Giacomo “Jack” Bologna was a college professor who’d written more than a dozen books on white-collar crime and forensic accounting. He probably knew more than anyone else in the world on how to track down corporate crooks involved in inside jobs. But it was his work outside the classroom, going after corrupt labor officials, for which he likely will be best remembered. Bologna, 77, a resident of Plymouth, Mich., died on March 10 of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Most people don’t recognize his name; most Teamster old-timers do.
Back in the early 60s, Bologna was a point man in the Kennedy administration’s “get-Hoffa” squad, as it was commonly known. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had made a name for himself in 1957 as a special Senate counsel in his interrogation of Teamsters General President Jimmy Hoffa. He and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, wanted a second shot at taking him down; Hoffa earlier had beaten the rap with the help of defense lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. A Labor Department attorney, Bologna had brains and guts. As a plus, his home town was Detroit, same as Hoffa’s. Bologna was not a trial lawyer. But his relentless pursuit of the truth was instrumental in eventually getting a federal court to convict Hoffa in 1964 of jury tampering and fraud.
Bologna’s career didn’t end there. In the early 1970s, Bologna worked as a security consultant for International Intelligence, Inc., designing a security system for Detroit Metropolitan Airport. From 1984 to 1997 he was a professor of business administration at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Mich., about an hour’s drive southwest of Detroit, where he founded an institute to study computer security and ethics. He wrote many books, but still found plenty of time for his wife and six children, one of whom, Michael, said of him: “Integrity was everything to him.” All of today’s labor investigators owe something to Jack Bologna’s unrelenting integrity and sophistication in uncovering union fraud. (Detroit Free Press, 3/13/06).