Tyrone Freeman

Advocates for low-wage caregivers called on authorities Monday to investigate the spending practices of a Los Angeles union and a related charity that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to firms owned by the wife and mother-in-law of the labor organization's leader. "This is very serious," County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose 1990s legislation allowed the union to organize home-care workers here, said of the financial transactions disclosed by The Times.

The Service Employees International Union has accused the head of its largest California local of misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars in an alleged corruption scheme that included payments to firms owned by his relatives and expenditures on his Hawaiian wedding and a Beverly Hills cigar club. Tyrone Freeman has been removed from the payroll of the Los Angeles-based local and faces formal dismissal pending an internal hearing, a union spokeswoman said.

The U.S. Labor Department has asked a federal court to overturn the election of all officers at a troubled Los Angeles union local, alleging that the organization made it too difficult for challengers to qualify for the ballot. In a civil complaint against the Service Employees International Union's largest California chapter, the department contends that the March election of local President Tyrone Freeman and his slate of officers violated labor laws.

They make subsistence wages tending to the sick and elderly, minus the dues paid to the union local whose charismatic former president promised again and again to make the caregivers' own lives better. Now, the workers are told, the same fallen leader, Tyrone Freeman, owes the Service Employees International Union more than $1 million that officials say he misappropriated from the Los Angeles local to enrich his relatives and himself.

The union of low-wage caregivers that Tyrone Freeman once headed has taken him to court to demand restitution of more than $1.1 million -- dues money that allegedly financed his lifestyle of $175 glasses of cognac, $250 bottles of wine and a $3,400 trip to the NFL's Pro Bowl in Hawaii.