I Heard You Paint Houses Page 19

  That’s why Jimmy had us fight so hard against the rebels and sometimes do what we had to do. Jimmy needed a solidified union. Philadelphia was the toughest nut for Jimmy to crack. First, Cohen was against giving up the power. Second, the Voice and the other rebel groups were still very active and agitating. The truckers in Philadelphia took advantage of the situation at 107. They wouldn’t even cooperate on an area-wide agreement. They knew Cohen wouldn’t strike. Jimmy brought them around by threatening to shut them down with strikes at their terminals outside of Philadelphia.”

  In February 1963 while the grand jury in Nashville was gathering evidence of jury tampering, Jimmy Hoffa spoke about the trucking companies in Philadelphia: “They’ve either got to live with us here or fight with us everywhere.”

  Hoffa addressed the problem of the rebel Voice, which he believed was then being supported and encouraged by the AFL-CIO and by Bobby Kennedy: “We have to convert them to our way of thinking.”

  And Hoffa addressed the legal proceedings in Nashville: “Something is happening in this country by the name of Bobby Kennedy. One man has assigned an elite squad of twenty-three deputy attorneys general to work his dictates on me.”

  Along with everyone else who had been part of Hoffa’s Nashville entourage at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, Ed Partin was summoned to the grand jury in Nashville, and following the Hoffa party line he took the Fifth. Bill Bufalino wrote the precise language out for him on a card to take into the grand jury room. The government was determined to keep Partin’s defection a secret. Meanwhile, people like the State Highway Patrol trooper began admitting the truth, and a jury-tampering indictment looked promising to the government.

  Jimmy Hoffa spent fourteen weeks in Philadelphia at the Warwick Hotel campaigning against the Voice in the upcoming April election. In an election held a few months earlier the Voice had lost by only 600 votes in a local with 11,000 members. That election was set aside because of the anti-Voice violence that had dominated that election. Not resorting to violence this time, Hoffa campaigned vigorously and explained the benefits in pay and in pension that would come from the plans he had for the Teamsters Union. In the election of April 1963, Hoffa’s Teamsters defeated the Voice again, bringing the fourth-largest Teamsters local back in line. Hoffa promised to “let bygones be bygones.” Equally as important to Hoffa as defeating the Voice, Cohen now owed Jimmy Hoffa his complete loyalty in the matter of a Master Freight Agreement.

  On May 9, 1963, Jimmy Hoffa was indicted in Nashville for jury tampering. At the entry of his not-guilty plea Hoffa held a press conference and said that Bobby Kennedy “has a personal vendetta against me and is trying to convict me with planted stories in the press…. Of course I’m not guilty. This indictment talks about ten people and I only know three of them.”

  On June 4, 1963, Cohen was convicted of embezzling union funds. There now would be no doubt about the dream of a Master Freight Agreement. Cohen would be removed as president of Local 107 and would go to jail. Cohen would be in no position to work secretly against Hoffa’s negotiations with the Philadelphia trucking companies.

  On the same afternoon of Cohen’s conviction, a grand jury in Chicago indicted Jimmy Hoffa for fraudulent misuse of the Central States Pension Fund for personal profit. The principal charge against Hoffa dealt with the pledging of $400,000 of union funds at no interest to secure a personal loan for the Sun Valley land development deal in Florida. It was alleged that James R. Hoffa had a secret 22 percent ownership interest in the profits of that venture. Hoffa denied that he had any such secret interest.

  “Right after Cohen went to school I went with Jimmy for a negotiating session against management, in a motel in Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington. I grabbed some college kids and gave them $50 each to use all the public toilets and keep the elevators busy. Then I put laxatives in one of the coffee urns. Those of us on the union’s team who drank coffee took our coffee from the other urn. Management was split about 50-50 on urn selection. Half of the people from management took coffee from the doctored urn. Pretty soon one guy ran into the one bathroom in the negotiating room and wouldn’t come out. The other few guys went nuts running around the hotel looking for a toilet that wasn’t being used. They all stayed out of the negotiations after that to rest up and change their clothes. I had thinned out the herd. It was easier to negotiate against a smaller group. Even with all the pressure on Jimmy, I never saw him laugh so hard as when we got back to our room.

  During that summer and fall I didn’t see that much of Jimmy. Jimmy met a lot with his lawyers about the new indictments. The first trial was going to be the one for so-called jury tampering. They had it scheduled in Nashville in October. I was planning on going down and getting to the Grand Ole Opry. The Chicago pension fund case involving the Sun Valley matter was scheduled for the spring of 1964. I most definitely looked for any excuse to go to Chicago.

  The lawyer Frank Ragano claims in a book and on the History Channel that Jimmy Hoffa gave him a message to deliver to Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello—to kiss the president, John F. Kennedy. He said it happened in Jimmy’s office in Washington while they were working on the trial preparation. I for one cannot see Jimmy delivering a message like that through that messenger with those words.”

  In 1994 Frank Ragano wrote a memoir appropriately called Mob Lawyer. In the memoir, Ragano claims to have heard a discussion between Jimmy Hoffa, Joey Glimco, and Bill Bufalino in early 1963 while the grand juries were meeting in Nashville and Chicago, but before the indictments had been handed down. While playing gin with Glimco, Hoffa asked Bufalino, “What do you think would happen if something happened to Booby?” (Hoffa always referred to his archenemy as Booby.)

  The consensus reached in the discussion was that if something happened to Bobby, Jack would unleash the dogs. But if something happened to Jack, Vice President Lyndon Johnson would become the president, and it was no secret that Lyndon hated Bobby. Lyndon, it was agreed, definitely would get rid of Bobby as attorney general. According to Frank Ragano’s recollection, Jimmy Hoffa said, “Damn right he would. He hates him as much as I do.”

  A few months later, on Tuesday July 23, 1963, four months before President Kennedy was assassinated, Ragano claims to have been meeting with Hoffa about the new indictments that had recently been handed down in May and June. Hoffa was beside himself with rage. According to Ragano he was told by Jimmy Hoffa: “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend and Carlos to get rid of them, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time—something has to be done.”

  “Okay, the way I look at Frank Ragano is that they didn’t know about Partin. Jimmy was pretty sure they had a spy in their midst during that trial in Nashville. I know that everybody that was a part of that Andrew Jackson Hotel scene was a suspect in Jimmy’s mind. Jimmy was just getting to know Frank Ragano back then. It’s not like Bill Bufalino, where they had known each other for many years, did deals together, established a record of mutual respect together. Jimmy had a private jet at his disposal at all times. If he wanted to deliver a message that’s as serious a message as a message can get, he would fly down to Florida. Jimmy kept a nice place down there in Miami Beach. Jimmy most definitely knew how to use a telephone to set up a meeting. That’s how I met Jimmy—on a prearranged phone call at Skinny Razor’s. Now don’t get me wrong, they say Frank Ragano is good people, and Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello put a lot of trust in him as a lawyer. If Frank Ragano said that’s the way he remembered it happened, I guess I have to go with his memory on that. But you’re talking about something here that nobody in their right mind talks about the way he said Jimmy talked about it. If Jimmy said it to Ragano, and Ragano said it to those people, they had to wonder whether Jimmy was thinking clearly if he was talking out loud like that to Frank Ragano. Not to mention the position you put the person in who hears such a thing. Carlos used to ha
ve a sign in his office that said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

  As if there weren’t enough going on in 1963, word spread through the grapevine that the FBI got a certain soldier named Joseph Valachi to turn. Valachi was the first guy to roll over. He was just a soldier out of the Genovese family in New York. That was the family that Lucky Luciano started when Luciano and Meyer Lansky and the rest of them put the thing together years ago. Valachi wasn’t too close to anybody big. I had never even heard of the man, much less met the man through Russell. If I’m not mistaken, Russell had never heard of the man either until the thing came out. But this Valachi knew all the old stories. He knew who whacked who and why. He told how Vito Genovese had a citizen thrown off a roof so he could marry the guy’s wife, which he then went and did. He knew all the families and how everything was set up in the organization among the Italians.

  Valachi was a born rat and a drug pusher, and his own boss Vito Genovese was going to have him kissed when they were in federal prison together on suspicion of being a jailhouse snitch and an informant. When in doubt have no doubt.

  Joe Valachi ended up killing some innocent inmate that he thought was going to kiss him, and after that he told everybody everything he knew about everything. He told about how they get initiated into becoming made men. He told Italian secrets I didn’t even know about. He even told little things like how Carlos Marcello didn’t allow anybody from any of the other families to so much as visit New Orleans, not even for Mardi Gras, without first getting his approval. Carlos Marcello was one boss that took no chances. The man ran a tight ship.

  A couple of weeks before Jimmy’s jury-tampering trial was scheduled Bobby Kennedy paraded this Joe Valachi on television in some more of those McClellan hearings. It was like propaganda in a war, like a publicity drive to sell war bonds. Only Joe Valachi was Bob Hope. You could see after the publicity over the Valachi hearing that the drive against so-called organized crime was really going to open up even bigger than it already was. There were a lot of interested parties glued to their TV sets in bathhouses and private Italian clubs all over the country.”

  In September 1963, about a month prior to Jimmy Hoffa’s scheduled trial for jury tampering, Joseph Valachi appeared on television before the McClellan Committee and unveiled to the public all the details of what Bobby Kennedy had called “the greatest intelligence breakthrough in the history of organized crime in America.”

  Joe Valachi’s odyssey from low-level “button man” and jailbird to media sensation and poster boy for Bobby Kennedy began a year earlier in the summer of 1962 in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Valachi was serving time on a drug-pushing charge at the same time his boss, Vito Genovese, was serving time. To embarrass Valachi and make it look as if he were cooperating, Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents visited Valachi regularly. The idea was to make Genovese paranoid around Valachi. That would put the fear of death into Valachi and that pressure on Valachi would cause Valachi to flip. This was a ruse that would later be used at Sandstone Prison by the FBI unsuccessfully against Frank Sheeran to get him to talk about the Hoffa disappearance. In Valachi’s and Genovese’s cases it worked.

  Vito Genovese walked up to his soldier, Joe Valachi, and, according to Valachi’s testimony, Genovese slowly and thoughtfully said, “You know sometimes if I had a barrel of apples, and one of these apples is touched…not all rotten but just a little touched…it has to be removed or it will touch all the rest of the apples.”

  Genovese grabbed his soldier’s head with both hands and gave Joe Valachi the “kiss of death” on the mouth.

  When Valachi used a lead pipe on the first inmate to approach him and killed the man, the ruse had worked. To avoid the death penalty and in exchange for a life sentence, Joseph Valachi gave Jimmy Hoffa and his friends one more reason to hate Bobby Kennedy.

  Bobby Kennedy was the first witness called by Senator McClellan before Joseph Valachi spoke at the September 1963 hearings. Bobby Kennedy told the committee and a nationwide television audience that “because of intelligence gathered from Joseph Valachi…we know that Cosa Nostra is run by a commission and that the leaders of Cosa Nostra in most major cities are responsible to the commission…and we know who the active members of the commission are today.”

  “Just after the Valachi hearings Jimmy’s lawyers got the jury-tampering trial postponed until January 1964. And then for some reason or other the judge made a change of venue to Chattanooga because something was going on in Nashville. We were all going to be dancing to the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for the New Year.”

  On November 8, 1963, the same Nashville police officer who had reported on Tommy Osborn during the Nashville Test Fleet case reported on Osborn again to the Get Hoffa Squad regarding an attempt to tamper with a member of the Nashville jury pool in the upcoming jury-tampering trial, then scheduled for early 1964. This time the Get Hoffa Squad got the goods on tape and reported it to Judge Miller, as chief judge of the court.

  Judge Miller called Tommy Osborn into his chambers and confronted Osborn with an allegation from the Nashville Police that Osborn had solicited a Nashville police officer to seek out and bribe a prospective juror with an offer of $10,000 for a vote of acquittal. The prospective juror would get $5,000 should the juror be selected for trial and an additional $5,000 when the jury subsequently reports itself hopelessly deadlocked. Initially, Osborn denied the allegation. Judge Miller then told Osborn that the police officer who had reported the clumsy solicitation to the Get Hoffa Squad had secretly tape-recorded a confirming conversation with Osborn. Tommy Osborn was given a Rule to Show Cause why he should not be disbarred. Osborn reported the matter to Bill Bufalino and Frank Ragano. Osborn returned to the judge and admitted that it was his voice, but that it was the police officer’s idea and Osborn did not intend to follow through on the idea. In other words, Osborn merely had been puffing, talking tough. Ultimately, Osborn would be convicted in a separate trial and serve a short prison sentence. Upon his release from jail, filled with despair, he would shoot himself in the head in 1970. But in late 1963, Jimmy Hoffa’s lead counsel for his upcoming jury-tampering trial awaited word on whether he would be disbarred for yet more jury tampering.

  Considering the city of Nashville to be contaminated beyond repair, the judge granted the defense request to move the trial to Chattanooga for January 1964.

  “One morning, a few days to a week before November 22, 1963, I got a call from Jimmy to go to the pay phone. When I got there the only thing Jimmy said to me was, “Go see your friend.”

  I drove up to Russell’s and when he answered the door all he told me to do was, “Go see our friends in Brooklyn. They’ve got something for you to take to Baltimore.” That was not like Russell. He was setting the tone for whatever this was.

  I turned around and drove to Monte’s Restaurant in Brooklyn. It was a hangout for the Genovese people. It’s the oldest Italian restaurant in New York City. It’s in South Brooklyn, not far from the Gowanus Canal. Excellent food. To the left of the restaurant they have their own parking lot. I parked and went in and stood at the bar. Tony Pro got up from his table and went to the back and returned with a duffel bag. He handed it to me and told me, “Go down to Campbell’s Cement in Baltimore where you went that time with the truck. Our friend’s pilot will be there. He’s waiting for this.”

  You didn’t have to spend all that time in combat to know you had a duffel bag with three rifles in it. I knew it was rifles, but I had no idea what it was.

  When I got there, Carlos’s pilot, Dave Ferrie, was there with another guy I knew from Monte’s who was with Genovese. He’s gone now, but he has a nice family. There’s no reason to bring his name into it. He said, “How’s your friend?” I said, “He’s doing good.” He said, “You got something for us?” With the tone Russell had set, I didn’t even get out of my car. I gave him the keys. He opened the trunk, took the bag, we said good-bye, and away I went home.”

  At the time of this
exchange at Monte’s, Provenzano was out on appeal from a June 13, 1963, labor-racketeering conviction. His bagman and fellow defendant, Michael Communale, a former Hudson County prosecutor, was also convicted. The June 1963 conviction would ultimately send Provenzano to Lewisburg prison for four and a half years, and because it was a labor-law violation he would be barred from union activity for five years after his release. During the trial New York Post writer Murray Kempton identified Provenzano as the “highest-paid labor boss in America.” At that time he was earning more salary from his three Teamsters posts than Jimmy Hoffa and more than the president of the United States.

  Bobby Kennedy was the very visible driving force behind Provenzano’s labor-racketeering conviction and hailed it roundly in the press. Provenzano in turn condemned the attorney general’s tactic of sending investigators out to question his friends, neighbors, and, most unforgiveably, his children. The New York Times reported that Provenzano had denounced Kennedy “in terms so obscene that the television film was unusable and reporters were unable to find a direct quote they could print.”