One day when I was digging a ditch near the Indiana border a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. A Buick drove out of this cloud, stopped next to my hole and two men in suits got out. They demanded my fee right away. I'd just cashed my check so I handed it over. They smiled, got back in the car, and drove away.

Much later, I discovered by reading unpublished hearings of an internal Laborers' investigation that officials of my old local had beat Tony "the Ant" Spilotro and his brother with shovels in an Indiana corn field and buried them alive. This scene appears in Martin Scorsese's Casino.

"You can't say that!" well-meaning union progressives have told me again and again in my lifetime in the labor movement, "You'll weaken the movement." But it's clear that the American labor movement is weak because it is corrupt. And without a genuine labor movement — one capable of mobilizing the best energies of its working people — America can only drift further along its rightward course. As Voltaire said of the corruption of the Church, Ecrasez l'infâme.