The Rise & Fall of Nashville Lawyer Tommy Osborn: Kennedy Convictions by William L. Tabac

Author:William L. Tabac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE

Tommy Osborn was not looking forward to what lay ahead. Obstruction of justice—the despoiling of their place of worship—was a serious matter to judges. If Hoffa was convicted, he would do serious jail time.

Test Fleet, the paltry influence-peddling case, had drained him. Accustomed as this combative Tennessee lawyer was to forceful encounters, what had gone down in Judge Miller’s courtroom had not met the customary rules of civility where lawyers honor their profession by treating one another with respect. With the prosecution anticipating his every move, the IRS rummaging through his records and the wiretapping of his office and home telephones, it was war.

If the attorney general had trespassed into his family’s home, a most welcome and frequent visitor to 2001 Wayland Drive had been the Teamster president. Before taking Hoffa on as a client, Osborn had called a family meeting over it. He knew it would be hard on them.

His family was involved in his career, both the ups and downs of it. When Osborn had argued Baker v. Carr, they had gone with him to Washington, where the girls had frolicked in the pool by the court. During breaks in the Test Fleet case, while the jury deliberated his fate, Margaret, the youngest of Osborn’s three daughters, recalled gin rummy games in the hallway with Hoffa while he waited the jury out. When her father was disbarred less than a year later, Margaret would feel relieved that the news of it was eclipsed by the assassination of President Kennedy.

“Have you heard of Jimmy Hoffa?” Osborn asked them over a dinner. Becky, the thirteen-year-old, said she had. “I’m thinking of accepting him as a client,” he announced. “Would it be all right with you if he I represented him?” Eyeing the silverware, Becky asked if they would have to hide it if he did.

Margaret recalled how, salting them with mild profanities, Hoffa regaled them with colorful anecdotes from his past. These comfortable get-togethers at the Osborn home often spilled into the late evening. As Osborn would later say in a futile effort to explain himself, he came to understand why Hoffa’s men worshiped him. He saw his client in that kind of light, and when that light shined on him, he crossed a sacred line.

The jury tampering charges baffled him. After having undertaken the most thorough investigation he knew how to make, he was convinced that the government had no case against Jimmy Hoffa and was persecuting him. How could he protect this man he had come to admire and who had become his friend?

“The Government will tamper with the jury,” the mysterious telephone caller to the Osborn home had said to Dottie Osborn during the Test Fleet case. They discussed that, he and Dottie, his beautiful, raven-haired wife. They reflected on the war he had served in and what a soldier might be called on to do in the midst of one.

Fight fire with fire. “We agreed on it,” Dottie Osborn explained during an interview many years later in her Wayland Drive home.

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