St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 9

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH March 28, 1982 15A 3 MAR 26 1982 Ex-St. Louis Gambler Linked To Bribes Shenker Reported Worth $33 Million 5 Years Ago made of whether the grand jury had made an inquiry. Another memo to Daly in January 1978 said the FBI was conducting another investigation of the Culinary Union's pension fund. The memo said that investigation involved reports of a $200,000 kickback to a union official for $2.7 million in loans.

The federal documents also indicated that $750,000 of the loans that Shenker received from the pension fund through his company, Sierra Charter had gone to Wyman. The money was used to bay U.S. treasury bills, which were kept in a safety-deposit box at the Dunes. The documents also said Sierra Charter had lent Wyman $20,000, which was not repaid. Investigators have tried to determine whether the money about 10 percent of one of the Culinary Union loans actually was intended as a payoff.

One document was a financial statement by Shenker dated Dec. 31, 1976. It said that his assets had an approximate value of $65,874,000 and that his liabilities amounted to $32 million, leaving a net worth of more than $33 million. Sen. Orrin G.

Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, has accused Shenker of cheating his employees at the Dunes of millions of dollars by not repaying the loans from the pension fund. The Senate committee invited Shenker to appear before it last month, but Shenker declined. He said his health would not permit an appearance. Shenker said that he had suffered a heart attack several years ago and that he had had open heart surgery. Shenker sent the committee a 125-page statement defending himself on the pension fund loans.

Shenker denounced the Labor Department's investigation and suit, calling them a "flagrant abuse of power and trust in attempting to bring about my financial ruin, oblivious to the harmful effects its actions had and continue to have" on the beneficiaries of the pension fund. Shenker said legal action thus far had cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He also said that under agreements signed with the pension fund after the loans were made, the Culinary Union took virtual control of Sierra Charter, replacing some of its officers and board members and dominating every phase of its operations. Wyman was close to the late Mickey Cohen, the West Coast racketeer. Authorities had found Wyman's and Giordano's names in Cohen's address book.

In the mid-1940s, Wyman ran what was known as the "Towne Game" in St. Louis, a mobile gambling operation to avoid police detection. In 1958, Wyman said he was an owner of the Havana Riviera Hotel in Cuba, but he refused to talk about it when questioned before a federal grand jury in Indianapolis. Wyman and another St. Louis gambler, George Duckworth, were indicted in 1972 by a federal grand jury in Las Vegas on charges that they filed false-income tax returns after they had skimmed money from the Dunes.

Wyman later was acquitted. Wyman and Charles J. "Kewpie" Rich, another prominent St. Louis gambler, once ran a betting clearinghouse on St. Charles Rock Road that did a national business of $4 million a year.

Morris A. Shenker reported a net worth of more than $33 million five years ago, according to documents recently released by the U.S. Senate Labor Committee. The documents also show that the lawyer from St. Louis apparently was the victim of extortion.

A report from that Labor Department dated April 7, 1977, disclosed that Paul Linden had said in an interview that a former officer of Shenker's Sierra Charter Inc. had owed that company $613,000. But the debt was uncollectable, he said. Linden was a board member of Sierra and a representative of the Culinary Pension Fund. Linden stated that when the officer quit, Shenker agreed to pay him $100,000, the report said.

Shenker also agreed to pay him $40,000 in each of the next two years, the report said. It continued: "When questioned why Shenker would agree to pay (the officer) this additional money after he already owed the corporation $614,000, which was uncollectable, Linden stated that (the officer) threatened to expose Shenker and the whole operation if Shenker did not agree to those terms. Linden stated that Shenker was a very frightened man Other documents made public by the Labor Committee charged that the Culinary Workers Pension "Fund had been "manipulated for the benefit of Morris Shenker and not for the benefit of the participants and the beneficiaries." The documents said Shenker had been "milking" the fund. It had lent Shenker $28 million. One document was a financial statement by Shenker, dated Dec.

31, 1976. It said that his assets had an approximate value of $65.87 million and that his liabilities were $32 million. That left him with a net worth of $33.87 million. i By Ronald J. Lawrence Of the Post-Dispatch Staff Federal investigators believe that A deceased St.

Louis gambler and an underworld associate bribed a high-ranking official of the South Nevada Culinary and Bartenders Union to obtain millions of dollars in loans from the union's pension fund. The investigators' suspicions are contained in recently released federal documents that date back five years. The documents identify the St. Louis gambler as Sidney Wyman. At the time, Wyman was a consultant for the Dunes Hotel and Country Club on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Dunes is owned by Morris A. Shenker, a lawyer from St. Louis. Through one of his companies, Shenker had obtained $28 million in loans from the Culinary Union's pension fund in the mid-1970s. He has not repaid those loans.

The documents disclosed that Wyman was one of the last people to talk to union Al Bramlet, an official of the union, on the day that Bramlet disappeared five years ago. The documents said Bramlet telephoned Wyman at the Dunes Hotel on Feb. 24, 1977, and asked for $10,000 in cash. The union official disappeared a few hours later. His body was found buried in the desert near Las Vegas about three weeks later.

He apparently had been slain, but the case has not been solved. Wyman died a year later. A source familiar with the investigation of Shenker and the Culinary Union loans said the deaths of Bramlet and Wyman had prevented any prosecution in the case. The source said authorities still believe Wyman might have been involved in payoffs to Bramlet for loans from the pension fund. Shenker was a longtime business associate of Wyman.

Wyman reputedly was also close to numerous St. Louis underworld figures, including the Anthony Giordano, the late mob boss. Wyman had been an owner of the Dunes before Shenker bought it. The documents were made public by the Senate Labor Committee in Washington. The committee is investigating the Department of Labor's handling of alleged abuses of union pension funds, including the loans to Shenker.

Bramlet was president of Culinary Union Local 226 in Las Vegas and was chairman of the pension fund's board of trustees. In a suit filed five years ago in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, the Labor Department accused Shenker of obtaining the Culinary Union loans by fraud and of diverting them to his personal use. The suit seeks repayment of the loans for the union and $37 million in accrued interest, penalties and legal costs. One of the documents made public by the Labor Committee is a memorandum to the Labor Department's solicitor general.

The memorandum is dated March 21, 1977 five days after Bramlet's body was found. "The circumstances of his (Bramlet's) disappearance included a telephone call on Feb. 24 from Bramlet to one Sidney Wyman, who is employed as a consultant in the Dunes Hotel and who has been an officer of the Dunes, in which Bramlet requested $10,000 to be delivered to a friend of Bramlet's," the document says. In an earlier memo, dated March, the head of the Labor Department's branch of reporting enforcement had written: "Why should the Dunes Hotel executive (Wyman) want to pay $10,000 to Al Bramlet? This gives some credence to a theory that Bramlet was possibly involved in a 'kickback arrangement' with the Dunes Hotel, since it is owned by Shenker, and Shenker received loans from the fund, which is dominated by Bramlet." The Labor Department official, Thomas Kane, prepared a report a short time later for Edward F. Daly, director of the depaitment's Office of Enforcement.

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