He played football at Long Branch High School, where he received good grades and graduated in 1946.
[1] Convinced that apprenticeship and training programs were important to growing the union as well as providing skilled labor for economic growth and development, Lucassen co-founded and helped raise funds for the New Jersey Alliance for Action, a labor-management development coalition which sponsored apprentice and journeyman programs.
[2] In September 1989, Lucassen revealed that Campbell had approved $95 million in loans to various builders, only to have nearly all the construction projects lose money or declare bankruptcy.
[2][3] When Lucassen ran for election outright in 1991, he was challenged by the union's national secretary, John S. "Whitey" Rogers.
In a hotly contested election rife with allegations of fraud, Lucassen and his running mates Dean Sooter, first vice president; Paschal McGuinness, second vice president; Jim Patterson, general secretary; and Jim Bledsoe, general treasurer, won.
Lucassen appointed Douglas J. McCarron, secretary-treasurer of the Southern California Council of Carpenters, second vice president.
He consolidated locals in Los Angeles in 1988, in San Diego in 1990 and Orange and Riverside counties in California in 1991.
[7] In 1993, a federal judge castigated Lucassen for snap elections he had ordered in a Los Angeles local.
U.S. district court judge Edward Rafeedie ordered new elections for Local 803 in Orange County, California.
After imposing a trusteeship on the local in 1991, Lucassen ordered Southern California Council secretary-treasurer McCarron to hold elections on just a few days' notice.
"[8] In 1994, a federal jury in Arkansas found the Carpenters and the United Paperworkers International Union guilty of tortious business interference.
A short time later, the jury found, Potlatch canceled the contract after union representatives threatened pickets, arson, violence and rioting.
Monroe, Lucassen and others argued that Georgine had failed to maintain the effectiveness of local BCTD councils, refused to fund organizing programs and allowed jurisdictional disputes to get out of hand.
They also claimed that Georgine's role as chief executive officer of ULLICO left him little time to devote to BCTD business.
McGuinness, meanwhile, had been accused of, and subsequently settled, racketeering charges and had quit his international union post to run for secretary-treasurer of the BCTD.