Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA)

Matthew Guglielmetti’s career as a made man is over.  But that doesn’t mean he’ll be cooperating with authorities to end other careers in the New England criminal underworld.  That’s what his attorney, at least, is counting on.

On May 13, Guglielmetti, standing before U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres, pleaded guilty to attempted cocaine-trafficking charges.  His arrest back in January was a classic sting of a union whose top leadership long had worked with organized crime figures.  Back in 1995 LIUNA, well documented to be in cahoots with mobsters, had averted a federal RICO suit by agreeing to a supervised internal cleanup.

Leslie Patricia Bell made off like a bandit back when she ran the books for Laborers Local 1184.  Now she’s being prosecuted like one.  The Justice Department announced on May 4 that they had charged the 39-year-old Palm Desert, Calif. woman with embezzling more than $178,000 from the union.  From 1997 until her termination in July 2003, Bell served as full-time bookkeeper for the local, which represents some 3,200 construction, maintenance and grounds keeping workers in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.  Since she already had pled guilty, the announcement would have seemed anticlimactic.  But the U.S. Attorney’s Office believes the case is serious enough to warrant formal charges. 

A federal judge in Albany, N.Y. has sentenced a stockbroker on April 12 for stealing more than $400,000 from a union employee benefit fund.  U.S. Senior District Judge Thomas McAvoy ordered Anthony DiPace, 47, to serve a prison term concurrent with his 2 ½ year sentence received in January 2004 on a separate conviction for mail fraud in Hawaii. 

A high-ranking mobster in the Patriarca crime family and laborers union member has agreed to plead guilty to cocaine trafficking charges stemming from his arrest in an FBI sting operation two months ago.  Matthew L. Guglielmetti has signed a plea agreement admitting that he conspired to distribute and possessed with intent to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine.  The plea agreement was filed March 30 in the U.S. District Court in Providence.