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Labor in Houston was enjoying a time of relative prosperity during Hammond's first decade in office, and he built the local membership from a low of 1,100 when he arrived to more than 4,000. But in the 1980s, deregulation hit the trucking industry, which employed a large percentage of Local 988's members, and in a matter of months a number of companies folded or merged. Since then, membership has remained static, hovering between 3,200 and 3,700. "We never got back to where we were before," Hammond says.

Still, Hammond's reputation as a fair and tough negotiator who looks out for the membership has generally survived the leaner years, evidenced by the fierce loyalty many members still show for him.

"I've had dealings with Richard Hammond for 25 years," says Yellow Freight truck driver Paul Rogers, who believes Hammond is innocent of the embezzlement and other charges. "He's always shot straight with me. He's never lied to me."

Whether Hammond can convince a jury he's telling the truth is another matter. Some of the more sensational early charges against him wilt under scrutiny: The "assault weapons" he charged to the union credit card consisted of a legal semiautomatic pistol and rifle, which he claims were given away as door prizes at membership meetings to boost attendance. The "monogrammed silk underwear" was neither monogrammed nor lacy women's lingerie, as had been implied, but thermal long johns from a hunting supply catalog.

And the explosives that were purportedly found in the union storage locker turned out to be illegal hand grenade firing pins, but they won't be an issue at Hammond's upcoming trial. According to George Lambright, chief of the district attorney's organized crime division, there were no fingerprints on the pins and no evidence that they were ever in the storage shed in the first place. (Buck says a worker conducting an inventory of the shed brought the pins to his office, where they sat for a few days before Buck turned them over to the police.) "There was a problem with an affirmative link between [Hammond] and the devices," Lambright says.

But as Hammond explains the various purchases and withdrawals that are the heart of the indictment, it's clear his arguments have some gaping holes, though he says they'll be filled by the time he goes to trial (which is currently slated for November 5 but likely will be postponed until the new year).

Most shaky is his defense of the $24,320 in checks he wrote himself between June 1994 and September 1995 from the Teamsters DRIVE (Democrat and Republican Independent Voter Education) political action fund, which is stocked by voluntary member contributions. Hammond says that he deposited the checks in his personal bank account, then withdrew the same amounts in cash, which he distributed to judges and other candidates. The largest totaled $11,500.

Hammond argues that it's standard practice to give candidates cash, though such contributions would be illegal if they exceeded $100, even if they were disclosed in campaign finance reports. As Hammond told the panel at his internal union hearing in May, "It may not be legal, but it's a fact of life." And he says that he's unwilling to disclose the names of those candidates because they've been supportive of the Teamsters and he doesn't want to compromise them: "There's politicians, good people, that I'd rather not be involved with this."

Besides, Hammond claims, all the names of the candidates and the amounts they received were contained in a blue binder that was in the local's office when the trusteeship was imposed, a point he plans to make at trial. "There's at least three other people who knew it was there," he says.

The indictment charges that an additional $19,300 in DRIVE money was spent to maintain hunting leases for Hammond's use. An avid hunter, he says the money was a legitimate political expense, that he entertained various candidates and elected officials and thereby kept the Teamster name fresh and positive in their minds. Asked at the internal union hearing in May about a $6,000 payout to "The Game Preserve," Hammond replied that judges and state and county officials were taken there "so that we would have close association with those individuals."

Also difficult to defend will be Hammond's draining of a union Health and Welfare Trust Fund. Endowed by employer contributions and intended for distribution to workers to reimburse medical claims, the fund had been inactive since 1982 but still had more than $90,000 in it when Hammond fired the previous administrator, Floyd Forrest, in 1990. He paid himself a salary of $1,200 a month, about the same as Forrest had been paid, until the fund was empty.

Hammond insists that the payments, which were made in irregular installments ranging from $500 to $6,000, were perfectly legal. "We were paying somebody else to do it," he explains, and as local president he was the logical, if not the only, person who could assume the role of administrator after Forrest was fired. The irregular amounts, he says, covered expenses he paid from his own bank account to accountants and others who worked on the fund's books. That explanation seems a stretch, especially in light of the fact that Hammond paid himself more than $20,000 the first two months he was in charge.

Hammond may have a hard time justifying his self-appointment as legally valid. According to International Teamsters spokeswoman Nancy Stella, such a move would violate the federal Employee Retirement Income Securities Act, designed in part to protect such funds from plunder. In 1988, a court ruled that former Chicago Teamster boss Daniel Ligurotis had to give back $120,000 he paid himself to administer a Health and Welfare and another fund.

The allegations that Hammond rang up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on the local's American Express card may be tougher for the government to prove. From Jim Buck's sweeping laundry list that topped $190,000, the indictment has narrowed the amount to a little more than $66,000, though prosecutors have yet to release the list of exactly which $66,000 is at issue. Hammond says most of the hunting and electronic gear that makes up the bulk of the items purchased with the card was either given away at meetings or donated to area hunting groups as charitable contributions.

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