Frontier goes to court to try to muzzle lawyer

Friday, Dec. 20, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Frontier hotel-casino lawyers have gone to court to bar the attorney for a California couple suing the resort from talking to the media.

Sworn statements that Las Vegas attorney Will Kemp took from the former head of a Frontier spy squad used against striking workers have prompted SUN stories the past week disclosing alleged wrongdoing at the Strip resort.

Frontier attorney Cory Jones said the gag order is needed to protect the jury selection process in the Frontier trial, which is set for August, from "further contamination by false and misleading reports from the press."

Jones also wants the trial moved to a new venue.

The California couple, Sean and Gail White, have sued the Frontier over their beating April 25, 1993, on the picket line by striking Culinary Union workers. The union has settled the case, but the Frontier remains a defendant.

Jones alleges in court papers that Kemp was quoted in the SUN stories.

But Kemp was not quoted. His name only was mentioned as the lawyer who took the statements from the spy squad leader, Wayne Legare.

Kemp said Thursday he planned to "vigorously fight" the Frontier move.

"It's ridiculous," he said. "Frontier executives were quoted in one of the stories."

In his papers, Jones says: "The articles are clearly biased in favor of the union and against the Frontier."

Frontier executives have refused to return repeated SUN phone calls since the first story about Legare's allegations was printed Dec. 11.

In that story, Frontier General Manager Tom Elardi was quoted as denying wrongdoing by the hotel and calling Legare a disgruntled former employee seeking money from him.

He said Legare, who left the Frontier in October 1995, recently wrote him a letter threatening to go public if he didn't get a sum of cash.

Legare, a nondenominational minister working with drug and alcohol abusers in Arizona, said he never wrote Elardi such a letter.

"That's a lie right from the pits of hell," Legare charged. "The Elardis do a lot of misrepresentation of the facts."

Legare has charged that the spy squad engaged in dirty tricks against striking workers, including spraying them with a water cannon, placing manure where they ate, and stealing their hand-held radio frequencies.

Strikers and other ex-Frontier employees have stepped forward to confirm those incidents and allege additional dirty tricks.

Legare said the Frontier kept tabs on the strikers 24 hours a day from a video command center, dubbed the 900 Room.

He also alleged that Elardi's brother, John Elardi, instructed him to lie to a county grand jury that investigated the Sean and Gail White beating.

Jones called that allegation "the most incredible" of all of those raised in the SUN stories.

Since Legare spoke out, other alleged wrongdoing at the Frontier has surfaced.

Former Frontier executives have charged that the hotel secretly wiretapped its own phone lines as part of a wave of "paranoia" over the five-year Culinary strike.

Ex-employees also have alleged in court depositions that Frontier executives fabricated a letter and gave it to the Nevada Equal Rights Commission to justify the firing of a veteran pit clerk.

The commission ruled against the clerk, 68-year-old Virginia Cook, but she went to federal court and won her job back.

Top labor leaders and state lawmakers have called upon law enforcement authorities to investigate the allegations. But so far, no agency is known to have launched a probe.