Janice Hughes has begun to pay her debt to society. Whether union members and taxpayers eventually will collect is a different story. On February 7, Hughes received a 51-month prison sentence in federal court for her role in defrauding a union-sponsored trust fund and two federal agencies out of a combined $917,000. Hughes, now 69, is the former office manager of the National Plastering Industry’s Joint Apprenticeship Trust Fund, a nonprofit training organization run by the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International Association. In addition to her sentence, she will have to pay $911,420.59 in restitution – in other words, virtually all that she and the fund’s then-executive director, Gilbert Wolf, had stolen. After much delay, Wolf is set to go on trial by the end of this month.
On January 2, Linda Weed, former office secretary for Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International Union Local 534, was charged in the Trial Court of Massachusetts, BMC Department, with one count of larceny from the Boston-based union in the amount of $7,294.73. The charge follows a probe by the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards.
On May 1, Lisa Barnes, former bookkeeper for Operative Plasterers & Cement Masons International Association Local 514, was charged in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan with one count of falsifying financial records of the Madison Heights (Oakland County)-based union. The charge follows a probe by the U.S. Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards.
The gleaming twin residential towers known as "77 Hudson Street" in Jersey City, N.J., is an urban landmark made possible by a lot of hard work. Unfortunately, not everyone who was paid to build it actually worked. And not everyone who did work was on the schedule. During last November and December, six persons, including a reputed mob associate, 
