Word: hoffa
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...Longtime Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa was still missing; foul play was suspected. The feds were investigating the union's pension funds for financial, uh, irregularities (like loans to mobsters, unsecured loans to friends, etc.). The biggest labor union in the United States. Bang...
Brill went at the Teamsters in the manner of a magazine writer. The book consists of nine profiles of Teamsters and associates--looking at the institution through the people in it. The characters include Fitzsimmons, Tony Provenzano (the New Jersey Teamster/mobster who Brill says orchestrated Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance), Jimmy Hoffa Jr. (a Detroit labor lawyer outsider, waiting for his father to float to the top), Ron Carey (a rare, honest Teamster local president in New York), Allen Dorfman (who made millions from his insurance monopoly with the Teamsters, then helped loot the pension funds), Jackie Presser (Cleveland Teamster boss...
...retirees with low-cost subsidized housing, St. Louis with mass transit, and who even supported busing to help eliminate segregated schools before the 1954 Supreme Court decision. And Gibbons supported McGovern in 1972 against the Teamster tide for Nixon. But he backed down when it came to challenging Hoffa or Fitzsimmons for union leadership--he was co-opted by the good life, a villa in Palm Springs, the perquisites of a high Teamster salary, a Lincoln Continental...
...decimate their purpose," Brill says. "Same with the tax revolt business, the middle class is saying we want more for us, screw the poor. That same attitude is why you won't have reform in the Teamsters." Brill points out that the course was set long ago, when Jimmy Hoffa cooperated with organized crime to achieve power in the union, when he acquiesced and participated in the corruption, extortion, and violence that cemented his power. If Walter Reuther, organizing the United Auto Workers at the same time and in the same city as Hoffa, didn't need the Mafia...
...talk show hosts don't usually discuss the prospects for reform, or the details of corruption--everybody's more interested in Brill's solution to the Hoffa disappearance. On a radio talk show in Seattle, a caller maintained that Brill was wrong, that Hoffa was still alive. "Why, I was just down in Argentina this summer, and I was in a bar, and there was Jimmy Hoffa, belly up to the bar, sipping a beer and chatting with Adolph Hitler." Brill told the caller, "Hey, fella, I think you got a bigger story there than just Jimmy Hoffa...