The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa (Forbidden Bookshelf) by Dan E. Moldea

Author:Dan E. Moldea [Moldea, Dan E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497697850
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

An opportunity to display his neutrality came on February 8, two days after the end of

the Banana Wars. On that day the second highest ranking IBT official, secretary-treasurer

John English, died.

Hoffa, still president of the Teamsters, sent word from behind bars to caretaker Frank E.

Fitzsimmons:

“Name Harold Gibbons [as English’s successor].”

Fitzsimmons sent word back, “I can’t.”

Why not?

The Chicago Capone gang, it turned out, had another candidate. Its conduit to the

Teamsters, Paul Dorfman, an old friend and business associate of Hoffa’s, had called

Fitzsimmons.

“You know the deal!” Paul Dorfman barked.

His memory refreshed, Fitzsimmons named the Capone gang’s designee, a regional

Teamster official from Chicago, Tom Flynn. 7

The fact that the Dorfmans had become mediators among the various crime

organizations on behalf of the Teamsters makes it much easier to understand why

Fitzsimmons actually took orders from them. The most effective way to undermine Hoffa

was to buy off his supporters, and the largest reservoir of Teamster money was the $628

million Central States Fund, which the Dorfmans controlled.

In a series of articles published by the Oakland Tribune in the fall of 1969, Gene Ayres

and Jeff Morgan analyzed the tremendous power Allen Dorfman wielded over the

Teamsters and the pension fund.

“Without Dorfman’s approval, you may as well forget about getting a loan,” Ayres and

Morgan wrote. “… Dorfman, according to federal investigators, is the one man who can

flatly say yes or no to an application for a loan from the huge pension fund … ‘And now,’

a source said, ‘Frank [Fitzsimmons] hardly makes a move related to financial matters

without consulting Dorfman.’” 8

In their attempts to woo away Hoffa’s chief support, Dorfman and the Teamsters lent

millions to the southern underworld and its associates. For instance, over half of a $13.5

million loan granted to Irving Davidson and a partner for the promotion of a California

real estate project was received after the Hoffa-Fitzsimmons split. And Trafficante

attorney Frank Ragano participated in a real estate deal in Florida that involved an $11

million loan from the Central States Fund—again, over half of it received after the Hoffa-

Fitzsimmons war began. Subsequently both Davidson and Ragano were indicted and

convicted for crimes related to their pension fund loans, Davidson for bankruptcy fraud

and Ragano for income tax evasion.

Another Hoffa mob ally, Morris Dalitz, received $27 million in 1969–70 for expansion

of his La Costa Country Club in Southern California. Beginning in 1964, Hoffa had given

Dalitz $19 million for the resort as well as $24 million for his Las Vegas casino interests.

Although Dalitz continued to live at the Regency Apartments in Las Vegas, he had now

moved his operations to California, selling the Desert Inn to Howard Hughes. 9 Hughes, another former friend of Hoffa, assumed responsibility for an $8.1 million Teamster

pension fund loan when he purchased the Landmark Hotel in July 1969.

Meanwhile the union leadership drove around with “Free Hoffa” bumper stickers on

their cars. So did the rank and file: the amiable Fitzsimmons was still unable to win their

devotion. Even some of the Teamster rebels sported the bumper stickers, perhaps out of

sentiment, perhaps out of a perception that any change of leadership might give them a

new chance at reform. The heat was off Fitzsimmons, but if Hoffa came back the

government would be watching the union and its treasury again.

Although the national dissident movement expanded in the wake of the 1970 wildcat

strike, its situation in Detroit was not unlike the burned-out rubble of Jim Leavitt’s home.

The membership received few, if any, of the concessions they demanded. Those they did

receive were cosmetic, rhetoric from union leaders who had made their careers by lying to

the rank and file. McMaster was still Fitzsimmons’ administrative assistant in Local 299

and his director of organizers in the Central Conference. The steel haulers were forced to

accept the revenue reduction McMaster negotiated in the steel addendum to the 1970

national contract.

The Detroit rebels were badly weakened by their failure to hold the rank and file on

strike and had quite realistic fears of reprisals against everyone who had participated.

Exhausted, the militants mourned the overnight loss of the momentum which had taken

them five years to build, while the rank-and-filer who had had his first taste of battling the

system vowed that it was his last. Some felt the Unity Committee had gone too far with

the protest and jeopardized the job security of everybody who wildcatted in Local 299;

others thought the rebel leaders had backed down to the Teamster leadership by not

carrying out the long-awaited “clean sweep” of the union hall.

Andy Provenzino, still tough and defiant, was a marked man, avoided even by some

who had been close friends. He would continue to challenge the union and management at

meetings and during elections, but he had little membership support.

The Detroit Teamsters went back to work on April 16, 1970, and began to mend their

fences with their bosses. Nationally, an impressive coalition of young union rebels was

carrying on what they had started. The young Turks were responsible for the small pockets

of wildcatting that still existed after the Detroit strike. In Ohio, Governor James A. Rhodes

called out the National Guard. When the wildcatters finally went back to work, he sent the

same tired guardsmen to Kent State University, where students were demonstrating

against Nixon’s Cambodian invasion. On May 4 the National Guard opened fire into the

crowd of students, leaving four dead and ten wounded.

Three months before the wildcat strike began, FASH had announced that its executive

board had voted to file petitions with the National Labor Relations Board in an effort to

become the steel haulers’ collective bargaining agent, the Fraternal Association of Special

Haulers. The NLRB refused to set an immediate hearing, and when the Teamsters’

ridiculously inadequate steel addendum was announced, the bitter FASH leadership was

the first group to call for a national shutdown on April 5.

But the steel haulers’ portion of the wildcat strike became more divisive than profitable

when key FASH officials—Daryl Duncan, who had tried to break the 1967 protest, and

Mike Boano, FASH’s national treasurer—met secretly with Fitzsimmons in Washington

during the strike and then announced their departure from the movement. Subsequently

they led FASH renegades in Michigan and Ohio against the national FASH leadership and

successfully broke the wildcat strike on April 16, the day after the Unity Committee

capitulated.

Crediting Boano and Duncan for “tearing FASH apart,” McMaster wrote in the June

1970 edition of 299 News:

There have been several outbreaks of violence during the long strike, with steel haulers

literally attempting to destroy each other’s equipment. At times the FASH members

took up guns and were shooting at each other.

The internal split that has developed within the FASH organization is similar to the

rift within Unity Committee in Detroit and other dissident groups around the country,

much of it developing as members realize that the Teamster contract is pretty good and

they are being deprived of pay checks by unauthorized strikes led by FASH.

The young FASH organization was nearly wrecked by the Boano-Duncan split, and

local FASH chapters began to sever their ties with the national leadership. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.