National Affairs: Citizen Beck

If Jimmy Hoffa is ever crowbarred out of the driver’s seat of the Teamsters Union, he need not fear for the future. Hoffa’s predecessor, fat, easy-to-shove Dave Beck, faces trial on a charge of violating the Taft-Hartley Act and is sweating out appeals on convictions for income-tax evasion and grand larceny. But Seattle’s Citizen Beck is too busy making money and enjoying life to worry too much about his problems.

Lawyer’s fees and payment of debts have cost him $750,000, Beck last week told Seattle Times veteran Labor Reporter Ed Guthman, “but my net worth is closer to $1,000,000 than it is to $300,000.” Apart from his $50,000 annual pension from the Teamsters, Beck’s income depends on a flourishing real estate business, which he conducts from the basement of the big, rambling Seattle home that he built with Teamster funds (later returned) and sold to the Teamsters Union for $163,000 (“I get by fine and dandy there”).

Beck’s day begins at 6:45 a.m. He plunges his well-sueted body into his heated swimming pool, pounds through a breast stroke for 30 minutes, then turns to a little weight lifting and to pedaling on his stationary bicycle before breakfast. After that, it is work, work, work on some current real estate deal that invariably produces money, money, money. He has two cars at his disposal (a 1959 white Thunderbird, a Continental Mark III), and in the evenings he sometimes watches movies on the CinemaScope screen in his basement.

“If I had it to do all over again,” says Beck of his past, “the only thing different I would do would be to keep much better records.” Otherwise Dave Beck, going on 66, stoutly protests that “I haven’t done a single, solitary thing wrong.” Adds he fervently: “May my dear mother not draw another breath if this isn’t so.”

His mother is going on 91.