"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (16 page)

Looking back on that twenty-four-hour period between the time I met with Angelo and Russell and the time I met with Angelo again, after that particular matter with Whispers on the sidewalk, it got easier and easier not to go home anymore. Or it got harder and harder to go home. Either way, I stopped going home.

Once that line was crossed into the new culture there was no more confession on Saturday, no more church with Mary on Sunday. Everything was different. I had been drifting downtown and now I was all the way down there. It was a bad time to leave the girls. It was the worst mistake I made in my life. But no time is a good time to leave your wife and kids.

I got myself a room around the corner from Skinny Razor’s and I took my clothes over there. I still went down to the Teamsters hall for trucks, and I still had the ballroom jobs, but I kept getting more and more jobs from downtown. I was now running. I was a part of the culture.
”

 
chapter eleven
 

Jimmy

It is no doubt difficult for some people today to appreciate the degree of fame or infamy that Jimmy Hoffa enjoyed in his heyday and before his death, a span of roughly two decades from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies.

While in his heyday he was the most powerful labor leader in the nation, how can that mean anything in these times when labor leaders are virtually unknown to the general public? Labor union strife? Bloody labor wars? The closest thing to a labor war today is a threatened baseball player’s strike and whether the major league baseball season will be shortened and whether there will be a World Series. However, in the first two years following World War II, years in which Frank Sheeran looked for steady work and got married, there were a combined total of 8,000 strikes in 48 states. That’s more than 160 separate strikes per year per state, and many individual strikes were nationwide.

Today Jimmy Hoffa is famous mostly because he was the victim of the most infamous disappearance in American history. Yet during a twenty-year period there wasn’t an American alive who wouldn’t have recognized Jimmy Hoffa immediately, the way Tony Soprano is recognized today. The vast majority of Americans would have known him by the sound of his voice alone. From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles.

Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30
P.M
. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched.

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.