeing in the next five days. The schedule underwent minor alterations by Berman when two of the supporters on the first list had to rule out their availability at the last minute for different reasons.

  On Saturday morning, Federal Express delivered an audio cassette to Fiore’s home. On it, Berman let him know that he made a great impression all around. “I’ve followed up every visit you made during the week with a phone call,” he related. “Everyone’s much more enthusiastic about the campaign now that they had the chance to meet you. Lester won’t have any trouble raising funds once all the meetings are over and he turns his attention in that direction.”

  Fiore recalled that the last words spoken when they left the homes of his prime supporters were always those in Karp’s high-pitched voice saying, “Thanks for your trust and encouragement. We’ll be back in touch soon.” Berman’s message succeeded in bolstering Doug’s confidence even more. It sent him into the second week of meetings determined to be able to grade himself no lower than a ninety-five at any time.

  The first three days flew by. Fiore was exhausted after the last of the supporters they saw each day listened to his views on the issues that concerned him or her the most. Walsh usually fell asleep in the car as soon as they scored Doug on the final performance of the evening, and they made the return to the Biltmore mostly in silence. Fiore preferred to take a room there overnight instead of driving back to East Greenwich, but he didn’t want to upset Grace at this early stage of the campaign.

  On Thursday, with all of their appointments in the neighboring towns of Warren and Bristol, Walsh was able to schedule them closer together. Shortly after five o’clock, they left the home of a software manufacturer who lived about half a mile from Roger Williams College. When they returned to the Lincoln, Berman contacted them on the car phone. He told them that the State representative from Bristol, who was scheduled to be their last visit that night, was going to join them instead at their six o’clock meeting in Warren. That was at the home of Don Avila, the general manager of the Raytheon plant located across the Mount Hope Bridge, in Portsmouth.

  “It should be okay,” Berman said. “Sousa, the rep, has been trying to get a few jobs from Raytheon for some engineers in his district who have supported him for a long time. He wants the chance to lean on Avila a little tonight. He figures it will be easier to do with you guys there because they’re both in our corner. He may even stick around after you leave. Just don’t let him put you in the middle of his problem.”

  Berman finished his message, wished them good luck and cut off. They decided to kill a little time and have another cup of coffee before crossing into Warren and looking for Avila’s house.

  Fiore realized that the change in schedule would have him back in Providence by eight o’clock that night. When Karp pulled into the parking lot of the Jade Tree Restaurant on Main Street, Doug went to the pay phone and called Carol in the office. The receptionist said that no one was answering that line but that she would have her paged.

  It took a couple of minutes before Carol came on the phone. When she heard his voice, she responded icily, as if the name meant nothing to her.

  He picked up on it right away. “Hey, give me a break. I know you’re upset but you can’t believe how busy I’ve been. The last ten days have shot by like a bat out of hell.”

  “You could have called.”

  “If I could have, I would have. I apologize, but there was just never the time. I’ve missed you very much.”

  She melted quickly. “I missed you too.”

  That’s what he was waiting for. It was the prelude for the invitation to follow.

  “I’ll be through with what I’m doing in a couple of hours. I can be in Providence early enough for us to get together at whatever hotel you work best in.”

  “I can’t, Doug. It’s out of the question.” Her voice revealed the regret she felt over having to say it. “I’m in a three million dollar closing with Twentieth Century Windfarm,” she explained. “Spalding Bank is putting up the loan. We were supposed to start at noon but one of the lawyers was tied up in bankruptcy court until three. There are piles and piles of documents on this one. You wouldn’t believe what the large conference room looks like. I think it may take six hours to get through this if everything goes smoothly, and how often does that happen? I’ll be ready to collapse when it’s over.” There was a pause before Carol asked, “Are you going to be back in the office on Monday?”

  He said he would, and she told him she’d see him then.

  “Is anything new with Bruce and his campaign?”

  “We don’t talk about it,” she answered quickly.

  When the conversation was over, Carol hurried back to the conference room from the office where she took Fiore’s call. She wondered why he asked her that last question. She couldn’t remember his ever inquiring about Bruce before.

  Doug phoned Pat Hanley. He informed her that he was away from the office for two weeks and didn’t speak to George Ryder in that time. “Is anything new on Ocean State?” he asked.

  “I’m more worried about it than before, Doug. Is there a time we can get together to talk about it?”

  “I’m coming into Providence from Warren tonight to pick up my car. I’ll be there about eight o’clock. If you want to do it then, it’s okay.”

  “Yes, let’s. Brad’s in negotiations with the Union today and warned me that he’d probably be home quite late. It’s very nice of you, Doug.”

  “My pleasure. Where will we meet?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you in Room 606.”

  Doug smiled. “Definitely, my pleasure,” he said.

  34

  CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE Machinists Union began at 10:00 a.m. in the Ocean State Wire conference room on the floor above the office. The Company provided coffee and donuts for the Union committeemen when they convened by themselves before the scheduled meeting. That gave rise to some friendly conversation when Hanley and Ryder first entered the room. But it didn’t take long for Johnny Morelli to begin losing his temper and periodically ranting at the bargaining positions being voiced for the Company by Ryder.

  Morelli knew what direction he was supposed to be moving in to arrive at a settlement. Tommy Arena had met him in a bar near the Machinists’ office building before the negotiations with Ocean State got under way. He came with a message for Morelli from Sandy Tarantino. Arena pulled a small piece of paper out of the po
cket of his gray silk shirt and looked at it as he spoke. “The Company wants a wage freeze in the first year. It will go along with small increases in the second and third, but nothing over two percent. And it will agree that employee contributions to the health plan can stay where they are now.

  “I’m telling you this from one fucking business agent to another,” he continued. “Tarantino said the Company’s hurting and a settlement along these lines is set in stone as far as he’s fucking concerned. He also wants you to know the Tarantino family will pull the plug and let the fucking plant close if the economics of the new contract don’t make sense. Tarantino says the rest of the issues are up to you and Hanley,” Arena told his friend. “He figures you two can trade off on some and drop the others. But that’s his fucking bottom line on the two strike makers.”

  At the first meeting, when Ryder gave Morelli and his committee the package of economic information he put together with Hanley, the Machinist business agent looked it over very carefully. The Union took a long caucus to review the documents. Morelli used the time to ask the members of the committee a lot of questions about Ocean State’s operation. He was interested in finding out why many of the past customers no longer showed up as current ones. He reviewed the accuracy of monthly tonnage figures on shipments with them and inquired about the amount of overtime being worked. He also sought out information on supervisory staffing, returns of defective product, second shift efficiency and inventory problems.

  When the caucus was over, Morelli told Brad Hanley he needed more information and more time to review it. Hanley bristled at the request, as if being accused of not telling the whole truth.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said in a surly voice. “What do you want?”

  As Morelli read off the four items on his list, Ryder jotted them down and Hanley agreed to send the data to the Union office in a day or two.

  Once he was able to study all the facts and figures supplied by the Company, Morelli realized that the Tarantinos were justified in presenting the contract position he was given by Arena at their meeting. He was convinced that no one was trying to jerk him around. If anything, the Union membership at Ocean State was even getting away pretty good on the medical, he concluded. It was no secret that health insurance premiums were going up about fifteen percent a year. He knew it was costing the Company a bundle.

  Morelli got his negotiating committee together at the Union hall the day before the next scheduled meeting with the Company. He explained to them that all the data they received from Hanley added up to a company in deep trouble.

  “Hear me good,” he told them. “Right now, the most important thing for you to be concerned about over the next three years is keeping your jobs. Unemployment’s up more than eight percent in Rhode Island. I’m sure you all know what that means. Ocean State’s gonna have a much easier time finding permanent replacements to take your jobs if you ever go on strike.

  “We ain’t gonna have no strike unless Hanley really tries to stick it to us,” he told the committee. “He ain’t gonna get no two-year freeze, no way. But we’ll let him have it for one and we’ll take whatever we can get in the second and third years. It might not be no more than two percent, but if we can push it up to that, we’ll be doing great. Him and his lawyer are pissing in the wind if they think you’re gonna pay more for your medical. We’ll hit the bricks on that one if Hanley won’t wise up and tell us to forget it.” He paused, and looked at each of the committee members sitting around the table. “Everyone here see it the same way as me?”

  Morelli knew the response would be unanimous. He gave this same speech more times than he could remember. Once the other side let you know, off the record of course, what you could expect to get for a final offer at the end of the negotiations, and that they were ready to go to war if you didn’t like it, the rest was easy. You’d just use those same numbers to tell the employee committee what your side would insist on being given if the other side wanted to stay out of trouble. That way, the committee could start getting used to the idea that the new contract wasn’t going to give the bargaining unit a lot of what it wanted. At the same time, the business agent could set himself up as a hero to the employees for eventually “forcing” the company to agree to his bottom line proposal. Most of those off-the-record meetings took place over a nice dinner, with plenty to drink, in some fancy restaurant, with the company picking up the tab. You could find a quiet corner in back, or even a private room if anyone was worried about being seen socializing together. Morelli was unhappy about the fact that he didn’t get a dinner out of this one from the Tarantinos or anyone else, but he understood the circumstances.

  As long as both sides in the negotiations knew pretty much where they were going in order to reach a new agreement, Morelli didn’t want to waste a lot of time getting there. He told himself that he had much better things to do, especially after five o’clock, than sit for hours on end with a guy like Hanley. He knew that Hanley hated his guts anyway because he called his bluff three years ago and came out of it with a tremendous contract. Morelli felt the same way about this stuffy asshole of a lawyer who wrote down every word that was said, talked in circles and wanted to caucus for a half hour every fifteen minutes. Ryder was handling things like he wanted to go on meeting forever, he thought.

  Morelli already made major changes in the proposal he gave the Company when the bargaining first started. His demands were lowered considerably, and now, five meetings later, Ocean State was still dragging its feet. Well, he’d let Hanley and Ryder know today what he thought of their positions. Depending on what they said, he’d decide whether to get together with Tommy Arena again and send a message back to Arena’s friend on Federal Hill.

  The two committees broke for lunch at one o’clock. On the way out, Morelli said that his people were sick and tired of what was going on. “The Company better show some movement in the proposals when you come back to the table.” As he opened the door to leave, he added, “Because if you don’t, the Union’s gonna have to reassess the concessions we’ve already given you.” He was throwing his opponents a signal they couldn’t fail to understand.

  When he and Ryder returned to his office, Hanley told his secretary to phone out for some sandwiches. Ryder was hoping they would get out of the plant for a hot lunch, but didn’t want to push it. “Whatever you like,” he said, when Hanley asked him what he’d prefer as they walked downstairs from the conference room.

  Hanley was actually pleased with the way the meeting went. “I think we’ve come that much closer to forcing the Union to strike when the contract expires. What we have to do now in our next proposal is give Morelli something to really rattle him.” His face lit up as he predicted that his nemesis would either jam all his papers into his briefcase in dramatic fashion and lead the committee out of the room, or request a short caucus.

  “If they caucus,” Hanley added, “he’ll have to follow through on his threat by raising their demands, probably wiping out most of the progress we’ve made to this point.” In either case, he viewed the Company’s move as the way to send a strong signal to Morelli and the committee that he was dead serious about wanting a two-year freeze in wages and more money from the employees toward their medical plan.

  Ryder was becoming concerned. There were still over three weeks left in which to reach a settlement, but he was having trouble figuring out exactly what Hanley was willing to do to get a contract. After years of negotiating on behalf of employers, Ryder took it with a grain of salt when a company’s chief executive tried to show his masculinity by expressing no fear of a strike. It was no different even when the CEO talked as if he relished one.

  He was used to seeing that macho attitude go up in smoke as the last day of the contract approached. As always, he began, of necessity, to put together a strike plan for the company he was representing at the time. He knew how swiftly the bravado could disappear, especially when he stressed the need to hire expensive security personnel on an around-the-cloc
k basis to protect the plant from overzealous strikers. And he could predict the fear he was used to seeing in the eyes of management when he urged the presence of a police detail in front of the premises twice a day.

  “It’s the only way we can restrict the amount of violence we’ve got to expect when the replacement employees enter and leave the plant,” he told them. The guts of the strike plan awakened the company to the kind of fight it could be getting into.

  But Hanley was different. He went into the negotiations with a vendetta. Ryder recognized it and feared that his client might not be satisfied with anything less than a contract he regarded as giving him back his manhood. Hanley was clearly looking for a victory, not a compromise. The question was how short a leash the Platts had him on and how close to that precipice called a strike they would let him venture. Ryder figured that Hanley received settlement guidelines from the Platts that he was keeping from him. Brad was probably afraid that his chief negotiator would “give away the store” once he learned how much money was available to work with. So he wasn’t going to tell him what settlement would make the Platts happy, at least not yet. It forced Ryder to conclude that a lot of what Hanley said was just bluffing.

  Still, Ryder had to assert himself and make sure the negotiations didn’t go off track. He admonished Hanley on several occasions to forget what happened three years earlier and simply find the best economic solution for the Company’s present problems. His client never directly rejected that advice, but answered each time with an affirmative nod of his head. Now Ryder was wondering whether the message in those nods meant something completely different to Hanley than it did to him.

  He explained all the difficulties contained in the position Brad insisted on pushing. “It’s hard enough to get a group of employees to accept a one-year wage freeze, let alone two. But you don’t have to do it that way. If the wage increase in the second year is minimal, you accomplish essentially the same purpose,” Ryder advised. There was no sense making it doubly insulting, he said. “That’s how a freeze is regarded. I’m sure the Platts know that,” he added, hoping to get Hanley to reveal their position. Again, a nod of the head was his only reply.