Word: agent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fingerprints quickly fingered "Doe" as Frank Henry Kierdorf, 56, bull-voiced business agent of Flint's Teamster Local 332 and one of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa's 40-odd crooked business agents (i.e., personal representatives). Eventually, Kierdorf gave his own explanation of his burns. He was home alone in Flint, he said, when two workmen appeared, invited him to a secret organizing meeting. At their plea for haste, he tossed bathrobe over T shirt and trousers, climbed into their old Packard. Outside Pontiac, 40 miles away, his hosts stuck a gun at his neck, doused him with fluid...
...brutality was plausible. Kierdorf had an arm-long arrest record, once served 27 months for armed robbery. On parole he had been made, at Jimmy Hoffa's insistence, a Teamster official like his ex-convict uncle, Herman Kierdorf (impersonating a federal officer, armed robbery), before him. As business agent of the 5,000-member Local 332, Kierdorf used brutal methods and produced satisfactory results. Once he tried to run over a stubborn employer. Said another: "You don't give him arguments." By brutal methods (see box) and by picketing until employers anted up money, Kierdorf was successfully negotiating...
What kind of man was Frank Kierdorf, Jimmy Hoffa's friend and business agent for Teamster Local 332 in Flint, Mich.? For a reading, a TIME correspondent tracked down a Flint businessman ("For God's sake, don't mention my name") who had had labor dealings with Kierdorf. The answer raises other questions. What kind of city is Flint? And what kind of nation is the U.S. when it lets Hoffa-type racketeering stand astride U.S. businessmen and workers? The report...
...star Algerian players (TIME, April 28). In combatting the F.L.N., French secret police have made thousands of arrests, but they mostly pick up small fry. In the first six months of this year, Algerian war violence in Metropolitan France accounted for 374 dead and 617 wounded. Grumbled a D.S.T. agent: "It's like chopping at the tips of the tentacles of an octopus. We haven't been able to get at the beast himself...
...performing. Compulsive and candid talker that he is, he looks for signs of having said the wrong thing or having been misunderstood. He still broods "When will they start tearing me down?" Or "I wonder how many among my group really love me?" Says a former agent of his: "He has no armor. You can pierce him with a piece of Kleenex...