textfiles/groups/ZAN/hoffa

        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.