INVESTIGATIONS: Hot Cargo

Highballing down a well-marked highway last week, Senator John McClellan’s labor-rackets committee stopped the caravan to take on some extra cargo, and headed on. Destination: the front door of James Riddle Hoffa, slick, front-running mastermind of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who hopes to take over the presidency from Dave Beck next month. The weighty new cargo, the committee hoped, would prove once and for all that Jimmy Hoffa hooked up with racketeers in what was eventually a successful attempt to seize power in the Teamster organization in New York.

First package in the load was cucumber-shaped Anthony Doria, who despite his vegetable-like appearance, sounded like the world’s longest-playing record. For eleven hours, Doria, former international secretary-treasurer of the U.A.W.-A.F.L., virtually overwhelmed the committee and absorbed television viewers with a display of verbal sidestepping, sermonizing, non-sequiturs and assorted mishmash calculated to assure everybody that Racketeer Johnny Dio is just as honest and devoted to clean labor unionism as Anthony Doria himself (“If society had treated Johnny Dio right, he would have had the opportunity of becoming an outstanding leader in labor”).

But as he filled up some 500 pages of testimony, Tony Doria never erased any of the committee’s charges that Doria 1) had both hands deep in the international’s till, and 2) helped Dio transfer phony U.A.W.-A.F.L. charters to the Teamsters Union, thus enabling the racketeers to take over New York’s powerful central Teamster outfit, Joint Council 16.

Assorted Surprises. Next came a crate of assorted mugs, who, Committee Counsel Bob Kennedy contended, were rounded up by Dio and his henchmen. They served as officers of the phony locals that were set up to outvote Joint Council 16 President Martin Lacey in 1956 and elect Hoffa’s man, John O’Rourke. Among these was one Armando Simontacci, who testified that, all of a sudden, although he had never been a member of the Teamsters, he was told one day by one of Dio’s boys that he had been made president of Teamster Local 269.

Q. You were not a member of it, were you?

A. Well, if I was nominated for president, I guess it is the beginning of a membership.

Q. How long did you serve as president? A. I might still be serving as president.

Surprise package was John O’Rourke himself. Sporting a huge diamond ring and a pink, craggy face, O’Rourke, 57, onetime ready-fisted dock worker, had led the committee to feel that he might cooperate with the investigators. He had been declared winner of the contested election, was forced to give it up after Lacey took the case to court—and finally, unopposed, took over Joint Council 16 when ailing Martin Lacey dropped out. O’Rourke’s surprise: Fifth Amendment pleas on all pertinent questions, even a refusal to admit that he is president of the council or that he is acquainted with other Teamster officials. Asked South Dakota’s Senator Karl Mundt plaintively: “Is there anything you would like to say to help disincriminate yourself? Is the whole story really that bad?” O’Rourke declined to answer, but after the questioning was over, he stepped outside the Senate caucus room, braced himself against a marble pillar and burst into tears.

Little Caesar. Giving orders in New York gangdom was one unwieldy bird named Antonio Corallo, known to cronies and cops as Tony Ducks—a title bestowed in praise of his ability to avoid convictions on all but two of his twelve arrests since 1929. A beefy, movie-style heavy, Tony Ducks keeps no bank accounts, buys no property in his own name, often meets his confederates at 5 a.m. (to avoid detection), assigns one of his boys to tail any detective found to be tailing Tony Ducks. One employer, said Committee Counsel Kennedy, hired Tony Ducks just to come into his shop once every couple of weeks and glare at the employees. In 1941, after he had dodged the draft by claiming that he was the sole support of his family, Tony Ducks was convicted on a narcotics rap.

When he took the stand in the Senate caucus room, Tony Ducks was not talking, beyond muttering “I refuse t’ansuh on the ground it may tend ta ‘criminate me.” But Tony talked anyway—on six wiretaps played by the committee. In telephone talks with a Runyonesque rogue’s gallery of obsequious underlings (including his front man, natty Sam Goldstein, who also claimed protection under the Fifth Amendment), Tony Ducks showed that he is a Little Caesar among New York’s labor racketeers: as a top gun, Tony Ducks snarled out advice to his hoodlums. Item: he ordered one of them to get Jimmy Hoffa, or Hoffa’s St. Louis henchman, Harold Gibbons, to settle one of the many New York Teamster problems. The committee heard enough to conclude that Tony Ducks, as well as Mobster Johnny Dio, helped rig the key Teamster election in Joint Council 16, and that he even planned to offer beleaguered President Martin Lacey $10,000 a year to move over and leave the spot for Hoffa’s man, Johnny O’Rourke.

The Conspiracy. As the week wound up, 74-year-old Martin Lacey showed up to verify much of the testimony. The chartering of the Teamster phony locals, he said, tears in his eyes, was the result of “fraud and deception . . . a major conspiracy.” Lacey was seconded by Teamster Vice President Tom Hickey, Jimmy Hoffa’s chief enemy in the Teamsters’

Eastern Conference, who told how Hoffa tried to get a charter for Johnny Dio.

“Mr. Hoffa,” testified Hickey, “interceded for Mr. Dio. [Mr. Dio] impressed Mr. Hoffa no end.” At a high-level meeting with Dio, Hickey and Dave Beck, Hoffa tried to win Beck’s agreement to sweep Dio into the Teamsters Union with a Dio-controlled taxicab local, but, said Hickey, A.F.L. Boss George Meany (now president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.) killed the move. In the end Hickey discovered that Hoffa had sneaked Teamster charters through to Dio anyway. Announced Hickey: he will run for the international presidency against Hoffa late next month. Asked John McClellan: “If you should be elected, would you use all power vested in you to clean out this organization?” Replied Tom Hickey firmly: “I would dedicate myself to that ambition.”

With its heavy load of evidence, the McClellan-led caravan moved on relentlessly toward Jimmy Hoffa’s door. Hoffa’s Teamster career would depend directly on how much of the hot cargo he could touch without burning his fingers.