James Riddle Hoffa

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(born Feb. 14, 1913, Brazil, Ind., U.S.disappeared July 30, 1975, Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit, Mich.) U.S. labour leader. He moved with his family to Detroit in 1924, left school at 14, and began work as a stockboy and warehouseman. He became a labour organizer in the 1930s, rising in the Teamsters Union during the next two decades until he reached the office of president, which he held from 1957 to 1971. Known throughout the trucking industry as a tough bargainer, he played a key role in forging the first national freight-hauling agreement and helped make the Teamsters the largest labour union in the U.S. Long associated with underworld figures, he was sent to prison in 1967 for jury tampering, fraud, and conspiracy; his sentence was commuted by Pres. Richard Nixon in 1971. In 1975 he disappeared from a restaurant near Detroit; he is believed to have been murdered to prevent his retaking control of the union. His son, James Riddle Hoffa, Jr. (b. 1941), was elected president of the Teamsters in 1999.

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Jimmy Hoffa's (1913-1975?) name will always be synonymous with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the largest union in the United States. Hoffa secured his place in union history with his zealous support of the Teamsters, which included conflicts with law enforcement and union leadership, dealings with organized crime leaders, criminal indictments, felony convictions, and, many speculate, his own murder.

Jimmy Hoffa is a name which will forever be associated with, and even synonymous with, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the largest union in the United States. From the 1930s Hoffa persevered through clashes with police, struggles with union members, fights for control of his union, known associations with organized crime, several indictments, a pair of felony convictions, banishment from union activity and even death to survive as a symbol of the Teamsters. Labor historians disagree about his relative value or disservice to the labor movement in America, but no one can question his legacy of power or his status as a legend.

Early Leadership

Hoffa's career in labor activity began as a teenager in the 1930s, when he engineered a strike on a Kroger grocery store loading dock in southwest Detroit. The strike was called the moment a huge trailer of fresh strawberries came in. Management knew it wouldn't take the food long to spoil, and a new contract was reached in an hour. Within a year, Hoffa's "Strawberry Boys" joined Teamsters Local 674, and later merged with Truck Drivers Local 299. Hoffa demonstrated his clout when he transformed the local from a 40-member unit with $400 to its name to a 5, 000-member unit with $50, 000 in the bank.

Organized Crime Connections

In 1941 Hoffa entered a phase of his life which would remain with him until the end and would define a large part of his reputation when he formed his first alliance with organized crime. Involved in a turf fight with the Congress of Industrialized Organizations, he asked for help from some of Detroit's east side gangsters to roust his opposition. The east side crowd was happy to oblige, and drove the CIO local out of town. Contacts between Hoffa and the mob would continue for the rest of his life. Some of the activities Hoffa engaged in with organized crime are rumors, while others are known for sure, but his connection to mob figures were never a secret, nor did he try to keep them one.

Tough Times for Unions

The union movement was unpopular in many quarters in the pre-World War II United States, and Hoffa's early experiences with the truckers' union were trying. Company goons, labor goons, and the police all were physical threats, Hoffa's car was bombed, his office was smashed, and he was once arrested 18 times in a single day. "When you went out on strike in those days, you got your head broken, " he remembered to the Detroit News. "The cops would beat your brains out if you even got caught talking about unions." By the time he was 28, Hoffa was vice president and chief negotiator for the union. In one major negotiation he threatened to shut down one trucking company and leave others open, a ploy which won the union an unheard-of statewide contract.

Hoffa Elected Teamsters Vice President

In 1952 Hoffa won election as international vice president of the Teamsters under president Dave Beck, who was already under investigation by federal agencies. Hoffa centralized the administration and bargaining procedures of the union in the international union office and succeeded in creating the first national freight-hauling agreement.

In 1957 Beck was summoned before the U.S. Senate's McClellan Committee, where he took the Fifth Amendment approximately two hundred times. When Beck finished his testimony, he had little credibility left as the Teamsters leader. Hoffa moved in. The election to put Hoffa in the presidency was disputed, and the government publicly emphasized Hoffa's connections with organized-crime figures. Nevertheless, Hoffa held on to the presidency and avoided jail for almost a decade.

Hoffa's entrenchment in the Teamsters went hand-in-hand with the mob's entrenchment in the Teamsters. Several organized crime figures assumed positions in the union, and a phony Teamster local was reportedly set up in Detroit as a front for drug dealing. Rumors persisted that Hoffa had murder contracts out on John Kennedy and/or Robert Kennedy, and Hoffa's unconcealed satisfaction at the assassination of both brothers didn't dispel the rumors. He never hesitated to use force in the operations of his union, either: An economics professor who had a 90-day inside look at the Teamsters in the early 1960s wrote, quoted in the Detroit News, "As recently as 1962, I heard him order the beating of a man 3, 000 miles away, and on another occasion, I heard him instruct his cadre on precisely how to ambush non-union truck drivers with gunfire … to frighten them, not to kill."

Criminal Activities

Hoffa faced a series of major felony trials in the 1960s. One factor which had worked in his favor at avoiding prosecution was that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover disliked each other too much to cooperate to prosecute him, but in 1962 he was tried for taking a million-dollar kickback for guaranteeing a company labor peace. He was acquitted, but on the last day of the trial he was accused of trying to bribe jurors. That charge brought Hoffa a conviction and an eight-year prison term in 1964, and two months later he suffered another conviction for mail fraud and misuse of a $20-million pension fund. The result was a 13-year combined sentence, which was commuted by President Richard Nixon in 1971 after Hoffa had served just under five years, during which he retained his presidency of the Teamsters.

One of the terms of Hoffa's commuted sentence was that he refrain from union activity, but he made no bones about wanting to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. He lost an appeal on the restriction before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, but still hoped to displace Frank Fitzsimmons, whom he had picked himself to serve as president upon his release from prison.

Mystery

That ambition reached its conclusion on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. Hoffa had apparently received an invitation to lunch at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Southfield, Michigan. The mob had a good working relationship with Fitzsimmons at this time, and wanted to stop Hoffa from regaining control of the Teamsters. Hoffa presumably thought he was being invited to a meeting to work out an arrangement with the mob, but instead he may have been invited to his own murder. No one has ever been arrested in the Hoffa case, no body has ever been found, and no one has ever definitively solved the mystery, but this is the scenario which most parties, including the FBI, believe to be true: Anthony Provenzano, a mobster and New Jersey Teamsters boss, asked Hoffa to meet him for lunch to patch up their relationship, which had become strained while Hoffa was in prison. Anthony Giacalone had arranged the lunch, but neither he nor Provenzano showed up. Hoffa was picked up by several men in a maroon Mercury sedan, was murdered in Detroit and his body was disposed of at a mob-owned sanitation company in Hamtramck, Michigan. Hoffa was officially declared "presumed dead" in 1982.

Immortalized on Film

The Hoffa legend was immortalized in 1992 when director Danny DeVito put it on the big screen in the film Hoffa. The film, which admitted to taking some liberties with the truth, received mixed reviews, and some criticism was leveled at it for historical inaccuracies and an overly sympathetic, even apologetic portrayal of the title character by Jack Nicholson. In perhaps the perfect postscript to the Hoffa legend, Sean Wilentz, writing in the New Republic, blasted the film for having been conceived, originated, and outlined by organized crime figures.

Further Reading

Walter Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972).

Arthur A. Sloane, Hoffa (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

Despite efforts from outside the union to remove him, Hoffa was reelected president by acclamation in 1961. In 1962 a federal grand jury indicted him for accepting illegal payments from a Detroit trucking company; the case ended in a mistrial. Hoffa's power continued to grow, and by 1964 he was able to effect the trucking industry's first national contract. In the same year, however, he was convicted of jury tampering and of fraud in handling the union benefits fund, and was sentenced to a 13-year prison term. After all appeals had been exhausted, Hoffa began (1967) serving his sentence, but he retained the Teamster presidency until 1971, when he resigned. In the same year, President Nixon commuted Hoffa's sentence, with the parole provision that he not engage in union activity until 1980. After his release, Hoffa promoted prison reform. He disappeared in 1975 and is widely assumed to have been murdered.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa (1970); W. Sheridan, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa (1972); D. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars (1978); T. Russell, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (2001).

His son James Philip Hoffa, 1941-, b. Detroit, is a labor lawyer. He was narrowly defeated when he ran for the Teamster's presidency in 1996 but won the post in a 1998 contest and retained it in 2001..

A labor leader who built the Teamsters Union into a powerful organization despite repeated charges of corruption. After his imprisonment from 1967 to 1971 for misuse of pension funds and jury tampering, Hoffa disappeared in 1975. It is widely assumed that he was murdered.

One of the most powerful labor leaders in U.S. history, James Riddle Hoffa ruled with brawn and charisma for fourteen years as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen, and Helpers of America. From 1957 to 1971, Hoffa bound the loose-knit Teamsters into a cohesive organization that won higher wages and tremendous bargaining power for its members. Loved by his union rank and file, he was thought ruthless, cunning, and corrupt by his enemies, among them law enforcement leaders such as Robert F. Kennedy. Federal investigators pursued Hoffa for several years because of his reputed ties to organized crime. He dodged conviction until being found guilty in 1964 on unrelated charges of jury tampering and malfeasance in a real estate deal. He began serving a thirteen-year prison sentence in 1967, which President Richard M. Nixon commuted in late 1971. He disappeared mysteriously in 1975.

Hoffa rose from obscure origins to stand in the national spotlight. He was born February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana, and his family lived in Indiana by modest means. His father, a coal driller, died of an occupational respiratory disease when Hoffa was seven. The second of four children, Hoffa, an athletic, shy B-student, quit school after the ninth grade to work full-time as a stock boy in a department store.

In 1930, still a teenager, Hoffa became a freight handler in a warehouse of the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company in Clinton, Indiana. Here came a turning point in his life, brought on by what he called a need for self-preservation in the face of meager pay and poor working conditions. The young man soon led the other warehousemen in a successful strike that would become a part of the Hoffa legend: by refusing to unload a shipment of perishable strawberries, they forced the company to accede to their demands. With his prowess as an organizer quickly recognized, Hoffa left the warehouse in 1932 to become a full-time Teamster organizer in Detroit. The four coworkers who had helped him carry off the strike at Kroger left with him and remained his staff members throughout his career.

Hoffa found his new work difficult in the beginning. During the 1930s, opposition to labor organizers was fierce and often violent. Clashes with management strikebreakers and police officers would turn bloody—Hoffa himself was beaten up twenty-four times, by his count, during his first year alone. Describing this "war" in his 1970 autobiography, The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa, he recalled, "Managements didn't want us around … and the police, recognizing who the big taxpayers were and responding to orders of politicians who knew quite well where the big contributions came from, seemed not only willing but anxious to shove us around." Tenacity, bullish strength, and a persuasive personal style were traits that helped him not only survive opposition but win new recruits to his side.

In the Depression era, the Teamsters were loosely organized in isolated areas. In 1937, Hoffa joined forces with the Trotskyite leader of the Minneapolis local Teamsters, Farrel Dobbs, a socialist who was successfully unionizing drivers in the Midwest. Hoffa helped Dobbs organize long-haul highway truck drivers under the Central States Drivers Council. However, Hoffa was never above using strong-arm tactics, and later, when it served him, he would help the federal government suppress the Trotskyites.

Whether with management or with rival unions, his policy was toughness. By 1941, he was making his first contacts with organized crime figures, as his biographer, Arthur A. Sloane, documented: that year, he enlisted the help of Detroit mobsters—the so-called East Side Crowd—to drive a rival union out of town. Thereafter, dealings with mobsters became regular. Never admitting any illegality, Hoffa nonetheless did not hide these connections. In later years, he claimed, "I'm no different than the banks, no different than the insurance companies, no different than the politicians."

Hoffa ascended to power during the 1940s. He became vice president of the Central States Drivers Council, then president of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, later an examiner of the Teamster's books, and eventually president of the Teamsters Joint Council 43 in Detroit. In 1952, he was elected an International Teamsters vice president. By 1953, as president of the Central Conference of Teamsters, he was the chief negotiator for truck drivers in twenty states. Over the next decade, Hoffa set about centralizing the Teamsters. As his power grew, local union leaders were encouraged to call Hoffa for authorization to hold strikes. The national bargaining unit that he created amassed such clout that it forged the trucking industry's first national contract in January 1964.

Although his gains were resisted by industry leaders, Hoffa won a reputation for being faithful to contracts. Within the Teamsters, the rank and file respected the gains he won for them and regarded him with open affection. At rallies and in interviews, he employed a speaking style more polished than his ninth-grade education might have suggested, gravelly yet authoritative. Frequently referring to himself in the third person, he would often boast, "Hoffa can take care of Hoffa."

But Hoffa was also running into trouble. Prompted by allegations of labor racketeering, the U.S. Senate began investigating several unions in January 1957. Nationally televised hearings were conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field—popularly known as the McClellan Committee, after its presiding officer, Senator John Little McClellan. Over two years, the committee uncovered widespread corruption in the Teamsters. Teamster president Dave Beck resigned; he was later convicted of larceny, embezzlement, and income tax evasion. Hoffa, succeeding Beck as president, faced months of intense questioning by Senator John F. Kennedy and the committee's chief counsel, Robert Kennedy.

The committee alleged that Hoffa had used union funds for his own profit, accepted payoffs from trucking companies, and associated with convicted labor racketeer John Dioguardi. Pressed by the Kennedys during hearings that had an air of open animosity, Hoffa admitted nothing. Just before one of his scheduled appearances, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested him on charges of trying to bribe a lawyer to leak confidential committee memos to him. Robert Kennedy announced he would jump off the dome of the Capitol building if the union leader was not convicted. When Hoffa was acquitted after a four-month trial, his attorney offered to send Kennedy a parachute.

The McClellan Committee report condemned Hoffa and the Teamsters. One result was the passage of more stringent legislation concerning unions; another was the expulsion of the Teamsters from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). For Hoffa, the hearings marked the beginning of a feud between himself and Robert Kennedy that would deepen upon the latter's appointment in 1960 as attorney general. Kennedy devoted considerable resources within the U.S. Justice Department to prosecuting Hoffa, whom he described as heading a conspiracy of evil. Despite several indictments, Hoffa escaped conviction until 1964. First, he was convicted of jury tampering and sentenced to eight years in prison. The manner in which the conviction was obtained later brought a rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren: the U.S. Justice Department used a jailed Teamster member to trap Hoffa. At a second 1964 trial, Hoffa received an additional five years for fraud and conspiracy in the handling of a Teamster benefit fund.

In March 1967, with his appeals exhausted, Hoffa began serving his thirteen-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, in Pennsylvania. Hoffa refused to relinquish control of the Teamsters. He was denied parole three times. Then, in December 1971, President Nixon commuted his sentence on the condition that he refrain from union activities until the year 1980. His attorneys worked to reverse the limitation, while he campaigned on behalf of prison reform. But he never regained power.

In 1975, Hoffa drove to a suburban Detroit restaurant to meet reputed crime figure Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano. Hoffa's car was found later, but he was never seen again. For several years, the FBI maintained an open file on Hoffa, yet it never solved the mystery. Theories about his disappearance abound, including the belief that Hoffa was buried underneath the goalposts at the Meadowlands football stadium, in New Jersey. In 1989, the retiring FBI chief in Detroit, Kenneth P. Walton, told the press that he knew the identity of Hoffa's killer. But Walton said the case would never be prosecuted because doing so would compromise the security of FBI sources and informants.

Hoffa's legacy is still controversial. Critics charged that the script for the 1993 film dramatization of his life, by screenwriter David Mamet, celebrated Hoffa while purposely ignoring the extent of his involvement with crime figures. Also in 1993, the longtime suspicion that Hoffa had been involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy generated renewed interest. Frank Ragano, a former mob lawyer, claimed that he personally delivered a message from Hoffa to two mobsters, which read "kill the president." Such speculation has never been substantiated, but another aspect of Hoffa's legacy is beyond doubt. Although he was enormously successful in building the Teamsters, his association with mobsters left a stain on the union that would linger for decades to come. Not until the late 1980s, when the federal government took control of the union's national elections, did the Teamsters begin to emerge from the shadow of organized crime.

Quotes:

"I may have faults, but being wrong ain't one of them."