‘Top Chef’ Teamster Redmond bites back at O’Brien’s ‘support’
One of the four Teamsters acquitted in the “Top Chef” extortion trial is blasting Local 25 President Sean O’Brien for claiming he supported them, when a newly released police report indicates O’Brien tried to distance himself from the picketers.
The Milton police report, obtained by the Herald and circulated on social media, summarizes O’Brien’s interview with a detective two months after the incident, in which “Top Chef” crew members were heckled by Teamsters outside the Steel & Rye restaurant for hiring non-union crews.
“(O’Brien) stated he has the same concerns as we do regarding the incident,” the police report reads.
“He also stated what happened was not a planned event through Local 25. There were never any signs ups (sic) for an organized picket line in Milton against Top Chef. Whatever union members that were causing the problems in Milton came on their own. His office is actively looking into what members of his union were in Milton.”
Yet court documents filed in the case show O’Brien was closely involved in organizing the picket, including a government filing opposing a motion to dismiss that details a call O’Brien made to a “Top Chef” producer.
“On the morning of June 10, 2014, the producer received a voicemail from O’Brien, who stated that they knew the Show was at (Steel & Rye), and ‘we will be sending fifty guys down there to picket,’ ” the filing reads. “The producer contacted the owner of (Steel & Rye), and they coordinated the hiring of a police detail.”
Daniel Redmond — one of the four Teamsters who prosecutors accused of yelling slurs at the Top Chef crew and slashing their tires — called O’Brien hypocritical for criticizing International president Jimmy Hoffa, who O’Brien is considering running against, for not acknowledging the acquittals.
“How could your local president send guys to a picket line, and then turn around and file a report against us — and then you end up getting indicted?” Redmond told the Herald. “It’s just absolutely outrageous, disgusting, and he should be ashamed of himself.”
O’Brien did not return a call for comment.
In an interview Tuesday on Boston Herald Radio, O’Brien chided Hoffa for not reaching out after the four Teamsters were acquitted last month.
“He didn’t even acknowledge it,” O’Brien said in the interview, adding that unions’ right to picket was at stake in the case. “But more importantly, it was our members’ freedom. They obviously were there for a cause, and unfortunately they had to get dragged through this with their families.”
Redmond said O’Brien also never reached out to the four acquitted Teamsters after the verdict, and said O’Brien “never did anything for us.”
Redmond owned up to shouting a slur at the Top Chef crew, but thinks he wouldn’t have been indicted if O’Brien hadn’t painted him and his three cohorts as rogue picketers in his police interview.
The report, by a Milton police detective, says O’Brien, who did not testify in the trial, attended the investigatory interview with his lawyer, and that Teamster picketers and “Top Chef” production crew members were both “vocal.”
“At times I had to speak with crew members not to engage the teamsters verbally,” the detective wrote, “because when they did the situation would escalate.”