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Neither Snow Nor Rain

Page 24

by Devin Leonard


  Frank had a more fractious relationship with Moe Biller, now president of the 370,000-member APWU, which had become the largest postal workers’ union. Another key participant in the 1970 strike, Biller remained an unabashed throwback to another period of labor history. “Biller always acted like he was still in the 1930s and his bosses were bashing him in the head,” says Michael Coughlin, who served as deputy postmaster general under Frank. Biller’s behavior was sometimes at odds with his rhetoric. Frank once bumped into him on an airplane. Frank was flying coach. Biller was in first class. “It was just a marvelous experience,” Frank says.

  Perhaps Biller had reason to be adversarial. The USPS would never replace carriers with machines, but the advanced optical character readers were a threat to the APWU and its members. Jaclynn Peon, a clerk who operated a mechanical letter-sorting machine in a processing plant in Garden City, New York, was devastated when the new devices arrived. She had mastered the old system; she and her coworkers had such good numbers that their managers rewarded them with an annual summer picnic and a Christmas party. “I loved Garden City,” she says wistfully. “Everybody knew each other. It was wonderful.”

  But now Peon’s skills were no longer needed there. Because of the no-layoff clause in postal workers’ contracts, she could count on having a job somewhere at the USPS. She ended up at a much larger facility in Huntington Station, New York. “It felt like a prison,” Peon says. “I’ll tell you right now: I hated it.” She had been used to her managers timing her activities in Garden City, but her new bosses timed her washroom breaks and confronted her when they felt she was taking too many. “You were questioned,” she recalls. “‘You are taking multiple trips to the bathroom. Is there a problem?’” Finally, Peon quit the USPS and became a nurse.

  In Louisiana, 22 hand-sorting clerks were displaced by the machines in the suburbs of New Orleans and transferred into the city, where there were still pigeonholes to throw mail into. With the move, they forfeited their seniority rights and had to work the midnight shift. “They shuffled me away like an old piece of furniture,” Alvin Coulon, a 27-year USPS veteran, told the Washington Post. These longtime clerks had once tossed 600 letters an hour. Now they practiced their ancient skill at a more leisurely pace. “We have to slow down,” explained a clerk named C. J. Roux. “We don’t want to work ourselves out of a job.”

  Moe Biller insisted his union wasn’t against automation. “You might as well oppose the sun setting,” he said. But Biller did everything he could to frustrate Frank’s efforts and raise questions about his leadership. He called for his resignation when Frank tried to outsource the advanced letter-sorting operations. He organized a boycott of Sears when the USPS opened post offices in the department stores; Sears eventually backed out of the deal. When Frank appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and let the host tease him about the stodgy, unreliable postal service, Biller excoriated him for not defending the institution. “He just stood there like a potted plant,” Biller scoffed.

  The war between Frank and Biller grew more vituperative when a new wave of violence engulfed the postal service. Biller laid the blame at the management’s feet. In June 1998, a clerk in Chelsea, Massachusetts, murdered a female coworker and took his own life. Six month later, a clerk in New Orleans killed a coworker with a shotgun and wounded two others. In August 1989, John Merlin Taylor, a 52-year old carrier in Escondido, California, murdered his wife while she slept and then went to work and killed two men with whom he had taken daily cigarette breaks. Frank and his wife flew to California and comforted the widows of the victims. “We did as good a job as we could in this calamity,” Frank says. “The thing is, the guy who did the shooting had been named outstanding letter carrier just a few months earlier.”

  When the APWU blamed the slayings in Escondido on what it described as the postal service’s militaristic management style, Frank was furious. “Obviously, this is a matter of great importance to me,” he said. “But when you shoot your closest friends and your sleeping wife, is it fair to blame work on that? Is that the fault of the Postal Service?” By now, however, there was a pattern emerging in the slayings. Perhaps Frank had already noticed it. If so, he didn’t say anything. Soon, he would.

  On April 21, 1989, John Frezza was driving through Berkley, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, when a letter carrier behind the wheel of a white mail truck cut him off at a stop sign. The mailman jumped out of his truck. He looked a bit like Charles Bronson with his brown hair, his mustache, and his flat nose. He started swearing at Frezza. “You punks are all the same,” he said. When Frezza tried to get his name, the carrier knocked him down. “Hey, what’s going on?” Frezza asked. The letter carrier told Frezza he was lucky he hadn’t knocked “his fucking teeth down his throat.”

  Frezza reported the altercation to the police. When the letter carrier’s bosses at the post office in nearby Royal Oak found out about it, they suspended him for seven days and ordered him to undergo psychological counseling. His name was Thomas ­McIlvane, and he had frequently been in trouble since he was hired in 1983. His superiors hadn’t wanted to hire him in the first place because he had a bad knee, but McIlvane knew how the system worked. He appealed the decision, and he got the job because he was a disabled veteran.

  Like Patrick Sherrill, McIlvane had served in the Marines and been trained as a sharpshooter, but he had trouble controlling what he described as his “short fuse.” In 1982, he was court-martialed for insubordination. The following year he drove a tank over an automobile in an apparent fit and still somehow received “a general discharge under honorable conditions.” It wasn’t as bad as a dishonorable discharge but it meant the Marines would never take him back and he couldn’t join the reserves.

  McIlvane didn’t fare much better at the postal service. He kicked open swinging doors rather than pushing them. He was written up for arriving late at work and delivering mail to the wrong houses. He got into an argument with another carrier over a parking space. When a supervisor intervened, McIlvane told him, “Don’t fuck with me.”

  Fortunately for McIlvane, he had a protector in Charlie Withers, the chief NALC steward in Royal Oak. A Vietnam War veteran with shoulder-length brown hair and a long mustache, Withers detested the management at Royal Oak and pushed back whenever possible, filing grievances on McIlvane’s behalf. “He was a good letter carrier,” Withers says. “I worked right next to him.”

  The relationship between labor and management at the Royal Oak post office became more difficult in 1990 when Daniel Presilla became its postmaster. Presilla came from Indianapolis, where he had been a high-level manger and earned praise for running a smooth bar coding operation. But he was also an autocrat. When injured employees in Indianapolis returned to work and requested light duty, Presilla made them spend their days in a glass-enclosed room on the processing floor reading postal manuals. So many postal workers in Indianapolis complained that the U.S. General Accounting Office investigated, but it found no evidence of widespread mistreatment of employees.

  Presilla brought along several of his deputies including Chris Carlisle, who became Royal Oak’s branch operations manager. He clearly wanted to clean house and seemed intent on starting with McIlvane, writing him up for small infractions. “They were targeting McIlvane,” Withers says. “They were ganging up on him for all kinds of things that they weren’t messing with other people about.”

  Carlisle sent McIlvane home for wearing shorts that were too short for work. When McIlvane returned to the office in long pants, he threw the shorts onto the branch manager’s desk. Soon after, Carlisle showed the carriers a training film at the end of their shift. Eight carriers ended up filing their daily paperwork late, but McIlvane was the only one suspended. Carlisle told him to leave the building and said he would be in touch. “Yeah, and I’ll be seeing you too,” McIlvane replied.

  Withers managed to get McIlvane a second chance, but when a supervisor called McIlvane at
home and told him to come in to work, McIlvane spewed vulgarities at her. That clinched it. On July 31, 1990, Carlisle fired McIlvane. Withers filed a grievance contending the decision, and starting a process that could take more than a year to resolve. Always a believer in his troubled coworker, Withers told McIlvane that he had a strong case, but the union steward knew it would be difficult for him to wait for the outcome. Withers felt the need to warn Carlisle about it. “I’m not saying McIlvane is dangerous, but I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” Withers told him. “If I think he is going to go crazy, I’ll come and tell you.”

  In the months that followed, McIlvane showed up several times at the post office and had to be escorted out of the building because he got into screaming matches with people. The human resources director was concerned enough to call postal inspectors in Detroit to see if they could do something about McIlvane. The inspectors gave him the brush-off. “We’re not a babysitting service,” one said.

  Meanwhile, the grievance process dragged on. The USPS upheld McIlvane’s firing and the union appealed, which meant the case was headed for arbitration. At times, McIlvane was optimistic, telling his roommate he planned to use his back pay to fix up his house. At other times, he spoke darkly about punishing his tormentors at Royal Oak. “They will not get away with this,” he promised. McIlvane started calling some of his former supervisors and threatening them. “You better not turn your head or you will be dead—you fucking bitch,” he told one woman.

  During the summer of 1991, McIlvane lost his health insurance, which only unhinged him further. “If I lose the arbitration it will make Edmond, Oklahoma, look like a tea party,” he told Paul Roznowski, president of NALC Local 3126, which represented Royal Oak. Another time McIlvane said he would make Edmond “look like Disneyland.” He also spoke of murdering Carlisle. “If I lose this thing, I’m going to blow Carlisle’s fucking brains out,” he promised. The union people didn’t warn the USPS about any of this because they worried that it would hurt his case.

  On October 10, 1991, another postal worker went on a bloody rampage. Joseph Harris, who had recently been fired from his job as a clerk in Ridgewood, New Jersey, put on a ninja hood, black fatigues, and combat boots and snuck into the home of Carol Ott, his former supervisor. Harris shot her boyfriend in the head at he watched television and fatally slashed Ott with a samurai sword. Then he drove to the Ridgewood post office and killed two mail handlers as they arrived for work. When Harris surrendered there, he wore a gas mask and a bulletproof vest. Police relieved him of an Uzi, a machine gun, three hand grenades, some homemade bombs, and his blade. “I think Mr. Harris came prepared to die,” said Joel Trella, chief of the Bergen County, New Jersey, police department. “He was armed quite heavily—more heavily than I’ve ever seen in my career.”

  Unnerved by the slayings in New Jersey, Carlisle appealed to the postal inspection service in Detroit. He sent a two-and-a-half-page letter to the inspectors, explaining that McIlvane’s case was scheduled to go before an arbitrator on Monday, October 21. Carlisle feared that if McIlvane lost, he would seek revenge. The inspectors didn’t reply. On the Friday before the hearing, Carlisle telephoned the Detroit office and pleaded with an inspector to be there in case ­McIlvane snapped. She reluctantly agreed. As it turned out, the two-day arbitration hearing was uneventful. McIlvane was agitated, getting up every 20 minutes or so to use the washroom. When nothing else out of the ordinary happened, the inspector decided not to return for the final day, much to Carlisle’s exasperation.

  When the hearings ended, employees at the Royal Oak post office braced themselves for a decision. Carlisle bought more life insurance and suggested that Withers do the same. “You know, McIlvane is going to lose and when he does, he’ll kill you too,” Carlisle told him. Another time, Carlisle stopped by Withers’s workstation and inquired if he had purchased a bulletproof vest. Irritated, Withers responded, “If I were you I wouldn’t bother because you’ll get it in the head.”

  On November 8, the arbitrator ruled against McIlvane. The union called his house and left a message on his answering machine. A woman in the USPS personnel department called the Detroit inspectors and told them again about McIlvane’s threats. An inspector promised to visit the post office and conduct an investigation. He said he would be in Royal Oak on November 14.

  The morning of November 14 was unseasonably warm for late fall in Michigan. Charlie Withers arrived at the post office at 6:30 am to take care of some union business. He still seethed about the loss of the McIlvane case. Chris Carlisle hurried over and said they needed to talk about something, but Withers waved him away. “Is this because of the McIlvane thing?” Carlisle asked. Withers said he had simply had enough of the “BS” that Carlisle and his people had heaped on the Royal Oak letter carriers. Later, Withers would wonder what Carlisle’s last words to him might have been.

  At 8:30 am, Withers was upstairs talking to Leonard Brown, head of labor relations at Royal Oak, when they heard noises that sounded like popcorn popping. “It’s a shooting!” Brown said. The two of them locked the office door, stuck a chair under the knob, and turned out the lights. It was McIlvane. He had entered the building through the rear loading docks with a sawed-off semiautomatic rifle hidden under his raincoat, along with two ammunition clips wrapped together with duct tape.

  McIlvane went straight for Carlisle’s office on the first floor and shot him before he could rise from his desk. Then he shot another supervisor who was sitting nearby. After that, McIlvane walked through the ground floor of the post office, firing at people randomly. “No, Tom, no!” one of his fellow carriers shouted. McIlvane shot Clark French, another NALC shop steward, as French ran out of the building. The bleeding postman escaped, but only because McIlvane let him go. He was headed upstairs to the second floor where there were more managers to kill.

  At the top of the stairs, McIlvane tried the door of Leonard Brown’s office, but he couldn’t get it open. Inside, Brown and Withers heard him reload his rifle, dropping an ammunition clip on the hallway floor. McIlvane kicked open the door of the office next door and shot another labor relations specialist in the head. Then he proceeded down the hall to Postmaster Presilla’s office. Presilla dialed 911. “He’s trying to get in my door now!” Presilla told the dispatchers at the Royal Oak police department.

  McIlvane furiously tried the knob, but it was no use. Presilla had barricaded himself inside. By now, McIlvane could probably hear the sirens of the police cars arriving outside. He had fired nearly 100 rounds, killing four people and wounding four more, but he wasn’t done yet. He wandered into the stairwell and shot himself in the head. The police found him there, still breathing. They took him to Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, where he was pronounced dead at 12:33 am the following day. The Royal Oak massacre wasn’t the worst example of postal violence, but in some ways, it was the most tragic because both labor and management missed so many opportunities to prevent McIlvane’s spree.

  Moe Biller rushed to Royal Oak that afternoon to exploit the crisis. Speaking to traumatized workers in a garage next to the post office, Biller blamed the tragedy on the postal service’s management. “It’s clear that something is fundamentally wrong in the postal worker environment, and something must be done about it,” Biller said. “Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Royal Oak situation is the fact that warning signs had been flashing there for months and months, but no one in management seemed to take them seriously.” But Biller didn’t mean McIlvane’s threats or violent behavior. “I’m referring,” he clarified, “to the chronic problems that had been reported concerning the management of the Royal Oak Facility.”

  Initially, the USPS insisted that there was nothing it could have done to prevent the tragedy in Royal Oak. “There is flat out no way to identify the character of an individual who would commit this sort of crime,” a USPS spokesman insisted. The following day, Anthony Frank appeared in Michigan with a different message. He dismisse
d calls for the USPS to station police officers in post offices to protect the workers. “Let me be brutal,” he said. “If we had a police officer at the back dock in this case, we would have had one more dead. These are public buildings. I don’t think you can make them hermetically sealed. We can’t make 40,000 post offices armed camps.”

  Instead, Frank announced that the USPS would review the hiring practices at every post office, conduct background checks of the agency’s more than 800,000 employees, and create a 24-hour hotline that postal workers could use to report threats made by their fellow employees. In 10 days, employees inundated the line with stories of ex-workers who talked about killing their bosses and current ones who brought weapons to work and talked about using them on people there. Postal inspectors took 328 of the calls seriously enough to conduct investigations and arrested seven current and former workers for making threats.

  On January 7, 1992, Frank tendered his resignation. He says he was eager to return to the West Coast, where his family was living, but he told colleagues privately at the time that he thought he could no longer be an effective leader. He had suffered too many defeats. Moe Biller had killed his plan for post offices in Sears. Private airlines with mail contracts had thwarted his proposal to create a new, USPS-owned airmail fleet. Frank had spent billions of dollars on automation, but he hadn’t been able to get labor costs down.

  The USPS had slipped back in the red, losing $1.5 billion the previous year. Frank had tried to erase the deficit by raising the price of a first-class stamp to 30 cents; the Postal Rate Commission would only approve a 29-cent stamp. Frank called the ruling “dumb” and said the only beneficiaries would be Chilean copper miners who would have to produce more raw material for pennies.

  But Frank could take pride in his accomplishments too. The proportion of automatically processed letters was expected to reach 61 percent by the end of the year. In his final months, Frank shoved through another one of his signature achievements. Early on, he had talked about issuing a stamp honoring the late Elvis Presley. He didn’t pursue it at the time. The idea was controversial because of Presley’s drug problems. Now, however, Frank appeared on the talk show Larry King Live and announced that the USPS would create a 29-cent Elvis stamp. But first, he said, there would be a contest to see if the public preferred a stamp featuring Presley as a youthful sex symbol or a middle-aged crooner. The USPS received almost 1.2 million ballots. Young Elvis won by a three-to-one margin. “The U.S. Postal Service has finally found a way to be responsive to the public,” wrote the Chicago Tribune.

 

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