The boss of a Bronx based construction coalition and a top deputy have been indicted on charges of strong-arming contractors to get Hispanic and black workers jobs, the Daily News has learned. United Hispanic Construction Workers chief David Rodriguez and field director Daryll Jennings threatened contractors with violence and labor unrest if they didn't hire their members at job sites in Manhattan and the Bronx, sources told The News. The DA's office would not comment, but a source familiar with the case said it was spearheaded by Vance's Rackets Bureau. The indictment comes seven years after a jury cleared Rodriguez of racketeering charges in Brooklyn Federal Court. He'd been accused of collecting more than $300,000 in kickbacks. At the time, investigators secretly taped a phone call in which Rodriguez said of a slow-paying contractor: "$11,000 worth killin' for, brother."
"This is a continuing attack on the coalition," said Richman, who defended Rodriguez in the federal trial.
"When white guys do this, they call it a union, but when persons of color do it, they call it a crime."
"I was acquitted [in 1994] because I did not commit any crime," Rodriguez said Friday. "I have done nothing wrong."
United Hispanic was formed in 1982, ostensibly to give minority groups a toehold in the city's white dominated building trades.
Rodriguez, a veteran of the Savage Skulls and the Dirty Dozen street gangs in the 1970s, has been president since 1988.
The group has a violent history.
United Hispanic members with pipes and bats clashed with members of a rival minority-worker coalition at a Times Square job site in 1995, authorities say. The next year, 33 people were arrested after a dustup between the group and another competing coalition.
In 2002, police fingered the group in a turf battle that sent three men to the hospital.
"But in this time of unemployment, it's ripe for them to resurface."
