Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met. Their demands included a four-hour-per-day guarantee of hourly pay per twelve-hour shift for the platform workers. Fearing the loss of the crates of strawberries in the heat of the day, Kroger folded and acceded to young Jimmy Hoffa’s demands and gave the new one-company union a one-year charter.
Born on St. Valentine’s Day in 1913, Jimmy Hoffa was seven years older than Frank Sheeran. Yet both grew to manhood in the same Great Depression, a time when management normally held the upper hand and people struggled just to put food on the table. Jimmy Hoffa’s father, a coal miner, died when he was seven. His mother worked in an auto plant to support her children. Jimmy Hoffa quit school at age fourteen to go to work to help his mother.
Hoffa and his Strawberry Boys’ victory in 1932 was a rare labor victory in those days. In that same year a group of World War I veterans and their plight came to symbolize the powerlessness of the working man in the Depression. In 1932 thousands of veterans, tired of broken promises, marched on Washington and refused to leave the Mall until their promised bonuses, not due until 1945, were granted by Congress now when they needed them most. President Herbert Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to evict the Bonus Marchers by force, and MacArthur, astride a white horse, led an assault of troops, tanks, and tear gas against the veterans without giving them a chance to leave quietly. The U.S. Army opened fire on its own unarmed former soldiers, killing two and wounding several others, all veterans of a bloody world war that had ended fourteen years earlier, a so-called War to Save Democracy.
The next year, Kroger refused to negotiate a new contract, and Hoffa’s victory was short-lived. But on the strength of his stand with the Strawberry Boys, Jimmy Hoffa was recruited by Detroit’s Teamsters Local 299 as an organizer. Hoffa’s job was to encourage men to join the union and through solidarity and organization to better their lives and the lives of their families. Detroit was home to America’s auto industry. As the auto industry’s chief spokesman, Henry Ford’s position on the labor movement in general was that “labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth.”
In fighting such a monstrous evil as labor unions, companies believed any means were justified. Both big and small business had no compunction about hiring thugs and goons as strikebreakers to break the heads and the will of strikers and union organizers.
Once it is organized, a union’s only negotiating weapon is a strike, and a strike cannot succeed if a sufficient number of people show up for work and do their jobs. Because jobs were scarce during Hoffa’s rise, management had little difficulty hiring nonunion “scab” workers to replace striking union workers. When union strikers on the picket lines refused to allow nonunion scabs to cross the lines and go to work, management goons and thugs would wade into the picket line, clearing a path. Sicilian mobster Santo Perrone of Detroit provided hired muscle for Detroit’s management. Perrone sent Sicilian goons to break strikes in Detroit with billy clubs, while cops either looked the other way or helped the strikebreakers.
As Hoffa put it, “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it.” And on another occasion he said, “My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year.”
And on the other side of the ledger, unions like the Teamsters often employed their own muscle, their own reigns of terror, including bombings, arsons, beatings, and murders. The warfare and violence were not just between labor and management. It was often between rival unions vying for the same membership. Sadly, it was often violence directed at rank-and-file union members who urged democratic reform of their unions.
The alliances Hoffa made with mobsters around the country as he and his union rose together are now a matter of historical record. But in the 1950s it was a subject that was just beginning to be exposed to public light.
In May 1956, Victor Riesel, an investigative reporter for the daily New York Journal American, featured anti-Hoffa Teamsters on his daily radio show. Riesel had been crusading against the criminal element in labor unions. The night of the radio broadcast, Riesel stepped out of the famous Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway near Times Square and was approached on the sidewalk by a goon who threw a cup of acid in his face. Riesel was blinded by the acid’s effect on his eyes. It soon became obvious that the attack had been ordered by Hoffa ally and labor racketeer John Dioguardi, aka Johnny Dio. Dio was charged with ordering the vicious crime, but when the acid thrower was found dead, and other witnesses got the message and refused to cooperate, the charges were dropped.
The image of a blind Victor Riesel wearing dark glasses and appearing on television still courageously urging labor reform so outraged the nation that the U.S. Senate responded by conducting live televised hearings on the influence of racketeers on the labor movement. These hearings came to be known as the McClellan Committee hearings, named after the Arkansas senator, John L. McClellan, who presided over them. Future presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were members of the committee. The committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator was the future president’s younger brother and the nation’s future attorney general, Bobby Kennedy. As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy.
Johnny Dio took the Fifth Amendment on every question posed to him, including whether he had ever met Jimmy Hoffa. Because of his union position, Jimmy Hoffa could not take the Fifth Amendment without forfeiting his job. He answered question after question with doubletalk and a memory incapable of being refreshed. When confronted with wiretap tape recordings of conversations he had had with Johnny Dio, Hoffa could not remember ever asking Johnny Dio to do any favors for him. At one point Hoffa told Bobby Kennedy regarding the tapes, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.”
There would have been considerably more outrage had the public known what Hoffa had told his staff when he had heard about Riesel’s blinding: “That son of a bitch Victor Riesel. He just had some acid thrown on him. It’s too bad he didn’t have it thrown on the goddamn hands he types with.”
When asked by Bobby Kennedy where he’d gotten $20,000 in cash to invest in a business venture, Hoffa replied, “From individuals.” When asked to name them Hoffa said, “Offhand, that particular amount of money I borrowed I don’t know at this particular moment, but the record of my loans, which I requested, I have, and out of all the moneys I loaned over this period of time I went into these ventures.”
Well, that explained that.
Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa “the most powerful man in the country next to the president.”
Part of Hoffa’s mystique when he became famous in the fifties came from his in-your-face rebel tough-guy image on television. He was antiestablishment before people used that word. The closest thing today to what Hoffa’s public image was then might be some heavy metal band. There are simply no public figures today who so challenge the elite business and government establishment and so champion the working class as Jimmy Hoffa did almost daily and with arrogance.
Television was in its infancy when Jimmy Hoffa became president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on October 14, 1957, a month before Apalachin. Hoffa was a frequent guest celebrity on the news talk shows of the day, such as Meet the Press. Microphones were stuck in his face wherever he went, and if Jimmy Hoffa called a press conference the world press showed up.
Jimmy Hoffa had two philosophies that guided his actions. One way or another he expressed them daily and often through word or deed.
The first of these philosophies was “the ends,” the second was “the means.” The “ends” was his labor philosophy. Hoffa often said that his labor philosophy was simple: “The working man in America is being shortchanged every day in America.” The “means” was his second philosophy and can be summed up by a remark he made to Bobby Kennedy at a private party in which they found themselves together: “I do to others what they do to me, only worse.” Simply put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish it.
His popularity with his own membership reflected their willingness to reap the tangible rewards he obtained for them in wages, vacations, pensions, and health and welfare benefits. As Hoffa told Johnny Dio in one of those wiretapped conversations that he couldn’t remember: “…treat them right and you don’t have to worry.”
Although others may have shared his zeal to improve the lives of American working men and women and their families, Jimmy Hoffa had the power to do something about it. His ardent supporter Frank Sheeran said that “Jimmy Hoffa was ahead of his time when it came to labor. There were only two things that mattered in his life: the union and his family. Believe it or not, as strong as he was for the union, his wife and his daughter and his son came first to him. Unions to him were a thing that helped not just the men, but it helped the men’s families, too. They talk all about family values these days. Jimmy was ahead of his time on that, too. Those two things were his whole life.”
Jimmy Hoffa once said to Frank Sheeran enthusiastically, “If you got it, Irish, a truck driver brought it to you. Don’t ever forget that. That’s the whole secret to what we do.” That “you got it” part covered food, clothing, medicine, building materials, fuel for home and industry, just about everything. Because a nationwide trucking strike could literally starve and shut down the nation, Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters “the most powerful institution in the country aside from the United States government…. and as Mr. Hoffa operates it, this is a conspiracy of evil.” Senator John L. McClellan took the image a step further. McClellan called “the Teamsters under Mr. Hoffa’s leadership” a “superpower in this country—a power greater than the people and greater than the government.”
From the time in 1957 that his predecessor and mentor Dave Beck abdicated the presidency and went to jail for embezzling $370,000 from the Western Conference of Teamsters, to finance, among other things, the building of a house for his son, the new president Jimmy Hoffa wielded his power absolutely. Perhaps it is true that all power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If it is so, Jimmy Hoffa was not apologetic about the criminal records of the men with whom he allied himself to accomplish his goals.
Hoffa once announced to a television audience: “Now, when you talk about the question of hoodlums and gangsters, the first people that hire hoodlums and gangsters are employers. If there are any illegal forces in the community, he’ll use them, strong-arm and otherwise. And so if you’re going to stay in the business of organizing the unorganized, maintaining the union you have, then you better have a resistance.”
Hoffa’s “resistance” consisted of close alliances with the most powerful godfathers of the newly uncovered, secret tangled web of Apalachin gangsters who had carved America into twenty-four territories of organized crime and who ran their organizations (called families) with a military structure. They were “bosses,” the godfathers who were the equivalent of generals; “underbosses” and “consiglieres,” who were the equivalent of top brass; “capos,” who were the equivalent of captains; and “soldiers,” who, as soldiers, followed the orders from upstairs. In addition, there were associates like Frank Sheeran who had whatever status they earned, but who were not permitted an official rank in the Italian families’ military structure.
From the historical record there can be little doubt that Hoffa knew full well that the vast majority of mobsters who constituted his “resistance” had little regard for his ideals. Johnny Dio himself owned and operated a nonunion garment industry dress shop. Many of these dark figures looked upon unions as just another means to aid them in the commission of more crime, and to aid them in the accumulation of more wealth and greater power.
Meanwhile, in speech after speech to his rank and file, Hoffa told his brother Teamsters, “All this hocus-pocus about racketeers and crooks is a smokescreen to carry you back to the days when they could drop you in the scrap heap like they do a worn-out truck.”
On the other hand, in his book, The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy wrote about his experiences and observations as chief counsel for the McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime and labor unions, saying: “We saw and questioned some of the nation’s most notorious gangsters and racketeers. But there was no group that better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union.”
Twentieth Century Fox commissioned a screenplay of Bobby Kennedy’s book. Budd Schulberg, the celebrated writer of On the Waterfront, wrote the screenplay, but the project was abandoned by the studio. Columbia Pictures then expressed interest in picking up the project but abandoned it as well. In an introduction he wrote to a 1972 book written about Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy’s chief aide, Walter Sheridan, Budd Schulberg explained why the two studios abandoned the project: “A labor tough walked right into the office of the new head of [Twentieth Century Fox] to warn him that if the picture was ever made [Teamster] drivers would refuse to deliver the prints to the theaters. And if they got there by any other means, stink bombs would drive out the audiences.”
This threat to Twentieth Century Fox was backed by a warning letter to Columbia Pictures from Teamsters lawyer Bill Bufalino, who at the time was also Hoffa’s lawyer. Budd Schulberg wrote about Bufalino’s letter: “It stated flatly that Twentieth Century Fox had wisely abandoned the project as soon as all the possible eventualities had been pointed out to them, and he felt confident that Columbia would be smart enough to do likewise.”
chapter twelve
“I Heard You Paint Houses”
“My restless streak never went away. And it seems like my whole life when I could still get around pretty good on my legs I had a lot of gypsy in me.
Working out of the union hall on a day-by-day basis with no commitment gave me the freedom to be wherever I needed to be on any given day. On the days I had a downtown odd job, I just didn’t bother going down to the union hall to get a truck. Little by little as my reputation increased I did more and more odd jobs downtown. I supported myself, and I dropped by and paid support to Mary and the girls depending on how much I had that week. Everything I did downtown was a cash business; even the dance halls paid me in cash.
If I had a truck for the day, however, there was no cash attached to it. You couldn’t do any larceny on the side with a truck you only had for a day. You needed more than a day here and there to establish a system, like the hindquarter thing with Food Fair. So going downtown and hanging around the bar was like shaping up for extra cash.
I learned the ropes from Skinny Razor and a lot of his people. It was like they were the combat veterans in this line of work and I was the new recruit just coming in to the outfit. In people’s eyes I appeared to be closer to Angelo and his people than I was to Russell. But my allegiance was to Russell. I just saw more of Angelo and his people, because he was downtown and Russell was mostly upstate. Angelo said he loaned me to Russell, but it was really the other way around. Russell loaned me to Angelo. Russell thought it would be good for me to learn and earn downtown with Angelo’s people. One day Russell called me his Irishman, and then everybody else downtown started calling me Irish or the Irishman instead of Cheech.
After the Whispers matter I started having a piece available to me for whatever purpose at all times. If I was driving I had one in the car’s glove compartment. One night, coming home around two in the morning from the Nixon Ballroom,
I stopped at a red light on a dark corner on Spring Garden Street where the streetlight was busted. I was alone and my window was down. This young black guy came up waving a gun under my nose. I figured he’s the one who must have put the streetlight out on that corner by breaking the lightbulb. It was his corner. He had a partner standing behind him for backup without an obvious piece on him. The one with the gun told me he wanted my wallet. I told him, “Sure, but it’s in my glove compartment.” I told him to “settle down” and “don’t do anything rash, young fellow.” I reached across into the glove compartment and took hold of my snub-nosed .38, which the bandit couldn’t see at all because my broad shoulders were blocking his view. And then when I turned back to him he couldn’t see it because of my big hand and because I swept around as fast as the tail on a kangaroo. He had his empty hand out for what he thought was going to be my wallet. I shot him in the kneecap, and when he started to double down I shot him in his other kneecap. In my rearview mirror while I pulled away I could see him rolling around in the street, and I could see his buddy running straight down Spring Garden Street. Something told me his buddy wasn’t running for help or for more backup. Something told me the one rolling on the ground would never do anymore running of his own. From now on every time he took a step when he walked he’d feel it in what was left of his kneecaps and he’d think of me.
I Heard You Paint Houses Page 11