The Hoffa wars : the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa

356 Pages·2015·1.51 MB·English

by  Hoffa

Rolland McMaster.
The real businessman of the Teamster trio—Hoffa, Fitzsimmons, and McMaster
—was McMaster, who was now Hoffa’s powerhouse on the Central States iron
and steel negotiating and grievance committees.
In late 1949 McMaster filed a certificate with the state of Michigan indicating
that he was planning to do business under an assumed name. Claiming to own
and control the M
& G Cartage Company, he placed the corporation in the maiden names of his
wife and sister-in-law. Not surprisingly, the firm’s address was that of
McMaster’s farm in Wixom, Michigan. He owned no trucks and had no
employees; yet he made money, lots of it.
One business venture involved William Rumminger, owner of a Detroit
company, Aero Cartage. In 1953 and 1954 Rumminger worried increasingly
about his declining business, particularly with his major account, Douglas
Trucking Lines, a local steel hauling outfit.
The following year he approached McMaster, who was the business agent for
Douglas’s employees. Touched by Rumminger’s sad tale about his failing
enterprise, McMaster promised to help the salesman by “putting in a good word”
with the McLouth Steel Corporation, one of the largest steel producers in the
Detroit area.
As quick as you can say “shakedown,” Rumminger had landed the steel hauling
business from McLouth for Douglas, picking up a small fortune for himself in
the process.
But McMaster’s services didn’t come cheap; he and Rumminger made a deal. “It
was more or less on a partnership basis,” as Rumminger put it. “I split my
personal net with him, which was about three percent, on the McLouth business.
”7
Rumminger paid all McMaster’s “commissions” into M & G Cartage. In the first
two years of their partnership, McMaster, according to his income tax returns,
pocketed $19,711 from Rumminger’s business alone.
McLouth’s executives contended that any business Douglas Trucking received
McLouth’s executives contended that any business Douglas Trucking received
from McLouth via Rumminger was based upon the merits of Rumminger’s Aero
Cartage and had nothing to do with McMaster’s intervention. As to McMaster’s
payoffs, the McLouth version was that Rumminger was a “pretty stupid
businessman” to pay McMaster when he was going to get their business anyway.
McMaster also owned Powers Trucking Company, established in 1950; Reed
Transportation Company, 1953; Ram Transport Corporation, Inc. (with an
anonymous man known only as “Allen”), which succeeded Reed Transportation,
1954; and Aggregates Transport Company, which succeeded Powers Trucking in
1956. In 1951, with Local 299 trustee George Roxburgh and Local 337 official
James Clift, McMaster founded Canter’s, Inc., which owned a riding stable; and,
with his nephews, the Enterprise Equipment and Leasing Company, which
bought, leased, and sold trucking terminals.8
Incredibly enough, all McMaster’s business ventures—even those involved with
trucking—functioned with nonunion employees, when there were employees.
By the mid-fifties Hoffa and his top men had either ruined or bought their major
enemies in labor and business. They had clawed their way from poverty to great
personal wealth and, even more important to them, to power. They had also
become tasty bait for ambitious politicians and investigators by the score.
Slapping official inquiries away, like the countless dolls Cagney slapped in
Public Enemy, Hoffa himself was the Cagney figure of the fifties.
Hoffa traveled first class but wouldn’t let bellhops carry his luggage. He insisted
on driving himself around town, and he remembered people, faces and names.
His general defiance of “bourgeois respectability” enhanced his popularity
among the workingmen who watched their cigar-smoking union leaders and
bosses alike flee to country manors in sleek black chauffeur-driven limousines.
Hoffa went on living in the modest house he had bought for $6800 after his
marriage. Few union members knew of Hoffa’s private defiance of bourgeois
respectability: that his household contained a “foster son,” Charles O’Brien, and
often the foster son’s mother, Sylvia Pagano Paris. Friends and associates who
knew the family well thought that, because of Hoffa’s fondness for teenage
Chuckie, the boy was probably his own son. Apparently the strange household
ran smoothly. According to a family friend, Mrs. Hoffa and Mrs. Paris were
good friends, and the Hoffas’ children, Barbara and James, got on well with
Chuckie.
Although things were going well for Sylvia Paris, one of her ex-lovers, Frank
Although things were going well for Sylvia Paris, one of her ex-lovers, Frank
Coppola, was looking for work. Coppola, like Luciano and others in the
international drug traffic, had been nearly forced out of business by the
cooperative effort of U.S. and Italian narcotics officers.
“Luciano ran the whole show,” says Charles Siragusa of the Bureau of
Narcotics. “He had the contacts with the Italian manufacturers of heroin and
operated without challenge.
Until we put an end to the traffic in the early 1950s, he had been traveling
illegally to several countries, including the United States and Cuba, setting up
additional drug routes.”
Siragusa and his men had been closing down Luciano’s drug outlets since 1950.
The big bust occurred in April 1952, when narcotics agents intercepted a green
trunk containing six kilograms of heroin, valued at $80,000. The trunk, which
had a fake bottom and sides covered with old clothes, was on its way from
Coppola to the Detroit receivers, John Priziola and Raffaele Quasarano.
That same year the Italian government indicted both Priziola and Quasarano in
absentia for involvement in the dope ring. Records confiscated from Coppola
and his partner, Salvatore Vitale, were evidence of the Detroit men’s complicity.
“Since the Detroit mob was the principal supplier of heroin for the rest of the
country— through Coppola and Vitale—it was the worst hit from the raids we
conducted,” says Siragusa. “Later, Vitale returned to the United States—
California, where he had family— and was arrested and put in prison for a few
years. When he got out, he accused Priziola and Quasarano of cheating him out
of about $80,000 worth of heroin which the Detroit boys said had been
adulterated. Because Priziola and Quasarano refused to pay, a big meeting of
hoods was set up in California. There Priziola decided to give the old man
$20,000—probably only because they were both related to the Matranga mob
family out in California.
“But Vitale still wasn’t happy, so he went to Detroit to collect and never
returned. His son-in-law told me that he was killed by Priziola and Quasarano.”
Under extreme pressure from the American and Italian governments, the
Luciano network had crumbled, and by 1954 it was replaced by French Corsican
drug traffickers Giuseppe and Vincent Cotroni. The Cotroni brothers ran what
was later known as “the French Connection.” Dope manufactured in Marseilles
was later known as “the French Connection.” Dope manufactured in Marseilles
was routed to North America, where it was distributed and sold for street
consumption.
Sixty percent of the heroin was shipped across the Atlantic, then through the St.
Lawrence Seaway to Montreal. Needing protection and the contacts to handle
the merchandise, the Cotroni brothers solicited the services of their American
mob friend, Carmine Galante, the former Vito Genovese gunman who had
become the underboss in the Joseph Bonanno crime family. Galante maintained
two major distribution routes. The busiest was simply southeast through Buffalo,
where it was handled by Steffano Maggadino, a former Bonanno bodyguard, and
to New York City, where Galante did business with syndicate leaders Genovese
and Thomas Lucchese.
The second major path was west from Montreal to Toronto, Ontario, then to
Windsor, and across the river to Detroit.
Still maintaining strong relations with Lucchese crime captain John Ormento,
the Melis’
Long Island relative, Priziola and Quasarano remained in charge of Detroit’s
drug importing business. They were also co-owners of the Motor City Arena and
the chief promoters of the boxer Hoffa and Brennan owned.
“Hoffa was not at all averse to using the Teamsters Union as a means of
protection for those who were associated with the narcotics traffic,” Vincent
Piersante says. “By protection, I mean he went as far as giving some of those
involved jobs with the union.
And others, like Priziola and Quasarano, were protected by Local 985.
Using Sam Gompers’ “reward your friends, punish your enemies” philosophy,
Hoffa went into the 1952 IBT convention in Los Angeles knowing that he was
powerful enough to choose and then destroy the next Teamster president.
The headliner of the Los Angeles convention was Dave Beck, from Seattle.
Pudgy and red-cheeked, Beck was the image of an overheated, beardless Santa
Claus with sweat marks under the arms of his expensive suits. Since he
controlled the Western Conference of Teamsters, it was appropriate that his
moment of glory be staged in his own backyard.
moment of glory be staged in his own backyard.
Old Dan Tobin, who had served the union well—or at least without major
scandal—for forty-five years, had decided to retire in favor of Beck, his close
associate. Although a grass-roots “stop-Beck” movement briefly upset the pro-
Beck delegates, the little Michigan Teamster boss came to the rescue, quashed
the phantom challenge, and sewed up the election for Beck. In return Beck
promptly entrusted Hoffa with an IBT vice presidency and a seat on the
Teamsters’ general executive board.
Arrogant and brassy—nicknamed “His Majesty the Wheel”—Beck had little
direct contact with the operations of the union. For the first five years of his
administration he remained aloof from it all, calling on his friend, President
Dwight Eisenhower, at the White House and making speeches on U.S. foreign
policy. Detached from the rank and file, Beck allowed Hoffa to represent him on
union business.
“Jimmy was always out front, trying to develop as a national figure,” McMaster
says.
“Now we were happy with that, because we supported him. He was Beck’s
assistant … a troubleshooter for him. In other words, if there was trouble, he told
Jimmy. Of course Jimmy would call his boys in.”
Hoffa’s philosophy of organizing was indicative of his complex and pragmatic
personality. Strikes for recognition on a regional basis, he often said, worked as
much against the worker and his union as it did against management. “So when
Jimmy had difficulty getting some of the bigger companies to sign our
contracts,” Dave Johnson explains, “he’d only strike five or six of them, letting
the little companies operate. This would cause the employers to be fighting not
only us but among themselves too.
“Hoffa told us a hundred times: If a company in New York is having problems
with the contract and won’t sign and it hauls into Michigan, then we’ve got to
stop them in Michigan and other states that are key to their business. With all
that pressure, the company usually came around. But several states, especially in
the South, were causing headaches for Jimmy, and he had to do something about
them.”
Antiunion sentiment was especially strong in Tennessee, one of the last holdouts
from the Central States Drivers Council’s regional contract. Hoffa sent
from the Central States Drivers Council’s regional contract. Hoffa sent
McMaster to Nashville to change some minds. Taking with him Flint Local 332
business agent Frank Kierdorf— ex-convict, a Teamster torch and nephew of
joint council organizer Herman Kierdorf— McMaster worked with local
Teamster leaders against independent owner-operators and other nonunion
factions.
Don Vestal, formerly of Dallas, Texas, led the Tennessee pro-Hoffa forces. Once
arrested for attempted murder—he later pled guilty to a reduced charge of
assault and battery—Vestal was the president of Nashville’s Local 327. In 1952,
because of his loyalty to Hoffa, he became the head of Tennessee’s Joint Council
87, representing seven locals.
As a close Hoffa confidant and one of five top Hoffa representatives, Vestal was
given the money and manpower to neutralize his union’s enemies in the state.
With Hoffa’s help he recruited heavies from trucking companies and formed a
brutal goon squad which was involved in 173 known separate acts of violence
against the nonunion opposition.
Operating in several states, including Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi,
and even New Jersey, the special units of leg-breakers were led by William A.
Smith, a Local 327
“assistant business agent” Vestal appointed in 1953. Smith, an explosives expert,
had twelve convictions for a variety of strongarm crimes.
“McMaster and his enforcer, Frank Kierdorf, came down to Tennessee to
supervise the action,” Vestal says. “Plus Hoffa wanted to make sure that we
weren’t messing around with any of the companies owned by his friends in
Chicago. And you just didn’t mess with Mac. I once saw him hit a man so hard
you’d have thought a mule kicked him.”
After a long, violent campaign which included bombings, shootings, and
sabotage, Tennessee, like other states around it, fell into the fold of the Central
States Drivers Council, which within four years included twenty-two states. The
victory in Tennessee was a milestone in Hoffa’s career, and McMaster was now
Hoffa’s number-one strongarm specialist.
During the Tennessee campaign the national IBT, at Beck’s instigation and with
Hoffa’s enthusiastic approval, moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., to
be closer to national policy decisions that affected labor—and the politicians
be closer to national policy decisions that affected labor—and the politicians
who made them. In 1955 the IBT
moved into its brand-new marble palace, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the
Capitol Rotunda.
Hoffa began to spend much of his time in Washington, running the union for
Dave Beck. Frank Fitzsimmons, Local 299’s vice president, assumed many of
his boss’s day-today duties in Detroit. With Hoffa’s consent Fitzsimmons made
his friend McMaster his “administrative assistant,” a nonelected position. Thus
McMaster was really third in command after Hoffa and Fitzsimmons.
“Because Jimmy was always in Washington, and he usually took Fitz with him,
we had an executive board meeting,” says McMaster. “I was chosen to run Local
299. But because neither Jimmy nor Fitz wanted to give up any titles, they just
called me ‘the administrative assistant,’ which meant that they came to the
meetings to add dignity to everything while I did the work.”
With aides like Johnson, McMaster, and Vestal working in the field, Hoffa
began to assemble a Washington staff of union professionals. His top adviser
was Hoffa antithesis Harold Gibbons, a scholarly, dignified liberal crusader. The
youngest of twenty-three children, Gibbons had worked his way through a maze
of government jobs and several labor organizations. He was with the Teamsters
because in St. Louis his CIO union had been in competition with Teamsters
Local 688; both unions were organizing the area’s warehousemen. When
Gibbons and the head of Local 688 went to Dave Beck for advice, he suggested
a merger of the two locals. In 1948, providing some $78,000 in severance pay to
Local 688’s officers from his CIO local’s treasury, Gibbons moved in and
became president. He had literally purchased the union. 9
As soon as he took over, Gibbons began to have problems with the St. Louis
union dissidents—whom he calls “hoodlums”—and he went to Hoffa for help.
“Jimmy listened to my problem and told me just to place some of these fellows
on my local payroll. Then, in a few months, I’d be taking orders from them,”
says Gibbons. “He also told me that I could grab the first one that walked in,
take out my gun, and shoot him in the head.”
Gibbons walked away shaking his head while Hoffa laughed; he continued to
have problems until Hoffa finally came to St. Louis with Johnson, McMaster,
and other musclemen and cleared up the situation. Then, through Beck, Hoffa
and other musclemen and cleared up the situation. Then, through Beck, Hoffa
put the entire St.
Louis joint council into trusteeship to prevent a rebel takeover, selecting
Gibbons as trustee. Soon after that Hoffa named Gibbons secretary-treasurer of
the newly formed Central Conference of Teamsters, founded in 1953 to
complement the already-established Southern and Western Conferences.
“Hoffa was an intense worker who knew the union from top to bottom,” Gibbons
says.
“His working hours and demands on his staff’s time were difficult to keep pace
with. But he had a way of handling people which made them want to make the
sacrifices. We didn’t have as many problems as one would think we would,
taking into consideration how different we were. But I always contended that
labor unions were a movement; Jimmy viewed them as a business.”
With the help of Gibbons and other union leaders in the jurisdiction of the
Central States Drivers Council, Hoffa, now a seasoned bargainer, negotiated the
1955 over-the-road contract.
In a side deal during those negotiations, Hoffa, Fitzsimmons, and McMaster
managed to sell out some owner-operators. McMaster, who had represented
employees at Transamerican Freight Lines since the war, had a warm working
relationship with its executives and was often accused of either owning a large
chunk of the company or receiving payoffs to protect the firm against the
Teamsters. He firmly denies both versions: “I would much prefer a friendly than
an adversary situation between me and an employer.”
McMaster’s growing importance to Hoffa was perhaps best exhibited when
Hoffa, as chairman of the CSDC negotiating team, allowed Transamerican to
make a separate agreement with the Teamsters, a blatant violation of the master
contract.
As secretly negotiated by Hoffa and McMaster, Transamerican’s contract
included none of the normally expected fringe benefits and instead forced
employees to accept a mere 1½ cents per mile raise. Second, while the
established grievance procedure called for processing complaints at the local
level and, if necessary, sending them on to state Teamster committees and then
to the area committee in Chicago, the arrangement with Transamerican provided
for all grievances, no matter where they originated, to go directly to either
for all grievances, no matter where they originated, to go directly to either
McMaster or Fitzsimmons in Detroit. Because Transamerican operated
principally with owner-operators, it was clear that Hoffa, McMaster, and
Fitzsimmons remained consistent in their intention to get those who owned and
operated their own trucks out of the industry.
Although the Transamerican grievance procedure didn’t need ratification, the 1½
cents raise in lieu of fringe benefits did. The owner-operators knew that they
were being taken and voted down the agreement. McMaster then made a
“goodwill tour” of Transamerican’s terminals in several cities, bringing with him
a small group of his associates to provide varying degrees of persuasion.
Sympathetic employees were persuaded to sit down with company and union
officials, and it was decided to give the new agreement a twelve-week trial. Then
a second meeting would be called at which a final judgment on the future of the
contract would be considered. But when the twelve-week cooling-off period
ended the second meeting was not held, and the owner-operators were stuck with
the contract.
Although it did not have the immediate impact of the Transamerican deal, one
provision of the 1955 Central States master contract had all the earmarks of
being even more illicit.
Introducing an innovation in workmen’s benefits, Hoffa pushed through a
provision that employers would contribute two dollars a week for each of their
employees to a pension fund. Formally set up on March 16, 1955, the IBT’s
Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund was a strong
addition to Hoffa’s massive war chest, which already contained the large sums
accumulated in the Michigan Conference and Central States health and welfare
funds. Intended to provide a $90 per month pension to supplement Social
Security benefits for 110,000 eligible union members who were at least fifty-
seven years old and had twenty years of unbroken service, the Central States
Pension Fund was governed by a twelve-member board of trustees, composed of
six Hoffaloyalist union officials and six friendly executives from the trucking
industry. The trustees of the fund were empowered “in their sole discretion, to
invest and reinvest the principal and income of the Trust Fund” according to the
CSPF’s Trust Agreement, “… and may sell or otherwise dispose of such
property at any time and from time to time as they see fit …”
Since the fund was authorized to do business in the state of Illinois, where its
headquarters were, its trustees didn’t have to look far for a fiduciary manager.
Like the two welfare funds, the Central States Pension Fund was handed over to
Like the two welfare funds, the Central States Pension Fund was handed over to
Allen Dorfman.
Through his friendship with Allen Dorfman’s stepfather, Hoffa asked Paul
Dorfman’s associate, John Dioguardi, for help in gaining control over the eastern
states. With Beck’s blind approval and cooperation, Hoffa created seven “paper
locals” in New York City, most of them with no membership and under
Dioguardi’s jurisdiction. Passing these dummy unions to his gangster buddies,
the racketeer engineered the takeover of the city’s Joint Council 16 in 1956. The
margin of victory for the pro-Hoffa supporters came from the votes of the
fraudulent locals.
The election in New York convinced Teamster watchers that if the growing
power of the union remained unchecked, it could rival that of the U.S.
government. Among those especially concerned was labor reporter Clark
Mollenhoff, head of the Washington bureau of the Des Moines Register and
Tribune. He persuaded Robert F. Kennedy, then the chief counsel of the Senate
Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, to conduct a preliminary investigation.
“Bobby Kennedy was already investigating Johnny Dioguardi for his activities
in the northeastern garment industry,” Mollenhoff recalls. “So the paper locals
episode, plus the operations of Hoffa, Beck, and the Teamsters around the
country, made it fairly easy to talk Bobby into promoting a major study of the
matter.”
Kennedy flew to Seattle, Dave Beck’s home territory, and found documentation
that proved that the Teamster president had used over $320,000 of union funds
to construct his private home and swimming pool and pay off personal debts.
Returning to Washington, Kennedy in turn persuaded his subcommittee
chairman, John L. McClellan of Arkansas, to support the establishment of a
bipartisan Senate select committee which would look closely at corrupt union
and management practices.
On January 30, 1957, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities
in the Labor or Management Field was created, with an initial budget of
$350,000. Chaired by McClellan, the committee consisted of four Democrats—
McClellan, John Kennedy of Massachusetts, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, and
Pat McNamara of Michigan—and four Republicans—vice chairman Irving Ives
of New York, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota,
and Barry Goldwater of Arizona. It eventually had a staff of ninety-one
employees.