Extortionists Pose As N.Y. Job Activists

The AP reports:

The builder was an out-of-towner, but was well-schooled in the ways that business sometimes gets done in New York.

So when a group of burly men turned up at his Queens construction site in 2005 and threatened to shut the place down unless he hired someone from their crew, he quickly made peace. He put one of them on the payroll for a no-show job that paid $15 per hour.

The arrangement may have looked like a traditional Mafia shakedown, but it wasn't. The men lining their pockets were leaders of a "minority labor coalition," ostensibly set up to help blacks land jobs in an industry still dominated by whites.

The difference may have been lost on the contractor. When he cut the checks, he wrote the word "extortion" on the stub.

Prosecutors say these kinds of shakedowns keep happening in New York, despite an intensive effort to rid the construction industry of a brand of corruption with roots in the civil rights movement.

Over the past year, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has obtained a string of indictments against the leaders of minority labor coalitions.

Labor coalitions have existed in the city since the late 1960s, and their rallies and pickets at construction sites were originally aimed at integrating trades once notoriously closed to minorities. But in later years, authorities said, legitimate groups became outnumbered by intimidation squads looking for payoffs.

"They keep popping back, because there is a lot of money to be made," said Daniel Castleman, the district attorney's chief of investigations.

Imagine that.