Union Delegate for Fired IPN Workers Goes to Prison

by Ronald Drenger

The controversial former union delegate for Independence Plaza North’s building workers is going to prison this month in connection with a labor bribery scheme at another housing complex.

The delegate, Ismet “Izzy” Kukic, of Local 32B-J of the Service Workers International Union, was sentenced on Nov. 27 to a year and a day for conspiring to take a bribe from mobsters who were trying to help the owner of a Brooklyn residential complex get rid of 32B-J building workers and replace them with lower-wage staff.

Kukic was the delegate for IPN’s 24 security guards, members of 32B-J, when IPN management fired them in April 2000 and replaced them with lower-salaried workers from Cambridge Security Services. Many of the workers complained that Kukic did little or nothing to help them on the eve of their dismissal. Management later agreed to rehire 12 of the fired workers, half of them part-time.

Kukic (he also used the last name Kukaj) was among 45 organized crime members and mob associates indicted in April 2001 for a wide range of crimes after an informer caught their conversations on tape. He was recorded discussing the Brooklyn labor situation with mobsters at a meeting on May 10, 2000, in a Manhattan Wendy’s restaurant.


According to prosecutors, Abe Weider, the owner of Venderveer Apartments in East Flatbush, had turned to the mob for help in keeping the powerful 32 B-J off his back, and Kukic was the Genovese family’s connection inside the union. Kukic pleaded guilty earlier this year.

In a letter to the judge before the sentencing, Kukic’s lawyer, Michael Marinaccio, said Kukic deserved leniency because he was “a hard working family man” whose involvement in the crime was motivated “not so much by greed or dishonesty but by a misguided desire to ingratiate himself to individuals he thought were his friends.”

Some members of 32B-J also wrote on Kukic’s behalf.

But Paul Weinstein, an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn who handled the case, wrote to the judge that Kukic was “a corrupt union official who had gained the trust of Genovese family soldiers” and that his offense “was no aberration.”

At IPN, in the months before and after the firings, many of the veteran guards said that Kukic ignored their repeated complaints about management and their fears about being let go, and often did not even return phone calls.

They noted that the only union rally on their behalf took place outside of IPN three weeks after they received termination notices and two days after their last day of work, and only in the wake of extensive press coverage of the firings.

“The union lay down like a dog and let management scratch its little tummy,” a fired IPN worker said at the time.