All the President’s Teamsters

A TIME investigation turns up a Watergate-era cover-up

The top officers of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters turning Government informers and supplying tips against their enemies in the union? The Nixon White House calling off Government investigations that threatened to incriminate the President’s supporters in the nation’s largest union? Such Watergate-era allegations began to surface as long ago as 1975, but they attracted little attention, partly because they came initially from an informer of dubious credibility.

But now TIME has obtained support for these charges, and more, from a far more reliable source: long-secret files of the Internal Revenue Service. In some 500 pages of reports to their superiors from 1972 to 1974, veteran IRS Agents John Daley and Gabriel Dennis of the service’s Los Angeles office asserted:

1) That three important Teamster officials—Frank Fitzsimmons, then president, William Presser, then boss of Ohio’s Teamsters, and his son Jackie—met regularly with the IRS agents between 1972 and 1974. The trio allegedly supplied information about their foes in the union, in the hope of persuading the Government to prosecute these enemies rather than themselves.

2) That Fitzsimmons described a secret meeting between himself and President Richard Nixon in the White House in late 1972. At that session, the President allegedly summoned Attorney General Richard Kleindienst* and personally ordered him to make sure that Government investigations of the Teamsters then in progress did not harm Fitzsimmons or his allies. If true, this story could have formed the basis for an additional charge of obstruction of justice in the eventual impeachment proceedings against Nixon, but Watergate investigators apparently never heard the tale. The IRS did convey the agents’ reports about the alleged meeting to the Department of Justice in 1973, but the department did nothing with the information. In effect, the story was covered up far more effectively than the Watergate scandals were.

All that might seem ancient history. Nixon and Kleindienst, of course, are long since gone from office. Fitzsimmons died in May and William Presser in July. Jackie Presser, however, is very much alive and a powerful ally of another Republican President, Ronald Reagan. As “communications director,” or official spokesman, of the Teamsters, Presser helped to swing the union’s support to Reagan in the 1980 campaign, and was named a senior labor adviser to one of Reagan’s transition teams. Some Teamsters are convinced that he is next in line for the presidency of the union. His accession might come soon if the incumbent, Roy L. Williams, is convicted of attempted bribery, a charge on which he is now awaiting trial. Says Presser: “I’m waiting my turn and it’s down the road.”

The beefy and profane Presser characteristically dismisses the allegations with an expletive. He conceded to TIME that he, his father and Fitzsimmons met with the IRS agents once, in early 1972, but added: “I never talked with them again. I’m certain my dad didn’t talk to them either, because he never told me that he did. I can’t say what Fitz did.” Presser added: “So, I’m a fink? Look, I can’t be responsible for what’s in Government reports.” Presser said this in a limousine carrying him to the Executive Office Building; he ended the interview by entering the building for a meeting with Reagan’s aides.

Kleindienst describes the charge that Nixon ordered him to go easy on Fitzsimmons and friends as “absolutely false. The man [Nixon] never mentioned the Teamsters to me.” Former White House Aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, who are said to have helped set up the Nixon-Fitzsimmons meeting, insist that they have no recollection of it. A spokesman for Nixon at first told TIME that Nixon also had no memory of a meeting with Fitzsimmons at the White House in late 1972. But when told that the meeting supposedly was arranged by Colson, the spokesman said: “Colson? Oh, now, that’s a different set of facts. The former President’s statement [of not remembering it] would not apply to that.” The spokesman would gono further.

The written reports of the IRS agents tell a detailed story. The tale begins in early 1972, when Daley and Dennis met Fitzsimmons and the Pressers at a Teamsters conference in Miami. The meeting was arranged by one Harry Hall, also known as Harry Haller and Harry Helfgot. He is a professional informer who boasts, accurately, that he has ties with the Teamsters, the Government and organized crime; he has also been imprisoned for passing bad checks, impersonating Government officials and grand theft.

William Presser was then facing indictment on a charge of embezzlement, and Fitzsimmons would later be implicated by FBI wiretaps in a scheme by Los Angeles mobsters to gain access to union funds. Fitzsimmons and the Pressers, according to the reports, met regularly with the agents in Washington, Miami, Cleveland and Las Vegas. They hoped to arrange “targets of exchange”—people that the Government could prosecute instead of themselves or their cronies. These turned out to be Fitzsimmons’ enemies. Three whose names occur in the agents’ reports were Jimmy Hoffa, the former Teamsters president whom Nixon had just released from prison on condition that he take no part in running the union until 1980; Harold Gibbons, a Hoffa loyalist who was boss of the Teamsters in St. Louis; and Jay Sarno, who had built two Las Vegas casino hotels with loans from Teamster pension funds.

Nothing much happened. Fitzsimmons told the IRS agents that Hoffa was intriguing to get the union presidency back, which could have been grounds for sending Hoffa back to prison, but the Government took no action. William Lynch, then head of the Justice Department’s organized crime section, recalls that the IRS gave him data about Gibbons from an unnamed “hot informant,” presumably Fitzsimmons. Says Lynch: “We sent it out to the department strike force in St. Louis and found that they already had it. It was totally worthless.” Sarno was tried in 1975 on a charge of offering a $64,000 bribe to an IRS agent, but was acquitted. It is possible that the IRS dunned some people named by Fitzsimmons and the Pressers for additional taxes, but the Daley-Dennis reports do not elaborate.

In any case, by late 1972 Fitzsimmons complained to the IRS agents that he and his allies were still in trouble and his enemies were not. He threatened to take his complaints directly to President Nixon. Later the Pressers and eventually Fitzsimmons himself told the agents that Colson, Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, who was then White House chief of staff, had set up a meeting between Nixon and Fitzsimmons in one of the private rooms of the White House.* Kleindienst had allegedly been summoned to the session and ordered to review all investigations pending against the Teamsters and to make sure that Fitzsimmons and his allies were not hurt. The meeting supposedly occurred after Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, to which the Teamsters contributed an estimated $1 million.

Whatever the case, the Justice Department in March 1973 did stop court-sanctioned FBI wiretaps that seemed to be on the brink of disclosing corruption in the Teamsters. The FBI, in an affidavit, asked to continue the wiretaps, saying it had information that Fitzsimmons had been meeting with Los Angeles gangsters who were trying to tap Teamsters health-and-welfare funds, but Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen turned down the request. He said in 1974 that the wiretaps had been “nonproductive.” The department, it should be noted, did press the indictment of William Presser, who was tried on the embezzlement charge in 1973 but acquitted.

For years afterward, the Daley-Dennis reports languished in IRS files, though there were several occasions on which they might have become public. In the spring of 1973, just as the Watergate scandal was breaking into the open, the IRS delivered a bundle of the reports to the Justice Department. They included those with Fitzsimmons’ account of his alleged meeting with Nixon and Kleindienst. Edward Joyce, then deputy chief of the Justice Department’s organized crime section, signed a memo saying that he had received the reports and was studying them. Joyce’s superior, Lynch, however, says that Joyce never mentioned the reports to him. Joyce can no longer say if he brought them to the attention of anyone else; he died last year. All that is known is that the reports were returned to the IRS, and no action was taken.

The only people who ran into trouble, in fact, were Agents Daley and Dennis. The Justice Department in 1974 indicted Informer Hall on a charge of possessing stolen Treasury bonds, and threatened to indict the IRS agents as co-conspirators—though they protested that they had only been asked by Hall to check the serial numbers on the bonds. The agents composed a memo pointing out that the IRS and the Department of Justice had failed to inform the Senate Watergate committee of their reports about Fitzsimmons’ account of his alleged meeting with Nixon. If indicted, they threatened to summon high-ranking Justice officials to testify about what had—or had not—been done with that information.

The agents were not indicted. Hall was acquitted of the possession charge, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of fraud and was imprisoned for six months. After his release, he told the New York Times in 1975 about Fitzsimmons’ alleged informing and said there had been a deal for the Government to go easy on the Teamsters leader; he also said he had given that information to a House Judiciary subcommittee. The subcommittee, however, never called Hall to testify; probably it was warned by the Justice Department that Hall was unreliable. Daley retired from the IRS in 1977 and Dennis in 1979. Both are living in Southern California.

The FBI finally got a look at the Daley-Dennis reports in 1978, after an anonymous tipster informed the agency that Fitzsimmons and the Pressers had been seen with the IRS agents. The tipster also hinted that the conversations might have had something to do with Hoffa, who disappeared in 1975 and is presumed to have been murdered. The FBI then began an investigation, about six years too late. By then the statute of limitations had expired, so nobody mentioned in the Daley-Dennis reports could be prosecuted anyway.

Some FBI agents nonetheless wanted to convene a grand jury in the hope that under oath some of the people named in the IRS reports might yield clues to Hoffa’s fate. The Justice Department turned them down. Says one FBI agent: “Can you imagine the scene? Fitzsimmons, the Pressers, White House aides, Nixon Administration officials all trooping in; questions about Teamster campaign contributions and ‘exchange targets’—it would have been a replay of Watergate. Nobody in the department wanted that.” So the FBI investigation wound up last year without results, and the contents of the Daley-Dennis reports remained unknown to the public—until now.

* It is not clear whether the meeting took place in the Oval Office, where Nixon had installed voice-activated recording equipment. The FBI later examined the White House tapes for late 1972, but found no trace of the meeting, indicating that it might have taken place elsewhere in the building.

* Kleindienst, now practicing law in Arizona, went on trial in Phoenix last week on 14 charges of perjury stemming from a state bar investigation of an insurance deal involving the Teamsters.