Word: hoffa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While teamster officials met in Boston (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS) the vigil continued at the three-acre Hoffa compound north of Detroit. Burly Teamsters patrolled the grounds; an antenna on the roof signaled the presence of FBI agents within the two-story white frame house. Hoffa's wife Josephine occasionally walked the family's German shepherd. For the first time since her husband's disappearance, she left the compound briefly in the company of her son James. Young Hoffa continued to meet a dwindling band of reporters. He added an intriguing new ingredient to the case when...
...hoodlum empire"-and thrown out of the AFL-CIO as a pariah unfit to live in the house of labor. Since then, it has been the target of endless grand-jury investigations and many exposes of Teamster-Mafia deals, and some of its officers have been jailed; James R. Hoffa ran the union from a cell in Lewisburg federal penitentiary between 1967 and 1971. Now Hoffa's disappearance and presumed murder have focused new attention on the giant union, leading to one clear-if dismaying-conclusion: the decades of exposes and cleanup attempts have accomplished next to nothing...
Organizing success and a mass membership bring political power. Some 93% of the candidates endorsed by the Teamsters won in last fall's California state elections. Teamster President Frank E. Fitzsimmons, who succeeded Hoffa when Hoffa gave up union office several months before being released from prison, was close to President Nixon. Indeed, Nixon showed preference for the Teamsters, who supported him for re-election in 1972. Hoffa charged that the condition of his parole barring him from resuming union activity until 1980 was the result of a deal between the White House and the Fitzsimmons leadership...
Teamster ties with the Mafia go way back. Nicholas P. Morrissey, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Joint Council 10 in Boston, observes, "Most people who come out of prison go into this kind of work [trucking, warehousing and longshoring]." Hoffa had friends in the Mob and indeed used them in his climb from the boss of Detroit's Local 299 to his election as the union's president in 1957. But Hoffa always retained a degree of independence of the gangsters...
...contrast, Fitzsimmons, who was Hoffa's hand-picked successor but then became a rival, is said to show no such resistance. Indeed, he has left the 15 regional vice presidents pretty much alone, making them again the semiautonomous barons that they were before Hoffa began centralizing most of the power around himself. To veteran Teamster observers, that means an open season for the underworld and increasing Mafia penetration...