Nearly a decade ago, in the spring of 1997, General Motors assembly plant workers in Pontiac, Michigan walked off the job in what became a nearly three-month-long strike. It could have been longer had the automaker not accepted an offer they couldn’t refuse from a United Auto Workers local. A half year ago, two surviving instigators of the scheme had a date with justice in a federal courtroom. On June 27, 2006 a jury returned a guilty verdict against Donny Douglas and Jay Campbell, respectively, a former UAW servicing representative and a former shop committee chairman for Local 594, for conspiracy to violate the Taft-Hartley Act and Hobbs Act anti-extortion statutes. The pair had been indicted nearly four years earlier for using their positions to demand the hiring of unqualified persons, in violation of a contract with GM. A third man, William J. Coffey, now deceased, also had been indicted, though charges against him were posthumously dismissed.
Sometimes the unfinished business of a strike can take years to resolve. In the case of Donny Douglas and Jay Campbell, it was close to 15 years. Douglas and Campbell, each a former officer with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 594 in Pontiac, Mich., 
