Court reverses 2014 teamsters extortion case
Ruling may complicate Boston Calling charges
A long-awaited appeals court decision threw out a raft of 2014 extortion convictions against two South Boston Teamsters, a reversal that could complicate the prosecution of two top City Hall officials accused of pressuring a music festival to hire union workers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the finding that Joseph Burhoe and John Perry — members of Teamsters Local 82 in South Boston — extorted businesses holding events at Boston hotels and convention centers by threatening to picket unless they hired union workers.
The decision, by Judge Juan Torruella, found that the letter of the law regarding union extortion requires the union pressure a company for “fictitious” work, or no-show jobs, not merely unwanted work. None of the supposed extortion was shown to involve no-show jobs.
The ruling is sure to result in headaches for federal prosecutors looking to pin the similar extortion charges on City Hall aides Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan, labor lawyer Michael Anderson said. The two men are accused of holding up key permits for the Boston Calling festival unless it hired union stagehands.
“I would be amazed if the district court did not dismiss those indictments now based on this case,” Anderson told the Herald. “It doesn’t matter how the facts shake out; the very theory from the prosecution that the court was willing to entertain is the one the First Circuit shot down.”
The Boston attorney said the ruling should “shut down” indictments similar to those filed against the Teamsters who were acquitted of extorting the “Top Chef” production team to get union work.
“If the jury had convicted the Teamsters in the ‘Top Chef’ case, this decision would have been a freight train coming at the prosecution on appeal,” Anderson said.
Perry and Burhoe, from 2007 to 2011, were part of a Teamsters unit that would pressure companies to hire union workers by warning they would picket events at hotels and convention centers if groups didn’t hire their members.
Anderson said a union pressuring an employer with a picket in order to get work is a protected staple of labor that the Perry case threatened to criminalize as extortion.
“If the First Circuit affirmed the jury conviction,” Anderson said, “the whole labor movement would have to surrender themselves to federal prison.”