"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (19 page)

I started laughing again. I was afraid Russ maybe thought I was going nuts. But this was very funny to me. I don’t know why. I guess maybe I was embarrassed at how much the old man was taking care of me.
”

 
chapter thirteen
 

They Didn’t Make a Parachute Big Enough

At the time of the Frank Sheeran job interview by long-distance phone call, Jimmy Hoffa was coming off a period full of accomplishment and notoriety. In the mid-to late fifties Jimmy Hoffa had bulldogged and bluffed his way through the McClellan Committee hearings. He had become president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And he had survived several criminal indictments.

More significantly for his future and that of his rank and file, in 1955 Jimmy Hoffa had created a pension fund whereby management made regular contributions toward the retirement of their Teamsters employees. Before the creation of the Central States Pension Fund, many truckers merely had their Social Security to fall back on when they retired.

“
Jimmy knew how to use his temper. I wasn’t with him when he got that pension fund off the ground, but Bill Isabel told me how he exploded at the trucking companies at their meetings. He threatened them with everything. He wanted the fund, he wanted the fund set up in a certain way, and he wanted to have control of the fund. He wanted it set up so certain people he approved of could borrow money from the fund. Now don’t get me wrong, the fund managers charged interest on the loans, like the loans were an investment of the fund’s money. The loans would be secured and all. But Jimmy got it the way he wanted it. So he could lend out the money to certain people. Right away the fund kept getting bigger and bigger, because the men it covered weren’t retiring yet, and the companies kept putting in so much for every hour worked by every man into the fund. By the time I came on there was about $200 million in the fund. By the time I retired there was a billion. I don’t have to tell you how much juice comes out of that kind of money.
”

The Teamsters pension fund organized by Hoffa almost immediately became a source of loans to the national crime syndicate known to the public as La Cosa Nostra. With its own private bank, this crime monopoly grew and flourished.

Teamsters-funded ventures, especially the construction of casinos in Havana and Las Vegas, were dreams come true for the godfather entrepreneurs. The sky was the limit and more was anticipated. At the time of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 Atlantic City was about to open up to legalized gambling.

“
Jimmy’s cut was to get a finder’s fee off the books. He took points under the table for approving the loans. Jimmy helped out certain friends like Russell Bufalino, or New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello, or Florida boss Santo Trafficante, or Sam “Momo” Giancana from Chicago, or Tony Provenzano from New Jersey, or Jimmy’s old friend Johnny Dio from New York. They would bring customers. The bosses would charge the customers 10 percent of the loan and split that percentage with Jimmy. Jimmy did a lot of business with our friends, but he always did it on Jimmy Hoffa’s terms. That pension fund was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Jimmy was close with Red Dorfman out of the Chicago outfit. Red got the Waste Handlers Union in Chicago in 1939, when the president of that union got whacked. They say Red had Jack Ruby with him as the other officer in the union. That’s the same Jack Ruby who whacked Lee Harvey Oswald. Red was tied in with Ruby’s boss Sam “Momo” Giancana and Joey Glimco and all the rest of the Chicago Italians. Plus Red was big on the East Coast with people like Johnny Dio.

Red had a stepson named Allen Dorfman. Jimmy put Red and Allen in charge of union insurance policies, and then he put Allen as the man to see for a pension fund loan. Allen was a war hero in the Pacific. He was one tough Jew, a Marine. He was stand-up, too. Allen and Red took the Fifth a grand total of 135 times during one of those Congressional hearings they used to have. Allen Dorfman had a lot of prestige in his own right. Allen would collect the points and then split it with Jimmy—nothing big, just a taste. Jimmy always lived, not poor, but modest. Compared to Beck and the ones that came after Jimmy, you might as well say Jimmy took home company stamps.
”

However, Jimmy Hoffa had at least two little business secrets that became a source of concern to him. In both of these secret ventures Hoffa’s business partner was his close Teamsters ally Owen Bert Brennan. Brennan was president of his own Detroit Teamsters local and had an arrest record for violence that included four incidents of bombing company trucks and buildings. Brennan referred to Jimmy as his “brains.”

Hoffa and Brennan formed a trucking company called Test Fleet. The “brains” and his partner put that company in their wives’ maiden names. Test Fleet had only one contract. It was with a Cadillac car carrier that had been having union problems with its Teamsters union independent owner-operator car haulers. This group of Teamsters held an unsanctioned wildcat strike. Angered by this break of union solidarity, Jimmy Hoffa ordered them back to work. With Hoffa’s blessings the Cadillac car carrier then terminated its leases with the independent Teamsters haulers, put many of them out of business, and gave hauling business to Test Fleet. This arrangement helped Josephine Poszywak, aka Mrs. Hoffa, and Alice Johnson, aka Mrs. Brennan, make $155,000 in dividends over ten years, without doing a single minute’s work for the Test Fleet company.

Hoffa and Brennan had also invested in a Florida land development deal called Sun Valley and had committed $400,000 in interest-free union money as collateral to further their investment. When he entered into these deals, Jimmy Hoffa had little reason to believe he would soon be a worldwide figure who would be held up to public scrutiny and have to answer for sins of the past, however small they may have seemed to him.

Justly concerned that the McClellan Committee would soon be discovering many of his little secrets, including the pension fund goose that laid the golden eggs, Jimmy Hoffa became obsessed with deflecting the committee’s attention from himself.

When the committee was formed in early 1957, its target was the then-Teamsters president Dave Beck. According to Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand man, Walter Sheridan, Hoffa secretly provided Kennedy with details of Beck’s wrongdoings. Sheridan wrote in his 1972 book,
The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa:
“He went about this by arranging for one of Beck’s own attorneys to feed information to Kennedy about Beck.”

That simple sentence is a courageous one by Mr. Sheridan. Although Hoffa was still alive when the book came out and had literally just walked out of jail, Bobby Kennedy had been dead for four years. Had Kennedy been alive, and had anyone picked up on the implications of that sentence, an ethics probe would have been fully warranted. Depending on the facts, Kennedy could have been disbarred for his complicity in allowing Beck’s attorney to violate his ethical duty to his client and secretly “rat” on Beck on Hoffa’s behalf.

Sheridan went on to say that Hoffa “had that same attorney arrange a meeting between him and Kennedy where he would offer to cooperate with the committee.”

Can there be any question that Hoffa’s own godfather pals took notice of these two sentences when Sheridan’s book came out in 1972? To ruthless and powerful men such as Bufalino, Trafficante, Marcello, Provenzano, and Giacalone being a rat is a severe character defect and ratting on your ally is a severe mistake; such a person can never be trusted again, and the offense is unpardonable, to say the least. Hoffa landed on the streets of Detroit from prison around the same time Sheridan’s book landed in the bookstores. The book labeled Hoffa a “rat,” and Hoffa leant credence to the label when, in pursuit of the IBT presidency, he publicly threatened to expose the mob’s influence in the Teamsters Pension Fund under Fitzsimmons. But all that came many years later. In the late fifties Hoffa’s Machavellian strategy of feeding his union brother Dave Beck to the wolves was a win-win strategy. By focusing its resources on Beck the committee put Hoffa’s Test Fleet and Sun Valley deals on a back burner and Hoffa had Beck out of his way.

“
Jimmy liked to control his environment. He didn’t drink, so no one took a drink in his presence. He didn’t smoke, so nobody lit up around him. Sometimes he’d get all riled up. He’d get impatient and he’d do things that would remind you of a kid scratching chicken pox. You couldn’t tell him he was going to end up with pockmarks. You couldn’t say a word. You just listened.
”

Jimmy Hoffa became impatient and obsessed with finding out as much as he could about the inner workings of the McClellan Committee.

In February 1957, Hoffa contacted a New York lawyer named John Cye Cheasty. Cheasty had been in the Navy and the Secret Service. His law practice had a subspecialty in conducting investigations. Hoffa told Cheasty that the committee was hiring investigators. If Cheasty would take a job with the committee and report on its activities to Hoffa there was $24,000 in cash in the deal for Cheasty at the rate of $2,000 a month for a year. Hoffa gave Cheasty a down payment of $1,000 for his expenses in getting the job. However, in his impatience, Hoffa had not sufficiently checked Cheasty out. This was an honest New York investigator and a patriot. Cheasty reported the bribery scheme straightaway.

Bobby Kennedy gave Cheasty a job with the committee at a salary of $5,000 a year. The FBI planted microphones and set up cameras. Cheasty notified Hoffa that he had an envelope with sensitive committee documents and wanted another cash installment in exchange for the envelope. The two men met near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Cheasty handed the envelope to Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa handed Cheasty $2,000 in cash. The exchange was photographed. The FBI moved in, catching Jimmy Hoffa red-handed with the documents. They arrested Jimmy Hoffa on the spot.

When a reporter asked Bobby Kennedy what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, Bobby Kennedy, who said he had “never considered that possibility” with such an “air-tight case,” remarked, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.”

In June of 1957 Hoffa went on trial in Washington, D.C., on a charge of passing a bribe to a McClellan Committee investigator for inside information on the committee’s activities.

The jury was composed of eight blacks and four whites. Hoffa and his attorney, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, struck only white jurors in the selection process. Hoffa had a black female lawyer flown in from California to sit at counsel table. He arranged for a newspaper,
The Afro-American,
to run an ad praising Hoffa as a champion of the “Negro race.” The ad featured a photo of Hoffa’s black-and-white legal team. Hoffa then had the newspaper delivered to the home of each black juror. Finally, Hoffa’s Chicago underworld buddy Red Dorfman had the legendary boxing champion Joe Louis flown in from his Detroit home. Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Louis hugged in front of the jury as if they were old friends. Joe Louis stayed and watched a couple of days of testimony.

When Cye Cheasty testified, Edward Bennett Williams asked him if he had ever officially investigated the NAACP. Cheasty denied he had, but the seed was planted.

Hoffa was acquitted.

Edward Bennett Williams sent a wrapped box with a ribbon around it to Bobby Kennedy. Inside was a toy parachute for Kennedy’s jump from the Capitol Building.