Thursday, May 29, 1997 
Watertown, MA TAB & Press 
Between the Lines - By John Moxley 

Call it karma. Call it ironic. Call it what you want. But the recent news that Michael Ansara, the chief executive officer of the Somerville-based Share Group, Inc., has turned cooperative witness in a federal grand jury probe of alleged fund raising irregularities growing out of the January national election of the Teamsters Union has got to make George Bachrach a very uncomfortable camper. 

How bad is it for Bachrach, who in 1995 joined the Share Group, a telemarketing operation, as senior vice president and in August of 1996, basked, along with Ansara, in the glow of a Boston Globe business section puff piece carrying the improbable headline, "Telemarketing with a conscience?" 

Well, try this out for size. If allegations of money funnelling shenanigans by Share Group CEO Ansara and Teamster insiders stick, the "Telemarketers with a conscience" may find themselves explaining well into the next millennium how it came to be that they helped Jimmy Hoffa Jr., the putative anti-Christ of labor movement reform, capture the presidency of the troubled union. This is because federal law allows for the nullification of union elections where significant undue influence can be shown. And Barbara Zack Quindel, the official who oversaw the Carey-Hoffa election, is now pondering a Hoffa camp request to just that. 

It all started following January's razor-thin Teamster reelection victory of union president Ron Carey over challenger Jimmy Hoffa Jr. Shortly after that race, Boston Teamsters Local 122 President John Murphy, a Hoffa supporter, complained to the United States Attorney's Office that the national election results were illegally skewed by a money-funnelling ruse perpetrated in large part by the Share Group's Ansara, Ansara's wife Barbara Arnold, and Carey operatives within the union. Murphy's allegation, as it pertains to the Share Group, is that Carey sympathizers wrote checks out of the union treasury totaling some $100,000 to the Share Group and that Arnold, the wife of the Share Group's CEO, made contributions in largely matching amounts, and just days apart, to Carey' s reelection campaign.  

The first reaction of the Share Group's Ansara to the Hoffa camp's accusation was textbook Nixon-style stonewalling. 

In an early March Globe story, William Codinha, a lawyer representing Ansara and Arnold, called the money-funnelling complaints a "witch hunt," complaining that Barbara Arnold's contribution to Carey was legal in that it came out of an inheritance and not from Share Group generated income. Federal law, you see, prohibits employers, their spouses and children from contributing to union campaigns unless the donated funds can be demonstrated to be independent of company income. 

Arnold was in high dudgeon about the insinuation by low-brow unionists that there might perhaps be something fishy about her mirroring Teamster treasury payouts to the Share Group with her own contributions of $45,000 and $50,000 to the campaign of the very same union's president. Never mind that the Carey-controlled union just happens to be a flagship account of the Share Group - a firm whose stock is 60 percent owned by her husband. So, for the benefit of doubting Thomases (and presumably, doubting Jimmy Juniors) she waxed righteous in a way Jimmy Swaggart would envy. Arnold pointed to her "long history of involvement with social justice causes" and went on, apparently straight of face, to tell the Globe that her extraordinary generosity to Carey's campaign was motivated by a desire to "clean up" the Teamsters' image and to aid in "rebuilding the US union movement." 

Lovely rant, that. Very . Everything but the pooch named Checkers.  

And ambitious, too, especially that hooey about rebuilding the US union movement. But the bloom of rectitude would soon be off the rose. 

By mid-March , feeling the heat from a federal investigation, the Carey campaign returned Barbara Arnold's $95,000. Her stock-rich husband Michael Ansara, who emoted in Oprah-esque fashion in that now-famous summer of '96 Globe hagiography that his seven years at the helm of the $20 million telemarketing firm had made him "less of a Marxist, but more angry," was recently described by lawyer William ("It's a witch hunt") Codinha as being a cooperative witness before a federal grand jury. Men of Ansara's vaunted principles, one must deduce, do not cooperate in witch hunts. 

As for Bachrach. Well, now that Ansara has opted to take a leave of absence from the Share Group, Bachrach is now the firm's acting CEO. Like the Mel Brooks character in the 1985 film, Lost in America, it falls to Bachrach to "guard the next egg" - all $20 million of it. 

No slouch at damage control, Bachrach, on April 15, mailed a finger-in-the-dike missive to Share Group clients informing them that although there is indeed an "ongoing investigation" into some of the contributions made to the Carey campaign, clients could be assured that "The Share Group and Share Commercial Services are not subjects of this investigation." 

Bachrach followed that curious interpretation with a tour de force of unfathomable hair splitting wherein he acknowledged the following to Nervous Nelly clients: "Michael Ansara, however, as an individual (unrelated to Share) is a subject of the investigation." Finally, in a dismissive formulation that could well have been pilfered from the play book of Iran-Contra apologists, Bachrach alluded to the "technical nature of the violation" that had landed his corporate fellow traveller in the grand jury room. 

Guard the nest egg. At all costs. 

Asked Monday by this columnist whether he himself had ever met with any Teamster Union representatives, Bachrach issued a flat "No." Considering that his anxiety-assuaging client mailing included the comforting reminder that he had "spent many years as a partner in a Boston law firm and three terms in the Massachusetts state Senate," one might wonder, from a fiduciary perspective, how such professed aloofness from The Share Group's involvement in the legally intricate and highly regulated realm of national union affairs served the interest of company stockholders and employees - not to mention the union rank-and file. After and thanks to a storied history of corruption, the Teamsters Union is still operating under under a federal court consent decree and therefore cries out for careful watching. 

The Teamster/Share Group fund raising allegations are ugly stuff. And if they pan out, they are hardly indicative of the kind of ethical behavior you would expect from a firm that once seduced a Boston Globe business writer to gush "In the world of telemarketing, an industry sometimes accused of running 'technology sweatshops' and frequently associated with sleazy fund raising scams, the Share Group stands out for its social values." 

Ouch!