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Jimmy Hoffa
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James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (February 14, 1913–disappeared July 30, 1975, exact date of death unknown) was an American labor leader and convicted criminal (pardoned). As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. After he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror, he served nearly a decade in prison. He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death.
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James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (February 14, 1913–disappeared July 30, 1975, exact date of death unknown) was an American labor leader and convicted criminal (pardoned). As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. After he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror, he served nearly a decade in prison. He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death. His son James P. Hoffa is the current president of the Teamsters.
Biography
Early life
Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. His paternal ancestors were "Pennsylvania Dutch" and Irish-American. Hoffa's father, John Cleveland Hoffa, a coal driller, died of lung disease in 1920. His mother, Viola "Ola" Riddle, took in laundry to keep the family together and the children took after-school jobs. Hoffa later described his mother as a woman "who believed that Duty and Discipline were spelled with capital Ds."
In 1922, the Hoffas moved to Clinton, Indiana, for two years, then to the working-class west side of Detroit. Hoffa worked as a delivery boy and dropped out of school in the ninth grade, just as the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression brought massive layoffs and business failures.
A friend, Walter Murphy, advised Hoffa to get into the food business. "No matter what happens, people have to eat," the friend reportedly said. Hoffa lied about his age to get a job at the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company, whose warehouses were near his home. He worked unloading produce from railroad cars for 32 cents an hour. The pay, two-thirds of it in scrip redeemable for food at Kroger's, was considered relatively good for the era, in light of growing unemployment and food lines. Warehouse workers were required to report at 4:30 p.m. for a 12-hour shift, but were paid only for time spent unloading produce. Hoffa later said that the foreman was "the kind of guy who causes unions." Called "The Little Bastard" by his employees, he abused his powers, threatening and firing workers without cause.
Hoffa and his coworkers, including Bobby Holmes (who would later rise in the Teamster hierarchy with Hoffa), bided their time. The reality that one third of American workers remained jobless may have contributed to caution in their organizing efforts. Finally, one night in the spring of 1931, after two workers were fired for going to a food cart for their midnight dinner, the men acted; Hoffa called for a work stoppage just as trucks loaded with Florida strawberries pulled into the warehouse. Faced with the need to get the perishable cargo into refrigerators quickly, Kroger management agreed to meet with the new leaders the following morning, as long as the workers resumed their duties.
After several days of negotiating, Hoffa and his aides had a union contract. It included a raise of 13 cents an hour, the guarantee of at least a half a day's pay per day, an insurance plan, and recognition of the union. The new leaders soon applied for and received a charter as Federal Local 19341 of the American Federation of Labor.
Hoffa was fired the following year after a fight with a plant foreman who goaded union leaders into throwing a crate of vegetables on the floor and spraying the boss with vegetable juices. Jimmy claimed in later years that he quit before he could be fired and walked away.
Hoffa next worked as a full-time union organizer for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (the IBT). He took the Kroger union with him into the IBT, where its membership was absorbed into Local 299. He and other IBT organizers fought with management in their organizing efforts in the Detroit, Michigan, area.
Hoffa used organized-crime connections to influence an association of small grocery stores. This led to his first criminal conviction, for which he paid a fine. After he rose to a leadership position in Local 299, Hoffa continued to work with organized crime in Detroit, using the threat of labor trouble to induce businesses to use a mobster-controlled clothier.
Union activities
The Teamsters organized truckers and firefighters first throughout the Midwest, and then nationwide. It skillfully used "quickie strikes," secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company to organize workers and win contract demands at others.
Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was convicted on bribery charges and imprisoned. Hoffa worked to expand the union, and, in 1964, succeeded in bringing virtually all over-the-road truck drivers in North America under a single national master-freight agreement. Hoffa then tried to bring the airlines and other transport employees into the union.
Both President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, put pressure on Hoffa through the president's brother Robert F. Kennedy (then Attorney General), in an attempt to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. Having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO aided the Democrats in their investigations.
Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is the Teamsters' current leader. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, currently serves as an associate circuit court judge in St. Louis, Missouri.
Conviction and disappearance
In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and jailed for 15 years. On December 23, 1971, however, he was released when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at, or sometime after, 2:45 pm on July 30, 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City.
Investigations into his disappearance
DNA evidence examined in 2001 placed Hoffa in the car of long-time, Teamster associate Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien (who has been described as Hoffa's "foster son"), despite O'Brien's claims that Hoffa had never been in the car. Police interviews later that year failed to produce any indictments.
Frank Sheeran
In July 2003, convicted killer Richard Powell told authorities that a briefcase containing a syringe used to subdue Hoffa was buried at a house in Hampton Township, Michigan. The FBI searched the backyard of a home formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, Second World War veteran, Mafia hitman, truck driver, Teamsters official and close friend of Hoffa. Nothing significant was found.
In 2004, Charles Brandt, a former prosecutor and Chief Deputy Attorney General of Delaware, published the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The title is based on a euphemistic exchange apparently used by hitmen and their would-be employers ("I heard you paint houses." "Yes, and I do my own carpentry, too.") House-painting alludes to the
incidental-to-homicide emplacement of blood spatter on walls, and "doing my own carpentry," to the task of disposing of the body. Brandt recounted a series of confessions by Sheeran regarding Hoffa's murder, and claimed that Sheeran had begun contacting him because he wished to assuage feelings of guilt. Over the course of several years, he spoke many times by phone to Brandt (which Brandt recorded) during which he acknowledged his role as Hoffa's killer, acting on orders from the Mafia. He claimed to have used his friendship with Hoffa to lure him to a bogus meeting in Bloomfield Hills and drive him to a house in northwestern Detroit, where he shot him twice before fleeing and leaving Hoffa's body behind. An updated version of Brandt's book claims that Hoffa's body was cremated within an hour of Sheeran's departure.
In 2004, authorities in Detroit extracted floorboards from the northwest Detroit home where Sheeran said he had shot Hoffa. However, by February 2005, the Bloomfield Township Police said the FBI Crime Lab reported that, while there had been male, human blood on the floorboards, the blood did not match Hoffa's. It was later revealed that the DNA had been destroyed when the wrong kind of Luminol was used to find the blood remnants.
Events since February 14, 2006
On February 14, 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband had told her, during an argument in 1988, that he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.
In April 2006, news reports surfaced that hitman Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group of five men who had kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. The claim's credibility is questionable, as Kuklinski has become somewhat notorious for his repeatedly claiming to have killed people — including Roy DeMeo — and concrete evidence has proven he could not have killed Hoffa. The story forms part of the book The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, which was released on July 1, 2006.
On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip, the FBI searched a farm in Milford Township, Michigan for Hoffa's remains. Nothing was found.
On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called Hoffex Memo, a 56-page report the FBI prepared for a January 1976 briefing on the case at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. The FBI has called the report the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa.
In November 2006 KLAS-TV Channel 8 Las Vegas interviewed author Charles Brandt about Hoffa's murder and disappearance. Brandt claims that Hoffa's body was taken from the murder scene and possibly driven two minutes away to the Grand Lawn Cemetery where he was cremated.
Further reading
- The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa is an account of Hoffa's trials in Tennessee. Author Walter Sheridan was a lawyer working for Robert Kennedy.
- The Hoffa Wars by investigative reporter Dan Moldea, which details Hoffa's rise to power.
- Contract Killer by William Hoffman and Lake Headley, which attempts to examine Hoffa's murder in great detail.
- Hoffa! Ten Angels Swearing. An Authorized Biography by Jim Clay was published in 1965 and defends Hoffa's position in his own words.
Bibliography
- Arthur A. Sloane, Hoffa, MIT Press, 1992.
- Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran and the inside story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa, Steerforth Press, Hanover (NH, USA) 2004 (ISBN 1-58642-077-1).
- Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, Charter Books, New York: 1978 (ISBN 0-441-34010-5).
See also
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