I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  If they did sign the card that didn’t mean they had to vote for the union later on in the election, because those elections were supervised and they were by secret ballot, so the cabbies could sign just to get rid of you and then vote whichever way they wanted to, and you couldn’t do anything about it.

  I was staying at the Holiday Inn, and the union was picking up my hotel bill and giving me meal money and daily-expense money, and I got a paycheck besides. You could have more than one full-time union job in those days and pick up as many full-time paychecks as Jimmy or whoever was your rabbi got for you. I had the one, but I know Bill and Sam got paid out of several different accounts.

  It seemed like easy money, and Detroit was a lot like Philly. There was plenty to do and never a dull moment. We’d go to the fights or a football game or whatever was in town. Bill and Sam were both heavy drinkers and so we did a lot of that together.

  They taught me that the word union means something. Everybody’s got to be united in the same direction or there is no progress for the worker. A union is only as strong as its weakest member. Once there is dissension the employer senses it and takes advantage of it. Once you allow dissension and rebel factions to exist you are on the way to losing your union. You can have only one boss. You can have helpers, but you can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make side deals and split the union. The employer would illegally fire the strongest union men and get away with it while the union was split in half.

  “Rebel factions are like Nazi collaborators during the war, like they had in Norway and France,” Bill Isabel told me. “Jimmy Hoffa will never tolerate rebel factions. He’s worked too hard to build what we have. He’s the first one up in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Look at how much better off we all are today. The rebels didn’t give us shit. Jimmy won it all. The pension, the hospitalization covering your whole family every time you’re sick. He’s fighting for a Master Freight Agreement where every trucker gets the same wage all over the country. And whatever Jimmy gets for us, the do-gooders in the AFL-CIO tag along and get the same for its members. Then they complain that Jimmy’s tactics are too rough. You were in the war; you know what you got to do to get from point A to point B. I say if a few pints of Guinness get spilled along the way, that’s tough shit, my fine colonial boy.”

  One night the three of us were out on the town. Bill was driving us to an Italian restaurant. I had been on my new job just a few weeks. I was in the backseat and Bill was watching me in the rearview mirror. Bill said to me, “We heard from Jimmy that you paint houses.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head “yes.” Okay, here it is, I thought. So much for getting away from the downtown culture and getting into a new line of work.

  “We got something in Chicago that needs to be straightened out. We got a friend there named Joey Glimco. He runs the cab local there, 777. He’s got the trucks on the waterfront, too. Ever heard of him?”

  I still didn’t say anything. I just shook my head “no.” A couple of weeks later Russell told me that Joey Glimco was Giuseppe Primavera. He had been with Al Capone and was very big with the Chicago outfit. He had a big record, a couple of murder arrests. He took the Fifth on every question during the McClellan Committee hearings, including whether he knew Jimmy Hoffa.

  “There’s a guy there needs straightening out,” Bill said. “We want you to fly to Chicago tomorrow morning. Somebody will meet you at the airport.”

  And that was it. Don’t ask me who or what because I don’t know. It’s not something I want to talk about anyway. It was a problem that needed squaring away and I squared it away for them. By now it seemed like it was something I was doing all my life. If you count my father sending me out to beat up other boys so he could win beer bets, maybe it was.

  Evidently they needed somebody unknown to the guy, because everybody the guy knew on the street was a person he had screwed and he’d be leery of. The guy wouldn’t be concerned about some Irish-looking fellow walking by him on the street. And they wanted the guy left right there on the sidewalk as a message to those who needed to know the guy did not get away with whatever it was he had done.

  Anytime you read in the paper about a masked gunman, rest assured the gunman had no mask on. If there are any eyewitnesses on the street, they always say the gunman had a mask on, so everybody on the shooter’s side of the thing knows the eyewitnesses didn’t see a thing and the eyewitnesses don’t have to worry about a thing.

  I was used to getting put on landing craft and now I was moving up in the world, invading Chicago on a plane. I was in Chicago maybe an hour. They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it. They had other guys sitting in crash cars to pull out in front of cops who might go after the car I got in. The car I got in was supposed to take me back to the airport.

  I relaxed when I saw the airport coming up. I knew that they used “cowboys” sometimes and then took care of the “cowboys” when the matter was completed. The “cowboys” were expendable. Russell had told me how Carlos Marcello liked to send to Sicily for war orphans with no families. They would get smuggled in from Canada, like through Windsor, right across the water from Detroit. The Sicilian war orphans would think they had to take care of a matter and then they could stay in America and maybe they’d be given a pizza parlor or something. They would go paint a house and then they would get in the getaway car and be taken somewhere and their house would get painted and nobody back in Sicily would miss them. Because they were orphans and had no family there would be no vendettas, which are very popular things in Sicily.

  Carlos Marcello and the war orphans did cross my mind during the drive, and I sat the whole way facing the driver. He was a little guy, and if he took his hand off the steering wheel I was going to take his head off for him. I flew back to Detroit, and Bill and Sam were waiting at the airport for me. We went to dinner. Bill handed me an envelope. I handed it back to him. I told him, “I’ll do a friend a favor.” Russell had taught me well. Don’t cheapen yourself. “If you do a friend a favor,” Russell had said, “then sometimes he does you a favor.”

  Bill and Sam had a chance to evaluate my work and they recommended to Jimmy Hoffa to keep me with them. That way I had a better chance to learn.

  We flew to Chicago, and we stayed at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. The union kept a suite on the eighteenth floor with two bedrooms and two beds in each room. Sam and Bill had one and I slept in the other. The second night in Chicago, I got introduced to Joey Glimco. Bill told me that Joey handled important problems for all the locals in Chicago, not just his own, and that I would probably be sent to him in the future.

  The next night Jimmy Hoffa came to Chicago and I met him at Joe Stein’s across the street from the Edgewater. Jimmy Hoffa was very personable. He was a charming man who was a good listener for all the talking he did. He asked me all about my daughters. He told me the reason the union was kicked out of the AFL-CIO was that the AFL-CIO leaders were scared if they crossed that “spoiled brat” Bobby Kennedy they’d end up getting investigated themselves and they’d end up with all the legal hassle Jimmy had. For all the pressure on the man he seemed very at ease, a man you’d like to have with you in a foxhole.

  When the waiter came I ordered a glass of Chianti, and Bill kicked me under the table and shook his head “no.” I stuck to my guns and drank my wine, but I do know there was a little tension in Bill’s face after that at the table every time I lifted my glass. Bill and Sam stuck to ginger ale. Bill later told me that before the dinner he had been recommending me to Jimmy and he wanted me to make a good impression.

  During the dinner Bill said something to Jimmy I’ll never forget. He said, “I’ve never seen a man walk straight through a crowd of people like the Irishman does and never touch a single person. Everybody automatically parts out of the way. It’s li
ke Moses parting the Red Sea.”

  Jimmy looked at me and said, “I think you should stay in Chicago for a while.”

  And what a town that turned out to be. If you can’t make money in Chicago you can’t make money anywhere. They leave the bodies right on the sidewalk. If your dog was with you, your dog goes, too.

  They sent me to Cicero to see Joey Glimco about a problem he was having and I got lost and went into a bar. Cicero was the town Al Capone used to own. As soon as I walked into the bar to ask directions I was surrounded by about twenty rough-looking men and every one of them had a piece. Something told me I was in the right neighborhood. I told them I was looking for a friend and they told me to sit down until they made some calls. Joey Glimco himself came into the bar to get me and take me to the right bar I was supposed to meet him at.

  Glimco was having a problem with a freight hauler that was resisting the union and wouldn’t rehire a shop steward they had fired. It made Joey Glimco look bad to his men, and he wanted me to take care of the matter. I told him nobody needed to paint anybody’s house. I told him to give me a case of Coca-Cola that used to come in those old-fashioned bottles. I said give me one of your men and we’ll handle it. I got on a bridge just down the street from the freight company. When a truck would pull out and drive down to go under the bridge, the man and I dropped bottles of Coke down on the truck. It sounded like bombs going off, and trucks were crashing into the bridge abutment without knowing what was happening. Finally, the drivers refused to take trucks out of the yard, and the freight company came around and rehired the shop steward, but he didn’t get his back pay. Maybe I should have used two cases of Coke.

  I spent nights at the Edgewater, mostly rooming with Jimmy Hoffa when he came in from his home in Detroit. Sam and Bill and I would cut a hole in a watermelon and fill it with rum so Jimmy didn’t know we were drinking. “Boy, you men sure like your watermelon,” Jimmy would say. One night Jimmy wasn’t supposed to be coming home and I had a gallon of wine in the window cooling off. Jimmy came in while I was asleep and the noise of him coming in woke me up. When he got in bed he said, “What’s that in the window?” I said, “I think it’s the moon, Jimmy.” Sam and Bill said I got away with more shit with Jimmy than anybody else did.

  Jimmy was the first one up every morning. Breakfast was at seven sharp and you’d better be up and ready or you got no breakfast. His kid, young Jimmy, would come around to the Edgewater. He was a good kid and he respected his father. Jimmy was very proud that his son was going to go to law school, which he did. He’s now president of the Teamsters.

  I got to meet a lot of important people. Sam “Momo” Giancana would come by the Edgewater. In the beginning I wouldn’t stay for their business. But I would be there to greet him on his arrival at Jimmy’s suite. Giancana was in the newspapers a lot in those days, dating celebrities. He was the exact opposite of Russell as far as publicity went.

  Later on, when Jimmy got to know my work himself, I stayed in the room whenever something was going on. Once in a while Giancana would have a guy with him named Jack Ruby from Dallas. I met Jack Ruby a few times. I know Jimmy’s kid met him, too, at the Edgewater. Ruby was with Giancana and he was with Red Dorfman. One time we all went out to eat and Ruby had a blond with him that he brought up from Dallas for Giancana. There is no doubt whatsoever that Jimmy Hoffa didn’t just meet Jack Ruby, he knew Jack Ruby, and not just from Giancana, but from Red Dorfman, too.”

  In September 1978 Dan E. Moldea, author of The Hoffa Wars, tape-recorded a conversation with James P. Hoffa, Jimmy’s son. Moldea wrote in a postscript to his meticulously researched and reasoned book on Jimmy Hoffa and his many wars: “When I reminded [young Jimmy] Hoffa that he had told me of his father’s relationship with Jack Ruby, Hoffa confirmed [it]. Unknown to Hoffa and for my own protection I secretly tape-recorded this telephone conversation with Hoffa.”

  “One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with.

  Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood. Giancana said he was going to fix the election in Illinois so Kennedy would win that state. Jimmy couldn’t believe his ears. Jimmy tried to talk him out of it. Jimmy told him nobody could control Bobby because he was mental. Jimmy said people went to the old man during the McClellan Committee hearings and he couldn’t do anything about either one of his millionaire kids.

  Giancana told Jimmy that Kennedy was going to help them get Castro out of Cuba so they could get their casinos back. Jimmy said that they were crazy to trust those Kennedy boys after what they did in the McClellan hearings. Jimmy said Nixon was still going to beat Kennedy and Nixon would help them in Cuba. Giancana said the whole thing happened in Cuba under Eisenhower and Nixon, so what good were the Republicans? It was something to listen to this. It was only a couple of years after Apalachin let everybody know there was such a thing as this La Cosa Nostra. And here they were talking about whether the Chicago outfit should or should not fix a presidential election. Growing up wherever you grew up you knew the local elections were fixed. You knew the local Philly elections or whatever were fixed, but this was something, and this high-level talk was all going on right in front of me.

  The Teamsters turned out to be the only union to back Nixon in the 1960 election. Now the History Channel makes no bones about it; one of the reasons Kennedy won that election was because Sam Giancana fixed Illinois for him with phony ballots from people who were dead, names taken off gravestones.

  I knew how important Cuba was to my friends in the East and all their friends in the country. Russell had taken me with him to Cuba just when Castro was starting to kick everybody out and confiscate their casinos and racetracks and houses and bank accounts and everything else they owned in Cuba. I never saw Russell madder than on that trip to Cuba, and I wasn’t even on the last trip he made where he was even madder because his friend Santo Trafficante from Florida had been arrested by the Communists and was being held in jail. I heard a rumor that Sam Giancana had to send Jack Ruby to Cuba to spread some money around to get Santo out.

  Around that time I was getting more advanced in the union work, and I was going back and forth between Local 107 in Philadelphia and Local 777 in Chicago to be with Bill and Sam and Joey Glimco. I wouldn’t just be walking on the picket line or getting workers to sign a card. I would be put in charge of making sure the pickets showed up. I was what they called “muscle” for the picket line. I’d make sure the picket line was orderly. If a striker didn’t show up and pull his tour of duty, he didn’t get paid for walking the picket line. I made sure he didn’t get a strike check for that day.

  Local 107 in Philly was the fourth-largest local in the country and it was always having a lot of problems. It was just too big to manage. They were investigated for corruption by the U.S. Senate, and the president, Raymond Cohen, was always on the hot seat. There were always factions at 107. Joey McGreal had his own muscle crew and he was always looking to sow dissension so he could take over. I couldn’t stand Raymond Cohen. He tried to rule with an iron hand. He had no respect for people. Every month I would make a motion to take away his car or his expense account or something to harass him. Cohen was a big supporter of Jimmy Hoffa in public and so Cohen complained about me to Jimmy.

  But what Cohen didn’t know was that Bill and Sam were encouraging me on orders from Hoffa. Cohen was big in the International. He was one of the three
trustees. But Cohen was the kind of guy that backed Jimmy on the outside publicly but bucked Jimmy on the inside when Jimmy wanted to get something done. For example, he was against Jimmy’s biggest dream of a nationwide trucker’s contract, the Master Freight Agreement. Cohen was an embarrassment, and he ended up getting indicted for embezzlement, and they eventually got rid of him.

  Jimmy had a loyal supporter in Puerto Rico named Frank Chavez. But however, Frank Chavez was a definite troublemaker. He was very hotheaded. He’s the one who sent Bobby Kennedy a letter from his local in Puerto Rico the day John F. Kennedy got assassinated. He told Bobby that in honor of all the bad things Bobby Kennedy had done to Jimmy Hoffa, his Puerto Rican local was going to put flowers on the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald and maintain them and keep them fresh. That still has to make you cringe a little. Let the dead rest in peace. You honor the dead, especially that man. He was a war hero who saved his own men in that PT boat incident. Bobby was a son of a bitch, but the man had just lost his brother and he must have known it was all connected with him and that it was his own fault, besides.