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In 1964, at the height of Jimmy Hoffa's power as the
president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
Chauffers, Warehousemen, and Helpers of America (or Teamsters
as it is more commonly called), the union had over 1.4 million
members. It was (and is) the most powerful union in the United
States, and possibly the world. Hoffa himself controlled over
259 million dollars worth of union pension money, and the
Teamsters total assets were worth well over 1 billion dollars.
Perhaps some men could resist the temptation to misuse
this power, but Jimmy Hoffa was not one of them. His eight
years as president of the Teamsters were marked with almost
constant corruption, as were his activites before and after his
reign. Even to his end he was corrupt; his disappearence and
presumed death in 1975 smacked of foul play and underworld
figures. But before we look at his life as a Teamster, we will
look at his humble beginnings.
James Riddle Hoffa was born on February 14 (Valentine's
Day) in Brazil, Indiana. He had a brother and two sisters. His
father was a coal miner, and died of coal dust inhalation when
Jimmy was 7. When it became apparent that his mother could not
support all of them by herself, Jimmy dropped out of school in
seventh grade and did odd jobs, anything to make a little money.
He got his first full time job when he was 16 as a stockboy in a
department store.
His first encounter with organized labor came not long
afterward, as an employee of Kroger Grocery Company. He and his
fellow workers unloaded food from boxcars for 32 cents an hour.
He helped plan a strike just as a load of easily spoiled straw-
berries arrived, forcing his employers to give in to their de-
mands before the strawberries went bad.
The AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and
Congress of Industrial Orginizations) granted his tiny union a
charter, and in 1937 he was elected president of Detroit local
union #299. It was in this same year that he married his wife,
Josephine Poszywak, whom he met on a picket line.
In 1940 he was made chairman of the Central States
Drivers' Council, and in 1942 he was elected president of the
Michigan Teamsters Conference. It seemed his meteoric rise to
power would never stop. He became an international trustee in
1943, and in 1946 he was elected president of Detroit's Joint
Council #43.
At the same time that he was advancing in the union
ranks, he was also stacking up an impressive police record.
Once, during a strike in 1939, he was arrested 18 times in one
day. He was convicted of assault and battery in 1937, of mono-
poly conspiracy in `40, and for attempted extortion in 1947. All
in all, he had been arrested 17 times before 1959.
It was in 1957, however, that he took his biggest step
toward power: the presidency of the Teamsters. It was also in
this year that Hoffa was charged with the crime that it appeared
would finally bring him down: the bribing of Senate Rackets
Committee investigator John Cye Cheasty.
The Senate Rackets Committee, or McClellan Committe after
it's head, Arkansas Senator John McClellan, had Hoffa under
investigation for two years: from 1957-1959. It's purpose, as
stated by the committee, was to investigate "improper activities
in the labor or management field". The Committee had the power
to make laws and charge people with criminal activity, but it
could not bring people to court or fire anyone. It charged Hoffa
with a variety of crimes: giving better contracts to favored
employers, "grossly misusing" 2.4 million dollars of his home
local's money, loaning 1.2 million dollars to a friend who was
under strike from another union, threatening a witness in a trial
into leaving the state, using 31,953 dollars of Teamster money to
defend 4 Teamsters who were then convicted of extortion, giving a
special contract to a trucking company which had helped Hoffa buy
his own trucking company, along with various other nefarious
deeds. Nevertheless, the only real lasting effect of the
Committee was the Landrum-Griffen Act, which (among other things)
, prohibited anyone convicted of certain crimes within the past
five years from holding union office. While this did force Hoffa
to fire several of his union cronies, it didn't, however, touch
Hoffa.
But it looked like Hoffa would be brought down by the
Committee after all, albeit in a rather convoluted fashion. The
government in its case against Hoffa had pictures of Cheasty
taking $2,000 from Hoffa in exchange for McClellan Committee doc-
uments. Hoffa found a way around this, though. Taking advantage
of a jury that was 8 black and 4 white, he appeared several time
in court with the great black boxer Joe Louis. He was aquitted.
It seemed that Hoffa would never be out of court, though.
In October of the same year he was indicted on a charge of wire-
tapping the phone lines of his home union local. The case re-
sulted in a hung jury.
Part of the reason for so many court cases against Hoffa
was that the government, recognizing the threat Hoffa posed to
the nation, set up a special investigative squad in the
Department of Justice headed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
By its own admittion the purpose of this squad was to "get" Hoffa
. For, if he chose to do so, Hoffa could order a general strike,
bringing to a halt the majority of transportation inside the
country, and wrecking the economy. It was even more frightening
because this power was held by someone so corrupt.
Dispite for 1957 being such a breeze for Hoffa in the
courtroom, he did not get through it scott free. Thirteen "rank-
and-file" Teamsters rose up against Hoffa's election as president
and demanded his presidency be taken away on the grounds that the
election had been fixed. Hoffa was able to passify them, however
, with the monitorship.
The monitorship was to be three men, one appointed by
Hoffa, one by the thirteen men who opposed him, and one by mutual
agreement (called the "public" monitor) who were to advise
Teamster reform. Hoffa found a way around them by playing on the
word advise. They could only advise, he said, not order, so he
simply ignored them. Not only could he ignore them, but they
were sided with him 2 to 1 from the beginning, so he was doubly
safe from them. That was, until one of the monitors became
possibly the greatest threat to Hoffa's power he had ever faced.
That man was Martin F. O`Donoghue. When the public
monitor quit, O`Donoghue was suggested as a replacement. Since
he was a lawyer for the Teamsters, Hoffa accepted him. He would
soon wish he hadn't. Not only did O`Donoghue suggest an exten-
sive cleanup, he questioned the fact that the monitorship could
only advise, not order, and took the issue to court. Hoffa,
finally realizing the threat, hired hired countless lawyers,
using over 1 million of union fees. For every move O`Donoghue
wanted to make, Hoffa inundated him with scores of writs, stays
and injunctions, hampering the monitors from doing almost any-
thing. Thirty-eight appeals by Hoffa caused the case to finally
come before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It declared that
the monitors could reccomend action to Judge Letts, who could
order Hoffa to act or face imprisionment. Just as O`Donoghue was
about to take Hoffa down for failing to assist the monitors
(which Judge Letts decided was the same as contempt of court),
the 13 rank-and-filers' monitor quit.
It turned out that Hoffa was the cause for his qutitting.
Under the deal Hoffa had made, he was to pay the monitors. To
get rid of the rank-and-filers monitor, Hoffa simply stopped pay-
ing him, literally starving the man (he had had to quit his job
to become a monitor). Despite protests by O`Donoghue to the
court, Hoffa continued to withhold his pay until the man could
not take it anymore and quit. His replacement sided with Hoffa,
so once again the monitors could do nothing.
The monitorship was finally disbanded when Hoffa "proved"
to the court that it was useless and served no real purpose.
You should not assume that Hoffa was aaccomplishing all
this by himself however. He had the help of many Teamster offi-
cials and underworld figures who were almost as corrupt as he
was. He accociated with the likes of Israel Alderman, a known
associate of Bugsy Siegal and Gus Greenbaum; Larry Knohl, who in
1962 had an embezzelment record going back to 1938 and was in-
volved in the murder of Albert Antasia (an executioner for
Murder Inc.); and Morris "Moe" Dalitz, a bootlegger and gambling
racketeer who Hoffa loaned $3,500,000 and helped to avert a
labor strike on. He kept on as Teamster officials the president
of the Chicago Teamsters, Joey Glimco, who had been indicted 36
times, including a count of murder, and Nunzio "Babe" Triscaro,
the vice-president of the Ohio Teamsters who was a convicted
robber and who at one time tried to sell surplus military planes
to Fidel Castro.
Despite his friendship with such obvious criminals, it
seemed that the government could not catch Hoffa. In 1962 he
slipped by a charge of taking $1,000,000 payoff in from a truck-
ing company in Nashville, Tenneesse despite 3 of the jurors being
dismissed because of supposed bribe attempts by Hoffa.
The Nashville trial was to return to haunt him, however,
in 1964. He was put on trial for obstruction of justice (jury
tampering) in the trial in Nashville. On trial with Hoffa in
Chattenooga were Ewing King (ex-president of Nashville Teamsters
), Larry Campbell (a business agent from Detroit), Thomas L.
Parks (Larry Campbell's uncle and a funeral home worker), Alan
Dorfman (an insurance broker from Chicago and a good friend of
Hoffa's), and Nicholas J. Tweed (a West Viginian business man
and friend of Dorfman's).
Hoffa, knowing that there was a real case against him,
hired 29 lawyers to defend him, including James Haggerty (the
ex-president of the Michigan Bar Association), Morris Shenker,
William Buffalino, and Jacques Schiffer, whose fiery courtroom
antics lead judge Frank W. Wilson to fine him 60 days in jail
for contempt of court.
But Hoffa didn't know how much of a case was lined up
against him. In addition to the testimonies of relatives of
two jurors who were approached (Betty Paschal and Gratin Fields)
and the testimony of juror James C. Tippens who was himself
offered $10,000 if he would side with Hoffa (but who the
persecution could not make full use of because he the man who
approached him was on trial in another court), the persecution
had a surprise witness.
This witness was Edward Grady Partin, a confidant of
Hoffa during the Nashville trial who claimed he was told by sev-
eral people that they were trying to fix the case. The defense's
only chance was to try to convince the jury that the government
had used illegal means to collect evidence on Hoffa. They
failed.
Slippey Jim, as he was once called, who had skated
through so many other trials without a scratch, had finally been
caught. He was convicted (along with King, Dorfman, and Tweed)
of jury tampering and sentanced to eight years in prison and a
$10,000 fine.
Almost as an anti-climax, he was convicted not long after
in Chicago of diverting pension funds and sentanced to another 5
years in jail. When his appeals ran out in 1967 (none succeeded)
he finally began to serve the time he so richly diserved. His
vice-president and friend Frank Fitzsimmons took over as pres-
ident, nominally until Hoffa returned.
It seemed that not even prison could hold back Jimmy
Hoffa though. In 1971 he was pardoned by Richard Nixon on the
condition that he would stay out of union politics for the next
ten years, and for the next four years it appeared he would
abide by the deal until he started campaigning to anull the
condition preventing his entry back into "his" union.
By 1975 it seemed that he would get the condition
repealed, and enter the Teamsters ranks once again, when he disa-
ppeared. There is no better word to describe what happened. To
this day, over 15 years later, no one really knows what happened,
and those that do aren't telling. Despite some interesting
clues, no conclusive evidence of his fate was ever found. The
facts of the case go like this: late on july 30, 1975, Hoffa
left home to meet with some people, presumably maffioso, at a
Detroit area resturaunt named the Machaus Red Fox. He later
called his wife and told her that the men never showed. That
was the last anyone ever heard of him.
There are a lot of suspects. Frank Fitzsimmons, his one
time friend was said to be vying for power with Hoffa, even
though Jimmy was still banned from union politics, and might
have had Hoffa killed to end the power struggle. There were
also rumors at the time that Hoffa's foster son, Chuck O`Brien,
whom Hoffa had raised from the age of four, had become increas-
ingly close to Fitzsimmons, and might have had something to do
with the disappearence. Another theory states that the maffia
had Hoffa killed for fear that he might expose links between
them and the Teamsters. Particularly under suspicion were
Anthony (Tony Black) Giacalone and Leonard Shcultz, whom Hoffa
was reputedly waiting for.
So a suspicious end came to a corrupt and suspicious
career. Some people propose that Hoffa is still alive, but I
belive that his craving for power would have caused him to enter
the limelight once again.
But what was Hoffa really like? His business dealings
and disregard for the law might lead one to belive that Hoffa was
an evil man, but is this true? He worked 112 hours a week, never
drank (even coffee) or smoked, an was fiercly loyal and scrup-
ulously honest to his family. He was most definately corrupt,
but did that make him evil? In the end, I guess it is up to
each person to decide for themselves.