DETROIT — If Sergio Marchionne was the puppeteer in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ alleged racketeering scheme, Alphons Iacobelli was one of his lead puppets. General Motors also says Iacobelli was key to unraveling what happened.
GM named Iacobelli, FCA’s labor relations chief until 2015, as a defendant in its federal lawsuit, along with FCA and two other former executives.
Unmentioned in the complaint, however, is that GM hired Iacobelli as executive director of labor relations in January 2016 — after he allegedly spent years conspiring with Marchionne to damage GM. GM fired Iacobelli in 2017, after the Justice Department charged him with violating the National Labor Relations Act and tax laws.
During his tenure at GM, Iacobelli worked on labor negotiations with Unifor in Canada.
A GM spokesman told Automotive News the company had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by Iacobelli or FCA when he was hired.
Iacobelli’s name came up more than 60 times in the 95-page lawsuit, which frequently cites evidence from his 2018 plea agreement.
The deal with prosecutors included a 66-month prison sentence for Iacobelli, who admitted to embezzling more than $1 million that he used to buy a $350,000 Ferrari, a swimming pool, a pair of $37,500 Montblanc pens and other luxuries. A judge also ordered him to pay $835,523 in restitution and a $10,000 fine.
Iacobelli was vice president of employee relations at FCA and Chrysler and co-chairman of the automaker’s national training center and its joint activities board from 2008 to 2015. Funds from the training center were used to pay off a number of UAW officials, according to prosecutors and guilty pleas by some of those who participated in the scheme.
He played a critical role in negotiating and implementing FCA’s labor agreements with the UAW.
GM’s suit argues that Iacobelli helped Marchionne bribe UAW officials to give FCA a labor-cost advantage over its domestic rivals. It says Iacobelli in 2012 told the training center to embrace “liberal” credit card and expense policies to facilitate bribes. UAW leaders used the credit cards for a long list of extravagances, GM and the Justice Department say: $1,259 for luggage, $2,182 for a shotgun, $2,130 for tickets to Disney World, more than $1,000 for Louboutin shoes and thousands of dollars for electronics and other personal items.
Evidence drawn from the federal government’s probe and Iacobelli’s guilty plea were critical to GM’s lawsuit. GM says the racketeering scheme and the damages it sustained were revealed in January 2018, when Iacobelli pleaded guilty.
“With each new indictment and the escalating number of guilty pleas, our understanding of what happened grew,” GM spokesman Jim Cain said.
Iacobelli, 60, is now an inmate at a federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va. He’s scheduled for release Sept. 8, 2023 — a week before the UAW’s new contracts with the Detroit 3 will expire.