Gaunt, perhaps 30 pounds lighter than when he stood trial in Chicago, Williams said he and Civella began to help each other from then on. Williams, who rose in Teamsters ranks under the tutelage of Jimmy Hoffa, said he first met Civella in the early 1950s when they served together on a committee of 'referees' to sort out the flood of Democratic candidates for public office here and give the nod to the ones 'we thought we could win.'Ĭivella, Williams said, 'was a very deep thinker. One of the defendants, Carl DeLuna, 56, for years Nick Civella's right-hand man, glared at him when the former Teamsters boss pointed him out in the courtroom. senator, Williams was supposed to start serving a 10-year prison sentence earlier this month, but the date has been postponed.

Williams is the third Teamsters president since 1957 convicted of a federal crime, but the first ever to testify in open court.Ĭonvicted in 1982 of conspiring to bribe a U.S. His testimony, in addition to providing details about the alleged skimming arrangement, offered a unique glimpse of the relationship between individual Teamsters leaders and Mafia figures that has been widely discussed but rarely documented by an insider such as Williams. Struggling to stay out of federal prison himself, Williams took the stand today as a government witness at the trial of nine reputed Midwestern crime bosses and their associates on charges of skimming $2 million from a string of casinos they secretly controlled in Las Vegas. 'He told me not to deal with anyone else who would try to contact me.' 'We tried to meet at least once a month, sometimes oftener,' the 70-year-old Williams recalled of his dealings with the late Nick Civella, the reputed Mafia chieftain who died in 1983. Roy Lee Williams, the ailing ex-president of the Teamsters union, testified today in compelling detail about the Mafia's domination of his union and how he himself came to be controlled by the crime boss of Kansas City.

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