There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The link between organized crime and the longshoremen’s union of New York was central to both Malcolm Johnson’s and Estes Kefauver’s work, and of course raised uncomfortable questions about organized labor generally. It was Robert Kennedy who would investigate this connection more closely. The inquiry he led, known as the McClellan Committee after its chairman, Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas, was sparked by an incident in New York City on the evening of April 5, 1956, when New York Post labor columnist Victor Riesel, who had just left Lindy’s Steak House, was attacked by a group of men who tossed acid in his face. The assault came only a few days after Riesel had published a column criticizing New York’s trucking and clothing industries for alleged connections to organized crime; Riesel had named John Dioguardi, known as Johnny Dio, a union officer and racketeer in the garment business who’d already done a stint at Sing Sing, as one of the more prominent culprits in the scheme.

  Convinced that Dio had hired the hoodlums who had attacked him, Riesel appeared on the network television program Meet the Press wearing sunglasses to protect his injured eyes from the studio lights, and bravely related what had happened to him on the sidewalk outside Lindy’s. Alluding to the protracted inquiry by Senator Joseph McCarthy into alleged Communist influence in America, Riesel asked why it was that a government committee could investigate a foreign threat such as Communism and not a serious homegrown one like labor racketeering. The vicious attack he described on national television stirred anger, prompting public figures including Vice President Richard Nixon and New York attorney general Jacob Javits to denounce the criminal underworld responsible for it. Talk spread in Congress of an inquiry into labor corruption and legislation to curtail it, while President Eisenhower appealed to the AFL-CIO to make necessary reforms.

  George Meany was quick to respond, vowing that “just as we have defeated the enemies without, who tried so desperately to destroy the labor movement, so will we defeat the enemies from within whose wrongdoing can undermine the effectiveness of everything we are trying to accomplish.”92 The AFL-CIO’s Ethical Practices Committee was ordered to expand its staff to confront the dilemma, as others braced to deal with what loomed as a major public image crisis for the federation and all organized labor.

  It was Clark Mollenhoff, a lawyer and investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register-Tribune, who approached Robert Kennedy about the possibility of following up on Riesel’s suggestion for a formal inquiry into labor racketeering.93 Kennedy was then serving as counsel to the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, which had been recently looking into corruption on the part of suppliers and low-level government officials in the clothing-procurement system of the armed forces. The clothing inquiry had already revealed the participation of gangsters in the making and shipping of military uniforms, and Mollenhoff suggested to Kennedy that it might be possible to redirect the committee’s efforts to labor-related corruption.

  Mollenhoff outlined for Kennedy the legal rationale for such a probe. By law, labor unions were required to submit annual financial accounts to the secretary of labor; but the reporting was very hit-or-miss and often incomplete; the Labor Department lacked the will and the manpower to scrutinize these submissions in any detail. All information the reports held was considered confidential, unavailable to the public. Mollenhoff suggested, however, that as union financial holdings were tax-exempt funds, any potential inconsistencies could be viewed as questionable dealings of interest to the government, and that an inquiry into the administration of these funds would be well within the purview of the committee since its mandate was to investigate government waste and malfeasance.

  Kennedy was intrigued by the idea. He had been a key aide and Senate staff investigator for the long-running anti-Communist probe headed by Senator McCarthy. While he admired McCarthy as a person, he had, along with the rest of the country, become disenchanted with McCarthy’s methods, and in any case by summer 1956 the zeal for hunting real or imaginary Communists in the federal government appeared to have exhausted itself. With McCarthy it had never been clear if he was sincere in his demands for reform, or simply attracted by the oversized megaphone his investigative powers gave him. With Kennedy there was no such question. A devout Catholic and ardent patriot who believed the country had a duty not to look away from its own lapses in judgment or conduct, the young congressional counsel was as close as Washington came to a bona fide moral crusader. He agreed to turn his scrutiny toward organized labor.

  His first step was to visit several cities where labor corruption had been reported; accompanying him was former FBI agent and accounting expert Carmine Bellino. Kennedy and Bellino, on Mollenhoff’s advice (and benefiting from the advice of tipster Eddie Cheyfitz, a disgruntled former Teamsters’ publicity agent), focused primarily on the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, with 1.6 million members the nation’s largest trade union, and on meeting journalists and police knowledgeable about its activities. In the course of their travels, Kennedy heard enough tales of extortion, thievery, and violence to more than confirm the claims he’d heard; indeed he was shocked. According to historian Thaddeus Russell, Kennedy saw the evidence of corruption touching the labor movement as so extensive as to represent “a crisis of both manhood and spirituality in American society.” Organized labor, “a movement of the righteous poor,” Kennedy realized, had been thoroughly infiltrated “by men who were degraded and emasculated by the sin of covetousness.”94

  More important than Kennedy’s outrage at this early stage of the inquiry were the unique skills of his traveling companion. For Bellino, a table full of canceled checks, ledgers, and scraps of paper offered a forensic key to Teamsters wrongdoing, and the accountant confirmed to Kennedy that deceit and phony transactions appeared to abound. However, as a veteran of several federal investigations into large companies or organizations that cooked their books, he knew it could be difficult to tie the suspicious financial data to specific individuals, or to get such persons to incriminate themselves or others in the limited prosecutorial atmosphere of a congressional hearing. “Unless you are prepared to go all the way, don’t start it,” Bellino cautioned as the men flew home to Washington. “We’re going all the way,” Kennedy replied.95

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  THE FIRST TARGET OF the probe was Teamsters president Dave Beck, the former head of the union’s Western Conference who had taken over the IBT in 1952 from the union’s aging founder, Daniel J. Tobin. The legendary “Old Danny Boy” having held office for forty-five years, Beck found plenty of room for innovation; he introduced new management methods, pumped up membership rolls, and offered a personal style far different from his venerable predecessor, becoming, as New York columnist Murray Kempton observed, “the first national labor leader who unashamedly talks the language of a Chamber of Commerce secretary.”96 With $5 million from the Teamsters treasury, Beck oversaw construction of an impressive new five-story union headquarters in Washington with a five-hundred-seat theater, extra-large meeting rooms, and an office for its top executive that struck Kennedy, upon his initial visit, as being “as big as it possibly could have been without being an auditorium.”97 Not for nothing, it appeared, had Beck become known to Teamsters rank and file as “His Majesty, the Wheel.”

  Kennedy and Bellino suspected Beck of playing fast and loose with union funds, making questionable purchases, often by siphoning money through a Chicago labor relations intermediary named Nathan W. Shefferman, a longtime union-buster for Sears, Roebuck and Company. Beck had spent union money on everything from home appliances to boats, as well as lavish renovations to his family’s house in Seattle; one set of receipts indicated he had dipped into Teamsters’ coffers to pay for kneesocks and a bow tie. In another instance he had looted money from a memorial fund that had been established to support the widow of a close colleague. The only explanation for such wanton abuse of trust, Kennedy concluded, was that Beck was “motivated by uncontrollable greed.”98

  Instead of using the standing Sen
ate Permanent Committee on Investigations to examine abuses in organized labor, the Senate had created a new panel, the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, to be chaired by John L. McClellan of Arkansas and endowed with an appropriation of $350,000. Kennedy was chief counsel. In addition to McClellan, the other Democrats on board were Sam Ervin, Patrick McNamara, and John F. Kennedy, who joined reluctantly but at his brother’s insistence in order to keep Strom Thurmond, “noted then, as later, for regressive views on all questions,” off the committee.99 Republicans included Irving Ives, Karl Mundt, Barry Goldwater, and Joseph McCarthy. It was Robert Kennedy, however, who was expected to lead the inquiry, which would be televised.

  In early 1957, after Kennedy issued a subpoena for Beck to appear before the panel, the Teamsters president conveniently left the country to spend several weeks in the Caribbean—he claimed the extended vacation was for his wife’s health—and when he finally presented himself in Washington it was only to refuse cooperation with the inquiry by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. George Meany, with the concurrence of Walter Reuther, had warned that any union official taking the Fifth in order to evade the committee’s questions would be expelled from the AFL-CIO, but Beck, by his stonewalling, seemed willing to incur Meany’s disapproval. One day he invoked the amendment from the witness chair no fewer than sixty-five times. AFL-CIO executives were unamused, assuring reporter A. H. Raskin that “Beck will wish he were back before Senator McClellan by the time Meany finishes with him at the next council meeting.”100 What neither Beck nor his lawyers likely could have known, in that relatively innocent age of emerging mass media, was the extent to which invoking the Fifth Amendment repeatedly on television, before millions of viewers, amounted to a plea of guilty. Forced to resign his Teamsters’ post, “His Majesty, the Wheel” was later convicted of grand larceny and tax evasion and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary.101

  Beck would prove something of a mild tune-up for Kennedy and the McClellan Committee, for waiting in the wings—both to assume Beck’s job and to sit in the Senate panel’s witness chair—was James “Jimmy” Hoffa, one of the scrappiest characters in organized labor. The son of an Indiana coal miner who died when James was four, he and his family relocated to Detroit, where the young man left school after the seventh grade to work on the loading dock of a grocery warehouse. He led his first strike at age nineteen and ultimately brought his three-hundred-man union into Teamsters Local 299. Eventually heading that local, Hoffa ascended rapidly in the Teamsters hierarchy, becoming a protégé of Farrell Dobbs, one of the leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters strike of 1934 who, as a national IBT official, had been instrumental in extending Teamsters membership to long-haul truck drivers. In an era when long-distance freight transport was leaving the railroads for trucking, this policy had added tens of thousands of members to the Teamsters’ ranks even as it displeased Dan Tobin, who considered the Dobbs-led expansion as little more than “chartering the riffraff.” Dobbs’s efforts were in step with the all-inclusive mood of 1930s industrial unionism, however, and he had the support of younger colleagues such as Hoffa.

  The expansion gave the Teamsters enormous organizing strength, because by controlling over-the-road trucking as well as local delivery-men and warehousemen, they could essentially bring local, regional, or even national commerce to a halt. “I don’t care what kind of strike you’ve got,” Hoffa once remarked. “Once you organize the road, the city, the warehouses, nobody can whip the Teamsters, nobody.”102 Hoffa had been investigated in the 1940s for strong-arm operations involving Detroit milk truck drivers, jukebox businesses, and vending machine firms, but that had barely slowed him down. His and Dobbs’s efforts to grow the Teamsters had led to such expansive membership growth, the IBT’s welfare and pension funds grew to almost $250 million, making the Teamsters the largest, wealthiest union in America.

  Hoffa was also no stranger to Capitol Hill, having recently been the subject of a House investigation led by Representatives Clare Hoffman of Michigan and Wint Smith of Kansas into the misuse of some of those vast IBT resources. It was alleged that Hoffa, in a bid to gain entrée to Chicago’s powerful criminal underworld, had handed management of a Teamsters Health and Welfare Fund to a start-up insurance agency run by Allen and Rose Dorfman, relations of Paul “Red” Dorfman, a suspected organized crime figure who headed a large Chicago trash haulers’ union. The Dorfmans, who prior to receiving the Teamsters fund had no experience in insurance, reaped as much as $3 million in fees and commissions from the fund, half of which came from overbilling and excessive fees.

  The Hoffman-Smith inquiry was mysteriously terminated before it could complete its work, probably under pressure from the Republican Party, which was eager to win IBT support for an upcoming election in Michigan, but it succeeded in creating the distinct impression that there was something unwholesome about the Teamsters. The exposure also introduced Jimmy Hoffa to the nation as a tough-talking, probably corrupt urban unionist. But what differentiated him from other compromised labor leaders was his style and popularity. No allegation of wrongdoing seemed capable of diminishing his star, particularly as far as the Teamsters rank and file was concerned. Unlike the aristocratic and remote Dave Beck, or the irreproachable “founding father,” Daniel Tobin, Hoffa was a mid-twentieth-century workingman’s workingman, at home in the company of the most road-hardened drivers; his brashness, and the fact that his success had been self-made, endeared him to his followers. The grueling legal problems he encountered, even as they exposed his abuse of his membership’s trust, seemed to only inspire greater devotion.

  Hoffa came up for scrutiny by the McClellan Committee due to his connection to Johnny Dio, the New York garment business racketeer suspected of ordering the assault on Victor Riesel. Dio was believed to have helped Hoffa maintain paper locals in New York City—local unions with no actual members that were used to swing control of union elections. When Dio himself arrived at the Capitol to testify, he managed to make headlines before uttering a word. Irritated when news photographers came too close to snap his picture, he erupted in anger, striking one of them and demanding, “Don’t you know I have a family?” A photograph of Dio, arm cocked, cigarette hanging from his lips, looking cruelly arrogant and abundantly more gangster than labor leader, ran in the nation’s newspapers the next day. It was an exceedingly poor advertisement for the image of organized labor.103

  Hoffa, in contrast to the excitable Dio, exuded confidence as he took the witness stand to face Kennedy’s questions. He knew the committee had limited authority and that, like the Hoffman-Smith investigation, its findings would either be marginalized by backroom political maneuvering or it would simply run out of steam. Television cameras notwithstanding, most of America, Hoffa believed, would not have any sustained interest in the bookkeeping practices of a truckers’ union.

  IN 1951, IN AN ATTEMPT TO CAPITALIZE on the popularity of the televised Kefauver hearings, Movietone News wove together some of the more sensational excerpts from the hearings and released a fifty-two-minute theatrical film titled The Kefauver Crime Investigation. Box office results were unimpressive, an early lesson for movie executives of television’s superior ability to capture live reality. Hollywood, however, would have the final say, for a film version of the New York longshoremen’s corruption saga Malcolm Johnson had uncovered, On the Waterfront (1954), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando, became one of the decade’s most acclaimed and successful movie releases. In telling a story taken from the day’s headlines, screenwriter Budd Schulberg crafted a vivid morality play about an imperfect but decent workingman, dockworker Terry Malloy (Brando), struggling against a union leadership turned to greed and brutality. Loyal to his friends among the longshoremen but bitter about the heavy-handed tactics of union boss Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J. Cobb and based on the character of Johnny Dio, Malloy ultimately shuns the corrupt waterfront and testifies to a gover
nment commission.

  Using the piers and factories of Hoboken, New Jersey, as his backdrop, Kazan captured the grit and moral precariousness of the longshoremen’s world, one of kickbacks, shakedowns, pilferage, and racketeering, where violence and intimidation upheld a frontier hierarchy. Yet On the Waterfront suggests an essential purity to workingmen and organized labor, and offers a parable of redemption. Malloy eventually works up the courage to confront Friendly, cleansing himself of the evil that has insinuated itself in the union; he takes a brutal beating from Friendly’s goons, but then, in a Christlike allegory, manages to stand and walk haltingly, but resolutely, toward his job, leading his fellow workers.

  The film was a popular and especially a critical success, winning no fewer than eight Academy Awards and compelling further attention to the need to root out the cancer destroying American labor unions. One fan of the film was Robert Kennedy, who likely identified with the film’s moralizing priest, Father Barry (Karl Malden), who seeks to guide the confused Terry Malloy.104

  A less acclaimed film in a similar vein was the noir feature Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957), in which a young district attorney, William Keating (Richard Egan), who bore a distinct physical resemblance to Bobby Kennedy, attempts to penetrate the secret world of waterfront labor racketeers. The story was based on the 1947 killing of stevedore Andy Hintz by racketeer John “Cockeye” Dunn, who went to the electric chair for the crime. Keating—whose name was that of an actual New York district attorney helpful to Malcolm Johnson’s reportage—attempts to prosecute the murder of Solly Pitts (Mickey Shaughnessy), a respected dock leader who had dared defy the hoodlums preying on his labor union. Venturing onto the troubled docks, Keating doesn’t hesitate to use his fists to advance the cause of justice; his greater struggle is to convince Pitts’s widow and his own supervisors to find the courage to stand up against the influence of the waterfront gangs and testify against them in court. The more profound danger to America is not criminal racketeers and weak labor unions, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue teaches, but society’s apathy and fear.