In Hoffa's Shadow by Jack Goldsmith

Author:Jack Goldsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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WHEN HOFFA WAS released from prison in December 1971, his drive to remove Fitzsimmons and reassume the presidency of the Teamsters union focused on the 1976 election for the Teamsters top spot. The Nixon bar on his involvement in a labor union until 1980 stood in Hoffa’s way. For the first few years out of prison, he took a low-key approach to overturning the ban. In private, he never stopped bad-mouthing Fitzsimmons. But in public, Hoffa praised Fitzsimmons throughout 1972 and into much of 1973.

Hoffa also avoided direct approaches to the Fitzsimmons-friendly White House and instead sought assistance from “anybody else that could help him,” Chuckie told me, including “politicians, senators, and congressmen” to whom Hoffa paid a lot of money. “He wasn’t bashful about paying,” says Chuckie. At the same time, Hoffa’s lawyers sought yet again to overturn his jury tampering conviction, using a dubious affidavit from Edward Partin that Chuckie, along with the New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, helped secure. If successful, this tactic might have negated the condition, since Hoffa had already served time on the pension fund conviction.

While Hoffa was pursuing these quiet moves against the Nixon restriction, he burnished his public image. The five years in prison had ground down some of his sharper edges and made him more appealing. He had gray temples and seemed less threatening, perhaps because he no longer commanded two million Teamsters. And his intelligence shone through. In his first television interview after prison, on ABC’s Issues and Answers, Hoffa spoke confidently about the pathologies of criminal justice, the problems bedeviling American labor, and the political scene. “He put out one of the most impressive performances that I’ve seen a man on television do,” Chuck Colson said to President Nixon of the interview. “He was firm, he was crisp, his words were well chosen. He was quick with his answers. And he gave the impression of real depth. He’s quite an interesting guy.”

Hoffa didn’t publicly comment a great deal on the social issues roiling the nation in the early 1970s. But he did enthusiastically take up the cause of prison reform in talks around the country, testimony before Congress, and press interviews. After his release from prison, “almost no Hoffa interviewer, no matter what the original line of questioning, departed without having heard a lengthy narration about just how bad life in the penitentiary was,” said Hoffa’s biographer, Arthur Sloane. Hoffa emphasized that drugs, violence, and rape were prevalent in prison, and tended to leave inmates, especially young ones, more crime-prone than when they entered. And he proposed a long battery of reforms.

Hoffa was committed to prison reform, but it was also “a disguise,” according to Chuckie, that gave Hoffa a reason other than labor management to travel around the country and meet with the many Teamsters who had never stopped adoring him. “Every city he would go to—you have to understand the magnitude of his personality—he’d be there for prison reform but every fucking guy that was a Teamster, either a member or an officer, showed up,” Chuckie told me.

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