24 minute read
Jimmy Hoffa and Me
(September 2, 2020)
exactly one year ago, septemBer 2019, two events occurred In what was a unique interface between Hollywood and Harvard. This unusual encounter was what made me decide to speak about today’s subject. The first happening was the release of Martin Scorsese’s epic film The Irishman. It is still available on Netflix. It deals with the disappearance on July 30, 1975, over forty-five years ago, of one-time Teamsters Union President James Riddle Hoffa. The other event was the publication last September of a book entitled In Hoffa’s Shadow, written by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith. Jack is a leading constitutional scholar and was a somewhat controversial figure in the G. W. Bush Justice Department between 2003 and 2004. (He is one of the founding editors of an interesting online blog entitled Lawfare.) In addition, Jack was the stepson of Chuckie O’Brien, who married Jack’s mother on June 16, 1975, when Jack was twelve. That was forty-four days before Hoffa vanished. O’Brien died at eighty-six in February of this year.
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Jimmy Hoffa was essentially a surrogate father to Chuckie O’Brien.
Chuckie’s mother was a close friend of Hoffa and his wife, Josephine, and he was raised with Hoffa’s children. As an adult, Chuckie served as a Hoffa factotum, but for many years after Hoffa’s disappearance, he was suspected of having been involved in Hoffa’s departure. Indeed, he was so identified in the Scorsese movie.
Let me say at the outset that I knew both Hoffa and Chuckie professionally, as well as Hoffa’s claimed assassin, Frank Sheeran, whose “as told to” book, I Hear You Paint Houses, was the basis for Scorsese’s movie. Thus, I was one of a few hundred people interviewed by Goldsmith while researching his book. I found both the book and movie gripping. Among other things, Jack’s tome sought to absolve O’Brien of complicity in Hoffa’s disappearance and thereby debunk the Sheeran book, which implicated O’Brien. In this, I believe Jack succeeded. Even more interestingly, Jack’s book explores the complexities of the father-son relationship that existed between these two quite dissimilar people over many years, as well as the Hoffa-Chuckie connection.
I have represented workers and unions exclusively during my entire career as a lawyer, which continues. (I am simply too old to quit.) During the summer of 1960 (sixty summers ago), between graduating from the University of Chicago Law School and entering the NYU School of Law, where I would obtain a master’s degree in labor law, I worked as a legal intern at Teamsters Union headquarters in Washington, D.C. After receiving my graduate degree, I returned to the Teamsters legal department in 1961 and remained there until 1967, when Hoffa left to become an inmate at the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was incarcerated until 1971. It was then that President Nixon commuted his sentence. He was released after serving almost five years, on the condition that he not return to the union until at least 1980, when his full thirteen-year term would have ended. Indeed, it probably was at least in part Hoffa’s effort to resume his union position earlier, notwithstanding this limiting condition, that caused his demise.
I left the Teamsters soon after Hoffa’s 1967 imprisonment and went on to represent other unions and individual workers until this day.
First, a few words about how I was hired by the Teamsters for the summer of 1960: You must believe me that I had no connections— legal, union, family, or otherwise—that got me that summer job. Rather, I just was a twenty-four-year-old law student who saw a notice on a law school bulletin board advertising a summer internship at the Teamsters Union, and I applied. I was recommended by my distinguished labor law professor, Bernard Meltzer, who was much too pro-management in my eyes. Indeed, I argued continuously with him about labor issues during my law school years. Bernie frankly told the Teamsters, “He’s your man!”
Indeed, since I was a left-wing youth, beginning from the time I was twelve (even before my bar mitzvah), becoming involved with unions was among my highest aspirations. I had read about the McClellan Committee hearings on labor racketeering in the late fifties, in which the committee’s counsel, Robert Kennedy, commenced his long-running vendetta against Hoffa. It continued well into Bobby’s years as attorney general of the United States. Before joining Senator McClellan, Bobby had worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy, as we learned here last year from Jay Kaufman. The union animus expressed at the McClellan Committee hearings and its ultimate legislative result, the anti-labor Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (LMRDA), made me want to observe firsthand the dealings around labor in the nation’s capital. And my summer Teamsters clerkship infected me with a chronic case of Potomac fever.
On my first day at the Teamsters, upon my being introduced to the then forty-seven-year-old, five-foot, five-inch, pugnacious Jimmy Hoffa, he jokingly asked my boss whether he was hiring lawyers on the basis of height and weight. Not a good start, I thought!
My boss, Bart Bartosic, was a former seminarian who taught labor law at the Catholic University Law School in D.C. while
working at the Teamsters. And some years later, he became a fulltime law teacher and law school dean. I might add that Bart and I remained the closest of friends until his death in 2011.
Let me offer a brief tribute to Bart, who was my principal mentor during my Teamsters years. Many who knew Bart often wondered why Hoffa would have hired him as his chief house lawyer during some of Hoffa’s most trying years, considering the remarkable differences in their personalities and outlooks. Bart was courtly, diplomatic, and scholarly, while Hoffa was direct, outwardly tough and aggressive, and eminently practical. Some insight is provided in an essay appearing in the UC Davis Law Review written by Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1990, upon the occasion of Bart’s retirement as dean there. St. Antoine, who was counsel to the AFL-CIO in the early sixties and later was dean of the University of Michigan Law School (where he is known to the students as “the Saint”), had this to say about Bart, whom he knew quite well: Bart had “a backbone of cast iron, a mind like a steel trap, and a willingness, when the situation demanded, to be as hard as nails when dealing with either ideals or people.” Let me add, to round out the picture, and to keep the metaphor metallic, Bart also had a heart of gold.
I cannot recall witnessing an occasion where Bart’s “immovable object” and Hoffa’s “irresistible force” collided directly, but there were a couple of close calls. To watch Bart and Hoffa spar was as creative a process of lawyer and client collaboration as I have ever seen. One occasion I recall especially vividly was when Bart, Hoffa, and I sat for a couple of hours in Hoffa’s office, at his insistence, cutting ten pages from a sixty-page draft of a much-too-long brief I had written. For me it was a truly excruciating experience!
An illustration of Bart’ s “spine” came when Hoffa approached him in 1963, in my presence, and said that he wanted his son, Jim, who was in his first year at the University of Michigan Law School, to be our summer intern. Bart calmly explained to Hoffa that the qualifications were that the student must have completed
the second year of law school and already have taken labor law, so that young Hoffa did not qualify, having done neither. Hoffa Sr. did not take this news gladly, but he accepted it and walked away somewhat dejectedly. However, he was back a year later, when his son did qualify and was hired. Hoffa Jr. was a very alert, hardworking, and helpful intern that summer. Many years later, by 1999, he was elected to the union’s presidency in a contested mail ballot election, and he still serves in that capacity today. He was narrowly reelected in 2016, in an independently supervised mail ballot election, but he does not plan to run again in 2021.
There’s a personal story that goes with the campaign of “ young Jim” for the Teamsters’ presidency that I recall well. There came a moment in the mid-nineties when a secretary of mine came racing into my office, somewhat shocked and horrified, to tell me that “Jimmy Hoffa is on the phone!” I reassured her, telling her that Hoffa had not returned from the beyond but that it was his son, Jim, calling.
Clearly, my seven-year stint at the Teamsters was as good an introduction to the practice of labor law and involvement in the labor movement as I could have imagined. And the many lessons I learned have served me well. For example, one of the fringe benefits of working at Teamsters headquarters at 25 Louisiana Avenue Northwest—still known as the “Marble Palace,” having been built very extravagantly by Hoffa’s predecessor, Dave Beck, in the midfifties—is its proximity to Congress and the Supreme Court. During my seven Teamsters years, Bart and I seldom missed an oral argument in labor and many other significant cases that came before it. And indeed, during that period our office participated in seven Teamsters labor cases that were argued and won in the Supreme Court by the union, which significantly benefited labor as a whole. Our success was owed to many factors, but one surely was the composition of the Supreme Court during those years. It was made up of several justices who were uniquely attuned to labor issues,
principally because of their backgrounds and experiences in law and life. These included Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose father had been a “blackballed” union advocate railroad worker in California; Justice William Brennan, whose father had been an officer of the brewery workers’ union in New Jersey; Justice William Douglas, who grew up in a hardscrabble environment among the Wobblies in the Pacific Northwest; Justice Hugo Black, who had represented injured workers in his law practice in Alabama before coming to the Senate in 1927; Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had supported unions while he was a Harvard Law School professor, had written a book in 1930 attacking anti-labor injunctions, and had been a defender of Sacco and Vanzetti; Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who had been general counsel of the CIO and the United Steelworkers; and Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had fought for the rights of Black workers during his long and illustrious legal career.
These justices were especially sensitive to the realities of working life and the needs of working people, and to the positive role that unions and labor laws played in advancing workers’ interests in our country.
Hoffa, too, was a great source of information and insight about labor for me. First, let me provide you with a few facts about his early years. He was born on St. Valentine’s Day in 1913, in Brazil, Indiana, a small mining town. His father was a coal prospector who died of black lung disease when Hoffa was seven, leaving a wife and four children. Hoffa’s mother moved her family to Detroit in search of employment, and Hoffa left school at fourteen and began working. When the Great Depression hit Detroit in 1929, Hoffa, then sixteen, began working nights at a Kroger warehouse, unloading freight. The pay and conditions were abysmal, and he and his co-worker “strawberry boys” went on strike one night, refusing to unload perishable fruit.
They won their strike for improved conditions, and Hoffa, not long after, went to work as a young organizer for a small Detroit
Teamsters local, where he excelled. He rose in the Teamsters ranks during the next twenty or so years, and by the mid-1950s he had become a national figure in the union. When Teamsters President Dave Beck became the object of investigations for criminal wrongdoing, he resigned, and Hoffa ran successfully for the union’s presidency in a three-way race in 1957. His election was challenged in court, and the case was settled with the court’s appointment of a board of monitors to provide oversight over Hoffa’s operation of the union. When I arrived in 1960, the board of monitors and its staff were still functioning, but they were no match for Hoffa’s legal blitzkrieg. The board was dissolved, and Hoffa was elected at the union’s next court-ordered convention in 1966. I attended that convention and recall Hoffa opening it by showing a thirty-minute Mike Wallace documentary about the life of John L. Lewis, who was Hoffa’s hero. As Hoffa had hoped, the film’s militant union message served to set the tone for the entire convention.
Despite Dave Beck’s legal problems, he had been a somewhat progressive union leader in the Pacific Northwest for many years. He forced out his predecessor, Teamsters President Dan Tobin, in 1952. (A fifteen-year-old Irish immigrant in 1890, Tobin had led the union beginning in 1907.) At this point I might add that when I went to work at the Teamsters in 1960, the entire sixteen-member general executive board of the then million-and-a-half-member union was composed of Teamsters of at least partial Irish extraction, including Hoffa. (I do recall one “salty” Irish Teamsters official declaring in my presence that “the Irish built this union, and the Jews aren’t going to take it over.” This was probably in connection with Hoffa’s proposal to fill a vice-presidential vacancy.)
Like Hoffa, Dave Beck left school early. At sixteen in 1910, he became a laundry truck driver in Seattle. This was followed by his career as a Teamsters Union organizer and leader. Among Beck’s many innovations during his tenure as Teamsters national president (1952–1957) was the establishment of the National Conference of
Teamster Lawyers. This was a loosely knit group of several hundred union lawyers and law firms from across the country and Canada, which represented Teamsters affiliates and other unions as well. It assembled annually at meetings where labor law problems and decisions were discussed and analyzed and where long-term professional alliances and friendships were established. Many of the lawyers had been practicing union-side labor law going back to at least the early thirties and were seasoned veterans of the stillcontinuing labor wars.
One of my first assignments in 1961 was to coordinate the Teamsters lawyers conference that year. In order to encourage a large attendance, Hoffa chose to hold the meeting in Acapulco, which was then beginning to be a desirable tourist destination. When we arrived, we learned that conference attendance was oversubscribed, and I vividly recall the first morning, when Hoffa led hotel staff workers in carrying additional tables and chairs into the meeting room. I was somewhat astonished but soon learned that Hoffa was what we in the labor movement call a “Jimmy Higgins,” ready to do whatever was needed on short notice. (Indeed, the figure of “Jimmy Higgins” comes from a 1919 novel with that title written by Upton Sinclair, which describes a devoted socialist organizer who was the person looked to in order to perform “tedious and disagreeable tasks.”)
The lawyer meetings went on for about four days, with Hoffa attending every day-long session, peppering the lawyers with questions, challenging many of our assertions, and letting us all know what a bright, activist, and energetic union leader he was and what his expectations were of the lawyers in assisting Teamsters affiliates in achieving their organizing and bargaining goals. Those meetings were held each year I worked at the Teamsters, but not in similarly exotic surroundings.
For me another engaging aspect of being at the Teamsters in the sixties related to civil rights. One of the first union leaders I met
at the Teamsters was Harold Gibbons, then the union’s executive vice president. In that role Gibbons oversaw the daily operations at headquarters while Hoffa traveled the country extensively, organizing and attending union meetings and bargaining sessions. Gibbons was the elected leader of St. Louis Local 688 and held other union positions as well.57
Born in 1910, Gibbons was the youngest in a very large coal mining family in Pennsylvania. He gravitated to Chicago in the thirties and became an organizer and leader in several unions. He teamed up there with a Black union and civil rights organizer and leader, Ernest Calloway, who once had worked as a coal miner. They both moved to St. Louis, where they developed some very progressive union programs for their Teamsters local’s members, in such areas as housing and health care. Both participated in freedom rides in the 1940s and were quite active in civil rights work in St. Louis and beyond. Hoffa befriended Gibbons and brought him to headquarters as his principal assistant when he assumed the union’s presidency in 1957, believing that Gibbons would know his way around Washington. And Gibbons brought several of his talented St. Louis staff members with him.
When I was at law school, the sit-ins began in North Carolina and elsewhere during my final year. And with some Black and other radical comrades, we began picketing Woolworths throughout Chicago to pressure it to desegregate in the South. When I got to D.C. in 1960, I became involved in civil rights activity there with both Gibbons and Bart’s encouragement and support. Thus, I was given fairly free rein to use the union’s facilities to advance the ends of the civil rights movement. Among the campaigns I was involved in were working to desegregate the Jim Crow Glen Echo amusement park in suburban Maryland (then owned by the Feld Brothers,
57. See Robert Bussel, Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
who later operated the Ringling Brothers circus); seeking to expel law schools that did not admit Blacks from an American Bar Association–sponsored law student association; supporting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Summer, including holding a fundraising event at Teamsters headquarters that featured a very young Bill Cosby; working with Stokely Carmichael to integrate an Albany, Georgia, unionized shirt factory; and planning and participating in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. I should mention, too, that Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights activist from Detroit, then a thirty-nine-year-old mother of five, was the wife of a Teamsters business agent in Detroit. She was murdered by the KKK right after participating in the 1965 third Selma-to-Montgomery march. Hoffa and Gibbons attended her funeral in Detroit with Dr. King.
One incident relating to civil rights I remember well occurred at a lunch meeting of several lawyers and Hoffa on September 16, 1963, where we were discussing several recent National Labor Relations Board decisions relating to picketing. I got a chance to offer my analysis, at which point Hoffa responded by exclaiming sharply, “What the hell do you know about picketing? You’ve never been on a picket line in your life.” I had the satisfaction of responding that, in fact, I had been on a picket line at the White House that very morning, protesting the bombing of the Birmingham church where four Black schoolgirls had been killed. Hoffa was somewhat nonplussed by my attempt at one-upmanship, laughingly declaring me a “dirty commie S.O.B.!” which I was not.
The high point of my civil rights work while at the Teamsters came in 1966, when Gibbons arranged for a meeting at Teamsters headquarters with Reverends Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, at which Hoffa agreed to present them with a union contribution to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Bart and I attended the luncheon meeting, and I also had the honor of driving the King party in Hoffa’s Pontiac. A lively discussion
regarding labor and civil rights took place at the lunch, at the end of which Hoffa presented King with a large union check.
A time came when Gibbons left Hoffa’s side and returned to his union base in St. Louis. It occurred when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas in 1963. I was with Bart and Gibbons in Hoffa’s office when Gibbons called Hoffa, who was out of town, to tell him that Kennedy had been murdered and that Gibbons was lowering the American flag outside of the union’s building. Hoffa reacted angrily, telling Gibbons not to lower the flag, since Kennedy had wished to see Hoffa in prison. Gibbons explained to Hoffa that that was irrelevant; Kennedy had been president of the United States and the flag was coming down. They argued loudly. Gibbons then hung up on Hoffa and told Bartosic and me that he was resigning as executive vice president and returning to St. Louis. This was not the end of the Gibbons-Hoffa relationship, but their partnership was never the same.
Hoffa’s greatest ambition was the development of a single national labor contract, including national standards covering every long-haul truck driver in the United States. He knew that unless such a national bargaining unit and agreement were created, it would continue to be possible, for example, for trucking companies to hire low-paid nonunion drivers in the South to haul freight to and from, say, Texas to Chicago and back, rather than hire wellpaid unionized drivers from Chicago to do the work. Thus, just as it was the case—and still is with companies moving unionized northern manufacturing jobs to the nonunion South—trucking had long been subject to the same manipulations. That’s why assuring that all motor freight was transported union was Hoffa’s goal. This required him to organize the South, while restraining the bargaining demands of powerful Teamsters locals in the North.
As a twenty-one-year-old Teamsters representative in 1934, Hoffa had observed the Minneapolis general strike led by a group of Teamsters who were revolutionary followers of Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky had been expelled from Soviet Russia by his archrival and enemy, Joseph Stalin, and was then living in exile in Europe. He had not yet moved with his wife, Natalia, to Mexico at the invitation of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and the Mexican government. It was in Mexico where Stalin had Trotsky murdered by a hired assassin in 1940.58
By the late thirties, the Minneapolis Trotskyists, including Farrell Dobbs and the Dunne brothers—Vincent, Myles, and Grant— had organized about 150,000 midwestern truck drivers under one multistate contract. Indeed, on the strength of Dobbs’s ability and achievements, he became a leading national Teamsters organizer. But in late 1939, he resigned from the union to become a national leader of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which opposed America’s anticipated entry into World War II on ideological and political grounds.
By mid-1941, Dobbs and seventeen other Trotskyist leaders were indicted and then tried and convicted by the federal government under the newly enacted Smith Act (1940) for sedition, consisting mostly of their opposing the draft. Needless to say, the then ultrapatriotic American Communist Party supported these prosecutions after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Communist Party’s turn to be indicted under the Smith Act did not come until 1949 and thereafter, when 144 Communists were prosecuted by the Justice Department.
It was Hoffa’s goal to finish the organizing job that the Trotskyists and their allies had started in the Midwest by bringing drivers from coast to coast under a single labor contract. And he achieved this goal in major part by 1964, upon the signing of the first National Master Freight Agreement, which covered more than 400,000 Teamsters. After Hoffa went to prison in 1967, trucking
58. See e.g., Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
deregulation caused tremendous upheaval in the very competitive trucking industry, Hoffa’s leadership was sorely missed, and the national agreement fell into serious decline. Also, the Teamsters previously had been successful at preventing companies from employing so-called owner-operators, who leased their rigs to employers and drove them as independent contractors. But this employer method of avoiding the terms of the national agreement prevailed, and today most over-the-road drivers are private entrepreneurs who lack job security, contractual benefits such as pensions and health care, and other protections enjoyed by such unionized employees as the tens of thousands of Teamsters at UPS. The owner-operators resemble the Uber and Lyft drivers, about whom we currently read so much. Today there are some 350,000 owner-operators driving on intercity highways. Their current plight as small-business owners has frequently been reported upon in the press. And the forthcoming introduction of self-driving eighteen-wheelers is the next crisis they will face, as was described in the August 23, 2020, edition of 60 Minutes, which is available online.59 The driverless trucks already being tested on public roads employ computers that are claimed to make twenty decisions a second and to be able to cross the country nonstop in two days. However, the 60 Minutes producers did not think to inquire as to how the trucks would refuel en route. Maybe by a drone or helicopter. Or perhaps they just assumed they would soon be powered by electricity.
As to Hoffa, Jack Goldsmith did a prodigious amount of research in preparing his book, including reviewing thousands of pages of documents from Justice Department and FBI files. Among these were voluminous records reflecting that the government had engaged in extensive unlawful spying on Hoffa’s associates and
59. See https://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/_dnJmeCnccahm_IUzz GCsx98XjuOZ8li/driverless-trucks-could-disrupt-the-trucking-industry-as-soon-as2021/.
family for many years. During my Teamsters years, I would have a monthly visit from a fellow named Bernie Spindel, who came like an exterminator to engage in office debugging. On one occasion it became clear that a union headquarters staff member I knew well, Sam Baron, was reporting to Attorney General Kennedy on what he saw and heard. And a Justice Department investigator came to the home of an accounting department employee, seeking adverse information on Hoffa. The employee sent the agent away and reported his visit to Hoffa, who assembled the entire union headquarters staff and gave us lawyer Edward Bennett Williams’s home phone number to call if we experienced a similar visit.
In the end Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, based upon the testimony of a union officer “friend,” Ed Partin, who succeeded in maneuvering himself out of jail while facing charges of state and federal crimes. He did it by soliciting a deal with the Justice Department to spy on Hoffa. He then insinuated himself into the Hoffa legal defense headquarters during Hoffa’s trial in Nashville, Tennessee, on a federal misdemeanor charge. Partin then proceeded to report to the Justice Department on what he said he saw and heard. Hoffa’s conviction, based in major part on this man’s testimony, was upheld by four members of the United States Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Earl Warren filing a stinging dissent, declaring that the government practices involved, which he recounted at length, were “offensive to the fair administration of justice in the federal courts.” Four other justices found procedural grounds for avoiding participating in the decision on its merits. Jack Goldsmith believes that the Court’s decision would have been otherwise if the case had not involved Hoffa.
As for Scorsese’s film, it is a clever yarn, but having been based upon the Frank Sheeran book, it is pure “cock-and-bull.” Sheeran was depicted in the movie as Hoffa’s virtual shadow, but during my years at the Teamsters, I saw him only once, while he was serving as a sergeant at arms at the 1966 Teamsters convention in Miami.
He was not Hoffa’s bodyguard, nor was he anything else but a local union official. Hoffa never had a “bodyguard,” unless it was Chuckie O’Brien.
Regarding the Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci performances in the movie, they were both outstanding. But Al Pacino flunked as Hoffa; fear, panic, begging, and apologies were not part of Hoffa’s repertoire. If anything, I always marveled at Hoffa’s ability to maintain his composure and personal discipline while under the most incredible pressures. And I recommend to you a YouTube interview with Hoffa after he was released from prison, in which he coolly described his years of confinement.60 After his release he became an advocate for much-needed prison reform.
There is no way to sum up what I have related to you today, since my comments have been random concerning my Teamsters years. I do hope you found a few of my “war stories” interesting. If anything, I might observe that one never really knows what lies around the next corner in a life in the law, especially one involving labor. But clearly, my Hoffa and Teamsters years were a remarkable introduction to a long and still engaging career practicing labor law.
In conclusion, and getting back to where I began, let me offer a final comment about the Scorsese movie as compared with Jack Goldsmith’s book (which relates also to what we have been going through almost daily since January 20, 2017), namely that “the truth never dies; it just lives a miserable life,” which is an old but very timely Yiddish proverb: “Emet shtarbt nit, ober es leybt a tsoresdike leben.”
60. See “Jimmy Hoffa on the Morning Exchange” (January 31, 2011), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCyZ9-AVNWE.
