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The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
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Overview
James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in twentieth-century America. His remarkable journey from young union organizer to all-powerful head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is an epic tale worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, jam-packed with intrigue, subterfuge, violence, and corruption. His successes were monumental, his fall truly spectacular, and his bizarre disappearance in the summer of 1975 remains one of the great mysteries in American history.
Widely considered to be the definitive volume on the career and crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, The Hoffa Wars, by acclaimed investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, is an eye-opening, extensively researched account of the steady rise and fall of an ingenious, ambitious man who was instrumental in transforming a small union of seventy-five thousand truckers into the most powerful labor brotherhood in world. Shocking disclosures in Moldea’s no-holds-barred account include the devil’s bargain that put Hoffa and his union in the pockets of the Mob, Hoffa’s role in the joint CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the deal Hoffa made with US president Richard Nixon that released the disgraced Teamster president from prison eight years early, and the truth behind Hoffa’s eventual disappearance and likely murder. But perhaps the most startling revelation of all concerns the integral part Jimmy Hoffa played, in concert with underworld kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, in America’s most terrible twentieth-century crime: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497697850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2015 |
| Series: | Forbidden Bookshelf , #12 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 479 |
| Sales rank: | 169,745 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Hoffa Wars
The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
By Dan E. Moldea
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1993 Dan E. MoldeaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9785-0
CHAPTER 1
In Search of Jimmy Hoffa
Jimmy Hoffa's most valuable contribution to the American labor movement came at the moment he stopped breathing on July 30, 1975. The involuntary act occurred in the midst of his dramatic bid to recapture the general presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which he had lost during nearly five years in prison. Still popular among reporters with short memories who insisted upon portraying him as a working-class hero, and among rank-and-file admirers who had forgiven him for stealing from them, Hoffa nevertheless had slim chances for a comeback.
Convicted in two separate trials of jury tampering and defrauding the union's pension fund, Hoffa had become an outsider to the Teamsters' high command when he entered Lewisburg Penitentiary in March 1967. His union problems began in less than a month, when he and his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, disagreed over an appointment. The increasingly bitter war between the two old friends lasted until Hoffa died, and it was to be carried on by Hoffa's supporters even after he was gone.
In 1967 Fitzsimmons suddenly inherited the uncontrollable monster Hoffa had created over the past twenty-five years: an alliance between the union and organized crime. Introduced to the underworld by a lover in the 1930s, by the 1940s Hoffa was asking for and getting muscle from the mob in a war with a rival union. He began using the Teamsters to provide his new allies with a façade of legitimacy, even for the international narcotics traffic, of which Detroit was a major center. In return Hoffa became rich and powerful, and so did the IBT. Wealth and power led to a second alliance, this one with corrupt politicians. The general public and the rank-and-file Teamsters, especially those who drove their own trucks, suffered from the two alliances.
Unable and unwilling to battle the underworld, Fitzsimmons promptly decentralized the autocracy Hoffa had used to build his empire, hoping to insulate himself from direct contact with organized crime. Among the immediate benefactors of Fitzsimmons' policies were local and regional Teamster leaders around the country, who acquired a considerable amount of new power in the two-million-member union. Instead of clamoring for the attention of one man, Hoffa, mobsters merely had to call their area Teamster representatives for a favor. Teamster bosses who cooperated became wealthy.
Without the daily burden of defending his professional relationships with organized crime figures to the press and to the rank and file—as Hoffa had spent much of his career doing—Fitzsimmons used his free time backing up his union subordinates and making new friends in politics and big labor.
Things were going well for the IBT under Fitzsimmons. Its first- and second-level officials were happy, and so was the National Crime Syndicate. Then, in November 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Because the Teamsters had gone with the rest of organized labor and supported Hubert Humphrey that year, Nixon's election was bad news.
Nixon had formed a quid pro quo alliance with Hoffa during his 1960 presidential campaign against John Kennedy, brother of Hoffa's archenemy. Until he resigned to manage his brother's campaign, Robert Kennedy was chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee, which investigated the Teamsters in general and Hoffa in particular. The extraordinary pressure Kennedy placed on Hoffa personally during the committee's hearings, combined with rumors that Bobby Kennedy would become attorney general if his brother was elected, led Hoffa to put his union at Nixon's disposal. According to Ed Partin, a former Hoffa aide turned government informant, in September 1960 the crime boss of Louisiana, Carlos Marcello, contributed $500,000 to the Nixon campaign through Hoffa and his associates. Within a few weeks after the alleged payoff, Nixon managed to stop a Florida land fraud indictment against Hoffa.
So when Nixon finally won the presidency in 1968, it was no surprise to Fitzsimmons and the Teamster leadership that he was considering an early release for Hoffa. Unlike Fitzsimmons, Hoffa had supported Nixon in 1968 through his influence with remaining friends in the union.
For Hoffa, however, problems remained and they would be his undoing.
In Lewisburg he had made a prison alliance with dope trafficker Carmine Galante, the underboss of the Joseph Bonanno crime family of New York, which was in internal conflict over the line of succession. Although other mob families had at first been neutral in the "Banana Wars," which lasted from 1963 to 1969, their attitude quickly changed when they uncovered a plot to murder two other New York crime bosses, Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese. Because Bonanno's son was implicated in the plot, the National Crime Syndicate's ruling council ordered the elder Bonanno to respond to the charge. When Bonanno refused to cooperate and began to raid other underworld jurisdictions, he was expelled from the ruling council, which quietly began supporting the rebels in the Bonanno clan. Fearful of mob reprisals and government prosecution, Bonanno arranged for his own disappearance, which lasted from 1964 to 1966. While underground he made a coalition with two other powerful organized crime figures, Santos Trafficante of Florida and Carlos Marcello of Louisiana. Moving his New York operations to Arizona—where he already had considerable influence—Bonanno, with his new friends, formed a triumvirate that rivaled the New York underworld's forces.
By making his prison pact with Galante, Jimmy Hoffa became a key figure in this North-South power struggle. As president of the Teamsters he had had a close working relationship with the New York crime families as well as Marcello and Trafficante, but his ties to the latter two mobsters were exceptionally close and personal.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when Fidel Castro began throwing the American mob off the island, Marcello and Trafficante were among those exiled. Both lost their best heroin and gambling connection. Trying to recapture their lost territory, Trafficante and other gangsters—including Sam Giancana of Chicago and Russell Bufalino of Pennsylvania—agreed to work with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a direct action against Castro. Strong evidence points to the fact that the original middleman between the CIA and the American underworld was Jimmy Hoffa, who used the union's financial machinery for arms sales to both sides in the Cuban Revolution.
There is solid evidence as well that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante—three of the most important targets for criminal prosecution by the Kennedy Administration—had discussions with their subordinates about murdering President Kennedy. Associates of Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were in direct contact with Jack Ruby, the Dallas night-club owner who killed the "lone assassin" of the President. Although members of the Warren Commission, which investigated President Kennedy's assassination, had knowledge of much of this information at the time of their inquiry, they chose not to follow it up. Marcello and Trafficante continued to support Hoffa after his convictions, offering bribes to a key witness to recant his testimony against Hoffa.
But while the southern underworld remained loyal to Hoffa, the New York mobs were shifting their alliances to Frank Fitzsimmons.
While Hoffa made friends with Galante and Bonanno did the same with Marcello and Trafficante, New York mob leaders began to realize that Hoffa's return to power in the union could wreck their business interests in the IBT. If Hoffa began favoring the Bonanno-Marcello-Trafficante alliance in the South—and there was every reason why he should, since he knew he was being betrayed elsewhere—there was a very real danger of a breakup of the National Crime Syndicate, with its traditional allotted spheres of interest. One indication of trouble to come was that in prison both Hoffa and Galante had brief fistfights with Anthony Provenzano, a captain in the Vito Genovese crime family, which had aligned itself with the New York families opposing Bonanno. A New Jersey Teamster leader, IBT vice president, and former ally of Hoffa, Provenzano had been an active participant in the battle up to the time he was jailed. He had ordered the locals under his control not to pay the Bonanno men who were on Teamster payrolls.
Knowing that if Hoffa was released from jail he and his allies would retaliate financially, the northern underworld and pro-Fitzsimmons union leaders turned their attention to President Nixon. Fitzsimmons' influence with the new President was minimal, but the Teamster president did know Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, with whom he had numerous conversations in 1969. It is reasonable to assume that the two men reviewed the situation between organized crime and the Teamsters Union, along with the underworld's growing internal problems; and that both men believed armed warfare could explode if Hoffa was permitted to return to power in the union. The prospect must have been deeply alarming to an attorney general serving under a President who had promised the American public law and order. At any rate, during 1969 the Nixon Administration balked at releasing Hoffa and kept him in prison.
In February 1969, less than a month after Nixon took office, the Banana Wars ended, and the Teamsters and the mob began to neutralize Hoffa by winning over his allies in both groups. Respected among all parties and put in control of the union's pension and welfare funds by Hoffa, Chicago underworld associate Allen Dorfman became Fitzsimmons' peacemaker. His job was to be sure that every section of organized crime got its fair share of the union's billion-dollar pension and welfare funds.
Hoffa's support within the underworld and among Teamster leaders whom the mob controlled dwindled steadily. By mid-1971 the White House had forced Hoffa to resign all his union offices in return for an early release. This set the stage for Fitzsimmons' election as IBT general president the following month, and for Hoffa's restricted commutation of sentence in December, which barred him from union office until 1980.
The Hoffa issue had drawn the White House, the Teamsters, and organized crime closer together. Although the Justice Department successfully prosecuted Allen Dorfman and associates of Marcello and Trafficante—all for misuse of Teamster funds—John Mitchell was personally responsible for numerous aborted prosecutions of underworld figures during his four- year tenure. Several investigations of Teamster officials, including one against Fitzsimmons' son Richard, were dropped without explanation.
As a result, Fitzsimmons, the IBT's general executive board, and the mob gave Nixon their full support during his 1972 reelection campaign. The only IBT board member who refused to back Nixon was named a White House "enemy" and had his income tax returns audited the following year. Fitzsimmons became personally involved in a dirty tricks campaign against Senator Edward Kennedy, a potential challenger to Nixon. Allen Dorfman chipped in a $100,000 contribution which he gave illegally to John Mitchell. And after the Watergate burglars began blackmailing the White House, the mob came through in January 1973 with a million dollars in hush money—delivery arranged by Fitzsimmons, Provenzano (out of prison since 1970), and Dorfman.
The press, which was concentrating on Watergate, did not notice for a while that Hoffa was patiently putting together the machinery for a comeback, which included a suit against the restrictions on his commutation. Although the battle between him and Fitzsimmons was for control of the international union, the battleground would be their home-town local, Detroit's Local 299. And in Local 299, as in the union at large, loss of support from both the underworld and top Teamster leaders left Hoffa surrounded by powerless allies, most of them rank-and-file loyalists who clung to the myth of Hoffa as their defender.
Although grandfatherly Prank Fitzsimmons was more amiable and easier to talk to than Jimmy Hoffa ever was or could be, that image never seemed to filter down to the rank and file. To them Fitzsimmons was Hoffa's shoeshine boy, who was handed and did not earn the number one spot in the union. By 1974, caught up in the drama of Hoffa's possible return to power, the press had picked up the theme and forever labeled Fitzsimmons as he was perceived by the membership. It was a bad rap to lay on Fitzsimmons, and it simply wasn't true. Defensive about being compared so unfavorably to Hoffa, Fitzsimmons drew further and further away from the rank and file.
In the years before he took over, Fitzsimmons had merely exhibited the loyalty that any subordinate should give his boss. A tough street fighter in the old days, a man who had held his own in all the brawls with rival unions, Fitzsimmons was a streetwise former trucker whom Hoffa had trusted and depended upon since the thirties. Perhaps that was reason enough for Hoffa to make Fitzsimmons his successor, but according to a Teamster official who was close to both men, Fitzsimmons was the Detroit underworld's choice. Certainly he was no stranger to the mob. The succession was allegedly arranged after Hoffa appealed to Detroit's top don to get rid of a local gangster who was having an affair with his wife. Soon after Josephine Hoffa's lover was sent to jail for stock fraud, Hoffa named Fitzsimmons his heir apparent.
Hoffa never operated in the heroic vacuum that was glamorized throughout his career. His successes and failures were in large part determined by who his friends and enemies were at each point in his life. Besides Fitzsimmons, two other men were of special importance in his rise to power: Dave Johnson and Rolland McMaster. Dissident truckers who, along with Fitzsimmons, joined and cleaned up Local 299 in 1935, Johnson and McMaster were major reasons for Hoffa's early victories. As his two top organizers they were probably more responsible than anyone else, even Hoffa, for pulling the entire midwestern trucking industry into the Teamsters during the 1940s and 1950s. They were partners who battled strikebreakers and rival unions on the front lines while Hoffa was by then sitting behind a desk calling the shots. Rewarded with top positions in the local—Johnson as recording secretary and McMaster as secretary-treasurer—they kept Local 299 functioning after Hoffa and Fitzsimmons went to Washington to run the IBT from its new headquarters. And when Hoffa and Fitzsimmons began their power struggle, no two people were more vital to it than Johnson and McMaster.
McMaster was the reason for the split between Hoffa and Fitzsimmons. It was his appointment as chief executive officer of Local 299 after his release from an extortion sentence that Hoffa protested from jail. Hoffa, who had decided that McMaster was probably a government informant, wanted Johnson, now secretary-treasurer, to hold major power in the local as his most trusted lieutenant.
One of the most serious problems Hoffa faced during his tenure as general president was the isolated pockets of rank-and-file resistance that challenged his leadership. Handfuls of bold rebels kept organizing in cities on both coasts, throughout the Midwest, and even in Detroit, forcing Hoffa to buy them off or physically intimidate them. But when new groups of reformers kept coming over the hill—some trying to overthrow their local union officials and others campaigning for decertification from the union—Hoffa had the IBT constitution revised to grant himself absolute control. Later, it was the Hoffa constitution that Fitzsimmons used to keep Hoffa out of power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Hoffa Wars by Dan E. Moldea. Copyright © 1993 Dan E. Moldea. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Series Introduction
- Introduction
- Part One
- 1 In Search of Jimmy Hoffa
- 2 Rebel Hoffa
- 3 The Oppressed Become the Oppressors
- 4 Stacked Decks and Dirty Deals
- 5 The Enemy Within
- 6 The Making of Two Presidents and One Angel
- 7 Teaming Up Against Castro
- 8 Coincidence or Conspiracy?
- 9 Mob Wars and Paper-Napkin Contracts
- Part Two
- 10 The 1967 Revolt
- 11 Rebellion in Detroit
- 12 Tremors and Explosions—and a Week in the Life of a Steel Hauler
- 13 Averting the North-South Mob War
- 14 “Free Hoffa!”
- 15 The McMaster Task Force and the Nixon Plumbers
- 16 Rebel Hoffa and the 1974 Shutdown
- 17 The Blank Check
- 18 Living by the Sword
- 19 The Real Hoffa Legacy
- Postscript
- Afterword
- Image Gallery
- Reference Notes
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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