I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  In Nashville on November 20, 1963, Judge Miller disbarred Tommy Osborn.

  Two days later, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

  Among the telephone calls a bereaved Bobby Kennedy made about those he suspected of involvement in his brother’s murder was one to Walter Sheridan. Bobby Kennedy asked Walter Sheridan to check out the possible involvement of Jimmy Hoffa.

  “The union hall in Wilmington, Delaware, was down near the train station at that time. It was still a part of Local 107 in Philly. I had some union business down there and I had to stop at a couple of trucking terminals on my way down. When I walked into the union hall it was on the radio that Kennedy had been shot. When I first heard the news about Dallas it bothered me like it bothered everybody else in the world. He wasn’t one of my favorite people, but I had nothing personal against the man, and he had a nice family. Even before Ruby whacked Oswald it crossed my mind whether it had anything to do with that matter at Monte’s. I don’t have to tell you there was nobody you could ask about something like that.”

  All the flags in Washington were put at half-staff as the news of the assassination spread and everyone who worked in or out of the government was sent home. When Jimmy Hoffa learned that International Vice President Harold Gibbons of St. Louis had put the Teamsters headquarters flag at half-staff and closed the building, Hoffa flew into a rage.

  “Jimmy never forgave Harold Gibbons for putting the flag at half-staff. I told Jimmy, “What was he going to do? All the buildings were at half-staff.” Jimmy wouldn’t listen to me. Later on when Jimmy was going off to school I told him to put Harold Gibbons in charge of the day-to-day instead of Fitz. There was no more dedicated or finer union man than Harold Gibbons. All Jimmy said to me was, “Fuck him.””

  On the day of President Kennedy’s funeral procession, while the whole world mourned the young fallen commander in chief of the United States of America, Jimmy Hoffa went on television in Nashville to blast the government for framing Tommy Osborn and disbarring him. Hoffa said, “I feel that it’s just a travesty of justice. That the government, the local officials, and the judges should have any part of trying to set up and entrap him and be able to take away from me a competent lawyer to represent me in my case.”

  Then, darkly relevant to the day’s heartrending and solemn funeral, Jimmy Hoffa gloated to the Nashville television audience and said, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”

  chapter nineteen

  Tampering with the Very Soul of the Nation

  As early as December 9, 1963—a mere seventeen days after his brother’s assassination—Robert Kennedy spoke briefly about the possibility of mob involvement to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and former Harvard professor, Schlesinger had been a special assistant to President Kennedy. Schlesinger wrote in his two-volume biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, that he and Robert Kennedy spent the evening of December 9 together and “I asked him, perhaps tactlessly, about Oswald. He said that there could be no serious doubt that Oswald was guilty, but there was still some argument if he had done it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.”

  Two years after the Warren Commission released its 1964 report, Bobby Kennedy told his brother Jack’s former White House aide Richard Goodwin, “I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved it was organized crime. But there is nothing I can do about it. Not now.”

  At the time Bobby Kennedy made these statements to former White House officials who were his friends, he knew more about the inner game of organized crime than any “outsider” in the country. Bobby Kennedy certainly knew that, in the absence of a mob war, bosses did not ever eliminate another boss’s underboss. It would bring major retaliation. To effect a desired change in policy, mob bosses have traditionally eliminated—and still eliminate—bosses, not underbosses. On an international scale it is called regime change. To the Italian bosses it is merely a matter of following the old Sicilian maxim that to kill a dog you don’t cut off its tail, you cut off its head.

  On the painful day his brother was shot to death in Dallas, Robert Kennedy was in Washington presiding over a two-day organized crime meeting of the federal attorneys on his staff. They had arrived from Untied States attorneys offices from all over the country to assemble at the Department of Justice for this pivotal meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to work out the details of the next phase of the attorney general’s campaign against organized crime.

  It was during a lunch break in the second day of meetings that Robert Kennedy heard the devastating news from Dallas.

  The chief of the Organized Crime Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice was an attorney named William Hundley. As Hundley expressed it, “The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head, it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped.”

  Exposing and ridding America of organized crime had been Bobby Kennedy’s passionate obsession. It had been a very personal campaign for him, and he had made it a very personal campaign for his staff and for his enemies in organized crime. Bobby Kennedy brought to the campaign a fiercely competitive nature.

  For the first three years of what would be a six-year campaign against organized crime, Bobby was chief counsel for the McClellan Committee. During those three years he grilled, taunted, and derided many of the most vicious and vengeful men in America. Kennedy asked loaded question after loaded question, and each answer came back the same: “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” During one such grilling, Bobby had stared into the eyes of Sam “Momo” Giancana and told him: “You are the chief gunman for the group that succeeded the Capone mob.” Bobby Kennedy had grilled Frank Sinatra’s pal and Cal-Neva Casino business partner about whether he disposed of his enemies by stuffing their bodies in trunks. When Giancana laughed and once again took the Fifth Amendment, Kennedy sneeringly remarked, “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”

  When Bobby Kennedy made that remark he certainly knew that Sam “Momo” Giancana was notoriously sadistic in the methods of his murders. In December 1958 Giancana had ordered the brutal slaying of Mr. and Mrs. Gus Greenbaum in their Phoenix, Arizona, home. After they were both tortured, their throats were slit. Gus Greenbaum was an associate of Meyer Lansky. Greenbaum had succeeded Bugsy Siegel as head of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas when Siegel was murdered. At the time of Greenbaum’s murder he headed Sam Giancana’s Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Giancana suspected Greenbaum of stealing. By having Greenbaum and his completely innocent wife tortured and killed, Giancana was sending a message to all those who worked for him to follow the rules.

  In 1961 Giancana repeated the message to his crew. William “Action” Jackson was a 300-pound loan shark who worked for Giancana. Jackson was suspected of being a government informer. He was taken to a meatpacking plant and hung on a six-inch steel meat hook and tortured for two days. Jackson was systemically beaten, cut, burned, shot in the knee, and shocked with a cattle prod until he died. Photographs were taken of Jackson. All the men who worked for Giancana in his vast criminal empire, ranging from Chicago to Las Vegas to Dallas to Hollywood to Phoenix, were required to view the photographs.

  At the conclusion of his three years with the McClellan Committee, Bobby Kennedy added a bestselling book to his fearless campaign. In his book Kennedy exposed organized crime in great detail, naming names and narrating deeds for a larger public. Bobby Kennedy labeled organized crime in the title of his book as The Enemy Within.

  For the next three years of his campaign against organized crime, Kennedy was the attorney general, the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the man to whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported. Bobby Kennedy drew up a list of gangsters to target, targeted them, and jailed them. Bobby Kennedy greatly expanded the use of informants and wiretapping. On an almost daily basis he taught America and the feder
al government, and especially FBI Director Hoover, about the existence of organized crime, about the need to rid the country of organized criminals, and how to use the enormous, heretofore dormant power of the federal government to do that.

  And no more personal target or greater danger to the nation existed in Bobby Kennedy’s heart and mind than Jimmy Hoffa. But so far Hoffa kept slipping through the net.

  After Dallas, however, Bobby Kennedy’s power source was unplugged. For any illegal acts Jimmy Hoffa and the friends of Jimmy Hoffa might venture into in the future, Bobby Kennedy would no longer be in the supremely powerful position of attorney general to his own brother and best friend.

  However, for Hoffa’s past sins, sins for which Hoffa was then under indictment, Bobby Kennedy continued to be very much the Attorney General of the United States.

  Somehow Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson patched up their differences long enough to keep Kennedy on as attorney general until Hoffa’s trials were over. The Get Hoffa Squad was kept intact, and their supervisor and chief strategist was to remain in command. Jimmy Hoffa’s upcoming jury trials were both scheduled for early 1964. The jury-tampering trial would begin in Chattanooga on January 20, and the Sun Valley pension fund trial would begin in Chicago on April 27, 1964. The Get Hoffa Squad was counting on back-to-back justice that would land Jimmy Hoffa in jail.

  “Around the middle part of January, I was in Chicago with Jimmy for the final signing of the first Master Freight Agreement. I was working for the International and it was well represented in Chicago that day. There were four districts or conferences at that time, and each one had a vice president and they were all there. It was history in the making for the labor movement. It was a very ingenious thing. The locals still had to approve it, but it was basically a done deal in Chicago. Each local still had autonomy over local matters and their conference could negotiate a supplement to the national contract for their own or for their management’s own special needs. Locals could negotiate better terms for themselves on something, but no one could negotiate less than what the Master Freight Agreement gave the workers. Unfortunately, there was still cheating after that. New York was notorious for giving their workers less. It was there for you to get in the national agreement, but it was up to your leadership to get it for you. Tony Pro was never going to get an Appreciation Night from his membership. A lot of his members took less or they didn’t work, and Pro got paid under the table by management.

  Four days after he signed the Master Freight Agreement, Jimmy was back down in a foxhole in Chattanooga for jury selection. After the trial started I went down to Chattanooga to sit in court with Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They had a new local lawyer now to replace the one that got disbarred. Bill Bufalino and Frank Ragano were there again. They had lawyers for all the other defendants. Allen Dorfman, who ran the pension fund, was one of those who were indicted for helping Jimmy on the jury tampering. Chuckie O’Brien was down there with Jimmy, no doubt keeping an eye out for any more nuts in the crowd with a gun.

  And oh man, was it crowded in Chattanooga. The courtroom was packed. After I was there a couple of days I got the word that there was no need for my presence in the courtroom, and I left Chattanooga and went back to work. When I left Tennessee everybody thought the government had some cases against some of the people, but the government had no witnesses that could put Jimmy in the thing. They sounded like they were getting ready to send some more parachutes to Bobby Kennedy. They didn’t know about Partin yet. The government saved Partin for last. He was their surprise witness.”

  There was no judicial requirement that government witnesses had to be identified in advance. Edward Grady Partin was kept out of sight in a cabin in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

  The Chattanooga jury-tampering trial plodded along as government attorney James Neal called witnesses to build up case after case against Hoffa’s accomplices, that is, against all those who had done the dirty work during the Nashville trial. Hoffa smiled cordially and exuded confidence.

  Then on the final day, three months into the trial, when victory seemed assured for Hoffa, the government called its final witness. Edward Grady Partin walked in, and the courtroom erupted. Immediately, the defense attorneys cried foul. A motion was filed to exclude from the trial any testimony Partin might have to offer. The government was accused of planting a mole inside the defense camp in violation of Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel. If that were proven to be so, Partin’s testimony would have to be excluded from the jury, and Jimmy Hoffa would walk out of court a winner once again.

  The government’s contention was that Edward Gray Partin was not planted by the prosecutors. Rather, he volunteered to attend the trial on his own. Partin did not report to the government prosecutors. Partin reported to the nonlawyer and former FBI agent Walter Sheridan. Partin merely had been instructed by Sheridan to be on the lookout for evidence of the ongoing crime of jury tampering. Partin reported such evidence of jury tampering to Walter Sheridan, and Sheridan reported it to the prosecutors, who reported it to the judge. Partin had never discussed with Walter Sheridan anything he may have heard in Nashville pertaining to the Test Fleet case itself or to any aspect of Hoffa’s defense in the Test Fleet case.

  The hearing on the defense motion lasted four hours. The judge accepted the government’s version of the events, and Edward Grady Partin was permitted to testify before the jury, which was called back into the room. Jimmy Hoffa sat in his chair and glared at Partin. Partin was not intimidated. Partin proceeded to link Jimmy Hoffa to the specific instances of jury tampering by repeating to the jury the bragging Hoffa had done to Partin about certain attempts to bribe jurors either before they occurred or while they were occurring. With each sentence it became clearer and clearer that Jimmy Hoffa had been the puppeteer pulling the strings in Nashville.

  At the next break Jimmy Hoffa picked up a heavy desk chair in the defense room at the courthouse and flung it across the room.

  Partin testified for the government, and then the defense began questioning Partin. The cross-examination lasted almost five days, and instead of breaking down, Partin just got stronger with each passing day. On one occasion a defense lawyer accused Partin of memorizing and rehearsing his testimony, and Partin replied, “If I had it rehearsed you would have heard a lot more than you did. I forgot some things.”

  One night early in Partin’s testimony a shotgun was fired into the Baton Rouge home of Partin’s business agent and good friend.

  At breaks during Partin’s testimony, Jimmy Hoffa began to hurl loud obscenities at Walter Sheridan whenever their paths crossed. On one occasion Hoffa made the bizarre observation to Sheridan that he had heard that Sheridan had cancer (which wasn’t true) and wondered, “How long does it take to work?” On another occasion Hoffa said to Sheridan, “You don’t have an ounce of guts in your body.” He began yelling at his own attorneys in public. Newsmen who overheard the defense attorneys being bawled out reported comments such as, “I don’t care if you have to stay up all night.” This treatment at the hands of Hoffa incited at least one defense attorney to erupt loudly and often at the trial judge, to the point of being held in contempt of court. At one break Jimmy Hoffa said to the prosecutor, James Neal, “I’ll hound you for the rest of your life, Neal. You won’t be in the government forever.” After Partin finished testifying, Jimmy Hoffa took the stand. However, by this time he was spooked. He didn’t know whether the government had tape recordings of anything he had said to Partin in Nashville. In fact, he was convinced the government had such tapes. As a consequence of his beliefs, he could not directly deny many of the things that were said against him. He hedged his answers and tried to explain away comments rather than flatly deny them.

  Unfortunately for Hoffa, these were comments about actual jury-tampering events that had been proven to have transpired by the testimony of the bribed jurors. No amount of explaining could have helped him. The only explanation he could have given to satisfy a jury would have
been an unequivocal denial that he had ever made such comments to the likes of Edward Grady Partin. But Hoffa’s fear of electronic surveillance took that option away from him. Hoffa’s performance on that Chattanooga witness stand was not vintage, in-your-face Jimmy Hoffa.

  The rest of the defense was even weaker. Hoffa and his attorneys had clearly been unprepared for the bombshell surprise witness.

  Frank Fitzsimmons testified for Hoffa that he had sent the black business agent Larry Campbell to Nashville to do some union organizing. This was weak testimony to imply that Campbell was not there for the purpose of jury tampering. Somehow it was intended to refute Partin’s testimony that Hoffa said, “I’ve got the colored male juror in my hip pocket. One of my business agents, Larry Campbell, came into Nashville prior to the trial and took care of it.”

  Another defense witness was called to say that Edward Grady Partin was a dope addict. As weak as that evidence was on its face, it served the prosecution further by allowing the government to destroy it. The prosecution had Partin evaluated by two drug experts, physicians who treated addicts, who came to court to testify that there was no evidence that Partin was then on narcotics or that he had ever used them in his life.

  In its desperation, and in a state of high paranoia, the defense filed a motion for a mistrial, accusing the government of employing electronic and nonelectronic surveillance against the defense team. The motions were supported by affidavits from experts in electronic surveillance and photographs of alleged FBI surveillance. Only one of the photographs had an FBI agent in it, and he happened to be a passing motorist. All the other photographs were of ordinary citizens of Chattanooga taking snapshots of the celebrity defendants. During an argument on the motion one of the defense attorneys, Jacques Schiffer, challenged prosecutor James Neal to a duel. Schiffer said, “You don’t say that again unless you mean to back it up. I will meet you anywhere with anything. We will see who turns yellow first.” Ultimately, the judge ruled that the motion for a mistrial based on alleged surveillance of the defense team by the FBI was “utterly without merit.”