LABOR: Pretty Simple Life

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“This ain’t my kind of place,” growled Teamster Boss James Riddle Hoffa. His cold, hard eyes swept across the well-groomed grounds of the Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. He spat on the lawn. “We are paying the bill.” he said, “but those intellectuals, those lawyers, picked out this place. This is their kind of place. They like to play golf and that stuff.”

Jimmy Hoffa’s top lawyers, 110 strong, were gathered at the stately Greenbrier last week for a three-day meeting “to figure out how we can live under this new law,” as Hoffa put it. Hoffa’s fight to emasculate the House labor bill had failed. Teamster Lobbyist Sidney Zagri’s warnings of political reprisals had stirred more anger than fear on Capitol Hill. Now, confronted with the prospect that a tough bill might emerge from the House-Senate conference. Hoffa wanted his lawyers to help him find easy ways to evade it.

Tragic & Dangerous. It was fitting that Jimmy Hoffa should be worried about the labor bill: he is the No. 1 reason for legislation aimed at reforming labor. The public demand for Congress to vote tough curbs on labor unions is a direct result of the revelations piled up over the past three years by the Senate’s Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, headed by Arkansas Democrat John McClellan. The McClellan committee uncovered plenty of corruption in other unions, notably the Bakery and Confectionery Workers and the Operating Engineers. But among U.S. labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America ranks first in size, money, power and sheer, shocking magnitude of corruption.

“Well-nigh incalculable power over our economy.” says a McClellan committee report, “is wielded by this union . . . Whoever controls the Teamsters controls much more than the immediate destinies of 1,500,000 union members; he and his lieutenants reach into every household in the land.” The fact that Hoffa is the man who controls the Teamsters, the report adds, is “tragic for the Teamsters Union and dangerous for the country.”

Up from the Warehouse. Squat, muscular James Riddle Hoffa. 46, once tried to sum up in four short sentences his career after he left school at the end of the seventh grade: “I got a job in a department store—stock boy. Then I got a job at Kroger’s. And that’s my whole life. Pretty simple life.”

It was a lot more complicated than that. But in one sense Hoffa’s career indeed followed a simple line: straight up the ladder of labor-union power. He started by organizing his own union at the Kroger grocery-chain warehouse in Detroit, where he unloaded boxcars and trucks. At 19, he took his warehouse workers into a Detroit Teamster local. At 24, he became president of Detroit’s Local 299, a post he still holds. In the 1940s he spread out through the Midwest, then moved South and East.

During the mid-1950s, when fat. greedy Dave Beck was president of the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa was No. 2 man on the surface but already No. 1 in real power. In 1957 he elbowed discredited Dave Beck aside, got himself elected president with a salary of $50,000 a year, plus $15,000 extra from Local 299, plus a bottomless expense fund. Despite his prosperity, Jimmy Hoffa, with his wife Josephine and their son and daughter, has conspicuously continued to live in the lower-middle-class Detroit house that he bought 20 years ago for $6,800 (it is now worth about $22,000).

“The Best Forgettery.” Hoffa’s rise to power, and the uses he has made of it, are detailed and documented in the McClellan committee record, sprawling over 44,000 pages of testimony. Backing up the transcripts are truckloads of documents, photostats and recordings gathered by dozens of investigators under the zealous generalship of Committee Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of Presidential Hopeful John F. Kennedy, himself a McClellan committee member. But for all its awesome bulk, the record has some significant gaps: committee investigators found that many Teamster documents, including all records of Hoffa’s own Local 299 for the years prior to 1953, had been destroyed or hidden. Most of the important Teamster officials who testified ducked behind the Fifth Amendment. Hoffa himself never took the Fifth, but he displayed what one Senator called “the best forgettery of anyone I have ever known.” In a single committee session, Hoffa pleaded lack of memory in times in response to committee questions.

Despite the obstacles of missing records and feeble memories, the committee doggedly piled up in its first round of hearings in 1957 a record gamy enough to persuade the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to expel the Teamsters Brotherhood from the united labor movement. Since then, the committee has uncovered a lot more of the Hoffa record. At one point during the hearings. Jimmy Hoffa, an aggressively contemptuous witness, told the committee: “I think my record speaks for itself.” It surely does. And on the basis of that record, the committee documents several damning general charges with scores of specifically detailed charges.

General Charge No. 2: Hoffa runs a hoodlum empire.

After investigating 124 Teamster officers with criminal records, the committee concluded that a criminal background was a “prerequisite” for “advancement within the Teamster firmament.” In cities that he invaded in his drive for power, the committee found, Hoffa teamed up with convicts and thugs. Items:

New York. From his Midwest power base, Hoffa pushed into New York in the mid-1950s with the help of Extortionist John Dioguardi, alias Johnny Dio, boss of a shakedown ring thinly disguised as a labor union. Dio & Co. brought into the labor rackets 40 toughs with a total of 178 arrests on their police dockets. One of them told a Brooklyn machine-shop owner: “You have got to pay us off because you are mine. No matter where you are going to move, you are mine.” During Hoffa’s struggle to get control of the Teamster joint council in New York, Dio helped him set up seven fake “paper locals” to cast votes in a joint-council election. When Dio went to prison on an extortion rap in 1958, Hoffa gratefully promised to look after Dio’s family.

Chicago. Balked in earlier attempts to move into Chicago, Hoffa got a foothold in the late 19403 through an alliance with Paul Dorfman, described by the McClellan committee as “a major figure in the Chicago underworld.” Hoffa paid Dorfman off by handing fat Teamster insurance contracts to Dorfman’s son. Through Dorfman, the committee charges, Hoffa got on good terms with such top Capone gang chieftains as Joseph Glimco and Paul (“The Waiter”) Ricca. Glimco, with a record of 36 arrests, including two on murder charges, became a trustee of a Chicago Teamster local. In 1956, when Ricca was in trouble with the law and needed money urgently, Hoffa’s own Local 299 and another Detroit local headed by Hoffa Pal Bert Brennan, now a Teamsters international vice president, jointly purchased Ricca’s home in Long Beach, Ind. for $150,000. Appraised value: $85,000. Hoffa explained that the two locals planned to turn the house into a training school for Teamster business agents. Not one has been trained there so far.

Philadelphia. In 1956 Hoffa helped 18-arrests Racketeer Samuel (“Shorty”) Feldman get a Philadelphia charter, Local 410, in the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. By the time the union revoked the charter the next year. Local 410 had been thoroughly looted: though it had taken in about $20,000 during its short life, its assets totaled $450, its liabilities some $22,000. In gratitude for the opportunity for plunder, Feldman helped work out an alliance between Hoffa and Philadelphia Teamster Raymond Cohen, whose Local 107 had 19 officers with criminal records totaling 104 arrests and 40 convictions. Cohen stands accused by the McClellan committee of misusing more than $400,000 in Local 107 funds (confronted with the accusation, Cohen dodged behind the Fifth Amendment). When Hoffa took over as Teamster president, he picked Cohen as one of the brotherhood’s three international trustees. The trustees are supposed to see to it that Teamster funds are properly used and accounted for.

Minneapolis. Fleeing an investigation of an attempted murder in Miami, Gerald Connelly found a haven as head of Teamster Local 548 in Minneapolis. When he got into trouble with the law there on charges of extortion and dynamiting, Teamster organizations under Hoffa’s control paid out several thousand dollars for Connelly’s lawyer fees.

Detroit. Hoffa helped Herman Kierdorf get a parole from a prison term for armed robbery, hired him as a Teamster organizer. Hoffa also found a job as a Teamster business agent for Herman’s ex-convict nephew Frank, who then set about shaking down small businessmen in Flint, Mich. He was fatally burned last year while setting fire to a Flint dry-cleaning establishment (asked by the McClellan committee to name some of the hoodlums he had got rid of since becoming Teamster president, Hoffa had the gall to list the late Frank Kierdorf). Other ex-convict business agents of Hoffa-controlled Teamster locals in and around Detroit include Larry Welsh (convicted of sodomy), Zigmont Snyder (twice convicted of armed robbery) and Jimmy Hoffa’s older brother, William (convicted of assault and carrying concealed weapons).

At one McClellan committee hearing, Jimmy Hoffa grinned and chuckled in the background as his beefy (284 Ibs.), strong-armed traveling organizer, Barney Baker, rattled off the names of bigtime hoodlums he knew in various cities Across the U.S. Taking the witness chair later on, Hoffa was asked whether he believed Baker really knew all the hoodlums he had mentioned. “I heard him testify,” said Hoffa.

Kennedy: Does that not disturb you at all about his operation?

Hoffa: It doesn’t disturb me one iota.

Despite this easygoing attitude toward hoodlums, Hoffa promised the committee in 1957 that he would investigate charges of wrongdoing by Teamster officers. But when the committee questioned Hoffa last year, it found that his methods of investigation had been remarkably gentle. Sample : Counsel Kennedy asked Hoffa whether he had looked into charges that Frank Kierdorf extorted money from Flint businessmen, tried to murder an employee of a holdout company by running him down with a car. “I discussed the matter with Frank,” said Hoffa, “and he flatly denied it.” Had he made any other investigation of Kierdorf? asked Kennedy. Replied Hoffa: “What other investigation would I possibly make?”

General Charge No. 2: The Teamsters have used terror, payoffs and political influence to gain immunity from the law. Items:

Tennessee. The committee reported that “law-enforcement agencies at every level in Tennessee have been shockingly derelict in their civic duty toward Teamster malefactions.” Members of a roving Teamster goon squad that terrorized nonunion trucking firms with dynamitings, arson, truck sabotage, bullets and bludgeons had a “scandalous immunity from prosecution because of an underlying and widespread fear of tangling with Teamster union power.” When the police did get up courage to arrest Tennessee Teamster Chieftain Glenn W. Smith and several of his men on dynamiting and arson charges, Smith used $20,000 in Teamster funds to bribe Chattanooga Judge Raulston Schoolfield (since impeached) to quash the indictments.

Michigan. “The police are afraid,” said a Flint businessman harried by Teamster extortionists. A Detroit police officer testified that “the people of the state of Michigan did not get a fair trial” when Judge Joseph Gillis, who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Hoffa & Co., presided at the trial of a Teamster official.

Kansas. In 1953 an investigation of Hoffa by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee was mysteriously called off after Kansas’ Republican ex-Governor (1939-42) Payne Ratner, on retainer as a

Teamster lawyer, interceded with the subcommittee chairman, Kansas’ Republican Representative Wint Smith. Congressman Smith explained that he was under “pressure from way up there.”

General Charge No. 3: Hoffa has “grossly misused” millions of dollars in Teamster funds.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to defend Teamster lawbreakers from justice and to pay their salaries while they were serving prison terms. Some $2,000 went to pay hotel bills and other expenses for William Hoffa while he was hiding out from the law. Hoffa’s Organizer Barney Baker squandered $25,000 in

Teamster money to install his mistress in a Miami house with swimming pool.

The committee tracked down scores of dubious Teamster loans. A bankruptcy-bound Minneapolis department store got a loan of $1,200,000. Two former members of the Michigan state legislature, James P. Hannan and John McElroy, gathered $280,000 in Teamster loans to set up a sanitarium in Detroit. Miami Lawyer Ben Cohen, defender of top mobsters, got a $2,000,000 loan for Florida real-estate ventures.

Costly to all Teamster members in Hoffa’s Midwest bailiwick were the lavish health-and-welfare-fund insurance contracts that Hoffa channeled in 1950-51 to Chicago Mobster Paul Dorfman’s son Allen, who had no experience in the insurance business. Allen Dorfman’s income, as reported on his federal tax returns, soared from $5,200 in 1949 to $166,508 in 1954. Over the years Dorfman agencies have collected more than $3,000,000 in commissions and fees on Teamster insurance, and $1,650,000 of that, according to a studied estimate by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., was excess that the Central States Teamsters could have saved by placing the contracts with established firms.

General Charge No. 4: Teamster officials have crushed democracy within the union’s ranks. Items:

St. Louis. Teamster Vice President Harold Gibbons, Hoffa’s executive assistant, captured the presidency of Joint Council 13 in St. Louis by bringing Teamster Local 447, Carnival Workers, into the council shortly before the election. The Carnival Workers’ jurisdiction was listed as the entire U.S., and there was no reason for the outfit to belong to Joint Council 13 except that Gibbons needed votes.

Nashville. Shortly before an election in 1956, an official from Teamster headquarters in Washington showed up in Nashville, declared all but eleven of the 3,300 members of Local 327 ineligible to run for office.

Pontiac, Mich. When rank-and-file members of Local 614 tried to rebel against corrupt leadership in 1953, Hoffa led several Cadillac loads of goons to Pontiac to break up the insurgents’ meeting.

Hoffa’s own election to the Teamster presidency, the McClellan committee charges, was a “mockery” of union democracy. By the committee’s count, 57% of the delegates who voted for Hoffa at the Teamster convention in Miami in 1957 were picked in ways that violated the Teamster constitution.

Saints & Sin. Despite these facts, Hoffa still has his defenders and even his admirers—and they pop up in some of the oddest places. Last June, for example, Harvard University’s Industrial Relations Professor James J. Healy wrote in the Harvard Business School Bulletin that Hoffa may yet “emerge as one of the outstanding labor leaders of all time.” True, there are blots on Hoffa’s record, Healy admitted, but “some of the greatest saints had their schooling in sin.”

Jimmy Hoffa does, in fact, have some minor virtues. He does not smoke or drink. He does not share the liking of many Teamster chieftains for flashy clothes and gaudy night life. He gains appeal by contrast with sybaritic Dave Beck: shirtsleeves, v. Beck’s tailor-made suits; tireless vigor, v. Beck’s general flabbiness; the modest Hoffa house in Detroit, v. Beck’s rambling mansion in a fashionable Seattle suburb.

But what really accounts for whatever lingering esteem there may be for Jimmy Hoffa is’ the image of him as a dedicated labor leader. Sure, the argument runs, Hoffa is tough, rough, and he pals with crooks; but at least it can be said for him that i) unlike Beck, he is not interested in making money for himself, and 2) unlike Beck, he is devoted to the interests of rank-and-file workers. The record, which Jimmy Hoffa says speaks for itself, explodes both of these notions as myths.

Myth No. I. Jimmy Hoffa, the committee charges, has shown a keen interest in making money for Jimmy Hoffa. Tracing the web of Hoffa’s financial dealings proved to be difficult, because he deals entirely in cash, leaving no personal-check stubs or canceled checks behind. Asked to explain this peculiarity, Hoffa bristles and replies that as a U.S. citizen he has a “right” to deal in cash if he wants to.

On Hoffa’s 1948-56 income tax returns, the committee found $60.322 reported under such vague headings as “miscellaneous income” and “wagering.” He explained that his friend Bert Brennan placed racetrack bets for him and always showed a yearly profit. Invited by the committee to explain his system, Brennan took the Fifth Amendment.

Committee investigators tracked down many loans made to Jimmy Hoffa, but found remarkably little evidence of repayments. Several recipients of Teamster loans showed their gratitude by lending Hoffa money or showing excessive kindness to his buddies. Teamster Lawyer George Fitzgerald got the Michigan Conference of Teamsters Welfare Fund to loan $1,000,000 to a realtor who paid Fitzgerald a $15,750 “finder’s fee.”

Hoffa, the committee found, has been involved in many business undertakings, including two summer camps, oil leases, a cattle farm, intricate real-estate deals, and various trucking ventures in which he got generous help from trucking-company owners with whom he negotiated as a labor leader. The most profitable trucking deal, as far as the committee investigators could trace, was Test Fleet, Inc., set up for Hoffa by a big Midwest trucking firm, Commercial Carriers Co. Commercial Carriers had some trouble with striking Teamster drivers in Flint. Mich., and Hoffa threw his weight into the dispute in favor of the company. Commercial Carriers then set up Test Fleet, transferred, all the stock to Mrs. Hoffa and Mrs. Bert Brennan in their maiden names, then guaranteed a $50,000 bank loan so that Test Fleet could buy trucking equipment to lease to Commercial Carriers. Under this can’t-lose agreement, Mrs. Hoffa and Mrs. Brennan took in $125,000 profit from 1949 to 1956.

Myth No. 2. Hoffa has told the committee (and anyone else who would listen) that no matter what else can be said about him, he is first and foremost interested in the betterment of the working conditions of his union members.

But in Hoffa’s own Detroit bailiwick, Teamster Business Agent Zigmont Snyder owned a nonunion car-wash that paid workers as little as $1 a day. Many a Hoffa crony has collected payoffs from employers for “sweetheart” contracts. Teamster Officer Gerald Connelly negotiated Teamster sweetheart contracts in Minneapolis, including one that lowered wages from $1.32 an hour to $1, another that cut workers back from $65 a week to $58.

Hoffa himself, when he was pushing into New York in 1954, tried to undercut New York Teamster Thomas Hickey by offering trucking companies better terms than Hickey — at the expense of the Teamster rank and file. In several states, Hoffa permitted trucking firms, against drivers’ protests, to save money by paying drivers an extra 1¼ or 1½ a mile in lieu of more expensive fringe benefits. A confidential memorandum from an Ohio trucking executive reports a conversation with George Maxwell, head of the Steel Truckers Employers Association. Says the memo, photostated by McClellan committee investigators: “George told me that in 1954 he made five separate deals with Hoffa concerning percentage pay rates [the percentage of the trucking fee that a company pays a driver who owns his own truck]. He had one company decreased from 74% to 70%, three companies decreased from 75% to 72%, and one company decreased from 80% to 72% . . . George further said that Hoffa is very tough in these open meetings, but you can talk to him in a closed, private session. That is the way in which most of the steel carriers operate.”

Looking for Loopholes. Despite his “speaks for itself” record and all the attacks it has stirred up against him, Jimmy Hoffa is still cockily confident, brimful of big plans for the future, including an alliance of all land, water and air transport unions in the U.S.

Expulsion from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has increased Hoffa’s power instead of denting it. The $840,000 a year that the Teamsters used to pay into the A.F.L.-C.I.O. treasury is now available for other uses. And expulsion left Hoffa free to raid the jurisdictions of A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions, which he has done gleefully.

The labor bill might trim Hoffa’s power, especially if the Senate adopts the House bill’s restrictions on blackmail picketing and secondary boycotts—longtime Teamster weapons. But with his lawyers already at work looking for loopholes, Hoffa is going to make every effort to go on behaving like Hoffa. Last week he finished buying control of the Miami National Bank so that he can use the bank to get around labor-bill controls on what he does with Teamster welfare-fund money. He plans to channel welfare-fund millions into Miami National and then distribute the money as bank loans and investments, exempt from labor-bill restrictions.

To cancel out any labor-bill ban on secondary boycotts, Hoffa is already setting timetables to rearrange Teamster contracts so that they will all expire at the same time. He plans to try to work out arrangements with other unions so that their contracts will run out at the same time as Teamster contracts. “This bill is going to bring on national bargaining,” Hoffa predicted. “That’s where those smart guys in Congress outsmarted themselves.”

Vanishing Files. One potentially formidable roadblock to Jimmy Hoffa’s plans is a three-member Board of Monitors, set up in early 1958 by Federal Judge F. Dickinson Letts to watch over Teamster affairs.

The Teamster representative on the board, Washington Lawyer Daniel Maher, votes the way Hoffa wants him to vote. But Letts-appointed Chairman Martin O’Donoghue and New York Lawyer Lawrence Smith make up a watchful majority. So far, Hoffa has been able to evade most of the 54 cleanup recommendations that O’Donoghue has handed down, but the real struggle between Hoffa and the monitors still lies ahead. Hoffa’s lawyers have appealed to the Supreme Court the Letts rulings setting up the monitors, and until the high court decides, O’Donoghue’s authority is weakened by uncertainty. Meanwhile, Hoffa keeps a team of lawyers busy harassing the monitors, fights them with such stock Teamster tricks as getting rid of records. Example: O’Donoghue asked for the records of Vice President Harold Gibbons, found that.the files for 1956, 1957 and part of 1958 had mysteriously vanished.

Day of Reckoning. Getting ready for what he calls “the day of reckoning at the polls,” Hoffa is planning to set up a Teamster political department financed by 50¢-a-month “voluntary” contributions from Teamster members. If all Teamsters “volunteer” to contribute, that will add up to $9,000,000 a year to help elect men Hoffa likes and defeat men he does not like.

Hoffa even claims that the labor bill will help him to make the Teamsters bigger and more powerful. He makes the wildly fanciful argument that rank-and-file union members may revolt against A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders for their failure to block a labor bill, then turn to Jimmy Hoffa, the man who fought the bill hardest. He has been making damn-the-labor-bill speeches to A.F.L.-C.I.O. locals around the U.S., and getting, he says, very favorable responses from the rank and file. “I could pull them out of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and into the Teamsters if I wanted to,” Hoffa told a TIME correspondent at the Greenbrier last week.

When was he going to do that? “Oh, we’ll see,” said Jimmy Hoffa. “We’ll see.”