I Heard You Paint Houses Page 21

  Next the defense filed a motion for a mistrial, alleging that the jury had overheard that same defense attorney, Jacques Schiffer, loudly arguing a legal point and that some of the jurors were overheard to be critical of Schiffer’s boisterous and aggressive tactics. At the time of the alleged incident the jury was sequestered in the jury room and was not permitted to hear the legal arguments taking place in the courtroom. But for the loud volume of the defense attorney’s argument, the jury would not have heard anything Schiffer had said. In support of its motion the defense alleged that defense attorney Frank Ragano, at the height of Schiffer’s thunderous oration, had left the counsel table and gone back to the jury room door to listen to the jury to see if it could hear the arguments by Schiffer. An incredulous judge pointed out to Ragano that what he had done violated the sanctity of the jury room and that instead of manufacturing evidence for a mistrial he should have asked his cocounsel to quiet down, as the judge had been asking him to do throughout the trial.

  In his closing summation, government prosecutor James Neal told the jury that what had occurred in Nashville was “one of the greatest assaults on the jury system known to mankind.” As for the truthfulness of his star witness, Neal succinctly told the jury, “The reason the government says Partin is telling the truth is because it checked and found out that all he said was happening, and what he said was going to happen, did happen.”

  James Haggerty, the lead attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, called it all “a foul and filthy frame-up.” Haggerty then played the Bobby card. By mentioning Bobby Kennedy and choosing words that would evoke slavery, Haggerty sought to appeal to a perceived Southern prejudice against Bobby Kennedy for his having put the Justice Department squarely behind integration and in support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Haggerty accused the man sitting in the back of the courtroom, a man who had not testified in the trial, Walter Sheridan, of being “the architect of the diabolical plot” against Jimmy Hoffa and of being “the servant of his master, Robert Kennedy.”

  The next defense summation also attacked Robert Kennedy and his “axe man Walter Sheridan.”

  The jury was not seduced away from the truth. Allen Dorfman, the marine combat veteran of the war in the Pacific, whose jury-tampering role had been minimal, was found not guilty. Jimmy Hoffa and three others who had done Hoffa’s bidding were found guilty. In two separate trials, two other men who had acted on Hoffa’s behalf were found guilty.

  At sentencing on March 12, 1964, defense attorney Jacques Schiffer was sentenced to sixty days in jail for contempt of court. Attorney Frank Ragano received a public reprimand for standing outside the jury room door with his ear to the door to listen in on the jury.

  Hoffa’s three guilty codefendants in his trial got three years each. At sentencing in one of the separate trials, a Hoffa jury fixer got five years. At sentencing in the other separate trial, the Nashville lawyer, Tommy Osborn, who had crossed over the line into jury tampering for his client Jimmy Hoffa, got three and a half years.

  Jimmy Hoffa, the architect of it all and the only person who could have profited from it all, got a sentence of eight years.

  Judge Frank W. Wilson, in pronouncing sentence, said:

  Mr. Hoffa, it is the opinion of this court…that [in those jury-tampering incidents] of which you stand convicted…you [acted] knowingly and you [acted] corruptly [even] after the trial judge reported to you his information with regard to an alleged attempt to bribe a juror…. [I]t is difficult for the Court to imagine under those circumstances a more willful violation of the law. Most defendants that stand before this Court for sentencing…have either violated the property rights of other individuals or have violated the personal rights of other individuals.

  …You stand here convicted of having tampered, really, with the very soul of this nation.

  chapter twenty

  Hoffa’s Comedy Troupe

  “Partin was no good to them dead. They needed him alive. He had to be able to sign an affidavit. They needed him to swear that all the things he said against Jimmy at the trial were lies that he got from a script fed to him by Bobby Kennedy’s people in the Get Hoffa Squad. Partin had to say that he did all of this because he had kidnapping charges hanging over his head and not because Jimmy had made threats to whack Bobby. That was Jimmy’s best chance on that jury-tampering matter. Partin knew nobody was going to kiss him as long as he strung them along. Partin gave Jimmy’s lawyers useless affidavits and even a deposition. In the end, they never really got him to say that he railroaded Jimmy Hoffa. All they ever got out of him about railroading amounted to no more than, “Partin, me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?””

  Another reason Hoffa needed Partin alive for many years to come had to do with Hoffa’s chances down the line before the parole board or for a presidential pardon. In his autobiography Jimmy Hoffa wrote that on March 27, 1971, Partin had given his lawyers a deposition that amounted to “a twenty-nine page confession.” From Hoffa’s written version alone it is clear to anyone who understands these things that it was not a “confession” of any railroading by Partin and the government. Furthermore, whatever it was, the deposition was given in exchange for the Hoffa camp putting Partin in a potentially lucrative business deal with Audie Murphy, the movie actor and “most decorated hero of World War II.”

  Still suffering nightmares from the war, Murphy had fallen on hard times. He had filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and had been acquitted on an assault-with-intent-to-murder charge in 1970. Still, to a southerner like Partin, the decorated soldier from Tennessee was a shining star. Hoffa brazenly wrote that for the deal to turn out profitable for Audie Murphy and Partin, an unspecified favor was needed from Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa wrote that shortly after the deposition, “Senator George Murphy [California Republican and former movie actor] personally took [the deposition] to Attorney General John Mitchell, and Audie Murphy gave it to President Nixon.”

  “I never met Audie Murphy, not with Jimmy and not overseas. We were in the same operations over there but in different divisions. He was a heavy drinker after the war like me. I heard he had business with Jimmy, but I didn’t know what kind of business. He died in a crash of a small plane. Jimmy was in the coal business for a while, but I don’t think Audie Murphy was in that.

  Meanwhile, in the spring of 1964 in Philadelphia, the rebels in the Voice threatened to sue the International if anymore money was spent on Jimmy’s legal fees. Over a million already had been spent on the Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. And now the Chicago Sun Valley trial was coming up right around the corner. There would most definitely be more than a little bit of fees and expenses on that one with everything that was at stake. Jimmy had reserved a floor at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago, and they had a full-time chef lined up to cook for everybody. The Chicago trial was going to go on for months. They had half a platoon of lawyers. None of this was free. All this had to be paid for.

  Jimmy told the International Executive Board not to worry about the Voice. He said that the lawyer for the International, Edward Bennett Williams, had told Jimmy that footing the legal bills was a perfectly legal union expense. Edward Bennett Williams was the lawyer Jimmy had used in the trial in Washington over trying to bribe the McClellan Committee investigator, where they brought Joe Louis into the courtroom and they sent Bobby Kennedy a parachute when they won. Jimmy gave Edward Bennett Williams the Teamsters business as a reward for the trial, and he figured Williams would go along with this. The International checked with Williams, and he told them that he had never said anything like that to Jimmy, and that paying the bills when Jimmy got convicted was not legal under the union’s constitution.

  I know I got reimbursed whenever I beat a rap, but I paid my own bills when I lost. Or I should say, somebody would hold a benefit and I’d get envelopes. I did collect a fair amount of private money to help out with my legal fees and expenses on those two cases I did lose. But in the end you’re still short when you lose.

  The trial in Chicago
started about a month after Jimmy was sentenced to an eight-year bit in Chattanooga. I happened to be in Chicago for a part of that trial, and I stopped in and waited in the hallway for a break. I wished Jimmy luck and saw a big crowd of people coming out, mostly Teamsters, no alleged mob figures, not even Joey Glimco, who was also a Teamster. I chatted with Barney Baker. He was 6'6" and weighed about 350. He was a heavy eater. Believe it or not he boxed as a middleweight. He was supposed to have had something to do with getting Joe Louis to that trial in Washington. Jimmy liked him. He sold ties. He had a lot of neckties for sale all the time. Barney had a lot of balls. He’d be available to help. He was a good muscle man. He got investigated in the Warren Report thing because they traced some calls between him and Jack Ruby a few days before the Dallas matter.

  Bill Bufalino was at the trial as a spectator, and Frank Ragano was there representing one of the other codefendants. Jimmy usually didn’t listen to lawyers. Jimmy told them what he wanted done. And Jimmy had a good memory. He could tell the lawyers what the witnesses said two weeks ago better than the lawyers could tell from their notes. If the lawyer told Jimmy something he didn’t want to hear, he’d say, “Well, you make it right.” But in the hallway it looked to me like he might be doing a little more listening.

  Jimmy told me to meet him back at the union office. At the Chicago office Jimmy told me point-blank to tell our friends back East that nothing should happen to Partin. Jimmy told me he had a good defense for the Chicago thing, and they were still working on Partin for an affidavit on the Chattanooga thing.

  Besides that, they had a congressman in Chicago named Roland Libonti. I never met the man, but I heard about him. He was with Sam Giancana. Later on it came out in the papers that Giancana’s son-in-law, Anthony Tisci, was on Libonti’s congressional payroll. They had Libonti making resolutions for a congressional investigation of Bobby Kennedy. The idea was that Bobby Kennedy had violated Jimmy Hoffa’s constitutional rights with illegal wiretapping and surveillance and by planting Partin in their rooms at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville. Jimmy was looking forward to turning the tables on “Booby” and getting him to have to take the Fifth at the congressional hearing. Jimmy claimed he had tapes of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe having sex. Johnny Roselli and Giancana had Marilyn Monroe’s house bugged. He never played me the tapes, but I got the impression that he planned on having them played, maybe during the congressional hearings if they ever had them.

  I left Chicago and went back to the fun and games in Philly, and I passed the word among our friends about Partin. At 107 we still had the battles with the rebels and the battles with the other outfits from the AFL-CIO. We had a bar on Delaware Avenue where we used to keep shirts to change into. The cops would be looking for a guy in a green shirt, and I’d be sitting in the bar with a blue shirt on. I’d show the cop my bar tab. It would look like I was sitting there all day, only I could drink that much in an hour.”

  The Chicago trial of Jimmy Hoffa and seven codefendants began on April 27, 1964, five weeks after Hoffa had received a crushing eight-year sentence in Chattanooga. As had been done in Chattanooga, the identities of the prospective jurors in the jury pool were kept from both sides until the morning of jury selection.

  The selection of jurors went without incident, and the government proceeded to put on a pension fund fraud case consisting of thirteen painstaking weeks of live testimony and the introduction into evidence of more than 15,000 documents for the jury to consider. It was a federal case in every sense of the phrase.

  The pension fund fraud centered on the improvement of a tract of land in Florida that had been intended as a housing development for Teamsters willing to personally invest in it by purchasing lots, for either retirement or vacation homes. The tract was to be known as Sun Valley Village. While lots were sold to Teamsters, including Jimmy Hoffa, the land was never developed by the developer and the developer had since died. The Sun Valley Village development went into bankruptcy, and the undeveloped lots became worthless.

  Unfortunately for Jimmy Hoffa, before Sun Valley went bankrupt in 1958, he had authorized the depositing of $400,000 in a non-interest-bearing account in a Florida bank as collateral to secure a loan to the benefit of the Sun Valley developer for the purpose of building roads and bringing utilities to the land. Jimmy Hoffa took that $400,000 that he pledged directly from the pension fund of his own Detroit local. When Sun Valley filed for bankruptcy, the bank held on to the $400,000 collateral. For Hoffa to get back the $400,000, he had to come up with a total of $500,000, which the developer had owed the bank altogether when he died.

  To gather together the half-million it would take, according to the government, Hoffa went on a pension fund lending binge between 1958 and 1960. Hoffa and the seven codefendants began lending pension money left and right on speculative ventures, charging points and finder’s fees, and funneling a portion of that money to Hoffa to pay off the Florida bank loans. By 1960 the mission was accomplished and Hoffa not only paid off the Florida bank, he paid Local 299 $42,000 in lost interest when he repaid the $400,000 to the local’s pension fund.

  What turned all this into fraud, the government contended, was the fact that Jimmy Hoffa personally sought to profit while he encouraged Teamsters to invest in Sun Valley Village parcels; that he personally sought to profit while he pledged Local 299’s pension fund money; and that he personally sought to profit while he scrambled his way through the Central States Pension Fund to siphon off enough money to pay back Local 299. The government contended that Hoffa’s personal profit motive was contained in a document he had signed. The government contended that Jimmy Hoffa had signed a secret trust agreement with the developer whereby Hoffa was to receive 22 percent of all of the development’s profits once the project was completely developed.

  Jimmy Hoffa’s defense was simple: He was going to deny that the signature was his. The developer was dead and couldn’t testify that the signature on that trust agreement was Hoffa’s. Jimmy Hoffa’s partner, Owen Bert Brennan, was dead and couldn’t testify that the signature was Hoffa’s. Perhaps Bert Brennan had signed Hoffa’s name and was going to keep the extra 22 percent profit himself. Perhaps the developer had signed Hoffa’s name to gain credibility with other investors by claiming that Hoffa, with the might of his pension fund, was behind the project.

  The government showed that the scrambling between 1958 and 1960 to get the money to pay the bank included things such as a $330,000 kickback on a $3.3 million loan for the building of the Everglades Hotel in Miami. On another scramble, $650,000 went to the Black Construction Company. There was no Black Construction Company; Cecil Black was a $125-a-week laborer, and he never saw a dime of the money.

  What made this Chicago case particularly galling to Jimmy Hoffa was that all the scrambling he was alleged to have done between 1958 and 1960 was done in what he considered self-defense. All of this scrambling to repay the Detroit local its money was a direct result of the heat being put on by Bobby Kennedy during the McClellan Committee hearings and by the negative light being cast by Kennedy on that pledged, non-interest-bearing $400,000 deposit as collateral.

  The chief witness in the Chicago trial against Jimmy Hoffa was an FBI handwriting expert who testified that the signature “J.R. Hoffa” on the trust agreement was a signature that was consistent with known handwriting exemplars of Jimmy Hoffa.

  The government rested its case and Jimmy Hoffa took the stand. As expected, Hoffa denied it was his signature on the trust agreement. As was not expected, Hoffa went one step further and denied that he ever in his life signed a legal document “J.R. Hoffa.” Jimmy Hoffa swore that he always signed all legal documents “James R. Hoffa.”

  While the government didn’t have a surprise witness, it shuffled through its own mounds of documents to find a surprise document. On cross-examination Jimmy Hoffa was asked if he personally had leased a penthouse in Miami Beach at the Blair House. Confident that the penthouse lease could be justified as an appropriate
union expense, Hoffa said that he had. When asked if he had personally signed the lease Hoffa said that he had. At that point the prosecutor asked Hoffa to authenticate the signature and handed the lease to Hoffa. To Jimmy Hoffa’s everlasting dismay he had signed the lease “J.R. Hoffa.”

  What the Chicago case against Jimmy Hoffa was all about was eloquently stated by Walter Sheridan: “Hoffa was using funds reserved for the pensions of Teamsters members to extricate himself from a situation where he had misused funds belonging to Teamsters members for his own benefit.” In dollars and cents, Jimmy Hoffa had swiped $400,000 from his union brothers, and to pay it back before it became a legal issue, he swiped another $500,000 from those same union brothers.

  On July 26, 1964, the jury promptly found Jimmy Hoffa and his seven minions guilty of pension fund fraud. On August 17, 1964, Jimmy Hoffa was given an additional five years in jail to serve consecutively with the eight-year sentence he had received in Chattanooga.

  This total of an unlucky thirteen years of sentences to be spent in a federal jail for Jimmy Hoffa was followed a week later, on August 25, 1964, by the news of Bobby Kennedy’s resignation as attorney general and his announcement that he was running for the U.S. Senate from New York. Walter Sheridan resigned from the Department of Justice to help run Bobby Kennedy’s campaign.