Word: hoffa
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With his canny knack for beating the rap, Teamster Topdog James Riddle Hoffa has survived 1) an A.F.L-C.I.O. expulsion order, 2) federal investigations of his income tax returns, 3) a pair of Justice Department prosecutions for wiretapping and bribery, and 4) the Landrum-Griffin labor law, which was written largely to unscrew Hoffa's hammerlock on most of the U.S. transportation industry. Just about the last hope of halting Hoffa is the three-man Teamster Board of Monitors, set up three years ago by a Federal court to keep the 1,650,000-member union at least reasonably clean...
Evasion & Frustration. The board came into being when 13 Teamster insurgents, charging that Hoffa's election had been rigged, sued in 1957 to prevent him from taking over the presidency. Hoffa made a deal that most Hoffa haters thought was a fatal blunder: if he could move in as "provisional" president, he would permit a board of monitors to oversee Teamster affairs. The resulting consent decree called for the board to consist of one insurgent-appointed monitor, one Teamster-appointed monitor, and a chairman to be named by Federal Judge F. Dickinson Letts. Ever since, Jimmy Hoffa...
...Hoffa either ignored the board's clean-up recommendations or evaded them by appealing to higher courts-with significant success. He also stalled. The former Hoffa-appointed monitor, Daniel Maher, started skipping meetings. His successor, William ("Buffo") Bufalino, a Hoffa crony and head of a Detroit Teamster local that was described by the Senate rackets committee as "a leech preying on working men and women," started walking out of meetings. Strangely, insurgent-appointed Monitor Lawrence T. Smith was hard to find when meetings were called, and he accused Chairman Martin F. O'Donoghue of being obsessed with "getting...
Protest & Veto. To succeed O'Donoghue, Judge Letts appointed former FBI Agent Terence F. McShane. 33. Naturally, Hoffa protested. Reason: trim, handsome Terry McShane had investigated Hoffa for the FBI in 1957, twice testified against him in the wiretap case. Fortnight ago. splitting 2 to 1 in favor of Hoffa, the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington bounced McShane, ruled that either the Teamsters or the insurgents could block any appointee for the chairmanship on "reasonable grounds...
Emboldened by his victory, Hoffa last week asked the Appeals Court for permission to call a Teamsters convention early next year. Order of business: to re-elect Hoffa as full-fledged president and thus extinguish the board of monitors. In fact, the monitors were headless and unable to function, and resourceful Jimmy Hoffa was riding high and wide, planted more firmly than ever in the driver's seat of the nation's biggest union...