- Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 after being laid off by salesman Handy Dan.
- FBI records show the pair were investigated over allegations they tried to bribe Handy Dan workers to decertify their union.
- The investigation ended in 1983 when a prosecutor determined the case was too old and the evidence was “insufficient.”
Home Depot co-founders Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were investigated by the FBI in the 1970s and 1980s over allegations that they used a $140,000 “slush fund” to attempt to bribe employees at a California retailer to decertify labor unions. them, the new public data. show
The investigation spanned 1978 to 1983 and focused on their time as executives at Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers. Marcus, who died at age 95 in 2024 with a net worth of more than $10 billion, served as president of Handy Dan. Blank, now 82 and worth more than $9 billion, was the company’s treasurer.
Marcus and Blank were fired in 1978 after Handy Dan’s corporate parent said in securities filings that it found “unauthorized and unacceptable business practices” at the company, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Handy Dan’s corporate parent later said the two men used company funds to pay employees to favor union decertification, the Journal reported.
The FBI began investigating in late 1978 after an attorney for a retail workers’ union filed a complaint with federal authorities based on The Wall Street Journal story.
Federal agents said their investigation substantiated the claim, according to the records. No charges were ever filed; the records cited “insufficient” evidence and “statute of limitations problems.” The attempt to decertify the merger was ultimately unsuccessful.
“The investigation revealed that from early 1977 to early 1978, approximately $140,000 in corporate funds” were paid to workers to influence them, an FBI agent wrote in a memo. “Many employees have admitted to receiving cash (over and above wages) usually received in plain envelopes.”
The FBI interviewed at least eight witnesses, whose names were mostly redacted in the records. An anti-union worker told investigators the money was “only given to those the company thought would ultimately vote for certification.” Clinton Doolen, a manager who died in 1992, recalled Marcus saying “money was no object” when it came to breaking up the union, records show.
“Marcus was adamantly anti-union and was very obsessed with getting rid of the union completely,” another witness told the FBI. The witness said Marcus told them he was willing to use any means to break up the union, and the witness “could see Marcus really meant it.”
Marcus offered a different version of events. In the 1999 book “Built From Scratch,” he said he learned that some Handy Dan workers wanted to dissolve their union. He said he hired a lawyer and “instructed our personnel department to do everything within legal guidelines” to support them.
He said the chairman of Handy Dan’s parent company twisted the truth and used an internal investigation “as a tool to eliminate me” and that “neither the Department of Justice nor the SEC initiated investigations.”
FBI records show that Marcus testified in a Securities and Exchange Commission proceeding in July 1978, about three months after he was fired. He declined, through a lawyer, to be interviewed by the FBI. It is not clear whether Blank was the subject of an investigation by the SEC.
The SEC and two high-ranking officials at the Marcus Foundation did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Marcus’ son Frederick Marcus, who is a director of the foundation. Representatives for Blank, Home Depot, the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.
Business Insider obtained the FBI records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Blank’s name was redacted, but his job title matched that of the subject in question. A third person, whose name was redacted, was also the subject of the investigation.
The FBI submitted a “prosecution report” to the Department of Justice in March 1982. A year later, a federal prosecutor decided not to move forward with the case. Prosecutors did not believe there was enough evidence against Marcus, Blank and the third person to indict them, and the union pick at the center of the investigation was more than five years old, an FBI memo said.
Marcus and Blank founded Home Depot in 1978, eventually transforming it into the world’s largest home improvement retailer. Its stores are not united; in 2022, the last time a shop petition was filed for a union election, union lawyers suffered a major defeat.
Marcus’s anti-union sentiments were well known. In 2008, he called a bill that would have made it easier for workers to form unions “the destruction of civilization,” and in 2010, he founded the Job Creators Network, which has opposed bills that would increase the power of unions.
Both men have been important political donors. Blank has largely supported Democratic candidates, while Marcus has given millions to Republican candidates and once said retail executives who weren’t helping Republicans “should be shot.”
Read the documents here:
