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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Ex-girlfriend testifies Rodrigues received cash

By David Waite
Advertiser Courts Writer

Almost every month from 1990 to 1993, a sales agent from a life insurance company who sold group benefit policies to United Public Workers union members would show up at the union hall with a white envelope for union leader Gary Rodrigues, Rodrigues' former secretary testified in federal court yesterday.

Georgietta Carroll, who was also Rodrigues longtime live-in girlfriend, said she never saw Rodrigues open one of the envelopes given to him by Transamerica Occidental insurance agent Herb Nishida but assumed there was cash inside based on what Rodrigues often told her afterwards.

"He would say, 'A payment was made,' or, 'We can go out to dinner tonight,' and would walk out of his office to put the envelope in the safe downstairs," Carroll said.

Carroll, a key prosecution witness and the first to take the stand in the fraud case against Rodrigues, provided testimony bolstering the prosecution's case that the union leader received kickbacks from Nishida.

But Rodrigues' defense lawyer Doron Weinberg suggested that Carroll assisted authorities because she was "a woman scorned."

"I was broken-hearted," Carroll testified. "He took my heart and ripped it into pieces, not once but two or three or four times. He made promises he didn't keep."

However, when asked if she were angry enough about the breakup to try to "harm Gary Rodrigues professionally or politically," Carroll answered, "Absolutely not!"

Rodrigues, state director of the 13,000-member UPW union, and his daughter, Robin Haunani Rodrigues Sabatini, are on trial in federal Judge David Ezra's courtroom on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy to defraud a healthcare benefit program and money laundering.

Rodrigues alone is charged with embezzling labor-organization assets and accepting kickbacks in connection with an employee welfare benefit plan.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Florence Nakakuni said during her opening statement in the trial last week that the evidence will show that Rodrigues devised a plan to charge union members more than necessary for life, health and dental insurance so he could use the surplus to steer consulting contracts to his daughter, with some of the money coming back to benefit him directly.

Nakakuni told the jury that Nishida earned more than $100,000 in commissions by selling union-endorsed life insurance policies to union members and gave cash payments to Rodrigues in return.

In her sometimes tearful testimony yesterday, Carroll said when she later questioned Rodrigues about Nishida's envelopes and asked him whether the union's executive board knew about the payments, Rodrigues grew angry and told her board approval was not required.

"I felt he should have gone to the board anyway to protect himself, and when I questioned him about it, he got angry and said I should go out and try to get elected to head the union myself," Carroll said.

Carroll also testified yesterday that she was surprised to learn when she came across a letter from Hawaii Dental Service to the UPW in December 1992 that her stepfather, Al Loughrin, had been named as a union consultant on the dental plan.

She said Rodrigues told her the money being paid to Loughrin as a consultant on the dental benefits contract was to pay off a $10,000 personal loan that Loughrin made to Rodrigues, who used the money to install a sprinkler system in the front and back yards of a house Rodrigues and Carroll shared near Bend, Ore.

She said she told Rodrigues he should have used "money out of his own pocket" and not the union's money to repay her stepfather.

Sobbing heavily, Carroll said Loughrin, who died in 1995, "thought the world of Gary and treated him as a son. He loved him deeply."

In his cross examination, Weinberg suggested that Carroll's motivation in talking with Honolulu police detectives about Rodrigues in 1998, trying to file a "palimony" lawsuit against him a year or two earlier and suing him for sexual harassment was based on Rodrigues' breaking off his relationship with her in 1995.

Carroll acknowledged that she hired someone to follow Rodrigues around during a business trip to Colorado after she began to suspect a co-worker at the UPW office was having an affair with him.

And she admitted looking through more than a year's worth of union records "that someone else provided me" to see if Rodrigues and the other woman were away from the union hall on the same day.

A tearful Carroll said after working at the UPW for 16 years, she left the union in 1998 after accepting the fact that she was continuing to give Rodrigues her love, but that none was coming back.

Reach David Waite at dwaite@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8030.