Senate Report 97-177: Oversight Inquiry of the Labor Department's Investigation of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund (1981)

S. Rept. 97-177, 97th Congress, 1st Session, is a report made by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, titled “Oversight Inquiry of the Department of Labor’s Investigation of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund.” The National Criminal Justice Reference Service number is 81128. This record draws on the report’s account of the 1980 hearings. Quotations are from the scan’s uncorrected text.

The report says that federal agents, acting under search warrants, searched the homes of Carl “Cork” Civella and Carl “Tuffy” DeLuna on February 14 and 15, 1979. Among the documents seized in Carl Civella’s home were “handwritten notes that spelled out how proceeds were divided up among Kansas City crime figures and their associates.” After its own analysis, the subcommittee staff “concluded that the handwritten notes represented the formula by which Kansas City mob figures were to share individually in proceeds from a Las Vegas skimming operation.” The notes identified people by initials, nicknames or numbers, and the report’s reading of them is the staff’s conclusion, with identifications attributed to law enforcement. The report says several allegations in the Government memorandum it reviewed “were not the subject of Federal prosecutions.”

The report also repeats Jack Key’s account of FBI affidavits, including that Nick Civella and his group held concealed interests in a number of Las Vegas casinos and that, as the report puts it, Civella stayed at the Dunes, “which was owned by Morris Shenker,” for which State officials later fined the Dunes $10,000. These are the subcommittee’s and the FBI’s statements, not court findings. The courts’ findings on the Tropicana and Argent cases are on the pages for United States v. DeLuna and United States v. Cerone.