Jimmy Hoffa
James Riddle Hoffa was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957 to 1971. He was alleged to have ties to organized crime, and disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1975.
From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist: he became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-20s. By 1952, he was the national vice-president of the IBT and between 1957 and 1971, he served as its general president. Hoffa secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.
Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, along with mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years.
In mid-1971, Hoffa resigned as president of the union as part of a commutation agreement with U.S. president Richard Nixon and was released later that year, but he was barred from union activities until 1980. Hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, he unsuccessfully tried to overturn the order. Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975: he is thought to have been murdered in a Mafia hit and was declared legally dead in 1982. Hoffa's legacy and the circumstances of his disappearance continue to stir debate and conspiracy theories.
Early life and family
James Riddle Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913, to John and Viola Hoffa, the third of four children, two boys and two girls. The doctor who delivered him originally thought Hoffa's mother had a tumor, not a baby, in her abdomen, so he was initially referred to as "The Tumor". His father, who was of German descent from what is now referred to as the Pennsylvania Dutch, died in 1920 from lung disease when Hoffa was seven years old. His mother was of Irish ancestry. The family moved to Detroit in 1924, where Hoffa was raised and lived for the rest of his life. He left school at the age of 14 and began working full-time manual labor jobs to help support his family.Hoffa married Josephine Poszywak, an 18-year-old Detroit laundry worker of Polish heritage, in Bowling Green, Ohio, on September 25, 1936. The couple had met six months earlier during a non-unionized laundry workers' strike action; Hoffa described the meeting as feeling as though he had been "hit on the chest with a blackjack". They had two children: a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, and a son, James P. Hoffa. The Hoffas paid $6,800 in 1939 for a modest home in northwestern Detroit. The family later owned a simple summer lakefront cottage in Orion Township, Michigan, north of Detroit.
Early union activity
Hoffa began union organizational work at the grassroots level as a teenager through his job with a grocery chain, which paid substandard wages and offered poor working conditions with minimal job security. The workers were displeased with that situation and tried to organize a union to better their wages. Although Hoffa was young, his courage and approachability in that role impressed fellow workers, and he rose to a leadership position. By 1932, after refusing to work for an abusive shift foreman, Hoffa left the grocery chain, partly because of his union activities. He was then invited to become an organizer with Local 299 of the Teamsters in Detroit. Between 1933 and 1935, Hoffa actively worked to recruit new members to the union; his favored tactic was to pull up on the road alongside sleeping truck drivers, wake them up, and give them his sales pitch.Growth of Teamsters
The Teamsters, founded in 1903, had 75,000 members in 1933. As a result of Hoffa's work with other union leaders, he consolidated local union trucker groups into regional sections and then into a national body, which Hoffa ultimately completed over two decades; membership grew to 170,000 members by 1936, and three years later, to 420,000. The number grew steadily during World War II and in the postwar boom to eventually top a million members by 1951.The Teamsters organized truck drivers and warehousemen throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. Hoffa played a major role in the union's skillful use of "quickie strikes", secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, moves to organize workers at another, and finally to win contract demands at other companies. That process, which took several years starting in the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States.
Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by, and in many cases controlled by, elements of organized crime. To unify and expand trucking unions, Hoffa made accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area. Organized crime's influence on the IBT increased as the union grew.
Rise to power
Hoffa worked to defend the Teamsters from raids by other unions, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he extended the Teamsters' influence in the Midwest from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Hoffa obtained a deferment from military service in World War II by successfully making a case for his union leadership skills being of more value to the nation by keeping freight running smoothly to assist the war effort. Although he never actually worked as a truck driver, he became president of Local 299 in December 1946. He then rose to lead the combined group of Detroit-area locals shortly afterwards and later advanced to become head of the Michigan Teamsters groups.At the 1952 IBT convention in Los Angeles, Hoffa was selected as national vice-president by incoming president Dave Beck, the successor to Daniel J. Tobin, who had been president since 1907. Hoffa had quelled an internal revolt against Tobin by securing Central States' regional support for Beck at the convention. In exchange, Beck made Hoffa a vice-president.
In 1952, a petty criminal living in New York, Marvin Elkind, was assigned by gangster Anthony Salerno to work as Hoffa's chauffeur. In a 2008 interview, Elkind said of his four years working as a chauffeur: "Mr. Hoffa was a tremendously intimidating man. This man had no fear at all, of nothing, showed very little emotion, had completely no sense of humour, and was dedicated to the people that belonged to his union. When you drive these people you learn a lot and I'll tell you why. They don't know you're there. You become a piece of the car, just like an extra gear shift or a brake, and they talk."
The IBT moved its headquarters from Indianapolis to Washington, DC, taking over a large office building in the capital in 1955. IBT staff was also enlarged, with many lawyers hired to assist with contract negotiations. Following his 1952 election as vice-president, Hoffa began spending more of his time away from Detroit, either in Washington or traveling around the country for his expanded responsibilities. Hoffa's personal lawyer was Bill Bufalino.
Teamsters presidency
Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, at the convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Beck, his predecessor, had appeared before the John L. McClellan-led U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor or Management Field in March 1957 and took the Fifth Amendment 140 times. Beck was under indictment when the IBT convention took place and was convicted and imprisoned in a trial for fraud held in Seattle.Teamsters expelled from AFL-CIO
At the 1957 AFL-CIO convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, union members voted nearly five to one to expel the IBT. Vice-president Walter Reuther led the fight to oust the IBT on charges of Hoffa's corrupt leadership. President George Meany gave an emotional speech, advocating the removal of the IBT and stating that he could only agree to further affiliation of the Teamsters if they dismissed Hoffa as their president. Meany demanded a response from Hoffa, who replied through the press, "We'll see." At the time, the IBT was bringing in over $750,000 annually to the AFL-CIO.National Master Freight Agreement
Following his re-election as president in 1961, Hoffa worked to expand the union. In 1964, he succeeded in bringing virtually all over-the-road truck drivers in North America under a single National Master Freight Agreement, which may have been his biggest achievement in a lifetime of union activity. Hoffa then tried to bring airline workers and other transport employees into the union, with limited success. His tenure became increasingly complicated by personal troubles, as he was under investigation, on trial, launching appeals of convictions, or imprisoned for virtually all of the 1960s.Hoffa was re-elected without opposition to a third five-year term as president of the IBT at the union's Miami Beach convention in 1966, despite having been convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud in court verdicts that were stayed pending review on appeal. Aware of his perilous legal situation, the delegates also elected Frank Fitzsimmons as first vice president, who would become president "if Hoffa has to serve a jail term."
Criminal charges
Hoffa faced major criminal investigations in 1957, as a result of the McClellan Committee. On March 14, 1957, Hoffa was arrested for allegedly trying to bribe an aide to the Select Committee. Hoffa denied the charges, but the arrest triggered additional investigations and more arrests and indictments over the following weeks. One of Hoffa's associates, Frank Kierdorf, on the night of August 3, 1958, while torching a cleaning and dyeing establishment, accidentally set himself on fire. When asked by a prosecuting attorney, a devout man, in a hospital, if he wanted to confess to anything, he uttered his final words, "Go fuck yourself."When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he appointed his younger brother Robert as Attorney General. Robert Kennedy had been frustrated in earlier attempts to convict Hoffa, while working as counsel to the McClellan subcommittee. As attorney general from 1961, Kennedy pursued a strong attack on organized crime and he carried on with a so-called "Get Hoffa" squad of prosecutors and investigators.
During a court hearing on December 5, 1962, a former mental patient, Warren Swanson, fired several pellets at Hoffa. The pellets did no harm, and the enraged Hoffa punched Swanson and knocked him down, while Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien and others overpowered him. Hoffa later told reporters "You always run away from a man with a knife, and toward a man with a gun."