The first time I met Jonathan Gould, he handed me a 4-inch-thick, three-ring binder about the Ƶ-Kansas City Carpenters Regional Council.
Gould was — still is — a whistleblower, and this was his life’s work. There were financial documents, meeting transcripts, recordings and the documentation that backed up his various state and federal lawsuits that since 2017 he has pushed at much personal cost.
Gould is a union floor layer from Edwardsville. He has alleged in lawsuits that the secretary-treasurer of the Carpenters’ union, Al Bond, and his predecessor, Terry Nelson, were using money from dues-paying union members “for improper reimbursements” and other “waste” and “breaches of fiduciary duty.”
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Despite many conversations and emails over the past couple of years, I never wrote about Gould’s allegations, even as the union was fingered in federal documents for funneling campaign money to former Ƶ County Executive Steve Stenger or, later, when it was pushing the risky airport privatization scheme.
Why?
The reasons are best explained by the oral arguments in one of those federal lawsuits filed by Gould that was dismissed by the court. I was listening last December when Gould’s attorney and the Carpenters’ attorneys argued over the case, in which Gould said a federal judge was wrong to dismiss the case. In the lawsuit, Gould alleged misappropriation of funds by Bond and others, covered up by a bad audit. But in the end, the Carpenters’ attorney told the judges, the 229 allegations in the lawsuit only uncovered in the neighborhood of $700 of allegedly inappropriate spending.
In June, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals . The judges didn’t say that Gould was necessarily wrong for believing that the Carpenters’ accounting of the allegations of wrongdoing was a “sham” but that Gould didn’t properly go about seeking redress for the various types of possible misappropriation.
That would have been the end of that, until late September, when Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, swept into town, dismissed Bond and other local union leaders, and folded the regional council into the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters. McCarron hasn’t said much about the consolidation, but his letter outlining the decision references an “internal report” about the union’s operations.
Whatever is in that internal report, I would wager my last mileage check that at least some of the allegations in it came from Gould’s several-year quest to seek justice on behalf of union members who deserve to have their money well spent. All of a sudden, the all-powerful Carpenters’ union, which has held oversized sway in Ƶ politics for too long, has had its legs cut off, with renewed questions about why Bond, for instance, raised his pay by about $100,000 to more than $300,000 a year in a short period of time.
And that’s why Gould went back to federal court this week, this time without an attorney, seeking to block McCarron’s forced consolidation of the local Carpenters’ regional council with the Chicago group. In his legal filing, he repeats many of the allegations he’s been making for years about alleged financial mismanagement under Bond’s leadership, and he fears that McCarron’s action is a preemptive move to somehow cover up misdeeds.
“The merger of union funds may even hinder investigators’ ability to effectively and timely track funds spent illegally by union officials,” Gould alleges in his court filing. Indeed, after McCarron has engineered a second leadership change in Missouri (the first was when he replaced Nelson with Bond), perhaps it’s time for his membership to question these moves. McCarron did not return a call for comment.
I have always had a soft spot for whistleblowers like Gould, who risk their own livelihoods because they are convinced that they see wrongdoing and they won’t stop until it is exposed. I’ve been sympathetic to his claims because Bond’s use of the union’s deep pockets to tilt the local political scales, particularly when supporting bad actors, did little to build a better Ƶ.
There’s a lot of smoke in that binder of Gould’s. Perhaps one day we’ll see where it leads.