National Affairs: Hoffa’s Funny Friend

Robert (“Barney”) Baker, liar, thief, union bullyboy and hash-house voluptuary, plopped his 284 Ibs. into a red leather chair facing the McClellan committee. For the next two days Teamsters’ Organizer Baker answered questions while the heat from overhead television lamps sent sweat from his pomaded hair down his neck into a wilted white collar that flapped outside his tentlike coat. His lawyers had urged him to take the Fifth Amendment. But Baker decided to clown his way through a performance aimed at concealing a grimly important fact: Barney Baker is just the sort of specimen used by his friend and employer, Teamsters’ President James Hoffa, to control the nation’s biggest, most predatory union.

Baker nearly got away with his buffoonery. The hearing-room audience gasped happily at hearing that Barney Baker, at separate sittings, had devoured 4 Ibs. of spaghetti and 38 Ibs. of meat. There were titters when Baker explained his philosophy for talking to cops: “Little white lies don’t mean nothing, not when you are not under oath.” Jimmy Hoffa, sitting in the audience, was convulsed by his pal’s antics. And even Arkansas’ dour John McClellan turned his head to hide a smile when Baker was being questioned about his murderous old pals on New York’s waterfront.

Q. (by Committee Counsel Robert Kennedy) Did you know Cockeyed Dunne?

A. I didn’t know him as Cockeyed Dunne. I knew him as John Dunne.

Q. Where is he now?

A. He has met his maker.

Q. How did he do that?

A. I believe through electrocution in the City of New York of the State of New York.

Q. What about Squint Sheridan? Did you know him?

A. Andrew Sheridan, sir?

Q. Yes.

A. He has also met his maker.

Q. How did he die?

A. With Mr. John Dunne.

But the jokes wore thin as the squalid facts about Barney Baker piled inexorably up in the hearing’s record. Items:

⊇¶ For more than 20 years, Barney Baker, 47, has palled with and worked for nearly all the U.S. hoodlums of any consequence. Among them: Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis and Trigger Mike Copola in Miami; Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas; John Vitale in St. Louis. Said Counsel Kennedy: “Everywhere you go there has been violence.”

¶ As an organizer for Hoffa’s Central Conference of Teamsters, Baker visited Miami, there lavished $25,000—in Teamsters Union funds, naturally—on a house, swimming pool and Buick for his doxy. Since 1953 Baker has spent $2,200—also in Teamsters’ money—for sanitarium treatment that brought his weight down from 420 Ibs. to an oafish 284.

¶ Kicked out as president of Washington’s Warehouse Employees’ Local 730 after its treasury was looted by its officers in 1952, Baker joined up with Jimmy Hoffa, went to work in St. Louis for Hoffa Lieutenant Harold Gibbons. Baker’s specialty: “belly bumping,” i.e., using his gross girth to direct or obstruct picket line traffic.

¶ During a 1953 taxicab strike, Baker ordered his wife to provide an alibi for a night spent dumping a taxicab into the Mississippi River. After police found a loaded .38-cal. revolver and seven extra shells in his pocket, he was told he was unwelcome in St. Louis and would be arrested if seen with any hoodlums.

¶ Posing as a veterinarian, he once collected $1,500 for doping a race horse, on other occasions bragged that while organizing carnival workers, he tipped over a bleacher and killed some people. Again, objecting to the size of his bill, he beat up the manager of a posh Chicago apartment hotel. Still again, he threatened to “put into concrete blocks” a Miami lawyer who failed to fix a manslaughter charge against his mistress (she got 15 years).

Woman Scorned. Most fascinating of all to the McClellan committee was testimony linking Barney Baker to New York’s presidentially hopeful Democratic Governor Averell Harriman. Baker’s former wife Mollie told how he became chairman of a 1952 Harriman-for-President labor committee, worked for Harriman against Estes Kefauver in the District of Columbia preferential primary. Testified Mollie Baker: Barney talked every Sunday morning to Harriman on the telephone, was invited to the Sun Valley resort run by the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific Railroad, proudly possessed a Harriman photograph signed, “To my dearest friend Barney.” How dear was that friendship? Insisted Mollie in a statement later supported by Baker’s man-slaughtering ex-mistress: “It was very close, very close, very close.”

Next day thrice-married Barney Baker indignantly denied that he had seen or talked to Harriman more than three times, that each time he was just one of a crowd. Said he: This was “the vengeance of a woman scorned. I am not close, close, close.” He pleaded with the committee not to let the testimony of his scorned women destroy “a man I honor and love.” Equally indignant, Governor Harriman called a press conference to deny that he had known Baker well enough even to remember him.

At hearing’s close John McClellan decided he knew who had done the lying. Said he to Baker: “You have committed perjury over and over.” Added Counsel Kennedy: “The people you associate with are the scum of the United States, and you are a part of them.” Indeed, by general agreement, the best thing that could be said about Jimmy Hoffa’s friend Baker was that he had not crawled out from under a rock. It would have taken a boulder.