Tourist to sue union over beating

Steve Sebelius

Friday, Jan. 30, 1998 | 10:35 a.m.

First published on May 5, 1993

A Malibu, Calif., man beaten outside the Frontier Hotel by striking union members in March - more than a month before two other California tourists were attacked - says he will sue the union.

William Cooper, 35, was walking to the Desert Inn, across the Strip from the Frontier, when he was assaulted by at least three people, according to a police report.

Cooper was spit upon, knocked to the ground, punched and kicked by the strikers, suffering a concussion and internal injuries, including possible kidney damage.

Like the high-profile case involving Sean and Gail White of Moorpark, Calif., the incident was caught on videotape.

Ironically, Cooper is a member of a longshoremen's union in California and even showed his union card to the strikers before the beating, said his attorney, James F. Lisowski Sr.

Lisowski, retained by Cooper to try to get the union to pay medical expenses, claimed his client did not realize the strike was still going on.

"He's a union guy. He's on the side of the union in this thing," Lisowski said. He maintained Cooper didn't see the pickets because he drove up and entered through the back door.

There is a Culinary Union picket shanty near the entrance to the back parking lot, although it is sometimes not staffed.

A union spokesman, however, claimed Lisowski wrote two letters to Culinary Union officials threatening to take the case to the media unless the union agreed to an unspecified settlement.

"It is Mr. Cooper's intent to settle this matter amicably, if possible, without involving the press or the Frontier," Lisowski wrote in an April 12 letter to Culinary Secretary-Treasurer Jim Arnold.

But after receiving no response and then seeing the videotaped beating of the Whites by Frontier pickets on April 25, Lisowski wrote a second letter, this one to union attorney Thomas Pitaro. That letter read, "The videotape showing the Whites' beating looks like a Sunday school social compared to the beating Mr. Cooper took."

Since the union had not responded to his letter or telephone calls, Lisowski said, "I believe it is in my client's best interest to contact the media today."

Union spokesman Sam Singer called the letters "attempted extortion" and said the beatings were provoked. "The incidents that have occurred, there's been provocation," Singer said.

But Lisowski denied his client had provoked pickets, and said his letters were only meant to arrange a meeting with union officials for his clients and to recoup medical expenses for treatment of a possible kidney problem caused by the beating.

"I really don't see this letter as threatening," Lisowski said. "Those two letters are probably the softest I've ever written."

He said he would file a lawsuit against the Culinary Union because he still has not heard from union officials. "If I was in the other shoes, the first thing I would have done is to call the other attorney back," he said.

Meanwhile, Singer and Pitaro said the union is continuing to probe the beating involving the

"We're investigating right now," Pitaro said, declining to discuss specific items the union's outside investigator is examining. "It is obvious that this thing did not happen in a vacuum."

One item union leaders did discuss: The videotape showing a striker hitting Sean White in the head with a beer mug is misleading. After slowing the tape down and enhancing it, the man is shown to drop the glass mug just before he strikes the Moorpark tourist, Pitaro said.

Metro Police Lt. Joe Greenwood said police agree, after viewing the enhanced tape, that the striker did not use a mug to hit Sean White.