DESPITE MCCARRONS BULLSHYTE STORY ABOUT RESTRUCTURING IT APPEARS ONCE AGAIN THERE ARE ALLEGATIONS OF UBC CORRUPTION BY YET ANOTHER OF DOUG MCCARRON HAND PICKED EST STOOGES
Case: 4:21-cv-01187-RLW
FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT EASTERN MISSOURI
UBC MEMBER JOHN GOULD HAS BEEN WORKING TO EXPOSE UBC CORRUPTION IN ST LOUIS FOR YEARS
HE HAS EXPOSED MCCARRONS HAND PICKED STOOGE ALBERT BOND
HEY FEDS CAN YOU SAY "A PATTERN OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
"Fast forward to today, and the UBC is once again attempting to hide the financial crimes and poor behavior of an EST under the guise of a simple merger.
A "merger that will allow for better use of resources and serve to increase market
share." Regardless of the potential under the leadership of EST Gary Perinar, we
know this PR statement to be a complete fabrication. The merger is the result of
actions taken by Al Bond during his tenure as EST. Numerous employees of the
CRC had already leaked the secret details surrounding Mr. Bond's untimely
departure; a letter written to the UBC by an anonymous and recently discharged
employee, included multiple allegations of impropriety committed by Al Bond.
The real reasons for Bond's dismissal were confirmed to the media, some members, and former employees of the Council. Business Representatives in the Kansas City area sent text messages to CRC Delegates on the evening of
September 26, 2021, stating that there were no issues on the western side of Missouri; adding that Bond and others had been removed from office, and a key sentence for the purposes of this letter, "that the UBC was overseeing
operations in Kansas City and St. Louis."
Employees have confirmed that Mr. Bond was removed for financial misappropriation, hostile work environment, and sexual harassment.
Furthermore, the CRC and the UBC are currently being sued in the Eastern District
of Missouri's Federal Court for ignoring hostile working conditions and the repeated sexual harassment of female employees by Al Bond and others"
HEY DOUGY.IF YOU THINK YOU ARE HAVING RECTAL CRAMPS NOW WAIT WE ARE NOT DONE
FROM THE LABOR- MANAGEMENT REPORTING AND DISCLOSURE ACT
Tony Messenger
The first time I met Jonathan Gould, he handed me a 4-inch thick, three-ring binder about the St. Louis-Kansas City Carpenters Regional Council.
Gould was — still is — a whistleblower and this was his life’s work. There were financial documents, meeting transcripts, recordings and the documentation that backed up his various state and federal lawsuits that since 2017 he has pushed at much personal cost.
Gould is a union floor layer from Edwardsville. He has alleged in lawsuits that the secretary-treasurer of the Carpenters’ union, Al Bond, and his predecessor, Terry Nelson, were using money from dues-paying union members "for improper reimbursements" and other "waste" and "breaches of fiduciary duty."Despite many conversations and emails over the past couple of years, I never wrote about Gould’s allegations, even as the union was fingered in federal documents for funneling campaign money to former St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, or later, when it was pushing the risky airport privatization scheme.
Why?
The reasons are best explained by the oral arguments in one of those federal lawsuits filed by Gould that was dismissed by the court. I was listening last December when Gould’s attorney and the Carpenters’ attorneys argued over the case, in which Gould said a federal judge was wrong to dismiss the case. In the lawsuit, Gould alleged misappropriation of funds by Bond and others, covered up by a bad audit. But in the end, the Carpenters’ attorney told the judges, the 229 allegations in the lawsuit only uncovered in the neighborhood of $700 of allegedly inappropriate spending.
In June, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Gould. The judges didn’t say that Gould was necessarily wrong for believing that the Carpenters’ accounting of the allegations of wrongdoing was a “sham,” but that Gould didn’t properly go about seeking redress for the various types of possible misappropriation.
That would have been the end of that, until late September, when Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, swept into town, dismissed Bond and other local union leaders, and folded the regional council into the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters. McCarron hasn’t said much about the consolidation, but his letter outlining the decision references an “internal report” about the union’s operations.
Whatever is in that internal report, I would wager my last mileage check that at least some of the allegations in it came from Gould’s several-year-quest to seek justice on behalf of union members who deserve to have their money well spent. All of a sudden, the all-powerful Carpenters’ union, which has held oversized sway in St. Louis politics for too long, has had its legs cut off, with renewed questions about why Bond, for instance, raised his pay by about $100,000 to more than $300,000 a year in a short period of time.
And that’s why Gould went back to federal court this week, this time without an attorney, seeking to block McCarron’s forced consolidation of the local Carpenters’ regional council with the Chicago group. In his legal filing, he repeats many of the allegations he’s been making for years, about alleged financial mismanagement under Bond’s leadership, and he fears that McCarron’s action is a pre-emptive move to somehow cover up misdeeds.
“The merger of union funds may even hinder investigators' ability to effectively and timely track funds spent illegally by union officials,” Gould alleges in his court filing. Indeed, after McCarron has engineered a second leadership change in Missouri (the first was when he replaced Nelson with Bond), perhaps it’s time for his membership to question these moves. McCarron did not return a call for comment.
I have always had a soft spot for whistleblowers like Gould, who risk their own livelihoods because they are convinced that they see wrongdoing and they won’t stop until it is exposed. I’ve been sympathetic to his claims because Bond’s use of the union’s deep pockets to tilt the local political scales, particularly when supporting bad actors, did little to build a better St. Louis.
There’s a lot of smoke in that binder of Gould’s. Perhaps one day, we’ll see where it leads
