I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  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 ju
ry 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.

  “Jimmy never met Joe Louis before that trial, only the jury didn’t know that. But Jimmy was strong for civil rights. That part is true. The only thing is, every time he won a trial, he thought he could never lose. And have no doubt: he hated Bobby with a passion. I heard him call Bobby a spoiled brat to his face in an elevator and start after him. I held Jimmy back. Many a time Jimmy said to me they got the wrong brother. But he hated brother Jack, too. Jimmy said they were young millionaires who had never done a day’s work.”

  In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy asserted that after the trial, Joe Louis, who was out of work and deeply in debt at the time, was immediately given a well-paying job with a record company that got a $2 million Teamsters pension fund loan. Joe Louis then married the female black lawyer from California whom he had met at the trial. When Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand and chief investigator, the future author Walter Sheridan, tried to interview Joe Louis for the McClellan Committee about the record company job, the ex-champ refused to cooperate and said about Bobby Kennedy: “Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.”

  Still, Bobby Kennedy expected to have the last laugh by the end of 1957.

  Hoffa’s need to control his environment had led to a federal indictment for hiring a friend of Johnny Dio to illegally wiretap and bug Teamsters offices to make sure that none of his own officers were feeding the McClellan Committee information against him, as he had done against Beck. Hoffa’s coconspirator in the bugging offense was Owen Bert Brennan, his partner on his Test Fleet and Sun Valley ventures, a man well motivated by his own potential legal problems involving these two ventures.

  In addition to the pending bugging indictment, Bobby Kennedy brought a separate perjury indictment in Washington because Hoffa had lied about the bugging incidents in his testimony before the McClellan Committee.

  At the time Hoffa had these two indictments hanging over his head, the Teamsters union was, and for decades had been, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the world’s largest labor organization. In September 1957 the Ethics Committee of the AFL-CIO charged that Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa had used “their official union positions for personal profit.” The AFL-CIO further charged that Hoffa “had associated with, sponsored, and promoted the interests of notorious labor racketeers.”

  The response of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was to elect Jimmy Hoffa, while under indictment in two federal jurisdictions, to his first term as president.

  In those tight-reined days, the president was elected not by the rank and file, but by handpicked delegates to the International Convention held every five years. And just to be on the safe side, there were no secret ballots. In his acceptance speech Jimmy Hoffa said, “Let us bury our differences.”

  How many dissidents had Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeers already buried? How many houses would be painted in the future?

  We do know that as a result of his ascendance to president, Jimmy Hoffa was able to advance his mob allies. Although it was to change by the seventies, Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano was in 1957 a staunch Hoffa man and president of Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, one of the largest locals in the nation. Hoffa immediately gave Provenzano a second paycheck by naming him president of New Jersey’s Joint Council 73, with its one hundred thousand members. By 1959 the government had installed a Board of Monitors to oversee the Teamsters. The Board of Monitors ordered Hoffa to purge Provenzano from the union. Instead, in 1961 Hoffa added a third paycheck and enormous power to his ally by making him an International vice president. In that same year, Provenzano “buried his differences” with popular reform-minded Local 560 member Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito by having him strangled to death and buried on a farm in upstate New York by K.O. Konigsberg, Salvatore Sinno, and Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio.

  Ten days after Hoffa took the oath of office in 1957, the AFL-CIO kicked out the Teamsters, saying that they could get back in only if they got rid of “this corrupt control” of the union by Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeer union officials.

  On November 15, 1957, the public was greeted with the news of the Apalachin conference. Notwithstanding J. Edgar Hoover’s protestations to the contrary, there appeared to be a national crime syndicate that operated like a separate country and whose capital appeared to be New York City.

  Ten days later a federal jury in New York City was impaneled to try Hoffa and Brennan on the bugging charges. The jury hung at eleven to one. Promptly a new jury was impaneled. During the second trial a member of the jury came forward to report a bribe attempt. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. This jury found Jimmy Hoffa not guilty.

  A crushed Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury charge against Hoffa to fall back on. But not for long. The perjury indictment relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. The wiretap had been authorized pursuant to New York State law and was a valid search and seizure of the telephone conversation under existing New York law. Unfortunately for Bobby, this was the beginning of the age of the Warren Court’s expansion of its control over state and local police procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such state-sanctioned wiretaps were unconstitutional and that any evidence obtained by the wiretaps or derived from them was “fruit of the poisonous tree.” As a consequence there was no admissible evidence with which to bury Jimmy Hoffa, and the perjury indictment was dismissed.

  “I went to work for the union around the time all this was going on, right after Jimmy got the president’s job. After the wiretap trial everybody was saying they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.”

  chapter fourteen

  The Gunman Had No Mask

  “I flew to Detroit and reported to Local 299 on Trumbull Avenue. That was Jimmy’s home local. It was down the street from Tiger Stadium. Local 299 was having an organizing drive to unionize the cab drivers of Detroit. Right across the street from the union hall there was a big taxicab garage, and when my cab pulled in to Local 299 I could see the Teamsters picketers across the street. That was going to be me. I knew I was right where I belonged. I was very happy to be an organizer attached to Local 299, and if I worked out on this job they’d make me an organizer back in Philly at Local 107, even if they had to create an extra position for me. I had a chance to get the head rabbi as my rabbi.

  I already had my sights set on becoming an International organizer some day. That’s a position at the very top. You worked out of the national office. You traveled all over the country in that position, wherever they needed you. You could do a lot of favors that were legitimate and still help yourself. If that thing hadn’t happened to Jimmy at the end, I would have been an International organizer.

  In Detroit I was assigned to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They worked as a team, doing public relations, but actually Sam looked to Bill as boss of the team. Bill was about 5'8" and was known for his ability with candy, not the kind you eat, the k
ind you use to blow things up with—dynamite. Bill was proficient in bombing, and he always packed. Bill was born in Ireland, but he sounded American. He came up through the ranks as a trucker. He was stationed in St. Louis and was listed as an organizer for a St. Louis local and as an organizer for the Joint Council in St. Louis that a real good union man named Harold Gibbons headed. Harold Gibbons was the one Jimmy should have appointed to take his place instead of Frank Fitzsimmons when Jimmy went to school in 1967.

  Sam was out of Washington, D.C., and was a little taller and heavier and quite a bit younger than Bill, more my age. I was about thirty-seven. I think Sam came out of college and went straight to work for the union. They were both very tight with Jimmy Hoffa.

  There were about eight organizers assigned to the taxi driver organizing drive. We would assemble every morning and then go to a place to picket and hand out flyers that Bill and Sam put together as the public relations men on the thing. Sometimes we would picket the taxicab garage across the street from the union hall. Other times we would put up informational picket lines at cab stands around the city, like at the big convention center Cobo Hall or at the Warner Hotel.

  You’d take cabbies aside and you’d explain the benefits of being organized, and you’d ask them to sign a union card. If you got 30 percent of the workers to sign, then the labor law entitled you to an election to see if the workers wanted the union or not. But Bill taught me that you would never ask for the election until you had better than 50 percent, because with less than that you were sure to lose. Bill also explained to me that if you did get the right to hold an election, another union could come in and try to take it from you. If they got 10 percent of the cards they could intervene in the election and maybe beat your union out after you did all the work. Once we were kicked out of the AFL-CIO we were always concerned about one of their unions coming in on one of our elections to intervene and steal the election or siphon off enough of our votes so that nobody won. It was dog-eat-dog there for a while. You didn’t know who to trust, but you kept taking cabbies aside and persuading them to sign a card. For some reason there were a lot of lesbians who were working as cabbies at that time in Detroit. They liked to be treated like men, and you had to respect that or you wouldn’t get a signature.