KVIG Informative

The Culinary Union’s longtime secretary-treasurer was kidnapped at Las Vegas’s airport in February 1977 and killed three weeks later over an unpaid debt tied to a bombing campaign against non-union restaurants. The union he spent 23 years building didn’t collapse with him. It grew into the political operation that now drives Nevada elections.

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 chartered in Las Vegas in 1935 to represent hotel and restaurant workers, according to the union’s own history. Al Bramlet became the local’s secretary-treasurer in 1954. Over the next 23 years, the union’s membership grew from 1,000 workers to 16,000 by the time of his death in 1977, according to a finding aid for the Johnny LaVoie Papers held by UNLV Libraries Special Collections, which documents the union’s history through photographs and internal records.

Bramlet was abducted outside McCarran International Airport on Feb. 24, 1977, by Tom Hanley, his son Gramby Hanley, and Clem Eugene Vaughn, according to court testimony later given by Vaughn himself. Hikers found Bramlet’s body near Potosi Mountain roughly three weeks later. He had been shot six times.

The kidnapping grew out of a bombing campaign the Hanleys had been paid to carry out against non-union restaurants, including the Village Pub and the Starboard Tack, meant to pressure the owners into signing with the Culinary Union. Bramlet refused to pay the men their fee because the bombs had failed to detonate, and the men abducted him over the unpaid debt. During his captivity, his kidnappers also tried unsuccessfully to force him to arrange a money transfer tied to Binion’s Horseshoe.

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Tom Hanley and Gramby Hanley pleaded guilty to the kidnap-murder on March 2, 1978, and were sentenced to life in prison weeks later. Tom Hanley died in custody in 1979. Gramby Hanley later entered witness protection after testifying about the bombing campaign and the union-related extortion behind it. The case and its ties to organized crime were later examined in testimony before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1982.

Ben Schmoutey succeeded Bramlet as secretary-treasurer and led the union through a 17-day strike against 15 Strip hotels in 1976 and a two-month, citywide strike in 1984 that drew more than 900 arrests, according to the UNLV finding aid. The union rebuilt its leadership afterward, electing Jim Arnold as secretary-treasurer and Hattie Canty as president in 1987. The Culinary Union went on to wage the Frontier Hotel strike from 1991 to 1998, which it calls the longest successful strike in U.S. history.

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The Culinary Union counted roughly 60,000 members in Las Vegas and Reno as of 2023, up from 18,000 in 1987, according to the union’s own figures. Ted Pappageorge now serves as secretary-treasurer and Diana Valles as president. Through its affiliated Citizenship Project, the union says it has helped more than 18,000 immigrants become U.S. citizens and registered voters since 2001.

The union has also described its own get-out-the-vote operation as the largest political organizing effort in Nevada during recent election cycles, canvassing hundreds of thousands of doors ahead of statewide elections, according to its own announcements. Forty-nine years after a Culinary Union leader was kidnapped and murdered for refusing to pay off a bombing-for-hire scheme, the union he ran now wins its fights at the ballot box instead of the picket line — and without anyone needing federal witness protection to get there.