Word: union
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more complicated than that. But in one sense Hoffa's career indeed followed a simple line: straight up the ladder of labor-union power. He started by organizing his own union at the Kroger grocery-chain warehouse in Detroit, where he unloaded boxcars and trucks. At 19, he took his warehouse workers into a Detroit Teamster local. At 24, he became president of Detroit's Local 299, a post he still holds. In the 1940s he spread out through the Midwest, then moved South and East...
...York. From his Midwest power base, Hoffa pushed into New York in the mid-1950s with the help of Extortionist John Dioguardi, alias Johnny Dio, boss of a shakedown ring thinly disguised as a labor union. Dio & Co. brought into the labor rackets 40 toughs with a total of 178 arrests on their police dockets. One of them told a Brooklyn machine-shop owner: "You have got to pay us off because you are mine. No matter where you are going to move, you are mine." During Hoffa's struggle to get control of the Teamster joint council...
Philadelphia. In 1956 Hoffa helped 18-arrests Racketeer Samuel ("Shorty") Feldman get a Philadelphia charter, Local 410, in the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. By the time the union revoked the charter the next year. Local 410 had been thoroughly looted: though it had taken in about $20,000 during its short life, its assets totaled $450, its liabilities some $22,000. In gratitude for the opportunity for plunder, Feldman helped work out an alliance between Hoffa and Philadelphia Teamster Raymond Cohen, whose Local 107 had 19 officers with criminal records totaling 104 arrests and 40 convictions. Cohen stands accused...
Myth No. 2. Hoffa has told the committee (and anyone else who would listen) that no matter what else can be said about him, he is first and foremost interested in the betterment of the working conditions of his union members...
Africa, too, was complaining about the French. Tunisia last week canceled its customs union with France. The Premier of the new Sudanese Republic threatened to break up France's African community if the French exploded their promised