On August 19, 1971, the day before Jimmy Hoffa’s rehearing before the parole board, Frank Fitzsimmons held a press conference and praised President Nixon’s economic package as good for the country and good for labor. All the other labor union leaders in the nation who had taken a position, especially AFL-CIO president George Meany, had already come out strongly against Nixon’s economic plans.
The next day, August 20, 1971, James P. Hoffa and his client did not get the reception from the parole board that they had been led to believe they would get. Jimmy Hoffa’s resignations from his union offices were greeted with a yawn. James P. Hoffa was questioned about the job he held with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, as if his job had any relevance to Jimmy Hoffa’s plans for living if paroled. Next, James P. Hoffa was probed about his mother’s job with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ political action committee DRIVE (Democratic Republican Independent Voter Education). When the recently retired Jimmy Hoffa settled his future monthly pension payments for present value, he received a lump sum of $1.7 million. As that figure was certain to irk Sally Bugs’s boss Tony Pro in view of Pro’s jailhouse request of Hoffa for help on his pension, the size of Jimmy’s lump sum irked the parole board. That topic was explored by the board in hostile language and tone. Finally, Jimmy Hoffa’s connections to organized crime were explored in great detail, as if somehow the board were now shocked by it, simply shocked. Despite having voted in July to grant a rehearing on the “new evidence” of Jimmy Hoffa’s retirement from all of his union offices and the “new evidence” of his plans to lecture and teach, the parole board voted unanimously to turn down his request for parole. Hoffa was told he could reapply the following year, in June 1972, coincidentally the month and year of the Watergate burglary that brought down Richard Nixon and sent Attorney General John Mitchell and several other White House staff members to jail.
What were the grim possibilities that the “Get Hoffa Out of Jail Squad” were forced to face and to explore? Had Frank Fitzsimmons orchestrated an elaborate scheme to trick Jimmy Hoffa into resigning from every single one of his many union offices so that Jimmy Hoffa would not be eligible to run for IBT president from jail in July 1971? Had Jimmy Hoffa been led to believe that if he abandoned the idea of running from jail in July 1971 he would gain his freedom from jail in August 1971? Had Hoffa been led to believe that by resigning from his union offices he would be giving the parole board and the Nixon administration a face-saving excuse for paroling him? Did a man who was famous for not compromising fall into this trap out of a desire to return to his heartsick wife and family, to whom he was devoted? Did he fall into this trap because he trusted and believed that with his freedom he could ease back into union positions a little at a time and take back the presidency at the 1976 convention—or sooner if a weak and cowardly Fitzsimmons were literally strong-armed out of office? Had Jimmy Hoffa been outsmarted by the likes of Frank Fitzsimmons for all the world to see? Nixon, Fitzsimmons, and Mitchell all seemed to be playing the same hand, and they seemed to be holding all the aces.
What was Jimmy Hoffa going to get for his money and his support of President Nixon, now that Nixon’s parole board had slammed the window shut on his fingers?
At a Labor Day rally in Detroit, President Frank Fitzsimmons publicly urged his new friend President Richard M. Nixon to pardon Jimmy Hoffa.
On December 16, 1971, with no fanfare and bypassing all the normal channels, attorney Morris Shenker filed a petition for a pardon with the White House. Instead of the petition going through the Department of Justice for a response, and for input from the prosecutors and the FBI, and going to the two sentencing judges for their input as the procedures in effect for years required, the petition was marked “approved” by Attorney General John Mitchell.
“I went up to Lewisburg to see Jimmy just before Christmas. Morrie Shenker was there with the pardon papers that Nixon was going to sign. I was at another table with a kid. A guard looked the other way and they passed the papers to me as a matter of courtesy, and I read the papers. It said that Jimmy could get out with his good time and all in November 1975, but Nixon was letting him out now. It didn’t say one word about Jimmy not being able to run for office until 1980. I can assure you that I would have picked that up right away. Jimmy was already planning to run in 1976. I might not have a lot of education, but I had been reading union contracts and legal documents for a living for many years. I had read hundreds of documents that were far more complicated than that pardon. All it said was that Jimmy was getting out, finally. We were happy people in that lunchroom, and after a lot of double-crossing by Partin and Fitzsimmons and Nixon and Mitchell, Jimmy was finally getting what he paid for. He was getting out for Christmas. The only thing we were doing was talking about Jimmy taking a vacation in Florida for a few months to get squared away before he went back into action. There was no controversy in Lewisburg that day.
The controversy started when Jimmy got out and went to Detroit and they handed him the final papers signed by Nixon and we all got a good lesson when we saw in plain English that the final double-cross was in. Jimmy couldn’t run until 1980. He would miss the 1976 election. If he had stayed in and did all his time he’d have been out in 1975 in plenty of time for the 1976 convention. This was before Watergate, so who knew the thieves we were dealing with.”
An Executive Grant of Clemency reducing Hoffa’s sentence from thirteen years to six and a half years was signed by Richard Nixon in record time on December 23, 1971. With his good-time credit the reduction to six and a half years guaranteed Hoffa’s immediate release. That same day Hoffa walked out of the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and flew to his married daughter Barbara’s home in St. Louis to be with his family for Christmas. From there he returned to his home in Detroit to register with the federal parole and probation office, as Hoffa still would be “on paper,” that is, on parole, until the full six and a half years was up in March 1973. From Detroit Hoffa would be heading to Florida for a three-month respite. While in Detroit, Hoffa and his supporters, including Frank Sheeran, read the following language in the pardon from Richard Nixon:
…the said James R. Hoffa not engage in direct or indirect management of any labor organization prior to March 6, 1980, and if the aforesaid condition is not fulfilled this commutation will be null and void in its entirety…
On January 5, 1972, Jimmy Hoffa flew to Florida to his Blair House apartment in Miami Beach. He was greeted at the airport by Frank Ragano as a sign of respect from Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, who could not show their faces for many reasons. Perhaps the most important reason was that a federal parolee is not permitted to be in the company of organized crime figures or convicted felons. On February 12, 1972, on ABC’s Issues and Answers, Jimmy Hoffa said that he personally would be supporting Richard Nixon in 1972. Until his parole period was over in March 1973, he was going to go along to get along. Jimmy Hoffa had had enough experience by now that he did not trust that Richard Nixon’s administration would play fair with his parole if he provoked them by going after Fitzsimmons. Jimmy Hoffa was not going to provoke them.
On July 17, 1972, a month after the Watergate burglary, Frank Fitzsimmons’s executive board formally endorsed President Richard M. Nixon for reelection in November by a vote of 19 to 1. The one vote belonged to Harold Gibbons, the vice president who had enraged Hoffa by flying the flag at half-staff in honor of the fallen President John F. Kennedy. Mrs. Patricia Fitzsimmons, Frank’s wife, was appointed by Nixon to serve on the Arts Committee of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
When he was ready, Jimmy Hoffa’s plan of attack would be centered on a constitutional challenge to the condition to his pardon. His civil-rights attorneys would argue that the president exceeded his authority by adding a condition to the pardon. Under the Constitution a president has the power to pardon or not pardon, but he has no power, express or implied, to pardon in such a way that his pardon could later be rescinded and the re
cipient returned to jail. A conditional pardon would give a president more power than the Founding Fathers intended he have.
Furthermore, this particular restriction added a punishment of not being allowed to manage a union. Hoffa had had no such restriction even while in jail. Although the rules of the jail made it difficult to do, it was not forbidden. This new punishment had not been given to Hoffa at the time of his two sentencings, and the president did not have the power to increase a punishment handed down by a sentencing judge.
In addition, this condition violated Hoffa’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and of assembly by putting off-limits a valid and legitimate forum for the exercise of these freedoms.
However, because he hated jail and feared that the Nixon administration would more closely monitor his parole if he filed such a lawsuit, Hoffa played ’possum until his parole expired and he went “off paper” in March 1973. For the time being Fitzsimmons could relax.
A lot of allegations and finger-pointing were to come out of the Nixon White House on the topic of how the restriction ended up in the pardon. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate witness against his confederates, testified that it had been his idea to stick the restriction language in at the last minute. He testified that he was merely being a good lawyer, because when Mitchell asked him to prepare the papers Mitchell casually mentioned that Hoffa had orally agreed to stay out of union activity until 1980.
The other White House counsel and future Watergate jailbird to be suspected of complicity in the restriction language caper was attorney Charles Colson, special counsel to the president, and the man in charge of the infamous Nixon enemy list. John Dean testified that Colson asked him to initiate an IRS investigation into the finances of Harold Gibbons, the only member of the Teamsters executive board not to vote to endorse Nixon for reelection. A memo from Colson to Dean was produced asking for the audit and calling Gibbons an “all-out enemy.” Jimmy Hoffa testified in a deposition, “I blame one man [for the restriction on my pardon]…Charles Colson.” Colson took the Fifth on the topic during the Watergate hearings, although he did admit discussing the pardon with Fitzsimmons before it was granted. It is hard to imagine that the two men did not discuss something as important as the restriction.
Was the restriction a result of Dean being a good lawyer? Was it Colson and Mitchell ordering the language in such a way that Dean thought it was his own idea to add it? If the topic of a restriction were phrased the right way by his superior, any prudent young lawyer would have added the language on his own. John Mitchell had been a Wall Street lawyer; he knew how to massage an associate.
Shortly after Colson resigned from the White House, and before he went to jail, he returned to private practice. Frank Fitzsimmons took the lucrative IBT legal contract away from Edward Bennett Williams and gave it to Charles Colson, thereby ensuring Colson of a $100,000-a-year retainer, minimum.
Since those heady days, Charles Colson had changed his life and founded a Christian organization that sponsors prison visits and encourages the inmates to follow a spiritual path to redemption. While at Delaware’s largest prison to interview Frank Sheeran or some other client I saw a repentant and dignified Charles Colson leaving the prison after visiting with the inmates, Bible in hand.
Jimmy Hoffa, meanwhile, bided his time. Hoffa was going to take no chance that he ever would be sent back to prison. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I spent fifty-eight months in Lewisburg, and I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You’re like an animal in a cage and you’re treated like one.”
chapter twenty-four
He Needed a Favor and That Was That
“During that first year when he got out, Jimmy had to get permission to go anywhere. He was not allowed to go to union conferences, but he’d get permission to go to California or wherever for some other reason. He’d stay in the same hotel as all the other guys, and he’d run into them in the lobby. I guess you might say Jimmy was lecturing and teaching.
Jimmy was doing a lot of under-the-table campaigning, not that he had to. He was doing a lot of stuff on the telephone. It was more like keeping everybody in line and letting them know he was coming back so they didn’t get tempted to go over to Fitz.
I flew down to Florida to see Jimmy for a couple of days at his condominium. I called him from the airport while I was waiting for my rental car. He told me Jo wasn’t down there with him and that I should pick up some chili dogs from a Lums along the way so we could have a treat.
After we ate our dogs, we talked about John Mitchell resigning as attorney general to run Nixon’s reelection campaign. With that CREEP [Committee to Reelect the President] angle going for them, those boys were going to have a license to print money.
Jimmy told me he was going to get even with Fitz and Tony Pro for that restriction. He said he was definitely coming back. He was already lining up a lawsuit against the restriction, and I told Jimmy I wanted to be a party to the lawsuit. I told him that John McCullough with the roofer’s union and some other people in Philly were putting together a testimonial dinner for me. I asked him if he’d be the featured speaker. Jimmy asked me to get them to hold off on the testimonial until he was off paper and then he’d be honored to speak.
At this time Jimmy assumed that he was very strong with the alleged mob. He had Russ, Carlos, Santo, Giancana, Chicago, and Detroit. While he was in Lewisburg he got close with Carmine “The Cigar” Galante, from Queens, the boss of the Bonnano crime family. Galante was very rough. He took no prisoners.
Jimmy thought the only problem he had with their culture was with Tony Pro on account of their beef in school. He figured Pro was supporting Fitz so Fitz would help Pro get his lump-sum settlement with the pension fund and get his mil. Speaking mostly about Pro and Fitz, Jimmy said, “They will pay.” Jimmy told me he was going to send a message to Fitz. Jimmy told me he was going to have Pro taken care of. He didn’t specify, but I assume that taking care of Pro would be Fitz’s message.
“Something has to be done about Pro,” he said.
“You get the go ahead and I’ll do his house,” I said. “I got a good man who can drive me. The Redhead.”
“I’ll be the driver,” Jimmy said. “I want him to know it was me.”
When he said he’d be the driver, he took the serious part out of the subject. After he said that, I thought he was puffing, just letting off steam. You don’t use a driver that’s got a face as well known as Milton Berle’s.
The Redhead already had proved himself as a stand-up guy when it came to driving. A little while before I sat down with Jimmy in Florida that spring of 1972 and ate chili dogs, The Redhead drove me on a matter.
Late one night I got a call from Russ to get my little brother and go up to see The Redhead. The little brother was a gun. For something like this I’d have two little brothers. I’d have one in my waistband and a backup piece in my ankle holster. You’d use something like a .32 and a .38 revolver because you wanted more stopping power than you could get with a .22. You certainly didn’t want a silencer, which mostly only goes with a .22. You wanted to do some noisy stray shooting all over the place to send the witnesses for cover. But not the kind of noise that a .45 makes, which you could hear in a patrol car blocks away. So you wouldn’t use a couple of .45s, even though a .45 has first-class stopping power. Besides, a .45 is not accurate beyond twenty-five feet.
When I hung up the phone and got in my car I didn’t know who Russ had in mind, but he needed a favor and that was that. They don’t give you much advance notice. They have people that follow a guy. They have people that call in tips. They have people that tap his phone, and they figure out when he’s likely to be on the street in a vulnerable situation. They don’t want a lot of bodies around between the guy and the street.
A cou
ple of days before the July convention in 1971, where I put Jimmy’s picture inside the convention center, Crazy Joey Gallo got a nut from Harlem to kiss the Colombo family boss, Joe Colombo. This matter was done during an Italian-American Civil Rights League rally at Columbus Circle, and poor Joe Colombo lingered in a coma for several years. On top of everything else, Joe Colombo was hit in front of his own family and his own relatives. Handling the matter that way is something that violates protocol. No doubt Gallo had approval to kiss a boss like Colombo, but not that way, in front of his family. I guess that’s why they called the man Crazy Joey.
As I understand it, the Colombo thing got sanctioned because Joe Colombo was putting too much attention on the alleged mob by all these rallies and the publicity they brought, and he wouldn’t listen to anybody and stop doing them. So he had to go. If Russell had been on the commission I am most certain he would have voted against it. Russell had his own chapter of Colombo’s Italian American Civil Rights League in upstate Pennsylvania. They gave me the man of the year award. I got the plaque up in my room.
Now along comes the man who did a lousy job of kissing Colombo, and now he’s running around in New York with all the big shots in show business. He’s getting himself in the papers all the time. He’d be out with this movie star or that writer or going to a play with the New York nightlife crowd, and the photographers would be having a field day. Crazy Joey was drawing big-time attention and publicity. That’s what they didn’t need. He was doing worse things as far as publicity than Joe Colombo ever did. Colombo liked attention and Gallo liked attention even more than Colombo. When you look past all of that, I heard he was shaking down a restaurant in Little Italy so he could afford the lifestyle of the rich and famous that he was running around with, like he was Errol Flynn. Messing around with Little Italy was definitely out.
I Heard You Paint Houses : Frank The Irishman Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa Page 25