Ironworkers' Sweeney bullied builders, pleads guilty

FORMER Ironworkers business agent Edward Sweeney got riled up whenever a contractor failed to hire his men for jobs. He even fumed when another union got more work than the Ironworkers.

In an ongoing dispute last year with the carpenters union over a construction site at 19th and Arch streets in Center City, Sweeney often complained that the carpenters union was performing ironwork tasks.

In a phone call Aug. 28, 2013, with another member of Ironworkers Local 401, Sweeney, according to the government's plea memorandum in his criminal case, told the other member:

"I hate to say it, you wish to get cancer. You hope you get cancer so you can go there and just shoot every motherf---er [carpenter] down there. You just want to get cancer and just go there and shoot everybody. It's insane, man, to have, to actually, to wish, you know, you would die so that you can go down there and kill them."

Sweeney didn't do that.

But that quote exemplified the apparent pressure he felt and his willingness to violate the law so that his union would get city jobs.

Sweeney, 55, who walked into the federal courthouse with a cane, pleaded guilty yesterday to racketeering conspiracy, extortion and several arson-related counts. As one of the Ironworkers' four ex-business agents, he was part of its leadership, headed by then-longtime business manager Joseph Dougherty, who prosecutors say ran the union with an "iron fist."

"As a business agent, Sweeney felt enormous pressure" from union members and its leadership "to convince nonunion contractors to hire union ironworkers and occasionally to ensure that other unions were not performing ironwork," according to his plea memorandum, written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Livermore.

When he failed, Dougherty "verbally abused Sweeney in the union hall and during union meetings," the memo says.

Sweeney apparently felt pressured to prove himself for an upcoming union election. Another faction, which allegedly included Dougherty, supported another member, Richard Ritchie, to replace Sweeney, according to court documents.

"Dougherty, Ritchie and others began to ridicule Sweeney at meetings and spread rumors that he was a drunk," Livermore wrote in Sweeney's plea memo.

"In response to the pressure, Sweeney began to use a team of ironworkers loyal to him," including James Walsh, and resorted to "nightwork" - or criminal activity done on behalf of the union - in an effort to force contractors to hire union members, according to his plea memo.

Among the crimes Sweeney instigated as business agent were a December 2012 arson at the construction site of a new Quaker meetinghouse in Chestnut Hill and a July 2013 arson at the site of a warehouse on Grays Avenue in Southwest Philly. Dougherty and Sweeney gave Walsh an acetylene torch in both instances, prosecutors say, and Walsh used it to cut through the buildings' metal infrastructure.

Sweeney faces a mandatory-minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars when he is sentenced Jan. 27 by U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson.

Yesterday, another Ironworkers member, Shawn Bailey, 34, pleaded guilty to one act of extortion. He helped damage the warehouse being constructed on Grays Avenue. Bailey, unlike Sweeney, was charged by a process called criminal information rather than indictment. He faces sentencing Feb. 2.

He and Sweeney were the fifth and sixth defendants in the Ironworkers case to plead guilty. Two others are to plead guilty today.

Dougherty, 73; Ritchie; and two former business agents, Christopher Prophet and William O'Donnell, will face trial Jan. 5.